“Like any inquiry that must address an object that is moving, even seething […], this work was destined to come into being under the sign of untimeliness and delay: the very phenomena through which it allows itself to be questioned are far from complete and never cease to metamorphose our experience of the world and the horizon within which we are given to understand it. And yet, may this untimeliness prove a good omen, for philosophy itself moves within a constitutive delay, ‘at nightfall’. Its gesture is autobiographical and posthumous, or — as Lyotard would say — under the sign of confession, that is to say, always at a remove from itself. This is no doubt one of the reasons why one so readily writes in the plural, in order to find the voice of what a book is, that ‘unassignable assemblage’…”*
Anna Caterina Dalmasso, Le corps c’est l’écran, Éditions Mimésis
* G. Deleuze, F. Guattari
Where certain thoughts speak to us of times that are not their own.
Where Igniatius, after recounting the coming of Pinocchio the Other into his world and how speech, almost imperceptibly, passed from one to the other, tells how the relation began to work both ways… when Pinocchio the Other had decided no longer to be merely a descendant of Pinocchio and, in order to say so, needed whatever happened to be available around her, my hands perhaps, my gaze, my memories, and that voice too, which I no longer used but which had apparently not, for all that, ceased to be something through which another thing might pass.
Igniatius’s Notebook
It is only in this sense, slightly forcing the expression, that I can say today that the puppet took power, provided one does not imagine a conquest or a victory, for she wrested nothing away from me; she merely displaced the relation to the point where the old hierarchy of manipulator and manipulated no longer held together very well, since the person who was supposed to lend his gestures and his voice to the puppet found himself, in turn, carried along by the gesture and the speech that appeared through her, and when I look back at that scene I can no longer say which of us was then making the other speak.
It is here, too, that her lack of a mouth ceases for me to be merely a gap in the drawing, or even an almost too-perfect correspondence with my own silence, for this absence, without ever being filled, forced speech to find another passage, and what might have remained the sign of a lack began instead to produce movement, not because the puppet needed to be completed, but because she was already there as she was, and whatever she had to say had to find elsewhere the means by which to say itself.
Her absent mouth opened mine, but even this sentence risks placing me too firmly at the centre, for perhaps my mouth was then merely another available part in the strange assemblage that had begun long before I understood what it was forming, just as the fragments recovered from my memory, the old Pinocchio whose story I knew only in its most familiar form, the scattered body to which only later would I connect the name of Osiris, and that absence of speech which was mine, had all been brought together without any one of them containing, by itself, what was about to happen.
The word Other, then, did far more than name a newly reassembled character, for in the same movement it produced the distance that character needed in order not to return immediately to the one she resembled, and that separation possessed a force I could feel without needing to understand it, as though the puppet, at the very moment she became recognisable, refused to allow that recognition to close around her and said that she was not what was already known of her, that she was precisely what remained once resemblance was no longer enough.
I am other, she seemed to say, and I still do not know how far that sentence might also have concerned me, because it would be too easy now to turn it into a declaration I had made indirectly about myself, whereas it came to me first from her, and it is precisely because it did not belong to me that it was able to pass through me with that particular force, without requiring me to know what I meant before saying it.
Much later, when the Moon Child names himself, it will be difficult for me not to feel something of that first movement returning, not as though Pinocchio the Other had announced what necessarily had to follow, still less as though I had already prepared the Moon Child through her, but because I will already have encountered once before this strange way in which a being begins to separate itself from the names and forms one would readily have assigned to it by taking part in its own naming, and perhaps what I will recognise then will be less a repetition than a kinship between two gestures answering one another without ever having been programmed to do so.
I had therefore built nothing in order to make my speech return, and the question itself did not present itself to me in those terms; I had reassembled a puppet out of pieces that returned one after another, that puppet had eventually distinguished herself sufficiently from the old Pinocchio to demand another name, and when she found that name something spoke through me, that was all, except that this “that was all” now contains far more than I could have imagined at the time, since I discover that I could speak without first having decided to speak, simply because the movement that had opened between her and me no longer left me quite in the place where my silence had left me.
What happened then therefore repaired nothing, restored nothing, returned nothing to an earlier state; something new simply occurred in which the question of whether I could or could no longer speak ceased, for an instant, to be the important question, and it is probably for that reason that the voice was able to pass with such simplicity, almost without my noticing it, because it was not coming to answer my silence; it was coming to answer the far more immediate necessity of Pinocchio the Other to say that she was not the one people thought they recognised.
I thought I could give her a voice and, when I look now at what happened, I am no longer quite sure whether even that sentence still holds, since I have rather the impression that the voice found itself between us, that it made use of her in order to arise and of me in order to pass, and that each of us emerged from it slightly displaced, she because from then on she was no longer merely Pinocchio, and I because I had spoken without first having to ask myself whether I was capable of doing so. Perhaps that is what remains strangest of all… I did not recover speech; I realised afterwards that it had already begun to return.
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