Tag: bernard noel

[…] suddenly a mask falls, I say “flower” and, if I look, it’s the dead body of the flower – of all flowers – which appears. For words only signs embalming the absence of things. I write, I watch myself writing, and what do I see? I see myself in the process of replacing myself with another. Another who will bear my name, but will yet not be the one who, here and now, is writing: I. Besides, isn’t it language as a whole that is the Other with which all the I’s endeavour to identify themselves – all the I’s who write: I is Another.

To live. To write. To live looks again for To write so as to find itself at last before the mirror of revelation.What does it see? Exactly what each one can perceive by looking in his own eyes: night – black night. What I name is suppressed in the word that I name, and at every attempt looks like the centre of the eye, the centre which is a gaping hole. To change life, it was saying. Words can only naturalize life, give it an air of being alive in death. Words are that death agony which endures. No innocence. We are from the bad side. The order must be overturned. Revolution must be put into operation. Death must be changed. But how can we pass beyond the hereafter of our own end?

Then, we must again…experience the empty power of giving a meaning, again advance with naked face and unreservedly to what already names my absence, that is to say, my own name.