Jean-Francois Lyotard

Predavanja o detinjstvu

Lessons on infancy

INFANTS

No one doesn't know (how) to write. Everyone, especially the „greatest“, writes to catch by and
in the text something that he does not know (how) to write. He who will not let himself write [be
written] knows it.

The stories and essays that these Lectures relate to have been traced along the trail (track) of this
misery (poverty). Like a border, both outside and inside, the line of disappointment (frustration,
chagrin, razočarenja) circumscribes an object for reflection, over there, and brings (gets, makes,
works) the text as close as possible to its own writing [ecriture].

The thing from which these various writings suffer bears various names, names of elision
(izostavljanja). Kafka calls it indubitable (incontestable, unmistakable), Sartre inarticulable
(inarticulate), Joyce inappropriable (inappropriate, neprisvojivo, neprilično). For Freud, it is
childhood (infancy), for Valery disorder (confusion), for Arendt birth (nascency, rađanje).

Let us call it infantia (infancy), that which does not speak (of, about) itself (which is not spoken).
A childhood (an infancy) that is not an age of life and that does not pass. It haunts the speech
(discours). This one (speech) does not stop putting it (childhood) aside, it (speech) is its
(childhood's) separation (odvajanje, izdvajanje, izostavljanje). But it (speech) persists, at the
same time, in constituting it (childhood), as lost. Without knowing it (childhood), it (speech)
therefore shelters it (childhood). It (childhood) is its (speech's) residue (rest, ostatak). If infancy
(childhood, in ordinary sense) remains (abides, dwells) at its (infantia, childhood, kod njega), it
is not in spite of but [precisely] because it (childhood) lodges (resides) in (at, with) the adult.

Blanchot wrote: Noli me legere (do not read me), you will not read me (you'll read me not).
What does not let itself be written (what can not be written), in the writing, perhaps calls (for) a
reader who does no longer (not anymore) or not yet know (how) to read: old people,
Kindergarten children, drivelling (drooling, što trućaju, buncaju, balave) over their open book:
a.d.a.d.
 RETURN (RECURRENCE, REPETITION)

And then coming back was the worst thing you ever did (Ulysses)

1.

How to know that what returns (comes back) is what had disappeared? That it does not only
appear, but reappears? The first step (gesture) is to deny (challenge) it the reality. What passed
(is past) is not there, what is there is present (sadašnje, prisutno). A sign is required to convince
oneself, a proof that one does not dream.

Athena, as in a dream, disguised Ulysses into a wandering and miserable old man in order to
render him unrecognizable before he returns to the Ithaca mension. The dog Argos, who has
been waiting for him for twenty years, identifies his master, by his smell I suppose, and the old
faithful nurse, Eurycleia, by the scar he carries on his leg. As for Penelope, expert at thwarting
the suitors, she does not believe him until he turns out to know the secret structure of the
matrimonial bed.

The clues, smell, scar, sex, are proofs by (of) the flesh. Only Telemachus believes his father on
his word when he declares to be Ulysses. The designating (naming, nominative, imenujući) voice
is sufficient indication (clue). A son recognizes his father not by his body, but by his name.

A few millennia later, we are the sons of the Odyssey. One (we) must believe on [its] word.
Joyce titles a book Ulysses, we are in Ithaca, our father is back (returns). And Joyce goes for (has
a go at, makes an attempt at) his little story of the voyage (travel story, travelogue). He reveals in
confidence that each of the eighteen episodes of his story in fact bears the name of some
occasion (instance, circumstance) of the Homeric journey. Entitled, itinerary (putopisna,
mapirana), the Odyssey would return us in Ulysses, ensuring the master of the work (the master
builder; or: making us the master of the work).

But how? A god, a goddess has metamorphosed (transformed) it (Odyssey) to make it (Odyssey)
unrecognizable. The clues that would prove the return, the body of the text bears little (of them):
there is no perceptible Odyssey in the stories of Ulysses.

As for the name, the sons of Homer that we are can not trust it. The Greek father's name was
Odusseus (Odysseus). Ulysses is a derivation, first Latin, as the dialectal Olusseus, then English.
The book's name has been distorted by crossing two cultures, two worlds of names: Romanity
(Rome), classical and modern Northern Europe.

In addition, Joyce's title does not designate as the Odyssey or the Aeneid a literary genre, in this
case that of an epic or novelistic [romantic?] cycle. It indicates nothing of its mode (manner) of
exposition (presentation). One will say that this category of title, by the name of hero, is of
ancient use (usage), for example in the theater or in the novel. But Ulysses is not exactly the
name of the hero of the book, who is Bloom, Leopold.

These are not great transformations, will we say, no one is mislead (deceived, mistaken) [by
them]. But it's fishy (shady, doubtful, suspicious). The fishy title. It does not decline the identity
of the Odyssey, it evokes it, but by blurring (scrambling) it. It equivocates it [makes it equivocal].

Will we say that the journey traced by Homer served as a model for Joyce and that at least the
Odyssey returns to Ulysses in the way that it gives it its scheme of composition? I would like
(want) that, given the table of concordances between the episodes of the latter (Ulysses) and the
songs of the Homeric poem, the reader, the son that we are, has more ease in indentifying
(spotting, finding) the logic of return. But I fear that this ease is also a decoy (lure, bait).

To follow the principle of correspondences, one would never finish counting (enumerating) the
displacements that make Ulysses diverge from the Odyssey. Some affect the diegetic universe,
the reference; the others modify the story itself recounted (related) by Homer; others at last
(finally), and not the least, upset from top to bottom (turn upside down) the narrative operators
assigning (giving) the Odyssey its epic status. I leave it to the narratologists to count these
displacements. Their number is such that one wonders by what (on what basis) we can recognize
in Ulysses the offspring of the Odyssey. Especially since these correspondences, which we use to
designate the episodes of Ulysses, are held (kept) in secret in the text of the book.

But above all the ease they provide us is illusory because it is the one that affords (provides) the
viewer of a classical painting the revelation of the regulating lines (tracés régulateurs)1 that
organize it. He finds there the clarity of a construzione legittima (legitimate construction),2 the
limpid logic of a setting in space and in ordered time. But as for this order, we know that Joyce
worked (tried) not only to make it invisible but to undo (unravel, break) it in detail, episode after
episode. I think here of what we all know: the multiplication of the most diverse modes of
writing, the heterogeneity of genres and styles, something like an almost desperate effort to
escape the logic of the work, to disrupt (deactivate) the book, to keep it from closing in one
beautiful totality.

