Where Félix now begins to doubt his tendency to seek, behind every drawing or every figure, some first state that might account for all the transformations that followed. He comes to understand that what occurs between two forms is not a mere alteration, but an encounter with other circumstances, other gestures, other memories, sometimes even with accident itself. Passage therefore never carries intact what came before… it transforms, displaces, and brings new possibilities into being. Yet this transformation is not necessarily a loss, for something may remain alive only on condition that it change. Preservation and alteration thus cease to stand simply opposed to one another: fidelity may consist in allowing what has been received to go on acting otherwise. Careful not to turn passage into some new all-powerful origin, he knows that it does not create by itself whatever comes to pass. Like a stone rolled along by a river, a form retains something of itself while bearing the traces of whatever has displaced it. Provenance and transformation thus become inseparable without thereby becoming indistinguishable. More than this, what happens later retrospectively alters the way we look at the beginning. And so the words “it was already there” may point less to some original self-evidence than to an earlier possibility that only becoming has taught us to recognize.
Félix’s Notebook
The past obviously does not change under the action of what comes afterward, and yet what comes afterward changes the way we see that past, which is enough to make provenance itself less motionless than it had seemed; what something comes from is no longer merely behind it, since it continues to act within what that thing becomes, while what it becomes returns, as it were, to cast light upon what it came from, so that the movement which at first seemed simply to proceed forward, toward what comes after, begins to form a loop, or perhaps several loops, and I understand a little better why straight lines become suspect to me whenever I try to follow what passes.
I then hear becoming in an almost physical way, no longer as the mere accomplishment of a transformation, but as that unstable place where a provenance, a journey and an arrival can no longer be entirely separated, because what comes carries with it something of what it comes from, the journey modifies what is being carried, the arrival in turn transforms the value of what has been carried, and, when we look back, that arrival alters even the way in which we understand the departure.
What becomes, then, may never entirely leave behind what it comes from, but neither does it preserve it intact, and this is precisely what makes the word so difficult for me to hold still, because if I ask what remains and what changes, I fall once again into a division that movement itself makes uncertain; what remains may remain in a transformed form, what changes may retrospectively bring to light something that was already there, and identity itself ends by resembling less a thing than a continuity supple enough to withstand its own metamorphoses without our having to decide at every moment whether we are still dealing with the same or already with another.
I could perhaps stop there and consider that this faulty hearing of the word has led me sufficiently astray, but I notice that it inevitably returns to the one who listens… To follow something that comes… to try to recover what it comes from, or where it comes from… to observe what its passages have made of it, all this requires that I too pass through the traces I am examining, that I move from one notebook to another, from a drawing to a letter, from a hypothesis to its contradiction, and it then becomes difficult to go on thinking that I myself could remain identical to the point from which I had begun to look.
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