Fragmentary (thinking the fragment)

Dan Mellamphy his essay seeks to come to terms with the (literary and/or philosophical) fragment as something altogether different and distinguishable from "parts" of wholes. In order to break (fragment itself) from the dialectic of part and whole, fragmentality must side with Nietzsche over Hegel, with the eternal return of the Now rather than the dialectical progress of Knowledge, with the idea of endless Becoming instead of that of absolute Being. "Fragmentality" is the thought of the Nietzschean bermensch, and is as such beyond the bounds of the selfsame subject (stable subjects/subjectivities): it is "over and done with" man and thus the experience qua mentality of the overman. To think the fragment is to think the eternal return of a rupture, to get the drift of a rift, a fundamental fissure, a groundbreaking ground. Using the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Blanchot, Barthes, Deleuze, and Nancy, this essay assays to present the fragment in all its fragmentality, proposing for this purpose a series of principles or fragmentary "demands": 1. that the fragment breaks with the dialectic of part and whole, 2. that the fragment, as something broken, has no form (or rather, informsis informe, as Bataille would say); 3. that the fragment, informe, awaits is own formation andwhat is morecalls for it or calls it forth; and 4. that the calling for form or formation is the very "voice" of fragmentality, which is cut off as soon as its formation or formulation its achieved. To think the fragment as fragment is to avoid giving it a form and to allow its calling for(th) a form: a difficult task indeed. The first demand, then, is to think the fragment as fragment. If the fragment is truly broken (frangere), it cannot, it seems, be thought of in terms of a part (portio), for the part, as part of a whole, would deny that which is broken its broken nature, its different status, by relating it always to the former (whole). The fragment, following the first demand, must be thought of apart from a part, and therefore as wholly distinct from the whole (of which the part is a part) as well. The fragment, as fragment (broken off, broken away/from), escapes the logic qua dialectic of part and whole, and would constitute another relationa relation without relation, or rather the approach of (or approach to) a relation, the relation of (or relation to) the approachor perhaps, more radically, the relation of withdrawing: the "approaching" which is a "withdrawal." How would one come to terms with such movements, approachings and withdrawals, withdrawing approaches, approaching withdrawals? How would one come to terms with such fluid "becomings" as opposed to (distinct from) stable "beings"? How does one break away from the dialectic of part and whole? How does one think the fragment? Endlessly.
The break is the incapacity to end. (Frey 63)

The fragment ruptures: it breaks off, breaks away from the organization of the parts of the whole (of the parts, of the whole). How does one think the
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fragment? By making room for rupture, allowing its irruption (approach), interruption (withdrawal). "You make a rupture," explains Gilles Deleuze with Flix Guattari: "make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will re-encounter organizations that restratify everything, formations that restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject" (1987:9). In his book on the fragmentary entitled Singularities, Thomas Pepper writes that the fragment is in a sense the German Nivellierung: "Nivellierung, levelling, 1 is here the act of making observations, remarks, which treat different moments of the dialectic on the same level, while at the same time making the gesture of sayingand quite sincerely'it is nothing,' both of Hegel [the dialectical relation] and of one's own commentary [the interruption]" (197). Fragments are written against stratification, hierarchical organization, evolution (evolutionary/dialectical progression). The fragment does not evolve, does not progress, but rather digresses, dissipates, dissolves, disappears; this disappearance or dissolution is not a negation but in fact an affirmation of the fragment: the fragment breaks off, breaks up, ruptures, shatters. "We must try," in thinking the fragment, "to recognize in this 'shattering' or 'dislocation' a value that is not one of negation," writes Maurice Blanchot (1993:308). "Interrupted," continues Blanchot, the fragment "goes on" (1986:59). "Fragments are written as unfinished separations," he explains; "for fragments, destined in some respect to the blank that separates them, find in this gap not what ends them, but what prolongs them, or what makes them await their prolongationwhat has already prolonged them, causing them to persist on account of their incompletion" (1986:58). The fragment never ends: frangere, as Frey has said, is the frayed "end" ("The break is the incapacity to end"). Interrupted, it goes on; "it seemed," writes Blanchot in When the Time Comes , "to come across a fantastic layer of time, burning in its entirety inside me [...], as though I had not been touched at this moment but centuries ago and for centuries past" (1985:4). The fragment comes
1. Deleuze and Guattari, following Gregory Bateson, would call such Nivellierung "plateaus": the plateau, in Mille plateaux (1980), is a "superficial" or "surface" rather than "hierarchical" relationor rather, "alliance" (1987:25); it "movefs] between things, establish[es] a logic of the AND, overthrow[s] ontology, do[es] away with foundations, nullifies] endings and beginnings [...], it is where things pick up speed." "Between things," they explain, "does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle" (1987:25). "Unlike trees or their roots," they insist, the plateau [or rhizomatic structure] "connects any given point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome [the structural/structuring principle of the plateau] is reducible neither to the One nor the Multiple. It is not the One that becomes two, or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a multiple derived from the One, or to which One is added. It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills" (1987:21).