The construction serves only as a spring (jump, leap) to deconstruction. It is not the logic of
space-time that is at stake in Ulysses, but its paralogisms: paratopisms, parachronisms. While the
beautiful classical form closes on itself, concludes, and thus returns, so that it is in itself the
return, it is essential to the Joycean writing to place the cyclic pattern under the rule of its
disruption (disturbance, derangement, deregulation) and its inconsistency.

Everything is familiar, the hours, the places, the people met, the least passer-by, the animals. The
adventure is in the language, its proliferation, its dispersion, the liberation (emancipation) of its

1
Discourse, Figure; passim.
2
Ibid, chapter Veduta.
horizons. Ulysses is not the story of a return, because the hero never left. He finds himself
immediately in the position of an immigrant or a spook (spectre, ghost), (let us) say a metic
[métèque: a pejorative word for a shifty-looking immigrant of Mediterranean origin; unwanted
foreigner, alien, intruder]. Dubliners, he can not be (theirs, one of them), from Dublin, nor to be
there, he does not return, he wanders (there). Or strolls (loiters). He suffers from a disaffection of
the presence (od nezadovoljstva prisustvom). Each now evokes an once (a then, a past) or
another time (or again), each here a there. Intermediate state, half-sleep and half-awake, which
can be compared to the reverie (daydream) of the solitary walker. All that is perceived, well
known, too well known, presents (gives, provides) occasion for evoking, for listening to a call
from elsewhere. So that Dublin is only a stock, a storehouse of diurnal (daily) remains, which is
composed to emancipate the reverie (thought, dream) of the loafer (skitnice, stroller). T.S. Eliot
said of Bloom that he "does not say anything". In the silent monologue, all the inner voices
appeal (speak, talk), with no regard to the unity of their concert (arrangement, choir), which
would be the work or the subject.

If the Odyssey returns to the Ulysses, it is in the absence. Ulysses wanders (strolls) in (through)
Ithaca, inhabited by his own (relatives, kinfolk, close ones), but deserted, and populated
(peopled) by ghosts. At home (his own), he is not at home (his own). Of King Hamlet, the
returning father, Dedalus says in the episode at the library: „His speech (dry and sullen [suv i
sumoran] English) is always directed (oriented) to (towards) somewhere else (the other side) and
backwards“ (193; 162). His house is no longer his oikos (household, house, family house). This
is how he squints (čkilji, gleda ukoso) and how Ulysses squints at (to) the Odysey. He remembers
the beautiful enclosed and concluded dwelling (abode, house) of his cycle only to orient his
discourse "towards somewhere else and backwards", in accordance with a space that is not there
and a time that is not present.

2.

That Ulysses is called Bloom is a serious title to (of) paratopy (paratopism) and parachrony
(parachronism), to (of) the spatiotemporal disaffection by which the ghost (spook) is struck. It is
a blatant (flagrant) trace of the displacement to which Ulysses has subjected the Odyssey (in
order) to recall it (call it back). Bloom: the metic (métèque) par excellence, converted Jew. The
Greek epos is distorted (biased, skewed, prejudiced, opinionated) by (in accordance with) a
tradition of life and thought, by (in accordance with) a way of being that comes "from elsewhere
and from behind", and which is itself pretty much (somewhat) denied. A Ulysses who would
squint (skew), over (accross, through) today's Ithaca, at the land of Canaan and one (a)
protohistory (either first millennium BC, or literally 'protohistorija' Blumovog porekla), without
returning there. The interpolation of the Jewish theme in the Homeric pattern (motif, design), of
which there are many instances (occurrences) in the Joycean text, deserves (merits) examination
under the title (heading, perspective) of return. I sketch (sketched out) some (of its) features.
We remember the parallel drawn by Auerbach in the first chapter of Mimesis (entitled „The Scar
of Ulysses“) between the Homeric and the biblical scene.

At every moment and in every place, the Greek hero is entirely and expressly (in) his role, the
role imposed on (ascribed to) him by the legend. He saturates (fills) his presence in the situation
in such a way that he accomplishes his destiny, fulfills it to completion. He has no
sentimentality, I mean: nothing of depth, of singular (individual) historicity, of the unexpected,
of that "behind" („backwards“) and that "elsewhere" that we, modern, attach to affectivity, to the
ability (power) to be affected.

The bard leaves nothing in the shade, keeps nothing of motives, emotions, or situations in reserve
(store). The prosody, the recurrence of the stereotypes, the ornamental description present (place)
the states of the soul and the states of the fact with (at, in) the same visibility. This clarity makes
it possible to identify without hesitation the voices, the references, the intentions, the dramatic
relations (relationships). On the such overexposed stage, the protagonists are like pure actants
(active actors), whose Homeric poetics makes semiotics transparent. It is a poetics "of the
foreground" (prvog plana), writes Auerbach, where the story (narrative) of events unfolds (takes
place) "in a continual temporal and local present", and which generates a world that "contains
nothing but itself". There is, he says, neither teaching nor hidden meaning (there). It does not
give rise to interpretation.

Ulysses is, to himself as to us, nothing but the ever-exposed identity of his role, of his
„character“. In particular, he does not age. Athena is obliged to disguise him so that he would be
(is) unrecognizable twenty years after his departure. „Basically, on his return“, notes Auerbach,
„Ulysses is exactly the same man as the one who left Ithaca two decades ago (before).“ His
return would offer an example of perfectly identical recurrence, was only the circumstantial
alteration (the alteration of circumstances) that the goddess subjected him to (made him
undergo).

We, modern, son of Ulysses, can not believe that an expedition, an exile, the experience in
general, implies no alteration, no alienation. The travel stories, the novels of education
(Bildungsromans), the Phenomenology of the mind, which are all odysseys of the consciousness,
accustomed us to think that the mind conquers its substance and its final identity, its self-
knowledge, only by exposing itself to the adventure of all its possibilities, at the risk of losing
itself in it. We conceive the return not as the identity, found again, of the same with the same, but
as the self-identification of the same by the "succession" (shifts, instances) of its alterity. The
truth of Ulysses is not for us at the end of the journey as it was at the beginning (the departure), it
consists in the journey. The truth is the method, as Hegel says, and the method, the passage
through mediations and alterations, is by no means extrinsic to the knowledge of oneself, as is
the metamorphosis of Ulysses by Athena; it (method – passage) is this knowledge.
In other words, with modernity, the truth ceases to be a place, a dwelling, domus or oikos, from
which an inessential circumstance, the outer (external) war, the Trojan war, has dislodged the
master of the house, and which it will suffice for him to clean up – by slaughtering the suitors,
hanging the unfaithful maids and washing the floor – to restore the property intact, including
(that of) the bridal bed still leaning against its internal olive tree, pledge (token) of an
ineradicable reference.

