Discovering what I was not Seeking: A Brief Narrative

The two questions that SubStance asks us are beautiful in that they link knowledge to a desire for discovery. But by their very openness, these questions are immense. Faced with the infinite number of possible responses, who does not feel the same dizziness felt by the child who, looking at the starry heavens, is asked "which is your favorite star?" He must learn to narrow his scope, and to accept a certain arbitrariness. And he does so—"that one there!" he exclaims. Likewise, observers of animal communities tell us that when faced with a large group of individuals—fish, birds, or mammals—a predator is lost, dazzled, unable to make his choice, and fails. He, too, must learn to select and isolate a single prey among the thousands available, and to stick with it. I will be attempting something similar in what follows. Nevertheless, my first temptation was to respond to the two questions with lists of all kinds of objects of intellectual or other interest. That would have given an aleatory enumeration in the style of Borges or Perec (which is not without its charm, but in this case would have been a way of getting off the hook).

The other temptation—probably common to many of the contributors polled—would have been to discuss the questions themselves, to turn them this way and that, to scrutinize their presuppositions—in short, to subject them to the familiar torture of deconstruction. Or else to regard them with suspicion. For, taking into account the avowed objectives of the journal, the questions could have been more specific and thus more academic, like "What fascinates you in the field of literary theory? What motivates your reading of texts?" Or else "What do you want to know in your current field of research?" Thus one must suppose—I will suppose—that these questions contain an implicit specificity: what fascinates you in your work as a researcher, as a teacher or as a writer? And from here, one must still decide whether to envision things in terms of object and domain or in terms of an attitude, a way of working, a style of thinking.

While I was in the middle of this vast plateau of perplexity, and thinking about what my work has been these last years, slowly but clearly an answer came to me: what has fascinated me has been to discover what I was not seeking. It's what fascinates me still. I wonder if that is not perhaps the greatest joy for every researcher. Which is not to say that one should not hope to find what one is seeking; quite the opposite. But often what one is seeking or thinks one is seeking is given in addition to a result one had not expected.

A research project proceeds via exchanges between a hypothesis and attempts at verification. Each result or new fact can cause a bifurcation toward new fields, can lead one to modify the hypothesis, can suggest connections with very different domains. There begins a sort of strange journey, where one sees unknown objects take shape, networks extend, relationships multiply. And certitudes disappear or routes become blocked. The impasses themselves give a kind of excitement: that of seeing the journey continue toward an improbable elsewhere. These advances and movements are always local, singular, linked to reading, to pondering, to encounters, to pages of writing, to conversations, to periods of inspiration or of sterility. Advancing from place to place is comparable to the pleasure one has in discovering a city before having its map in your head—the joy of that which comes before any representation.

However, I'm not saying that the joy of a research project is in missing its objective, nor am I saying that it's the journey alone that counts, as one says that for a hunter, the point is not obtaining his prey, but stalking it. This pathos of the negative leads...