Je finirai peut-être par être très entouré, dans un capharnaüm.—Beckett, L’Innommable.

Life emerges from non-life, but at the cost of an unexperiencable death (a trauma, writes Caruth). Life cannot assume that death, not even by dying (writes Brassier). At the same time, the unassimilable death is not in a forever receding future—it’s here, it’s inside (a dead and scarred-over ‘vesicle,’ writes Freud; it’s the remnant of monocellular life that sacrificed itself in the furnace of unassimilable experience). As such, the impossible death happens, despite its being impossible; happens all the more, recurs: “Oui, nous sommes liés au désastre, mais quand l’échec revient, il faut entendre que l’échec est justement ce retour. Le recommencement, comme puissance antérieure au commencement, c’est cela, l’erreur de notre mort (Blanchot, L’Éspace littéraire).

The anterior is lost: there is no emergence and no beginning, only a continuing. This is the logic that animates (or re-animates) the fictions of Beckett and Blanchot. Molloy doesn’t know how he came to the room; neither does Malone; and as for the unnamable, not only does he begin (or continue) by asking where now, who now, when now, but the beginning of his narrative is lost to him, too: “Can it be that one day, off it goes on, that one day I simply stayed in, instead of going out, in the old way, out to spend the day and night as far away as possible, it wasn’t very far. Perhaps that is how it began.”

Writing emerges from non-writing, wakes up with its “death” already behind it—unconscious, unassimilable experience of death—and also inside it, a recurring end. For Friedrich Kittler, the nature of that non-writing is determined by the media age: around 1800, poetry emerges from the pure “O” of expressivity, the O that is the soul’s call; around 1900, writing emerges by differing from nonsense, from a kind of machinic/echolaliac stutter (think Dada, think Christian Morgenstern, though what registers as ‘nonsense’ in Europe around 1900 tends to be Africa or the New World: “Der Architekt jedoch entfloh/ nach Afri- od- Ameriko.” Or a better example, Stevens’s “Yillow, yillow, yillow,” in the poem “Metamorphosis.”)

In neither case—the O of expressivity, the jibber of nonsense—is it a matter of writing’s opposite. The differentiation that produces writing also exceeds it,* and the name of that excess might be O, might be nonsense, might be “persecutory prehensilism,” the hand that grasps and halts the writing hand (Blanchot). Or, in the case of Beckett’s unnamable, narrative emerges from and repeatedly terminates in the capharnaüm: “Je finirai peut-être par être très entouré, dans un capharnaüm,” considers the unnamable at the beginning of the novel. The English translation has “throng”: “perhaps I shall smother in a throng.” But the capharnaüm is not only a throng (a mass of unrelated, disunited persons); it’s also a place of massed, unrelated, useless things. The definition from Reverso—“endroit en désordre, où s'entassent de nombreux objets, l'ensemble de ces objets”—sounds like nothing so much as Benjamin’s descriptions of the Baroque stage, littered with ruined objects in a state of decay.

*[this isn’t quite right, oracular and vague, and “excess” is all wrong]