What modernity owes to Christianity, in this respect, is the internalization (interiorisation) of

war. The return to the peace of the house is prevented by an initial exile which has driven us out
(of it) and keeps us away (from it), by an entirely internal fault from which only the expiation
(atonement), the accepted suffering of the exile, that is to say the sacrifice, can bring redemption
(restoration, reparation) and allow the return to the innocence. The theme of self-sacrifice, of
which Christ is the paradigm, underlies the speculative motive of an experience conceived
(comprehended, understood, imagined) as death and resurrection of the spirit.

The beauty of Helene undoubtedly brings (plants, puts) the disorder to (in, into) the Greek
houses. It only provides (gives) occasion (incentive) for a distant (faraway) war. Under the name
of Eve, the woman embodies the original figure of sin, the permanent source of the secret war
that forbids the spirit to return to the father's house. However, the power of the "succession" is
such, in the Christian epic („geste“ – chants, poems, gesture), that Magdalene, the bad Eve,
assists the son in this agony, and that the prostitute will be redeemed. When the very Catholic
Claudel, this pagan(Gentile)-Christian, reads the Homeric nostos (ancient theme including an
epic hero that returns home by sea), he does not fail to make Penelope the symbol of the end of
this internal war. The olive tree of the conjugal bed, „a mediator between the substance and the
azure“, represents in his eyes the redemption of the flesh and the true return.

I am surprised that here and there the commentator can place Molly Bloom and her final "Yes
yes" under this pagan-Christian motive of the good Mother and the asylum (sanctuary) again
found (retrieved, repossessed). Claudel, more clairvoyant (insightful), returned to Joyce the copy
that the latter had dedicated to him, describing the book as "diabolical". Bloom may well have
been baptized, and (that) three times (as many times as Peter has denied Jesus), the sacrificial
and reparative dialectic celebrated at the cemetery and at the church he visits remains foreign to
him. And we know how much Rome is for Joyce, along with London, the name for the
oppression from which Ireland suffers.

If there is a return in Ulysses, it is not more Christian than Greek. I come back (get back, return)
to Auerbach's parallel. The writing of the Old Testament, he notes, is made of a juxtaposition of
little stories. Their conjunction is satisfied with and which orders the time in parataxis, without
distinguishing what is principal and what is subordinate. These stories touch on (are concerned
by) the most ordinary life. Far from being heroes, the protagonists are small tribal or family
leaders, preachers (shepherds) threatened by famine, driven (pushed) here and there by the
migrations and wars of the vast Orient. These brief narratives ignore everything about the setting
where the scene takes place, there is no description, even ornamental, of people and sites, only
names. The words are hardly exchanged. Injunctions, prayers, decisions arise (emerge, come up)
briefly, leaving motives and arguments in the shadow (shade). As in the Beckett's theater, silence
and this indetermination suggest that something is at stake that no one identifies (recognizes),
neither actor nor reader.

The Homeric gods deliberate in councils and come to support in person their protégés while they
fulfill (accomplish) the strategic program (project) allotted (assigned) to them. Jehovah, unique
and invisible, obliges, forbids, promises, is waited like Godot, without explaining his ends to a
people whom he has made his hostage. The latter (this last), writes Auerbach, is „undermined by
the jealousy of the election and the promise of blessing“ (33). Auerbach concludes from this
completely different scenography (setting) that, on the one hand, it introduces a demand for
realism, a concern for the concrete fact, an accuracy deprived of any epic amplification, where,
he thinks, the rules of historiography are announced (projected), while (whereas), on the other
hand, the enigma surrounding the logic of the episodes forces (compels) the reader or the listener
to an incessant, perhaps interminable, effort of interpretation, which will engender the
hermeneutics.

I do not recall these few observations of Auerbach to agree with (join) them nor to discuss them.
But they make it sufficiently clear that the interpolation of the Jewish motive in the return of the
Homeric epos seems likely to lead (it, there) to displacement. I will not go into the detail of the
demonstration. Impenetrability of motives, attention to the nearest (closest) everyday life,
examined as through a magnifying glass, the loneliness of the characters, the difficulty of
locating the voices even though they are exchanged in chatter or discussion or they
„monologize“, breaking the narrative rhythm, indifference to [syntactic] sequence (linking) and
general use of parataxis, multiplication of genres of discourse and of tones – none of this belongs
to the epic tradition, if not all of it proceed from the biblical writing (scripture) alone.

Even that which does not come directly from the latter, polymorphic (više-oblična) or
metamorphic (metamorfozna) prose for example, which must (should) be put on the account of
the modern decomposition of the literary languages – even that must be (should be, would be, is)
able to be related to it. For (because) this work of writing is part of an aesthetic or a counter-
aesthetic (an an-aesthetic) of the sublime, which since Longinus, through the Quarrel of the
Ancients and the Moderns (XVI – rani XVII vek, naročito u Francuskoj; Boalo–Pero) and the
romanticism, continues to attack the significant (meaningful) syntheses (syntheses of meaning,
syntheses of signifier). Not only the rules that classically set (arrange, determine, fix) the frames,
especially spatio-temporal ones, and genres, but deeper syntheses, cultural, ideological, perhaps
ontological, which set (arrange, determine, fix) the signifier [the meaning] (scriptural, pictorial,
and others) in syntactic and semantic groups, from the local turn [twist] or trope (turn or local
trope) to the greatest (most important) purposes (ends, finalities) of the ways of writing (or
painting, etc.). These syntheses which, in earlier ages, have recurrently given to the signifier its
signifying (significative) value, and to the poetics, then to the aesthetics of beauty, their
foundation and their authority.

But the work of anti-synthesis that I think of, which tries to measure itself against (da se meri,
određuje, procenjuje prema) this failure of representation that is the sublime feeling (feeling of
sublime, sentiment of sublime), has its distant source (root) in the biblical text. This is indicated,
still confusedly, in the treatise of Longinus, which often refers to it, and spreads (extends,
unfolds), after Boileau, especially into (in) the French dispute over religious eloquence. The
recourse to "je ne sais quoi" („I don't know what“) has at least the effect of coming up against
(being opposed to) the "great style", the style of the "foreground", the Greek ideal of beauty and
Roman ideal of eloquence. In the classical completeness of the gods, men and nature, it opens a
gap (breach). Through this gap (breach), one perceives a kind of non-world, of desert where
peremptorily sounds a voice (zapovednički odzvanja glas) that says nothing but: Listen.

