Where Félix, growing ever more lucid as he travels from page to page, from island to island and from discovery to discovery, accepts the idea, neither doctrinal nor parodic, that the origin of all things may not be a first source, but rather a point of passage chosen within a broader continuity. Every upstream point we reach then reveals that it, too, came from somewhere else. The “de” in devenant opens less toward a beginning than toward an indefinite chain of passages.
Félix’s Notebook
I think, of course, of these drawings, these names, these figures that I continue to follow from one notebook to another, with that old temptation to recover their first state, as though, behind their successive transformations, there had to exist some more original version that would explain those that followed, and I now wonder whether this very way of searching might not be precisely what prevents me from seeing what takes place between them, for a form passing from one drawing to another does not merely carry with it what it was before; it encounters another hand, or the same hand altered by the years, another sheet, another material, another disposition of the body, a memory that has come between, a sentence read in the meantime, an accident that may never be corrected, and what then appears can no longer be thought of as the mere alteration of an original, since the passage itself has produced possibilities that may previously have existed nowhere at all.
What comes from somewhere, then, never brings us that place from which it came entirely intact, and perhaps this is not a loss we ought to regret, for it may be that the greatest fidelity consists precisely not in remaining identical to what one was, but in allowing what has been received to transform itself sufficiently to continue acting elsewhere, which would already make far less simple that opposition which returns again and again between preservation and alteration, since something might preserve itself only by changing, and remain alive only on condition that it not be carried like a closed object from one place to another.
But I can feel that I am moving too quickly as soon as I write this, because passage in its turn must not become a kind of power to which I attribute everything I can no longer attribute to an origin; passage does not create by itself, any more than the river decides the exact shape of each stone it rolls along, and yet it would be just as false to regard the stone as though it could be understood independently of everything that has carried it, struck it, worn it down, displaced it, or to claim that it would have remained the same had it never left the place where it had previously lain.
Perhaps the two things must be held together, and this is where my sentence slows, because I can no longer simply say that something comes from somewhere without immediately hearing everything that took place while it was coming, nor say that it has become other without continuing to perceive within it what persists of that from which it comes, as though provenance and transformation could no longer be separated, not because they were identical, but because each now compels us to reconsider the other.
And even that may not yet be enough, for what arrives somewhere after having been transformed by its coming can in turn modify what we thought of its point of departure, since we return to what was with the eyes of one who now knows what has come to pass, and then discover retrospectively clues we had not seen, possibilities that nothing guaranteed would ever become actual but which later becoming teaches us to recognize, so that we readily say, “it was already there,” without always noticing that this already is a strange fabrication of time, since it names something that may indeed have been present, but which we learned to see only after it had been transformed.
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