as a return, and returns as something comingalways yet to come, or rather: yet to come to passnever "over" (finished) but rather "over" coming, or coming over, over and over again: berwindung, as Nietzsche would say; and the experience of the fragment as fragment is the experience of the eternal return of the unfinished, of the incomplete, of the abandoned: the berwindung experience of the bermenschZarathustra, for example. "Zarathustra," writes Ludwig Klages in his analysis of Nietzsche, "is an enraptured and uncanny exegesis of the proposition 'ber'. Over-fulness, over-goodness, over-time, over-kind, overwealth, over-hero, to over-drinkthose are a few of the great number of overwords, some of which are newly coined and some of which are used over again and they are just as many variations of the one exclusively meant: overcoming" (1926:204, quoted in Kaufmann 309). To think the fragment as fragment is to think the thought of the overman, which overcomes, overturns, overtakes stratified organizations and subject-formations, breaks with the organism or selfenclosed system and opens up to (opens onto) that which is beyond the closure of such subjectivities, such subjectionsonly to be itself brokenbroken off, broken away. For the fragment never reaches its end: it eternally returns to the fragmentary, breaks off, breaks away. The fragment "is" only in the sense that it "is" to come, that it "is" always coming up, that it "is" always eternally becoming. The time has come to put forward our principal thesis: that the fragment is the state of being of becoming (hence neither a "state" nor a "being"). 2 It is the "being" of that which becomes, of the return of or turn to (or again, of what turns out as) the unfinishedwhich is not to say that it is being (a being) that returns (that we are "turning to"), but rather that the return itself (the turning or breaking awaybreak of day or fall of night in Nietzsche, for example; the fracture as and factor of frangere) constitutes the fragment, that which "is" a fragment: its "being." The fragment is that which turns up (appears, irrupts) in the Nietzschean "eternal return," that which turns up in and turns out (comes) to be the experience of the bermensch. There where man is over and done with, when one has done with human "being," at that point at which we have moved beyond the constraints of organicistn, stratification, subjectification, there we bear witness to the Blitz of Witzthe irruption of the rupture, the appearance (drawing forth/withdrawing) of the fragment. The Blitz of Witzl "Witz ist ein Blitz," writes Jean-Luc Nancy, quoting the German Romantics (the Schlegels, Novalis, Bemhardi); "wit is a flash of lightning" (Nancy 263). "Flash, lightning, explosion are forms of the cogito's double" (Nancy 263) 3 : for the Cartesian subject "splits itself in two," explains

2. Neither a state nor a being, but never the less (all the more) the "state of being" of becomingcf. Nietzsche's Wille zur Macht, 617: ' T o impose upon becoming the character of being" (my italics). "Becoming as invention, willing, s e l f denial, overcoming of oneself: no subject but an action, a positing, creative, no 'causes and effects'" (ibid.). 3. Also sprach Zarathustra, 3: "Behold, I teach you the overman: he is this lightning, he is this frenzy." 4: "Behold, I am a herald of the lightning and a heavy drop from the cloud; but this lightning is called overman."

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Nancy, "and produces its own double 4 : l'homme d'esprit, the man of wit. Instead of being unique and unitary like the cogito, the double proliferates and immediately becomes a multiplicity of figures" (Nancy 257). The "man of wit" is, as this essay is itself trying to say, the overman, and the "multiplicity of figures" irrupting from the instant of the cogito' s splitting (the shattering of the subject as such) is the berwindung of the bermensch, the overman's very overcoming of the manageable whole that is the subject of man (the human, all too human, subiectum), the overman's overcoming of the organism. The experience of the overmanthis overcoming of human "being," of stable "subjects"reveals the transgressive "truth" (aletheia) of the Nietzschean eternal return: "henceforth mankind's truth, the truth of the subject whose cogito did not last any longer than the Cartesian moment, this truth also has to be found in the unstable and non-assignable" (Nancy 259). The moment of ipseity (selfconsciousness, self-knowing) is itself only an instantand an instant eclipsed in (moreover, by) the revelation, beyond man (ipse, cogito), of the overman eclipsed at high noon or full moon, at the point (noontime, moonscape) which reveals the instantaneity of ipseity and fragmentation of self-realization (its eternal interruption).
What if, some day or night, a demon [demonstration? demonstratum without strata] were to steal after you [steal you away?] in your loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every j o y and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequenceeven this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!" (Nietzsche 1974:273341)

consisting of the synthesis of the (philosophical) synthesis and the (literary) work. It merely has such a synthesis fulgurate like chaos" (263-64). 5 "Let us beware," writes Nietzsche, again in Die frhliche Wissenschaft, "of thinking that the world is a living being ["the necessary organicism" and "organism" (organized qua synthetic system) above]" ( 1974:167 109, my italics); "we should not reinterpret the exceedingly derivative, late, rare, accidental, that we perceive only on the crust of the earth and make of it something essential, universal, and eternal, which is what those people do who call the universe an organism." "On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is formless [or unformed; the word Bataille uses is "informe" ] amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider [which gets stepped on] or spit [spittle]," writes Bataille in the Dictionnaire critique (1929). This latter optionfollowing the "informe"would affirm becoming rather than being and in so doing avoid the closure and confinement (conforming) of organicism, organic being. "Informe," it seems 6 , would be in keeping with the Nietzsche of Der Wille zur Macht: To impose upon Becoming the character of Being" (1968:330617), to allow for the existenceand independence (independent existence)of becoming. For the informe is not merely "formless" or "unformed" (two of its possible translations): rather, as Bataille explains in the Dictionnaire critique, it is the call to form. A dictionary would begin, writes Bataille, not when it "gives the meaning of words, but their tasks" (31). Informe is explained, then, in terms of the task of theof a, of anyDictionary (i.e. the work of definition) and that of Philosophy also (i.e. the task of conceptualization, of forming concepts); and yet in arriving at a definition, in attaining a conceptualization (a concept), the informe, he says, "gets itself squashed" or "stepped on" (se fait craser). The informethe formless, the unformed, and the call to form"has no rights": it "gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm"; "like a spider," he repeats a second time, "or spit" (last word in the entry).
The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!