By the time Joyce writes Ulysses, artists and writers know, in a very diverse way, that the
challenge (issue) of writing, in a broad sense, is, as it has undoubtedly always been, but
henceforth expressly, not to make beautiful (beauty), but to bear testimony of a passibility
[passibilité – prijemčivost, otvorenost, senzitivnost] to something – that voice – which in man
exceeds man, nature and their classical concordance.

The aesthetics of Baudelaire or Flaubert have already made it a faith (credence) [have already
made it authentic, are already authentic?]. It is not up to (posredi, u pitanju) the motive of the
city, so predominant in Ulysses, that does not belong to this stake (issue). For it is not enough to
treat it as a historian or sociologist, as the literary respondent of the current urbanization
(urbanization in progress). It is also, and I think (after Benjamin) above all, the return of
loneliness, the desert and passivity (aimlessness, idleness) in the heart of the community. The
modern city is this construction (structure, edifice, work) in which the community and the
individual are deprived of their activity (work) by the hegemony of the market value. Far from
being a free city, Joyce's Dublin is, to use the words of J.-L. Nancy, an idle (futile, purposeless,
pointless, useless) community. Bloom, announcer in small ads, is the witness of this suffering
futility. His testimony does not have (must not), either (no more), to be able to make (produce,
do) work (oeuvre), in the sense of the Fine Arts. It is only the mumbling mutter (voiceless
mumbling) of phrases (sentences) that associate with themselves "inside", when no one speaks to
you, when one is in the desert. And neither Joyce has to be able to make (art)work (oeuvre) of
the Bloom's testimony. He can only testify (to the fact) that the testimony does not make
(art)work (oeuvre), is not Greek. Ulysses is one of the greatest works devoted to idleness
(aimlessness, futility, poinlessness), and doomed (destined, devoted) to it. The structure of the
Odyssey returns only to be deconstructed, and to leave room for the void of interpellation (biti
„pozvan“, određen kao subjekt – ideološki, kulturološki, rodno; Altiser; Adorno i Horkhajmer;
etc.).
„Our loyalty“, says Professor MacHugh in the premises of the Telegraph (episode Aeolus), „was
always indisputable (indubitable, unquestionable) for the lost causes. Success is for us death of
(devoid of) intelligence and imagination“ (131, 110). This death is called England. Under its
domination (rule), Ireland is doomed (destined) not only to the observable misery, but to the
same radical disempowerment (idleness, futility) as Israel in Egypt. John F. Taylor explains
before (in front of) the Historical Society of Dublin, where the assimilation has just been
preached (advocated), that it is on the contrary by persisting in preserving and observing the
tables of the law of the Empire, "engraved, he says, in the language of the outlaws“, by refusing
the law of the Empire, that the Irish people will be able, as the Jewish people could, to escape
from „the house of their slavery" (140, 117).

I am not saying that Ulysses is the book of (about) the Law and the exodus. It is written in the
writing of the outlaws that were the sons of Joseph in Egypt (Josif iz „Postanja“, Izrailjev sin,
izdan od svoje braće) and that are the sons of Parnell in Ireland. In an alienated (estranged,
marginalized) Ireland on the flank of the Empire, Bloom the metec [stranger, alien, foreigner] is
more Irish than the Irish (themselves). As Moses suspects his people, he looks down upon
(askew at) a people enslaved to (by) the idolatry of the false Roman god and to (by) the interests
of British power. But Parnell failed to deliver (release, relieve, liberate, rescue) this people. Bad
Jew, ordinary Irishman, Bloom is not capable of (for) the holy wrath. From the calling (call,
challenge, being called) to stand up and go out (come out, da istupi), he retains nothing but the
disavowal (poricanje, odricanje) of what is there: the indignity of ordinary life, the cowardly
(faint, spiritless) concession (ustupak, pristanak, kompromis) of the soul to the derisive
(derisory) reality.

„And yet Moses died before entering the promised land“, adds J. J. O'Molloy in the same episode
(140, 118). After (on, about) which Lenehan concludes: „And with a great future behind him“.
The exodus may be (is perhaps, maybe, possibly) a return. It is at least the promise of a return.
But this promise remains, and must remain, held (kept) as a promise, never realized. Moses,
Parnell: we die (one dies) before it is fulfilled. The future of return remains contained
(concealed, harbored, held) in the promise made in the past (once made). The paradox of the
times is that which regulates the work of an anamnesis: what has been announced in the past is
that there would be a future to attest to it (da to potvrdi). Writing is this work of testifying to a
presence that is not the present of the (in the) "foreground". Once for all, the presence will have
been promised, the writing is devoted (dedicated) not to forget it.

In the Lestrygonians episode, Bloom talks (speaks) to himself: „We cannot get anything back
from the past. (It's) Like holding water in the (one's) hands. Would you? So you are not happy at
home, my poor little bad boy (naughty or wicked, rascal or brat)”? The seductive (tantalizing),
vulgar interpellation comes from a woman's voice (voice of a woman). This is a quote from a
letter of a correspondent, Martha, that Bloom found at the remainder post (mail held at the post
office until recipient takes it) and which responds to an obscene request (solicitation) he sent her
under the pseudonym Henry Flower.
Thus, at the lowest point of language and feeling, the misfortune of captivity in Egypt and the
misery of a false exit (way out), which would only repeat what Bloom did (made, performed,
played) in the company and to (on) the person of Molly, are expressed. Martha, Molly, the sirens
Bella, Zoe, Flora, Kitty, the girls on the beach - the women never go out of (leave) Egypt, they
are Egypt. One is not happy at home (at oneself), that is to say, at theirs (kod njih). You must not
(shouldn't, couldn't) want, or even hope, to „reclaim“ (get back, claim back, take back, retrieve,
restore) that at-home (at oneself), to return to it. It is not the home that has been promised. Bloom
will not find (recover) Penelope again, he will lie head-to-tail (head-to-feet) at his side [of the
bed] (Beckettian position), it is not to him that she will say yes, yes.

Here are, in bulk, suggested, indications to follow the fissure (rift) or the crack that the
Jewishness (the Irish condition) produces on the beautiful vase of Homeric journey.

3.

