Dos: Chapter 4

 

The problematic of the approach to the other is inseparable from the logic of the pas, which has to be understood in two ways: the pas as noun relating to passage (step, advance), and the pas of negation. Both signal toward the act of crossing a border and at the same time the impossibility of passage. The sense of the formula "step not beyond" [pas-au-delà] or what "goes for a certain pas" [il y va d'un certain pas] is therefore undecidable. The step-not toward the other doesn't find its place. (Malabou and Derrida, Counterpath)

The step [pas] that approaches steps away [é-loigne], at the same time and in the same step that denies itself and takes itself off, it reduces and extends its own distance. (Derrida, Parages)

She was writing yet again of her intellectual mistress Derrida and ended the piece with that bit of quotation. She remembers her French-speaking American ex-lover who can read and spoke French reading to her the original passage. 

This morning, she was stuck: she knew the piece didn’t quite gel, and felt that it wasn’t finished yet.

She writes not like Brandon writes, who takes the tram, takes his time, and waits for thoughts to coalesce like soldiers falling into battle. He does have a tactical process, she thought, jealous. It was their way of slicing time, she concluded, that meant that she will always be more prolific and he, more substantial. 

She, after all, is a creature of impulse: she decides in split seconds. He, however, cannot see past lunchtime, sometimes missing it altogether. She slices time so thinly that she was the most qualified to talk of time and eternity; he is so much in the present that he writes the way he fucks: with all of himself. That is why she decided on the university in Prague: it was a good idea at that time. That is why she told him about it: that is when the decision was cemented until he came in flourishing a sledgehammer to her thoughts, and eventually, to her heart.

No, she said, horrified. That step from her thoughts to her heart cannot be bridged this way. 

Calming herself down, knowing that it was too soon, she breathed, and got hit by inspiration. Ah, she found it, a way to conclude the piece she was wrestling with. It was again from Derrida, who can bastardize himself like no other. She used as a subterfuge David Mazucchelli’s Asterios Polyp to prop the entire discussion.

Not leading strictly into existentialism and its tenets, however, the book forks off into that which undergirds the human necessity and predilection for opposites, and the systems that we put in place to make sense of what otherwise would be a chaotic mess of brute facts. We, seeing ourselves as being binary creatures, (masculine/feminine, good/bad/, material/mental, right-handed/left-handed) impose this duality in things. For instance, either this book/art/song/person/place/any goddamned noun is good or bad - not so much by virtue of its properties but by who it is that's looking at them. (The technical term for it is "parallax" - which Asterios lost, also having lost one eye.)

This parallax is what allows for perspective and the impossibility of the purity of any either/or. Humanly speaking, an almost is ultimately impossible. An is should be an always already. The human mind almost demands it, for then alone can sense be sense. 

Jesus, she thought. Time to stop. Time to wrap up. Next thing I know, I’ll be waxing about flat Earth. Brandon would love that. 

Speaking of, it was almost time for Brandon to wake up. She left her desktop and settled on the bed, knowing that he would demand her to remove her panties upon waking in an effortful desire to get rid of his morning wood and resume writing.