Speck of dustwithout quintessence. Man: what is man? A quintessence of dust (Hamlet II:ii). And the overman? Dust without quintessence: apart from, not a part of, any greater "being," any overarching organism or organization. To think the speck, to become spectator of the speck (this uncanny spectre, this revenant), such is the thought of the overman, of that which is done with human being, that which becomes, is always yet to come to pass, and leaves it at that. Explosion of the subject, irruption of the rupture, Blitz of the Witz: "wit is a flash of lightning. Flash, lightning, explosion"... and yet that which "defines" Witz also dissolves it, destroys it, decomposes it, "dismays and staggers the thought of Witz. [...] Lightning blinds, an explosion deafens, pleasure benumbs. Witz gorgonizes the thought of Witzand thereby topples this thought from the supreme unity" (Nancy 263). "Witz, in keeping with the disassociation to which it owes its birth, never corresponds to the necessary organicism of a synthesis or a completed work," Nancy continues, "and even less to the supreme organism
4. Doppelgnger: its Double and/as its Other.

Speck of dust, squashed little spider, crushed earthworm, gob of spit, trampled under foot by the passage of time, again and again (and again). To think the dust-speck or the gob of spit as informewhich at this point points out and points to this essay's second demandis not to think of these (as) things, not to
5. "Here we will refer to a statement by Nietzsche found in [...] Die frhliche Wissenschaft [1974:167109]: 'The collective character of the world is, on the contrary, to all eternity, chaos'" (Heidegger 1984:91). This term, "chaos," "aims to capture the guiding representation of perpetual Becoming in the sense of the customary notion of panta rhei, the eternal flux of all things [of Heraclitus]," positing "being as a manifold of necessitous Becoming, in such a way that "unity" and "form" are excluded ab initio" (Heidegger 91). 6. "Seems, madam!" exclaims Hamlet at one point (I:ii), "I know not 'seems'. [...] I have that within which passes show"all else is "but the trappings and the suits of woe."

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think these things as being(s), not to take them as they are, but rather as they come or are coming. To think the informe (which for our purposes here is very informative) is to think the being as becoming and as such to think the being of becoming. Becoming what? is of course the wrong quest(ion). Becoming. There. To think in such a fashion is to think apart from the part and the whole, and, instead, to think the fragmentto come toward (to word) the fragment. Becoming, of course, means passing or surpassinga passage. To allow for becoming is to allow for a passing away, a breaking away (frangere). To come toward the fragment is also necessarily to break away from it, to pass it by or let it pass. The fragment as that which "overcomes" the part and the whole, as that which is berwindung, is, in its very "coming"its becomingalready "over." Lycette Nelson, in an essay on the work of Maurice Blanchot (Blanchot 1973:x), brings us back to the eternal return (fundamental to fragmentary thinking): "What is terrifying about the eternal return," she writes, "is not that what I live now I will live eternally, but that there is not, and never has been, any now in which to live anything"how, indeed, could there be, if, following the law of the eternal return, in the future there will recur what has occurred in the past rather than the present (since everything has always already happened)? The present is thus a fragment: not a part of the past or the future but apart (fragmented) from them and apart (fragmented) from the whole they compose; it has never been and will never be, but is only always yet to come, is always (eternally) becoming: "in the future," Blanchot explains, "there will return what in no form and never could be present, in the same way that, in the past, that which in the past never belonged in any form to the present has returned" (1973:22; my italics). What we have here is a becoming, in both the future and the past, worded according to the principle of the formless, unformed, or informe. The present is informe and (as such) always becomingnot becoming something, for that (something) which it "is" is becoming. The present is not becoming something, but becoming; it is not a part of something, but something (aliquidl nescioquidl) other: it breaks with the whole notion of a part or parts; it is the hole in the whole or wholes. The present is neither a part nor a whole but apart altogether from both, and thus it existsand exitsas a fragment. Works in progress would be an inappropriate name for fragments, since the fragment stands in opposition to progression. It is, as Blanchot would say. The Writing of the Disaster: "The fragment," he explains, "tends to dissolve the totality which it presupposes and which it carries off toward the dissolution from which it does not (properly speaking) form, but to which it exposes itself in order, disappearingand along with it, all identityto maintain itself as the energy of disappearing: a repetitive energy, the limit that bears upon limitation" (1986:60-61). The fragment dissolves, dissipates, discontinuesand its discontinuity, as Blanchot says, is "the mark of a coherence all the firmer in that it has to come undone in order to be reached, and reached not through a dispersed system, or through dispersion as a system, for fragmentation is the pulling to pieces (the tearing) of that which has never preexisted (really or ideally) as a whole, nor can it ever be reassembled in any future presence whatever" (1986:60). Fragments are destined, again, "to the blank that separates them, [and]