I have to say a few words about paternity as it affects the pattern (motive) of return in Ulysses.
About paternity or about filiation (parentage, poreklu, rodoslovu, bivanju detetom). This
question is also that of authority (autoritetu), or of the author, or, as they say, of creation. Under
the issue of (in relation to the, in respect to, in the name of) filiation, Joyce sketches (outlines)
his poetics.

I will confine (limit) myself to three observations concerning (touching on) the pattern (motive)
of return.

First of all, filiation obeys the general principle that it is reversible. The father is also son of
his son as the son is father of his father. They engender each other. One could say that they are
the same self-engendering [self-generating] (ones).

This does not seem to be the case of (in) the Odyssey. There is, however, a trace of this principle
in one fact (occurrence, event) [well] known to the scholars. The Telemachy is an addition to the
journey of Ulysses, placed before him (it) in the order of recitation. To complete (perfect) this
collage (affair), Telemachus, who leaves for Ithaca in the book IV, can not do it until (can only
get there in) the book XV, shortly before his father. The adventures of the son are like a pre-shot
image (a beforehand drawn image) of those of the father.

Joyce respects this disposition (arrangement) in the composition of Ulysses. Dedalus only meets
Bloom at (doesn't meet Bloom before the scene at) the brothel, in the fifteenth episode. The
question posed (asked) is whether, on this return of the son to the father and the father to the son,
the father finds (recognizes, retrieves) himself in his son, as if (there, then) he were the son
himself, and vice versa (conversely). Which is apparently the case in the Odyssey.

In Ulysses, the meeting, as we know, ends with separation (parting, separating, splitting up,
getting apart, getting parted). I would even (also) say: it begins with this separation. At the end,
Bloom settles at home, while Dedalus leaves (goes away). The filiation seems broken,
impossible. The son does not recreate his father. But it is precisely thanks to this failure of
identification that the true principle of generation (origination, production) is made known.
Authentic filiation requires the breaking (rupture, breakdown, severance), the interruption of
the bond (link) between father and son.

A word on (about) the staging of this break (breaking). In the Ithaca episode, Dedalus has just
refused the hospitality Bloom offered him, (and) they go out to say goodbye, in procession
(jedan iza drugog). Bloom paves the way (opens the door) with his candle, Dedalus follows him,
with ecclesiastic (ecclesiastical) hat on his head and ash stick in his hand (two accessories (props,
items, implements, instruments) of the exodus introduced in the third episode, Proteus) (50; 40).
Question (I quote): „What commemorative psalm did he [Stephen] sing in secreto (in private,
confidentionally)?“ Answer: The 113th, modus peregrinus: „In exitu Israel de Egypto, domus
Jacob de populo barbaro (in unfamiliar (inexperienced, outlandish) mannner: When Israel got
away from Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarian people)“.

We (should) note, obviously, the resurgence of the „Jewish“ theme at this precise moment of the
non-return. If (as much as; although) the son abandons (leaves, forsakes, deserts, dismisses,
abolishes) the father, it is also the father who then strives (strives hard) to return to the flesh of
his house, to the woman and the carnal generation (reproduction), I would say: to the Egypt of
representations.

I note (pick up, notice) only two signs of this movement which, in the second part of Bloom's
journey, because of (due to) his encounter (meeting) with Dedalus, alters the figure of the father
and makes it foreign to the son.

At the moment Dedalus finds Bloom at the brothel, the latter is (in the process of) reclaiming
(demanding, asking back) from Zoe the potato (the Irish misery still (again)) that he is carrying
on him and that he has given to her (Zoe) on entering, as a fetish. He reclaims (asks for) it in
these terms: „It is nothing but all the same it is a relic of my poor mother [...] It is the memory
attached to it. I would like to have it back“ (505–506; 453). On which Stephen goes on
(remarks): "To have it or not to have it, that is the question".

To have the memory of the woman and the house, to get it back. The son surprises the father
engaged in the imaginary (imagining, phantasy) of this return, in this nostalgia. The picture of
domestic enjoyment and appropriation, in which this movement ends (concludes), is lavishly
displayed in the episode Ithaca. The lady is dreaming upstairs, in the warmth of the flesh and the
intimate linen. Downstairs, in the kitchen, her husband lists all the small interests of the modern
(or postmodern) middle class, do-it-yourself (bricolage, house handyman issues), small patents,
easy astronomy, railway (train) station eroticism, rounding (up) incomes, gardening, finding
credit, playing (doing) errands, notability. Already in the episode Eumaeas, we are reminded
that Parnell missed the Irish liberation (failed in Irish liberation, missed to liberate the Irish)
because of a woman. The flesh, the incarnation, defeats (thwart, frustrate) the writing and the
exodus (fails in writing and in exodus). First (in the first place, firstly, primarily) by the fury
(rage, frenzy, force, žestina, pomama), when she offers herself. And, (by) exaltation once
appeased (soothed, satisfied), because it requires (demands) accounting (book-keeping,
accountancy). Two senses (meanings) of the French word jouissance. We also learned that
Bloom was baptized three times: Protestant, English (Englishman), Egyptian.

A complementary index (indication, sign) of the necessary separation between father and son is
still (yet, again, furthermore) on the other side, that of the son himself. Dedalus is, since the
beginning of Telemachy, on the way, or rather in the process of rehashing (reiterating, recycling,
prežvakavanja), of an irremissible (neoprostivog, obavezujućeg) internal exodus. I (will) retain
(keep, withhold, dwell on) only an example out of a thousand of this distance (these distances) in
the apparent presence. Dedalus has sent Mulligan, who has just left (gone away, departed... ili
vacated?, split up? – kako beše u romanu?), a telegram. Mulligan reads it aloud (loudly, in loud
voice) in front of the little cenacle (clique) of the disputants (disputers, debaters) at the library
(episode Scilla and Charibdys), which Dedalus has just joined: "The sentimental," says this
telegram, "is the one who would profit without assuming the overwhelming debt of gratitude."
Literally: who would like to enjoy without endorsing (odobravanja, priznanja, preuzimanja) the
endless debt (indebtedness) to the thing done (enjoyed).

This inscription from afar (distance, faraway), this telegraphy („Telemachus“, is it „the end of
the fight (battle, conflict)“, or rather „the fight (b, c) at (from) a distance“?), recalls the indignity
of all sentimentality: taking without paying. To believe oneself acquitted (absolved, exonerated)
because one has paid (for) the object of the „return“, by his enjoyment [jouissance]. But the debt
is immense, prohibiting (forbidding, preventing, suppressing, disabling, not allowing) the
sufficiency of this return that is jouissance (making the sufficiency of this return that is
jouissance impossible). In this way, the flow of sentimentality that floods (floats) Bloom back to
Ithaca is ruled out (discarded) beforehand (in advance).

