Why do you need to know?
Get yourself a copy of 3rd Bed, issue 11, last ever on the face of the earth. At newsstands now or soon. Includes, among other good pieces of writing, Brian Evenson's "Fugue-State."

Evenson's story "Fugue-State" is in part a mutation of Tony Burgess's novel Pontypool Changes Everything (ECW Press). Both concern plagues that hollow people out by destroying or damaging their ability to speak or understand speech.

In Evenson’s plague-strain, the forgetting of the proper name is key. "What is your name?"/ "Why do you need to know?" is the basic unit underlying most of the story's dialogue: a diagnostic question or test made from an ordinary piece of conversation, parried by a defensive ruse that's both linguistically competent and subjectively vacant. In this, the first paradox series in Gilles Deleuze's The Logic of Sense reads like a protocol for "Fugue-State":

The loss of the proper name is the adventure which is repeated throughout all Alice’s adventures. For the proper or singular name is guaranteed by the permanence of savoir. The latter is embodied in general names designating pauses and rests, in substantives and adjectives, with which the proper name maintains a constant connection. Thus the personal self requires God and the world in general. But when substantives and adjectives begin to dissolve, when the names of pause and rest are carried away by the verbs of pure becoming and slide into the language of events, all identity disappears from the self, the world, and God. This is the test of savoir and the recitation which strips Alice of all identity.

The test in "Fugue-State" often boomerangs back on the questioner, somewhat as in Kyoshi Kurosawa’s film Cure, where the mass murderer drives his interrogators mad by blankly repeating "Who are you?" But there is also an unhinged series of doubles here; as the character Arnaud puts it, "How many of the one of you are there? Two?" As though doubles had lost even the uniqueness of being the only doubles, the doubles here proliferate without end. Plague victims collide, infect one another and carom off to infect again with their questions.

Deleuze, again, doubling the fugue state: "For what can one do, vis-à-vis doubles, reflections, simulacra, other than speak?"

***
addendeum: fugue-state. There are no explicit theses about the state in this story, as there might be in science fiction. But there are hints--interrogation, quarantine, clean-up--of biopolitical functions. The phrase "fugue state" also echoes nicely with "rogue state;" fugue state, a demented or blank sovereignty. Finally, the blandness of "what is your name?" and "how are you feeling?", though they do not explicitly relate to torture, are almost the only way to represent torture in today's biopolitical fugue state. Any depiction of state torture that relies on the battle of wits, the malign but super-intelligent interrogator, the chess game, the dark hints about "our methods"--none of that is even remotely plausible today, if it ever was.

I am stupid

When I say I am stupid, I do not mean what Deleuze meant when he wrote about stupidity as lying outside the image of thought—-stupidity suggestive of, if not constitutive of, nomad thought outside the strictures of what everybody knows to be true. No, I do not mean that, and I do not mean whatever Nietzsche meant when he said, in the grip of paralysis progressiva, "I am stupid because I am dead."

I just mean... I don’t know. Maybe I mean that I’m dumb. Mute. This place I’m at, this so-called phronistery, that is what they call it in the promotional materials, is designed for isolation. I will not bore you with the obvious reading of its mid-century modern houses: the nearly floor-to-ceiling windows, all without curtains.

On good days in the phronistery—-days when the weather is not too appallingly beautiful, say—-you can imagine that the time you pass here without speaking to anyone is granting you a phantom childhood: inwardness, genius. As Guy Davenport writes in his essay on Balthus, "Balthus' children are as complacent as cats and accomplished in stillness... Of the autistically interior, dreaming, reading, erotic, self-sufficient child in Balthus' painting, we have practically no image at all. Balthus' children are not driven to succeed where there parents failed, or to be popular, adjusted, a somebody."

On other days, the mute passage of time has brought you to nothing but the bad bargains of interiority: ____. Whatever they are; I am in no condition to enumerate them. Too. Stupid.

And on the other hand (though I was just now comparing days, not hands), maybe weeks of muteness bring you to an a-relationality. The "revolutionary inaptitude...for sociality" Leo Bersani writes about in Homos. Though I haven’t gotten very revolutionary, since I just elided the words "gay desire" from that quotation.