find in this gap not what ends them, but what prolongs them, or what makes them await their prolongationwhat has already prolonged them, causing them to persist on account of their incompletion" (1986:58). Fragments persist rather than progress, perdure rather than endure? The fragment: eternal return of the same (rupture). The fragment presents the same problem eternally, and each presentation of this same problem marks its difference, since that which returnsruptureas rupture (break, fissure), differs, brings about difference. In the eternal return of the same, it is not the same that returns, wholly or partially (in whole or in part), but precisely this difference, this rupture or disruption... fragmentation rather than partition or completion. The same thing happens again and again: the eternal return of difference, distraction, disruption: the breakage, the break-off, the break-up or break-down, the breaking apartnot into parts of a whole but in fragmentsformless, unformed, informe. The fragment itself is the call to form, even as it is itself the ban and bane of all form(s). "Bannan, bannen," writes Jean-Luc Nancy in an essay entitled "Abandoned Being" (Nancy 45): "to order or prohibit, under threat of penalty [...] grafted onto a 'root' (*bha) of speech, of declaration. Fari and phanai are part of the 'family,' and so, as a result, is phone. Abandoned being is returned or left to phone, and to fatum, which in turn derives from phone [...] One abandons," Nancy concludes, "to a voice" (45). Third demand: the fragment calls for and calls forth an abandonmentthe fragment is abandon-meant. For if the fragment calls for form, formation, formulationdefinition, completion, conceptualizationit is because it is itself unformed, formless, informe, beyond the (philosophical) concept or the (literary and/or literal) definition qua elaboration, explication. But if this is true, then the fragment does not call for(th) an abandonment (which would give it voice, express its formless/unformed nature) but rather a betraying. That is, in calling for(th) its definition, its portrayal, the fragment calls for(th) its betrayal: the betraying of what it is ( i n f o r m e ) by a treacherous treading 8 upon it, squashing it "definitively" (formatively). 9 The third demand demands that we distinguish between: 1. the definition, depiction or formation which constitutes a portrayal and betrayal of the fragment, and 2. the abandon or abandonment of (and to) the fragment, which gives it voice, allows it to express, on its own. The fragment is

7. "Perdurance," literally meaning "carrying out" or "holding out," is the Heideggerian term which designates the act of bearing ("to bear") in the sense of "keeping together" andalso"keeping apart": "the between" of these two. I used the word years ago in an essay on the notion of sublimity (Mellamphy 1993:20) as "an aporetic endurance qui se perd mais qui dure quand mme: what is 'perdu'," I then wrote, "endures, lost." 8. "Fragmentary writing is risk, it would seem" {Seem, madam?): "risk itself. It is not based on any theory, nor does it introduce a practice one could define" (Blanchot 1986:59). 9. Follow the path, or "pas," of the rupture, draw a line of flight, "yet there is still a danger that you will reencounter organizations that restratify everything, formations that restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject," write Deleuze and Guattari (1987:9). "Fragmentary writing is risk," writes Blanchot (see note 8).

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abandon-meant but from this abandoned position calls for and calls forth its betrayal, its portrayal: its replacement by a portrait, painting, explanation or depiction. One cannot capture a picture ("frame") of the fragment: it is in fact the punctum that would puncture (poke a hole in) the Studium or study picture/depictionas such (the whole). Punctum and Studium: these are two words used by Roland Barthes (1981:2610). 10 It is by dint of the Studium, writes Barthes, "that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions," whereas the punctum shatters this relation, this figuration, this face, gesture, setting or action: it "will break (or punctuate) the Studium," Barthes explains. "This time it is not I who seek it out (as I invest the field of the Studium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me" (1981:26 10). The punctum punctures rupturesthe Studium, opens the uvre to altered, to its otherits alter (alternate, alternatives)and bears witness in so doing (splitting, breaking) to its spirit, its Witz. This witnessing, this Witz, is the enlightenment or illumination of the lightning flash qua Blitz of Witzthe rupture or the puncture of the punctum, "this element which rises from the scene, shoots out like an arrow," and shatters the subject of (the) study... its cogito, ergo sum. Such a witnessing is the witnessing of the overman ("it is not I who seek it," writes Barthes; it, on the contrary, comes tobecomes: approaches, withdrawsme): "an abomination all the more intolerable in that it seemed to come to me across a fantastic layer of time," Maurice Blanchot once wrote (1985:4); a quality which "rendered it easier but also harder to bear, by making of it a perseverance absolutely cold, impersonalthat neither life nor the end of life could stop." What is witnessed breaks the present, reveals its (the present) rupture, and strikes us, abominably, as a return of what has never been and will never be present (presented): the eternal return of the same (rupture, disruption, difference). And this eternal return, as Martin Heidegger wrote in his study of Nietzsche (13), "has a shattering impact on Being":
The span of the thinker's vision no longer ends at the horizon of his "personal experiences." Something other than himself looms there, abiding beneath, above, and beyond him, something that no longer pertains to him, the thinker, but to which he can only devote himself. (Heidegger 1984:13)

burden' makes it clear," writes Heidegger, "that this 'thought of thoughts' is at the same time 'the most burdensome thought'." The weight or gravity of this thought, the thought of the fragment, is the weight or gravity of the eternal, of becoming. This thought is greater than any and every part, any and every whole, all subjects, beings, what-have-you"a coherence all the firmer," writes Blanchot, "in that it has come undone in order to be reached" (1986:60).
To have a system, this is what is fatal for the mind; not to have one, this too is fatal. Whence the necessity to observe, while abandoning, the two requirements at once. (Schlegel 53)

The punctum of the Studium, the Blitz of Witz, bears witness to a "cold, impersonal" vision (Blanchot 1985:4); it no longer ends, as Heidegger says, at the horizon of "personal experience." This is the berwindung of the bermensch, I propose: both easy to bear and unbearable, intolerable, abominable, "[t]he greatest burden," writes Nietzsche in Die frhliche Wissenschaft (1984:273341). "The thought [of the return] as a burden!" exclaims Heidegger (21); "how can a 'thought' be a burden?": "The way Nietzsche here patterns the first communication of the thought of 'the greatest
1 0 . We will return to Roland Barthes (and his Fragments d'un discours amoureux) below.

