Inspiration might not be a content arriving mysteriously from elsewhere. It might be the name we give to the experience through which our own act momentarily becomes larger than our intention.
Félix’s Notebook
I understand better now why Lucian’s and Igniatius’s files had held me for so long without my knowing exactly what it was in them that held me… I had approached their relationship as one approaches two testimonies whose chronology, influence, possible borrowings would have to be established, trying to determine who had received what from the other, who had first seen this or that figure, who had first spoken a certain name, who had begun drawing after reading what the other had written, and despite all its complexity this inquiry retained one immense advantage, that of assuming there existed somewhere a first term, a point of departure from which the transmissions might have been reconstructed, as though every resemblance required an origin and every origin someone who had, first of all, possessed what was then destined to circulate; yet I am beginning to suspect that this very manner of searching for the origin may be precisely what prevented me from seeing what was happening, because I was trying to recover, before the passage, something that perhaps existed only in the passage itself.
It is here that a sentence by Derrida, or rather what I understand of it today, returns with an insistence I had not expected, for when he says that writing must be able to function in the absence of the one who produced it, he is not simply describing the secondary misfortune of a text abandoned by its author after it has been written, as though some original presence had once been wholly there and had subsequently withdrawn; he is showing something far more disturbing, namely that this possibility of absence belongs from the very beginning to writing itself, that a sign is truly a sign only because it can be taken up again, read, displaced, repeated when the person who traced it is no longer there to guarantee its meaning, and that what I had always regarded as a possible loss of origin might well be one of the conditions through which a trace can begin to live at all.
I do not know why I had never before felt how almost physical this idea could become when applied not merely to words printed in a book but to a line left upon a sheet of paper, for drawing too possesses this strange ability to remain once the hand has withdrawn, to be looked at outside the instant in which it was traced, to enter another gaze, then another still, and to produce something that can no longer be reduced to the simple intention of the person who made it, so that the absence of the draughtsman no longer appears as a deficiency that ought to be repaired by asking what he “meant to say,” but rather as the very space within which the drawing acquires the possibility of continuing to act.
And so my old question, “What did Igniatius mean to do?”, begins to strike me as strangely inadequate, not because it would be illegitimate, nor because Igniatius’s intention would be unimportant, but because it still assumes that somewhere the drawing possesses a key capable of leading it back to a first presence that would at last bring its meaning to a halt, whereas, if Derrida is right on this point, that key can never entirely close what it opens, since what has been traced must be capable of detaching itself from the person who traced it, of surviving his intention, of being taken up again in circumstances he had not foreseen and encountering eyes whose very existence he could not have known; and scarcely had I formulated this when I found myself wondering whether the word “survive” was not still too weak, since it might suggest that the drawing merely preserves something of its author after his disappearance, whereas what troubles me is precisely that, through this separation, it should be capable of producing something new.
Lucian draws after Igniatius, or at least believes himself to be drawing after him, Igniatius brings into being characters of whom he is no longer entirely certain he can say that he invented them, and I, arriving later still, armoured in that belatedness which I had made into a guarantee of impartiality, place my hand upon a sheet in my turn and discover that the lines forming there seem to know a path along which I do not remember having led them; from that moment, the succession to which I had clung begins to come apart, not because dates cease to exist, but because dates are no longer sufficient to determine what comes from what, since the one who arrives afterwards can bring forth in what preceded him a coherence that the one who came before did not yet possess, and what comes later can, without materially travelling backwards through time, alter what, for us, that which came earlier will have been.
I even sometimes wonder whether Lucian did not become Lucian, for me at least, as I read what he said about Igniatius, and whether Igniatius himself did not acquire a consistency his own texts had not yet possessed before Lucian began to follow them, imitate them, displace them, as though each had helped, after the fact, to constitute the predecessor from whom he believed himself merely to have inherited, and I can feel how readily such a hypothesis would once have aroused in me an almost immediate distrust, because it seems to threaten the elementary distinction between the one who creates and what is created, between cause and consequence, between what comes first and what comes afterwards, yet I can no longer dismiss it so easily since feeling my own hand allow itself to be instructed by what it had only just done.
Perhaps, too, I had until then placed too much weight on this idea of an author whom one need only recover for everything to fall back into place, for if a trace truly exists only from the moment it can move away from the one who made it, then the author is no longer quite there behind it like a proprietor whose virtual presence would accompany each of its movements; he himself becomes one of the moments in its history, indispensable no doubt, since there was indeed a hand, a body, a situation, a gesture, but no longer capable of remaining beside each occurrence in order to declare what it must be; and it may be this, even more than material absence, that troubles me in Derrida, this idea that at the very moment when I write a sentence or trace a line, I must, for it to be able to exist as a trace, consent without even intending to do so to its being able to function without me.
For does the hand know more than I do? I do not believe it does, and I would be almost as suspicious of that idea as I was of the former sovereignty of conscious intention, since all that would be required would be to replace one master with another and attribute to the body some secret design of which the mind remained unaware; what troubles me is far less mysterious and, perhaps for that very reason, far more difficult to contain, namely that it may not be necessary for anyone to know beforehand for something to begin taking a direction, that the preceding line is sometimes enough to call forth the next, that the eye responds to what the hand has just laid down, that the hand in turn responds to what the eye has just discovered, and that in the midst of this sequence of responses, in which no one needs to possess the overall plan, a form eventually appears with a coherence strong enough for us afterwards to attribute to it the intention which, we believe, must have preceded it.
And it is then that the word design returns, but reversed, almost unrecognisable, for I can no longer calmly place the design behind the drawing like the architect behind the building; I see it taking shape within what is being drawn, emerging as certain possibilities disappear and others grow stronger, then returning towards the beginning as though, having at last acquired form, it could henceforth cast its light retrospectively upon the first gestures, which nevertheless did not yet know it; so that, looking at a finished drawing, I can always tell myself the reassuring story according to which someone must surely have intended this, while the memory of my own hand confronts me with the far less comfortable experience according to which it has happened that I did not truly intend something until after I had begun to do it, and that what I had made, once separated from me, began to mean more than I could ever have intended to make it mean.
From that point on, the question of Child Moon becomes almost impossible to formulate as I was still formulating it only recently, for to ask “who invented him?” already assumes that the invention preceded him, that a mind conceived him before he entered the world of lines, words, gestures and encounters, whereas I am beginning to consider that he may have constituted himself in the course of that very circulation, taking something from a line, something else from a sentence, a posture from a drawing that Igniatius perhaps considered unimportant, a silence from what Lucian could not manage to say, and then, much later, this strange persistence in returning beneath my own hand, not as an object travelling intact from one man to another, but as a form that becomes more fully itself each time it passes and that, in passing, also alters the one through whom it passes.
And if this is so, the absence of the one who might have been able to say “I made him” is no longer merely the obstacle preventing me from tracing Child Moon back to his origin; perhaps it becomes precisely what allows him to continue his journey, for if Igniatius had to remain present beside every line in order to guarantee its meaning, if Lucian had to accompany each of his sentences so as to prevent them from becoming something other than what he had consciously thought, if I myself had to be able to follow indefinitely every line my hand leaves behind in order to explain what I had intended when I traced it, then nothing could truly pass from one to another, everything would remain tethered to its moment of production, whereas what troubles me today is exactly the opposite: this capacity traces possess to leave the one who produces them and, because they leave him, to enter into combinations in which he could never have taken part.
