jabes on precision

Precision

means effacement.

It is so precise.

It disappears.

Not to hide anything

means to disguise a bit more

— and more than a bit.

 

— Jabes, The Book of Margins p 65.

jabes’ distinction between speaking and writing

Everything is again set in motion–called into question– by writing. As we speak, nothing is ever said so completely that it could not be said over, differently. So that saying is a revelation, with the promise of further saying. Deconstruction functions at this level also, arranging and preparing those moments when utterance splits apart and is neutralized by its reconciled opposites….

-Jabes, The book of margins p 44.

jabes on writing

The gesture of writing is, first, a movement of arm and hand entering into an adventure under the sign of thirst. But the throat is dry, body and thought all attention. Only much later we realize that our forearm on the page marks the boundary between the writing and ourselves. On one side, the words, the work; on the other, the writer. In vain do they search to communicate. The page remains witness to two interminable monolgues, and once there is silence on either side, it is the abyss.

Our forearm constrains and inhibits us. All around, words go to waste. We thought that in taking up the pen we could reach a kind of comforting fullness and unity. But afterwards nothing is ever the same. But off from ourselves by our own daring, stripped of our belongings, the male gut reaction is to try to master this rebellious voice of ink and to appropriate it.

But the transcribed word, which we naively thought we had arrested and handcuffed, keeps its freedom for the space of its perennial night.

 

– Jabes, The Book of Margins p 41.

jabes on silence

It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey into the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to lose it, to lose your personality, to become anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. You must become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak.

— Edmond Jabes

laure on mutual destruction

I believe in our life together . . . I believe in it the way I believe in everything that brought us together: in the most profound depths of your darkness and of mine. I revealed everything about myself to you. Now that it gives you pleasure to laugh at it, to soil it––this leaves me as far away from anger as it is possible to be. Scatter, spoil, destroy, throw to the dogs all that you want: you will never affect me again. I will never be where you think you find me, where you think you’ve finally caught me in a chokehold that makes you come. . . . As for me I am beyond words, I have seen too much, known too much, experienced too much for appearance to take on form. You can do anything you want, I will not be hurt.

— Colette Peignot-Laure to George Bataille

bataille on purpose

And it struck me that death was the sole outcome of my erection, and if Simone and I were killed, then the universe of our unbearable personal vision was certain to be replaced by the pure stars, fully unrelated to any external gazes gazes and realizing in a cold state without human delays or detours, something that strikes one as the goal of my sexual licentiousness: a geometric incandescence (among other things, the coinciding point of life and death, being and nothingness), perfectly fulgurating.

– George Bataille, The Story of the Eye p 33.