Second observation. The thesis of consubstantial paternity, except in the mystical sense which is
also that of the highest uncertainty of filiation. The thesis of paternity or true filiation (parentage)
is exposed in this same library, in Stephen's speech (words), by (in, regarding) the case of
Shakespeare identified with Hamlet (Shakespeare's identification with Hamlet). Elsinore is an
Ithaca missed (failed, promašena). The suitor won (conquered, seduced) Penelope, Ulysses (the
king) was murdered. Penelope was unfaithful as a Helene. The father returns to the son only in
absence, by his voice, which recalls (reminds of) the debt. You must avenge (revenge) me,
restore me, that is to say, give me birth again (give me a new birth, engender me again). Dedalus
supports (without supporting it) the thesis that Shakespeare was this humiliated, absent,
cuckolded father, that he always played the dead king on the stage, and that his wife, Anne, was
a hussy (strumpet, whore) like the queen, (like) a Molly.
Finally (after all, at last, however, just as), there is no consubstantial paternity except in the
mystical sense which is also that of the highest uncertainty of filiation. „Paternity (fatherhood) as
conscious engendering does not exist for man“ (203; 170). And further (on): „In the economy of
heaven, predicted by Hamlet, there is no more marriage, (but, only) the glorified man,
androgynous angel, being a spouse (wife) to himself“ (209; 175). In the domestic economy,
incest rages on all lines of kinship, with the exception of father-son lineage. „They are“, Stephen
explains, „separated by a carnal shame […] In nature, what binds them? One minute of blind
instinct (blind call, sezone parenja)“ (204; 170–171). What binds them separates them, the
constraint of copulating (copulation), the woman, the „bite (bruising, strike, ujed, otisak zuba) of
her in oneself“. „Paternity [...] is a mystical state, an apostolic transmission (pasing on, handing
on, conveying) [...] On this mystery, the Church is founded, and founded unbreakably
(unshakeably, unswervingly) because (it is) founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, on
the void. On uncertainty, on improbability. Paternity can be considered as a legal (true, lawful)
fiction“ (203–204; 170).

Filiation, we should say the true paternation (paternacija? igranje uloge oca – sina?), is only the
transmission of what I called appellation (designation, imenovanje). There is no carnal filiation
of males. The feminine house is useless, even harmful (for them). At the birth of Shakespeare, „a
star, a day (diurnal) star, a meteor star appeared“ (206; 172). It is the one that William follows as
he leaves Stratford and „the web (arms) of his future“. „A star at night, and a pillar (column) of
smoke at day“. Again the Jewish theme. Shakespeare responds to the apellation (calling) that
comes to him from the desert. By fleeing the incestuous and lascivious mother, Egypt, he also
flees the pretenders (suitors – piše se isto kao pretenders na francuskom) to the carnal paternity.
We go out of here, we go there, elsewhere, back, to the true past, which remains to come.

Last remark (observation) on the issue (question) of paternity as a return, and missed (failed)
return. What is said of (about) the father and the son must (should) be understood as (of, about)
the writer and the reader. The reader engenders (produces, begets) the author, the author is
the reader of his reader. But here, too, a flesh interposes (intervenes) between them which
prevents a pure genealogy: it is the language, the hussy (strumpet, whore) that is the language. It
can represent everything (all), tell everything (say all), love everything (all). It is the Egypt of
writing.

It is like water, a kind of great spread out flesh, abandoned, ready for (landing itself to)
everything, marrying everything, infiltrating everywhere, redoubling and representing
everything. The writing (of Joyce), immersed in this water, tries to defer the effect of
representation and ductility (rastegljivosti). To delay (postpone, set back) the insidious
(podmuklu) tide. In the catechism recited in Ithaca, Bloom's praise (eulogy) of water takes on the
dimension of a flood. Bloom indulges (indulges himself, engages himself, engages) in immersion
(potapanje, utapanje). But he is careful not to tell Stephen of (about) this adoration and of (about)
his drowning. The reason: „The incompatibility of aquacité (motorika ronioca u vodi, kapacitet
mobilnosti ronioca u vodi) with erratic originality of genius“ (598; 550).
We can not not indulge in language when we write, but we can not indulge in it either. Defeat,
which consists in the trust (confidence) placed in it, must be constantly defeated in turn, the trust
(confidence) must be suspended (interrupted, aborted). I believe, o Lord (Stephen says in the
library), help my unbelief. Does this mean help me to believe, or help me not to believe? Who
helps you believe? Egomen (I, myself; ili: A monastic functionary in the Greek Church). Who
not to believe? The other guy (chap, fellow)“ (210; 176). What says yes to the permanent yes of
the language-woman is the Ego. As for "the other guy", "other chap", who says no, no, that's not
it, you're not there, get up and go out, I hear (there) the shattering (deafening) voice of
appellation (designation, imenovanje). (To chap, it's also to split, to cleave. And in English the
chap is the pedlar (torbar, putujući prodavac), the street vendor (ulični prodavac).)

The literary genealogy meets the same requirement and faces (comes up against) the same aporia
as filiation. How, if one writes, not to say yes to the water of the language? The genius is to write
down what it (water-language) could not marry (attach itself to, cling to, da prianja). What water
can not do is to be sliced (decided, defined, delimited, divided). Joyce-Dedalus lacerates
(rasecaju, seckaju) the language. It closes immediately (up)on his stroke of style (potezom
njegovog stila).

4.

I return to the catechism of the episode Ithaca. Question: „For which being the exit door was a
front door (entrance door, entry door)“? Response (Answer): „For a pussy (pussy-cat, kitten)“
(623; 573).

A (One) last return then (hence, therefore), in the company of this cat. Return to and of the
sexual difference. Argumentative genre (type, form, genus).