"He wants himself to get the drift of co-opting-out, which is like a 'taking-holdof-letting-go'," writes my friend and philo-sophic alter-ego Anand Thakkar in an essay having to do with "negative dialectics" (Thakkar 17)"Neither to cop out of the System (which inevitably comes our way) nor to be co-opted by it (letting what comes our way have its way with us). Rather, he is thinking, let what comes your way go its own way, in which case one must balance one's fierce resistance to it (protesting a difference) with a gentle disaffection (being there to care less)." My response to this, in another essay (1996), was a clear echo along with an inevitable difference or adjustment: "He wants himself to get the drift of this co-opting-out," I wrote, "which indeed is like a 'taking-hold-of-letting-go'; and this requires the balancing of one's fierce resistance (a 'rigorous logic and tautness of mind,' as Lautramont says), but not with gentle disaffectionif anything, with gentle solicitation: a solicitation which invites (invokes) the affect all the more. A rigorous logic and tautness of mind (a wariness and vigilance: that of das gefrchtete Auge, das reine/reinmachende Auge, das dritte Auge, das Theater-Auge11 which witnesses the wickedness of Witz) along with a gentle solicitation, an openness to what is being watched, to its 'desolate swamps' and 'poison-filled pages' (its 'deadly emanations'cf. Lautramont, Chants de Maldoror I:i)" (Mellamphy 1996:75). The fragmentary imperative: to observe, while abandoning, the two requirements at oncethat of systemic enclosure (resistance) and that of solicitudinal openness (compliance), that of being "informed" and of becoming "informe" (or rather the informe's "becoming")... in short, at length, "taking-hold-of-letting-go." 12 To get the (d)rift of this co-opting-out, the (d)rift of the fragment as fragment, is to take as "being" becoming, or as Nietzsche says, "to impose upon Becoming the character of Being" (1968:330617): "one must shape becoming as being in such a way that as becoming it is preserved, has subsistence, in a word, is," explains

11. The "dreaded" eye, the "pure" and "purifying" eye, the "third" or "theater" eye cf. Nietzsche, Morgenrthe 223, 497, 509. 12. This, in passing, is perhaps the best way to understand Walter Benjamin's (in)famous Einbahnstrae fragment "For Men," which I quote in full: 'To convince is to conquer without conception." Here "conquer" can be understood in terms of " o v e r c o m i n g " b e r w i n d u n g a n d "to convince... without conception" as "taking-hold-of-letting-go," or going beyondgetting "over" man: "becoming" bermensch.

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Heidegger (203). In other words, one must "recoin [...] becoming as being" (Heidegger 203):
Becoming is retained as becoming, yet permanencethat is, when understood in Greek fashion, beingis injected into becoming. Being as a whole is still [as in Heraclitus and Heraclitean doctrine] a flux, a flowing in the sense of a becoming. However, recurrence of the same is so essential to this becoming that it is such recurrence that primarily defines the character of becoming. (Heidegger 147)

The fragment as fragment (frangere), is, eternally, unfinishedit is never whole, nor (following this very logic) a part of any given whole. It becomes, not any stable being, but the being of becoming. And in this becoming it "is" always in passing. It passes away. But in this passing away it awaits its own becoming. The fragment becomes by passing, or breaking, away (breaking of[f], frangere). The fragment "is" by dint of its dissolution, dissipation, disappearanceits "being" broken; it turns out to be a fragment (frangere) only in returning to the rift or withdrawing to the drift (drifting, drafting) of its fissure, fracture, fragmentary nature. One cannot "grasp" the fragment, unless by "grasp" we understand the "taking-hold-of-letting-go." To capture the fragment, to put a cap on it, to frame it, close it off, would be fatal to the fragment as fragment (frangere: that which breaks with, breaks from, breaks off enclosures and frameworks); the fragment should not be co-opted by a given system or structure (form, formulation), nor should it, on the other hand, simply "opt out" (i.e. be taken as simply "formless" or "unformed"). "Informe" is not merely "formlessness" or a state of being "unformed": it is, again, the task of forminga becoming. To leave the fragment formless or unformed would be as "fatal" (Friedrich Schlegel) as giving it a form, formation, formulation: both options "portray" it rather than "port" it (carry it, bear itallow it its perduranceu). The fragment, as fragment, is somewhere in between these two polaritiesin the "gap" 14 which opens up (and opens out) from (and to) them. The fragment never "fills in" this gap: it is this gapit becomes this gap, it is this gap's inevitable becoming. To fill in the gap is to betray the fragment, to portray it. To allow the gap its voice (voix) and passage (voie), its passing and "pai"singing, is "to observe, while abandoning, the [fragment's] two requirements at once" (Schlegel): the necessity to let the fragment pass (frangere) and the necessity to bear (bear witness) to this passage, to allow it its perdurance, perdu. "[T]he mark of a coherence all the firmer in that it has to come undone in order to be reached" (Blanchot). Witz [flash of lightning, Blitz] gorgonizes [marks and makes (monstrously) coherent] the thought of Witz," writes Jean-Luc Nancy; "wit [Witz, Blitz] is a flash of lightning [...] [and] this same quickness ["flash," "explosion"] dismays and staggers the thought of Witz. 'In Witz there occur sudden petrifaction, dread, and coagulation,' writes Schlegel" (Nancy 263): dread, coagulation, and coherence of
13. See note 7. 14. "Mind the gap!" (fragmentary imperative).

