Exhaustion and the Inexhaustible

Spurious has recently written on writing and the inexhaustible in such a way that I cannot help but experience it as a purloined love letter addressed to me given my recent exhaustion or despair with writing, discourse, and thought. Of course, emphasis must be placed on "the purloined" here. Like Althusser's example of interpellation, where the man walking down the street experiences himself as the addressee of the police officer's "hey you!", even though it could have been addressed to anyone on the crowded street, I was interpellated by Spurious... Or should I say, I was "spuriously interpellated"?

The oldest topic on this blog, which is also what makes writing here possible, even as it seems also to deny that possibility, excluding it from any kind of project, and making it only the repetition of its exposure to the impossibility of beginning: how to mark that writing born from the exhaustion of strength, the 'merciful surplus', as Kafka called it? How to mark that turn in exhaustion, where suddenly - and by what miracle? - it becomes propitious, allowing there to begin what seemed to have no chance of beginning.

Exhaustion: the limits of strength. A limitless limit, because exhaustion seems without end, and that is its trial: who are you that cannot collect himself into a task? Who has fallen from anything but a waiting for waiting, that has forgotten the realm where a task might be completed and waiting takes an object? A forgetting of forgetting, too - for you must have exhausted all kinds of nostalgia for action, all memories of power, so that something might begin.

These strange formulations are necessary if the time (the non-time) of exhaustion is to be remembered. The word waiting, like the word forgetting, is suspended between transitivity and intransitivity, each falling back into what deprives them of object. So they can be put into play such that they echo exhaustion and let it speak in the way it, too, seems to strip possibility of itself and then, sometimes, bestow it again, the chance of action.

Then exhaustion is part of the rhythm of the withering and regaining of strength, of the ability to be able. A mysterious rhythm that allows, in with the withering of your powers, power to be regained, and not by an initiative that belongs to you. This is what Kafka calls the 'merciful surplus': the capacity of writing to come to itself, and for you to write of the exhaustion that kept you from writing...

Read on!

I suspect that I'm traumatized by my writing and that one of the reasons that I write as much as I do here is to unwrite what I've written by pushing it down the page or by assaulting my readers with so much mass that they lose interest and cease reading. What is it that might render the experience of writing traumatic? Why do I always suspect that I might have unwittingly written something that I shouldn't have written, as if my words might rearrange themselves when I'm not looking? Transferentially, what is suggested in suspecting that one's writing always harbors the seeds of disaster and one's own destruction? What is the unconscious desire or intention behind such paranoid thoughts?