On the one hand (frstly): The father being son of the son and the son father of the father is (such)
male (which is) born without coitus. Or rather: it is only in (by) the voice that what is male is
really (truly) born (only that which is male is born in truth, according to (by, by virtue of) the
voice). Of oneself, by mere obedience to the injunction (nalogu, naredbi), issued (resulting) from
nothing (fire and cloud), to listen (iz puke pokornosti nalogu... da sluša). That is to say, to write.
As for carnal paternity, the Saint Beni may well draw an Isaac from the withered belly of an old
woman and give him (as a gift) to her (his) old man. But the voice will come no less than to
(re)claim him (it), one day, if not in (for) sacrifice, at least in (for) aqeda (in Hebrew: „binding“
(to the altar)), in (for) ligature (povezivanje, binding) or alliance. Warning that the males, the
Ulysses and the Abrahams, would be wrong to wait for an income (a return, a revenue, a yield)
of (from) what women claim (pretend) to give them. Bloom lost his son Rudy. And Stephen
refused the ultimate assistance (the last relief, the last audience) to (of) his dying mother. The
sexual reproduction (generation, generating) is only an opportunity to sin, to forget the debt of
memory. Remember that nothing comes back (returns), that everything happens (befalls, dešava
samo po sebi, arrives by chance, događa slučajno). What the anamnesis means, thinking
backwards, going back, what is (that which is, that in which consists) the work of writing. And
that (so) without end. Peregrination (lutanje, hodočašće) without return.

But on the other hand: This pussy (cat) – it is, you know, a sweet name (pet name, ime od milja)
that the French give to the women's sex (genitals) – this pussy (cat) is the passage through which
the father entered and the son will leave. The cat objects that she is, in the filiation of male to
(by) male, the obligatory threshold, the inevitable place of the transmission of the seed. She
argues that if the Lord has made us sexed, divided (severed) and separated, and if he has reserved
(stored, preserved) the power to reunite us to depend on (according to the) fire he puts in our
loins, it is not only for test us (for us to feel it), it is to expose the mystery of his ways. In
particular this one: that the self-engendering (self-begetting, self-generation), of which he is the
only holder in the heaven, resides, oh so palpable, ad portas mulieris (in Latin: at the gates of the
woman).

We see the argument. That (It's the one) of the virgin mother and the holy prostitute.

Now what relation (relationship, connection, relevance) can have this disputatio (dispute, debate)
on (about) sex with the return to (on, of?) return? That relation (relevance) that things do not
happen in the right order: first the sufficiency of the son-father, the voice and the writing, second
the passage by (through) the woman, the feminine pass, the concession (ustupak, dozvola) and
the jouissance. No, it is the opposite, or rather it is not the opposite (either), it is not the same
order returned on the same timeline, it is the initial and definitive disorganization of this
purported (pretended, navodnog) timeline, which is only the time of the consciousness.

The question posed by Ulysses at the return is not even whether one can bathe twice in the same
river. Pardonable anxiety (worry, concern) of the conscience vis-a-vis (in the face of) the
chronological succession: this succession forces the consciousness to always postpone its
actualization, so that it must always catch up (zaostajati i sustići, hvatati korak), restrain itself as
it advances on (across) the line. The question of Ulysses is very (quite) different: isn't the sexual
difference the ontological difference? Is it not from it [the sexual difference] that the
temporalizing separation of consciousness with itself originates (engenders), and that the
unconscious is formed as a past out-of-memory? A past that does not remain as past and can not
be restored. Inappropriable (neprisvojiva, neopredeljiva, neodrediva). And is not this
immemorial that which is appealing (calling, obraća, zove)? And is not the writing what tries to
make a response (to respond), desperately, to this remnant (residue) whose soul is the hostage
(whose hostage is the soul?)?

Objection: why would the sexual difference occupy this eminent position in the begetting
(engedering), whereas it has been established that, according to Joyce-Dedalus, the true
generation, fertility (fecundity) and propagation, owes nothing to it and is (done) in (relies on)
the identity of (between) father and son?
Answer: It is easy to show that the idea of the self-begetting (self-engendering) of the males,
autochthony of the warriors in the Greek version, injunction of the voice ("appellation") in the
Hebraic version – that this idea only betrays (translate (transpose) and travesty) the irreparable
preeminence (nepopravljivu, nezanemarljivu, neotklonjivu; nadmoć, nadređenost) of the sexual
difference.

Argument: Homeric males go to war to look for an unfaithful woman, and Ulysses (quite simply)
would not have to come back if he had not taken part in this expedition. Helen commands
(orders, ustrojava, određuje, iziskuje) Penelope by this consecration (osveštanjem, posvećenjem;
ili: conseqution, razvojem, tokom vremena, redosledom), and also because the whore is sleeping
(slumbers; kurva spava, drema u matroni; kurva se krije u matroni) in the matron. And as for the
Jews, their book tells that the initial sin, the fault of pretending to be equal or substitute for the
divine transcendence, the voice, is the doing (action) of a woman. Eve commands (orders) Sara
by this consecration (posvećenjem, ili consecution, redosledom), and here too the [female] devil
is watching over (from within) the bride (spouse). As proof (of) the laugh(ter) (The proof is the
laughter?) that (over)takes the old woman at the announcement of her late pregnancy: it is the
same offense that Eve did to the Lord, Israel is called (in the sense – Israel's name is): he will
laugh.

Concession (ustupak, kompromis): certainly the return that is the Odyssey tries to heal the
difference, and this exodus that recounts (tells) the Pentateuch is trying to emancipate itself (ili:
it – the difference).

Conclusion: Both attempts bear in themselves the admission of an initial and recurrent servitude
(slavery, enslavement). This is why we must accord to the sexual difference, prior to any
meditation, and which is its inexhaustible source, an original (inherent, authentic, initial) position
(position of origin). If there is so much sex in Ulysses, it is not because Joyce is immoderately
obsessed with it, neither because of realistic scruple nor intent to shock. But it is because the
writing of the Homeric return, even if it returns by the biblical exodus, can not fail to meet again
with this difference, with this oldest obstacle, all intimate (inward?), opposed to the return, to be
shocked by it and keep coming back (returning) to it.

Turning to and against the event of the sexual difference, which has no site, no representation,
which generates the least manageable anxiety, by reinscribing this event in the language, whose
ductile power, however, never ceases to immerse this anguish and powerlessness (helplessness),
the writing of Joyce declares the irreparable fault and the impossible return. The writer can
testify only to (about) his persistence, again in the language (in the same language). For it is not
enough to make the anxiety linked to this irreparable secret separation the object of a discourse
(as I am doing here (too)), it is necessary, in order to truly testify, to anguish the language
(angoisser la langue, to make the language (itself) anxious; to be anxious about the language).
There is one (a) defeat of the spirit, which is of always. One does (We do) not avenge it. In
revenge, one repeats (we repeat) it as Hamlet. It is not located (situated) in the time of
successions. This anguish, this madness of joy (enjoying, pleasure) and this horror, starts (over)
again all the time. It is what supports (backs up) the parataxis, the return of the And, which
thwarts any (every) return.