the repeated rupturing or lightning-flash (Witz, Blitz), petrifaction (petrifying sight and site) of the staggering splitting and shattering... Witz, the "informe" (call to form, bannan, bannen) of the cogito, opens onto the "manifold of necessitous becoming" (Heidegger 91)the "spirit* haunting every "subject" and, as such, "proliferates and immediately becomes a multiplicity of [coherent/compossible] figures" (Nancy 263) irrupting in the between and as a becoming (in) the rupture qua frangere. To bear witness to the fragment as fragment is to observe, in the between between these two requirementstaking hold of letting gothe "being" of becoming. The fragment "never corresponds to the necessary organicism of a synthesis or a completed work," explains Nancy (263), but "aims to capture the guiding representation of perpetual becoming," as Heidegger says (91). "It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion," continue Deleuze and Guattari (21): "unlike the graphic arts, drawing, or photography," the fragment "pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entry ways and exits" (21). In the introduction to Mille plateaux, Deleuze and Guattari offer up their fragmentary strategy or rather counter-stratifying method for fragmentary writing:
For example, a book composed of chapters has culmination and termination points. What takes place in a book composed instead of plateaus that communicate with one another across microfissures, as in a brain? [...] Each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau. To attain the multiple ["the fragment as fragments," as Blanchot would say (1986:60)], one must have a method that effectively constructs it; no typographical cleverness, no lexical agility, no blending or creation of words, no syntactical boldness, can substitute for it. In fact, these are more often than not merely mimetic procedures used to disseminate or disperse a unity that is retained in a different dimension for an image-book. Technonarcissism. Typographical, lexical, or syntactic creations are necessary only when they no longer belong to the mode of expression of a hidden unity, becoming themselves dimensions of the multiplicity under consideration; we only know of rare successes in this. We ourselves were unable to do it. (22)

Typographical cleverness, lexical agility, blending or creating words, syntactical boldnessthese forms of wit are in fact merely that: forms of wit, forms of Witz, "a multiplicity of figures" irrupting from the split with or splitting of the subject (its rupture, fracture, frangere). They only become necessary (strategically or methodologically) when they themselves invoke or provoke the split, open onto the Nivellierung of becoming and point to the bermensch and its berwindung. An example of this (rare success): Tristram Shandy. As Jean-Luc Nancy points out, in Sterne's work "Witz is continually born and reborn like its hero, Tristram Shandy, whose identity is the identity of a Witz: although born from the normal generative process, Tristram owes his birth to an accident [a rupture]his mother disturbing [interrupting] his father at the crucial moment by reminding him to wind the clockand, as explained by

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Tristram, by an 'unhappy association of ideas which have no connection in nature'" (Nancy 254). The book itself mirrors this incessant interruption and irruption of Witz (witnessing the fragment) through typographical cleverness, lexical agility, blending or creating words, syntactical boldness, and other such strat^|ies/methodologies. Witz is continually born and reborneternally returns, incessantly fragments, breaks o f f , and perdures, perdulike its hero (Tristram). Tristram Shandy and Tristram Shandy (book and being, becoming) are constantly abandoned rather than betrayedthey are not "reduced to a simple symptomal subject, but rather," as Roland Barthes writes in his Fragments d'un discours amoureux, "we hear in [their] voice what is 'unreal' [not yet real]" (1978:3), we hear their yet-to-come, their yet-to-be, their yet-to-become realtheir spirit or Witz: their hum qua homme d'esprit (Nancy 263). Barthes, too (like Deleuze and Guattari in their Mille plateaux), has an introduction which explains "How this book is constructed" (1978:3), i.e. begins with the elaboration of a methodology for fragmentary writing. "Everything follows from this principle," he writes: that the matter at hand "is not to be reduced to a simple symptomal subject"; that we hear its voice (voix/voie: voice and passage, its passing and "pas"singing), "what is 'unreal,' i.e. intractable" (1978:3); that we hear the abandoned and that we not betray it. "Abandonment," indeed, is a word repeated throughout his Fragments, and yet at the very beginning, in "How this book is constructed," we stumble on the "portrait"the opposing principle, according to this article ("What is proposed, then, is a portrait," ventures Barthes [1978:3]). But, I would argue, even Barthes himself is wary of this word, and no sooner introduces it than he qualifies it: "What is proposed, then, is a portraitbut not a psychological portrait; instead, a structural one which offers the reader a discursive site: the site of someone speaking within himself' (1978:3). What is proposed then, I propose, is not a portrait but a portal: a passage (voie, voix) toward and to word a voice (voix), a concourse for the coursing of discourse ("dis-cursusoriginally the action of running here and there, comings and goings," as Barthes writes [1978:3]). Voice, passage, passing, rather than portrait, portrayal, betrayal. And in the first paragraph of the first fragment, where the word and the work of "abandonment" is first put forward (to be repeated again and again throughout the Fragments), a strange situation: the coordination of that which "breaks nothing" with "abandonment." "This morning," writes Barthes, "the weather is mild, overcast. I am suffering (from some incident). The notion of suicide occurs to me, 15 pure of any resentment (not blackmailing anyone); an insipid notion; it alters nothing ('breaks' nothing), matches the colour (the silence, the abandonment) of this morning" (1978:10). This notion, as faded and bleak as the day itself (daybreak, morning), "breaks" nothingfor it is already broken, it has already broken with the day, with the morningit is already being mourned, it is already being

15. "Idea of suicide; idea of separation; idea of withdrawal; idea of travel; idea of sacrifice, etc.-, I can imagine several solutions to the amorous crisis, and I keep doing so. Yet, however alienated I may be, it is not difficult for me to grasp, through all these recurrent notions, a single, blank figure which is exclusively that of outcome" (Barthes 1978:142).

