Here lies the most hidden moment of the experience. That the work must be the unique clarity of that which grows dim and through which everything is extinguished -- that it can exist only where the ultimate affirmation is verified by the ultimate negation -- this requirement we can still comprehend, despite its going counter to our need for peace, simplicity, and sleep. Indeed, we understand it intimately, as the intimacy of the decision which is ourselves and which gives us
being only when, at our risk and peril, we reject -- with fire and iron and with silent refusal -- being's permanence and protection. Yes, we can understand that the work is thus pure beginning, the first and last moment when being presents itself by way of the jeopardized freedom which makes us exclude it imperiously, without, however, again including it in the appearance of beings. But this exigency, which makes the work declare being in the unique moment of rupture -- "those very words: it is," the point which the work brilliantly illuminates even while receiving its consuming burst of light -- we must also comprehend and feel that this point renders the work impossible, because it never permits arrival at the work. It is a region anterior to the beginning where nothing is made of being, and in which nothing is accomplished. It is the depth of being's inertia [désoeuvrement].
Thus it seems that the point to which the work leads us is not only the one where the work is achieved in the apotheosis of its disappearance -- where it announces the beginning, declaring being in the freedom that excludes it -- but also the point to which the work can never lead us, because this point is always already the one starting from which there never is any work. Perhaps we make things too easy for ourselves when, tracing backwards along the movement of our active life, content to reverse this movement, we think we grasp thereby the movement of what we call art. It is the same facile procedure that persuades us we find the image by starting from the object, and that causes us to say, "First we have the object, afterwards comes the image," as if the image were simply the distancing, the refusal, the transposition of the object. Similarly we like
-46-
to say that art does not reproduce the things of the world, does not imitate the "real," and that art is situated where, having taken leave of the ordinary world, the artist has bit by bit removed from it everything useful, imitable, everything pertaining to active life. Art seems, from this point of view, to be the silence of the world, the silence or the neutralization of what is usual and immediate in the world, just as the image seems to be the absence of the object.
Described thus, the movement in question permits itself the facilities of common analysis. This fluency lets us believe that we grasp art, because it furnishes us with a means of representing to ourselves the starting point of the artistic task. But this representation does not correspond to the psychology of creation. An artist could never ascend from the use he makes of an object in the world to a picture in which this object has become art. It could never suffice for him to bracket that use, to neutralize the object in order to enter into the freedom of the picture. On the contrary, it is because, through a radical reversal, he already belongs to the work's requirements that, looking at a certain object, he is by no means content to see it as it might be if it were out of use, but makes of the object the point through which the work's requirements pass and, consequently, the moment at which the possible is attenuated, the notions of value and utility effaced, and the world "dissolves." It is because he already belongs to another time, to time's other, and because he has abandoned time's labor to expose himself to the trial of the essential solitude where fascination threatens -- it is because he has approached this "point" that, answering to the work's demands from within this original belonging, he seems to look at the objects of the ordinary world in a different way, neutralizing usefulness in them, rendering them pure, elevating them through continuous stylization to the simultaneity and symmetry in which they become pictures. In other words, one never ascends from "the world" to art, even by the movement of refusal and
disqualification which we have described; rather, one goes always from art toward what appears to be the neutralized appearances of the world -- appears so, really, only to the domesticated gaze which is generally ours, that gaze of the inadequate spectator riveted to the world of goals and at most capable of going from the world to the picture.
No one who does not belong to the work as origin, who does not belong to that other time where the work is concerned for its essence, will ever create a work. But whoever does belong to that other time also belongs to the empty profundity of inertia where nothing is ever made of being.
-47-
To express this in yet another way: when an all-too-familiar expression seems to acknowledge the poet's power to "give a purer sense to the words of the tribe," are we to understand that the poet is the one who, by talent or by creative savoir faire, is content to change "crude or
immediate" language into essential language, elevating the silent nullity of ordinary language to the accomplished silence of the poem where, through the apotheosis of disappearance, all is present in the absence of all? By no means. That would be like imagining writing to consist merely in using ordinary words with more mastery, a richer memory, or an ear more attuned to their musical resources. Writing never consists in perfecting the language in use, rendering it purer. Writing begins only when it is the approach to that point where nothing reveals itself, where, at the heart of dissimulation, speaking is still but the shadow of speech, a language which is still only its image, an imaginary language and a language of the imaginary, the one nobody speaks, the murmur of the incessant and interminable which one has to silence if one wants, at last, to be heard.
When we look at the sculptures of Giacometti, there is a vantage point where they are no longer subject to the fluctuations of appearance or to the movement of perspective. One sees them absolutely: no longer reduced, but withdrawn from reduction, irreducible, and, in space, masters of space through their power to substitute for space the unmalleable, lifeless profundity of the imaginary. This point, whence we see them irreducible, puts us at the vanishing point ourselves; it is the point at which here coincides with nowhere. To write is to find this point. No one writes who has not enabled language to maintain or provoke contact with this point.
-48-