The Time of My Life

… A period of mourning has kept me away from music, so my head fills with static bombs instead. I usually like to work with some sort of sonic signature. A subtle incentive laying down a basic beat, musical accompaniment allows me to pummel at a stubborn knot in life. In his work on cryptonymy, Laurence Rickels has claimed that background music rings a death knell. That may be so. I'm always hitching a ride on the death drive—the flex of my drivenness—a sure fire way to language. Doing without the rhythmic support that music supplies has presented complications in the mostly monogamous relation to writing. Ach! Despite my willingness to integrate silence and random noise into phrasal regimes, I become a bit sissyish when drafts recede so that nothing on the order of language assertion comes my way. Plunk, plunk. OK, so I'm still learning. As panic shivers through me: muteness happens.

In some sectors the mute burble constitutes an upgrade in the grapple with the poeticity of being. But, let's face it, regressive sputtering rarely scores points on my beat. At most, I can make something of "muttering"—or, with ears tuned to the German language, "mothering"—and stick it onto the subphenomena that constitute speech at its lowest capacity to say or mean. I am thinking of the registry of innovative sighs and groans, the low yowl that Friedrich Kittler locates as the start-up of German literature. Even here I invent, haplessly, for Kittler sees literary articulation originating only in the Seufzer, the sigh: Ach!¹ But, still. What is the sigh but a feminine accent placed near or on language's spareness? In Richard II the sigh and groan duke it out in a dance of sexual difference. Men groan, women sigh—signaling different letdowns in the poetry of speechlessness. Elsewhere, famously, "the rest is silence." …

When the music lets off, and you're shifting down to inert being, you sometimes need a jolt—a someone or something to slap it out of you, bringing you back to language, even without the sound track. So I say thank you to the editors of Qui Parle, to Simone, for rousing me from an overdrawn account of guarded lament. There are times when we all need our Claudius factor—the sensible portion of a Shakespearean dose to knock us out of grief, ringing the bell to stir us into action.

There is no accounting for the schedules that land grief or offer reprieve from the unrelenting experience of loss. Writing and remembrance deliver a momentary flicker, an estranging but welcome wind tunnel of hope, a kind of expectancy. Who's speaking, you've asked? I'm not certain that it's a matter of "who." The psychic division of labor rotates out to rumored relay posts and unmarked domains that define our way, if unconsciously or with purposeful abandon.

We went through this years ago, in negotiation over the title of the journal, on fast spin cycle: do we underscore "who" or stay with the "what" that speaks? There was Wordsworth's refrain in the "Idiot Boy" that went "to-who, to-who," sending up a flare of noncognition, sounding out the owl's nocturnal relay and a collapse of human subjectivity. Ach! Sometimes I just wanted to howl, Allen Ginsberg style. At the time we were debating this or that title—asking who or what speaks—Jean-Luc Nancy came out with the book, edited by Peter Connor and Eduardo Cadava, with my input and participation, Who Comes after the Subject? The decision to settle on who speaks, Qui Parle, resonates with the publication of that volume.² The fact that the title remained in French, emanating from Berkeley, in itself framed somewhat of a defiant pose that was not lost on the early readership. By contrast, Representations seemed staunchly Anglo-American, well-manicured and historicist, our adversarial alterity. I'll return to the posited standoff momentarily.

… Ach! I am too often seized by a spectral broadcast system that makes me say and commit to things I barely...