morning: it has already been betrayed (portrayed). This notion presents itself ("it is not I who seek it out," Barthes will write in La chambre claire [1981:2610], but rather it "which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me") as something unreal, intractable: a future already passed, another voice, which comes, or rather becomes, only to withdraw or be drawn into silence again (and again). "Endlessly I sustain the discourse of the beloved's absence," writes Barthes (1978:15); "a preposterous situation; the other is absent as referent, present as allocutory. This singular distortion generates a kind of insupportable present; I am wedged between two tenses" (1978:15). This "between," this "insupportable'Vunendurable present that is nevertheless sustained, supported, perduring, "presents" the fragmentthe fragmentary present, the present as fragmentwhich is always yet-to-come, always becoming. This "insupportable present" (perduring perdu) eternally returns in the fragment, as the fragment. "What is terrifying [preposterous, unsupportable] about the eternal return," as Lycette Nelson says, "is not that what I live now I live eternally, but that there is not, and never has been, any now in which to live anything" (in Blanchot 1973:x). "I am waiting," writes Barthes: "waiting for an arrival, a return, a promised sign. This can be futile, or immensely pathetic" (1978:37). "In reality, it is unimportant that I have no likelihood of being really fulfilled (I am quite willing for this to be the case). Only the will to fulfillment shines, indestructible, before me" (1978:55). The will to fulfillment does not amount to actual fulfillment ("it is unimportant that I have no likelihood of being really fulfilled") but to an act, an actionthe act (action) of willing. Awaiting, or waiting for, eternal return is willing the eternal return, willing the coming of becoming, and as such, (is) overcomingovercomes the dialectical relation of part and whole and the whole of the past and future, presenting in so doing (or as Anand would say, "nothing doing") the rupture of the present, the present as that which overcomes past and future, not by fulfilling themnot by filling them in, not by resolving thembut by dissolving them, dissipating them, scissipating them, and in this scissipation allowing the schizogenesis of becoming, of being able to become: "pouvoir devenir." This "pouvoir" is the power in the Nietzschean notion of "will to power in its supreme configuration," writes Heidegger (203). "To impose upon Becoming the character of Being," writes Nietzsche, "that is the supreme will to power." Shortly after this statement, Heidegger reminds us, Nietzsche writes: "That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of Becoming to one of Being." The "power" in "will to power" is the "pouvoir""being able"of the actant, the actor (the one who acts): it is the "being" of becoming. "Will to power," writes Gilles Deleuze (1983:68), must be understood with regard to the fact that "power is the one that wills in the will. Power is the genetic and differential element in the will. This is why the will is essentially creative." "This is also why power is never measured against representation," it is never represented, it is not even interpreted or evaluated, it is "the one that" interprets, "the one that" evaluates, "the one that" wills. But what does it will?" he asks. "It wills precisely that which derives from the genetic element" (1983:85).

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In Nietzsche's terms, we must say that every phenomenon not only reflects a type w h i c h constitutes its sense and value, but also the w i l l to p o w e r as the element f r o m w h i c h the signification of its sense and the value of its value derive. In this way the will to power is essentially creative and giving: it does not aspire, it does not seek, it does not desire, above all it does not desire power. It gives: p o w e r is s o m e t h i n g inexpressible in the w i l l (something mobile, variable, plastic); p o w e r is in the w i l l as "the bestowing of virtue," through p o w e r the w i l l itself bestows sense and value. We should not ask whether, in the final analysis, the w i l l to p o w e r is unitary or m u l t i p l e t h i s w o u l d s h o w a general m i s u n d e r s t a n d i n g of Nietzsche's philosophy. T h e w i l l to p o w e r is plastic, inseparable from each case in w h i c h it is determined; just as the eternal return is being, but being w h i c h is a f f i r m e d of becoming, the will to power is unitary, but unity w h i c h is a f f i r m e d of multiplicity. T h e m o n i s m of the w i l l to p o w e r is i n s e p a r a b l e f r o m a pluralist t y p o l o g y . (Deleuze 1983: 85-86) To i m p o s e u p o n becoming the c h a r a c t e r of being is to b e a r w i t n e s s to the f r a g m e n t a s f r a g m e n t ; t h e i m p o s i t i o n i s i t s e l f a willing (an a c t i o n ) w h i c h p r e s u p p o s e s a n d p r o j e c t s a n actant ( a b e i n g ) w h o i s a c t i n g ( b e c o m i n g ) . T h e actant w h o i m p o s e s (upon h i m s e l f / h e r s e l f / i t s e l f ) the character of b e i n g overcomes the static " s e l f * o r s u b j e c t " ( h u m a n a l l too h u m a n " b e i n g " ) a n d b e c o m e s a s s u c h (an) overman, o v e r and d o n e w i t h the c o n f i n e s and c o n s t r a i n t s o f o r g a n i c / s u b j e c t e d / s u b j e c t i v e b e i n g , open t o the i n h u m a n , n o n h u m a n , e t e r n a l , i m p e r s o n a l " p e r s e v e r a n c e " ( B l a n c h o t ) o r " p e r d u r a n c e " ( H e i d e g g e r ) o f the present ( N i e t z s c h e ) : the " n o w " w h i c h in " n o " s e n s e was or e v e r will be and y e t is willed or thought"known" i n the r u p t u r e of frangere, in the i r r u p t i o n of the fragment as fragment " h e r e " ( h e a r : bannan, bannen) a n d k"no/w".16 This o v e r w h e l m i n g e x p e r i e n c e t h e e x p e r i e n c e ( " k n o w " i n g , " n o " i n g , " n o w " ) o f the f r a g m e n t o v e r c o m e s t h e s u b j e c t ( h e n c e the m o v e t o w a r d a n d t o w o r d the overman) a n d in t h i s o v e r w h e l m i n g , o v e r c o m i n g , overcomes its o w n coming over, w i t h d r a w s its o w n a p p r o a c h , d i s s o l v e s , d i s s i p a t e s and d i s a p p e a r s . I n t h i s d i s a p p e a r a n c e i t a f f i r m s i t s e l f ( p e r d u r e s ) . W e c o m e t o " k n o w " i t o n l y i n the " n o w " w h i c h its v e r y " k n o w i n g " n o w d i s s o l v e s , d e s t r o y s ( " t h e r e i s not, a n d n e v e r h a s b e e n , a n y n o w " b e s p e a k s b a n n a n , bannenthe f r a g - m e n t [ B l a n c h o t 1 9 7 3 : x ) . " W e s h o u l d not a s k w h e t h e r , i n the f i n a l a n a l y s i s , the w i l l t o p o w e r i s 16, See Deleuze and Guattari (Mille plateaux) on hcceity, the "here and now" which is "nowhere" [no-where and now-herethis was initially the title of the present essay], "nohow" [know-how], Hcceity should be thought "independently" of forms and subjects," write Deleuze and Guattari (262), "which belong to another plane." The "plane" or "plan(e)" of hcceity is, according to D e l e u z e and Guattari, "[a] hidden structure necessary for forms, a secret signifier necessary for subjects. It ensues that the plan(e) itself will not be given. It exists only in a supplementary dimension to that to which it g i v e s rise. This makes it a teleological plan(e), a design, a mental principle. It is a plan(e) of transcendence [...] It may be in the mind of a god, or in the unconscious of life, or of the soul, or of language." In any case, they conclude: "Even if it is said to be immanent, it is so only by absence" (265).

unitary or multiple," writes Deleuze: " T h e will to power is plastic, inseparable from each case in which it is determined"it is always going to be different, different in e a c h a n d every single case, and this multiplicity or multitudinousness e x p r e s s e s its u n i t y qua u n i f y i n g p r i n c i p l e : i t h a s a l w a y s b e e n a n d will a l w a y s b e like this. T h e c o n c l u s i o n h a s a l r e a d y b e e n g i v e n (it h a s b e e n g i v e n a g a i n a n d a g a i n ; the last l i n e a b o v e i s itself another echo). It r e m a i n s f o r me to repeat my principal proposals: 1. that the f r a g m e n t as f r a g m e n t is distinct f r o m the d i a l e c t i c a l r e l a t i o n o f parts a n d wholes; 2 . t h a t t h e f r a g m e n t a s f r a g m e n t i s informe: d o e s n o t g i v e meaning(s) b u t tasks; 3. t h a t t h e f r a g m e n t as f r a g m e n t is a b a n d o n - m e a n t : it calls, it b e c k o n s , " p a s " s i n g i n g (goes the passage) their o w n s i r e n s ' s o n g ; 4 . t h a t t h e f r a g m e n t , a s f r a g m e n t (frangere), b r e a k s o f f , b r e a k s a w a y , b r e a k s f r o m a b s e n t s itself f r o m i t s v e r y p r e s e n t a t i o n ( h e n c e the Blitz o f its Witz a n d i t s " s t a t u s " w i t h o u t " s t a s i s " a s a punctum). T h e f r a g m e n t is a r u p t u r e , a n i r r u p t i o n , a n i n t e r r u p t i o n , a n d t o t h i n k the f r a g m e n t a s f r a g m e n t i s t o a l l o w f o r i n t e r r u p t i o n , i r r u p t i o n , r u p t u r e , t o take o n s u c h r u p t u r i n g s ( g o o d w o r d , g o o d w o r k : " r i n g s " true), taking hold of letting go. S u c h " t a k i n g - h o l d - o f - l e t t i n g g o " is an o v e r c o m i n g of the conditions of any and every stable subject, static b e i n g ; i t i s t h e berwindung o f t h e bermensch, a s N i e t z s c h e s a i d . T h e f r a g m e n t p r e s e n t s t h e " b e i n g " o f t h i s " b e c o m i n g " qua " o v e r c o m i n g . " T h e f r a g m e n t (in s h o r t , at l e n g t h ) is t h e being of becoming. University REFERENCES Barthes, Roland. 1978. Fragments: A Lover's Discourse [Fragments d'un discours amoureux]. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. . 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [La chambre claire : notes sur la photographie]. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Noonday Press. Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings. Trans. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Benjamin, Walter. "One-Way Street" ["Einbahnstrae"]. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Trans, by Peter Demetz. New York: Schoken Books, 1989. Blanchot, Maurice. 1973. The Step/Not Beyond [Le pas au-del]. Trans. Lycette Nelson. Albany: State University of New York Press. . 1985. When the Time Comes [Au moment voulu]. Trans. Lydia Davis. N e w York: Station Hill. . 1986. The Writing of the Disaster [L'criture du dsastre]. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. . 1993. The Infinite Conversation [L'entretien infini]. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. . 1997. Awaiting Oblivion [L'attente l'oubli]. Trans. John Gregg. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy [Nietzsche et la philosophie]. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. London: Athlone Press, 1983. Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus [Mille plateaux]. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. of Toronto