I finish. Dedalus exposes in these terms the initial defeat of Shakespeare:

„His belief (confidence) in himself was prematurely destroyed. To begin with, he was tumbled
(overthrown, laid down, srušen, položen, polegnut, oboren – od strane starije žene, pri prvom
seksualnom iskustvu – na to misli) in a field of wheat (of rye I say) and from then on he will
never be a winner in his own eyes or play victoriously that game of laughs (reefs) and lair (bed;
hole; misli igru seksa). An appropriation (affectation, impersonation) of donjuanism will not save
him. Doing (to do, by doing) it in (his) turn, he will not defeat the first defeat... The tooth of the
sow (female wild boar, divlje krmače) has hurt him where the love still bleeds. If the vixen
(shrew, goropadnica) is mated (married), he still has his invisible weapon of woman (his wife's
invisible weapon). There is, I feel it, throughout (through, in) the words, like a spur (sting) of the
flesh that drives him to a new passion, a shadow darker than the first (a darker shadow than/of
the first), obscuring (darkening up) his own understanding of himself [...] The soul was
prematurely struck dead, a poison poured into the porch (trem, predvorje) of a sleeping ear“
(193;161).

Stephen thus slips (slides, turns) to King Hamlet: "The poisoning and the two-back beast that
caused it, the specter of King Hamlet could know nothing of it if he had not been gratified
(rewarded) by this revelation by his creator“ (193; 162).

(Let us) Suppose now that the creator reveals nothing about the poisoning. That we risk (lay
down, sacrifice, lead?) a life to know that we were, not murdered, but begotten (engendred) by
this poisoning of the flesh. Because the creator doesn't exist (is not), or because he doesn't speak.
(Suppose) That the voice is silent.

It is then that Dedalus adds those words which will have served me to return to the return, to
return it and to try (with Joyce) to turn away from it: „Here's why, he says, his speech [of King
Hamlet, of Shakespeare, of Joyce] is always directed to somewhere else and backwards“ (ibid.).
Words that Dedalus still comments as follows (like this, on which D comments again): „Ravisher
(siledžija, silovatelj, ili: abductor, kidnapper) and prey (žrtva, plen), what he wanted but did not
want [...]“. That is the very designation (definition) of the work of idleness (inactivity, passivity,
futility). With this ultimate humor: "He returns (there, to it) tired (weary) of the creation he has
built to hide himself from himself, old dog licking an old wound. But because the loss is his gain,
he passes (in)to immortality whole (all) in one piece“ (ibid.). Dog is the truth returned from God,
but no writing can prevent Dog from turning back to God in his turn (that Dog in turn doesn't
turn back/return in/to God). Return of idleness to the work, in any case (anyway). Amen.
Published in Rue Descartes, 1 (1991), taken from franco-allemand conference, organized by
Interational Coledge of Philosophy, in March 1989, in Paris, on the theme „Moral and Politics“.

Prescription (recept, uputstvo)

I will use the text of The Penal Colony as a pretext to exhibit some sense (meaning) of
praesribere: to write in (on) head or (in) title, to prescribe (arrange, order), and, in late Latin, to
draw (trace, sketch) in advance, to sketch out. Without forgetting the meaning of the low
(rainessance Latin, later than tardif Latin, sometimes associated with vulgar (medieval) Latin)
Latin praescriptio, the limitation, on which is grafted (nakalemljen) our prescription (Latin:
prescription) of the Civil Code (which is grafted on our prescription of the C.C.), which names
(designates, defines, establishes) "the means of acquiring (gaining, earning, securing – ili: be in
force, be in effect) or liberating oneself by (in) a certain amount of time, and under the
conditions determined by the law." The English prescription fits (covers, are connected to)
almost all these nuances. The German, on the other hand, does not confuse the instruction
(regulation), the Vorschrift, the decree, the Verordnung, the ordinance (arrangement, dekret,
propis), the Anordnung, and the Verjährung, which is the expiration (expiry) of a right or a duty
for cause of (due to) duration (because of duration) (expiry of the duration of a right or a duty).

The violence and the plain clarity of Kafka's text, as usual, call for no comment. The comment,
rather, degrades them. I resign myself to it (I accept it; pomirio sam se s tim?). My excuse is that
I think I hear and pretend to hear, in these pages heated to the whiteness of hallucination, the
echo of what may have been called (could be called) the intractable (nekontrolisano, nestišljivo,
neupravljivo). I hear (there; about it?) that the intractable, which resists any law, is also an
absolute condition of morality. And finally, a little of what (which; that) results in politics (that a
little of it results in politics).

The officer describes to the Western traveler, in French, the machine of execution and the
operation of its parts, the rocking bed, the gearbox called the designer (drawer), the harrow
(drljača) with glass needles irrigated with water. The machine writes the sentence on the body of
the convicted (condemned), back and front. She (machine) incises it in his (very) body, until he
dies bloodless (bleeds out). The 'coup de grace' (the stroke of mercy) is given to him by a long
steel needle (the only one in (of) the apparatus) which pierces his forehead. After that, the bed
rocks the tortured body (falls with tortured body) in a pit.

The officer describes, the machine writes. The officer describes the machine, the machine writes
the judgment (verdict). I (will) come back (again) (returns) to the description below. Let us see
the inscription.

The machine executes blindly (automatically), she places the inscription program corresponding
to the sentence in the gear box, and performs it. The gearbox is what we call the dead memory of
a computer (data processor), the text of the program its (her-machine's) memory alive (living
memory, alive memory). That (being) done (so, the case), we press the send button on the
keyboard. The machine is blind not because she can not read, but because she can read only the
prescriptions written in the language of the former (previous, old) commander. Let's say (for
them) to go fast, too fast (Let's say that they go fast, too fast), the prescriptions of the old law.
Artificial intelligence whose memory operates only in the old language. Of this automaton the
officer is the servant. He has in his pocket the papers in which are drawn all the schemas
corresponding to all the prescriptions which constitute, by themselves, the whole of the old law
(entire-all old law). It looks like (at, the equipment of) a maintenance engineer (It looks as they
belong to the maintenance engeneer-he is the m. e.; they look like the property-belongings of the
m. e.).

In the late Latin ('latin tardif') these traces were called praescripta, lines written in advance, we
would say sketches, the guidelines for the execution. It is a late and seemingly modest sense of
praescribere, a spatial and, so to speak (if I may say), aesthetic sense. The hand, as one says the
hand of the executioner – here the harrow (ovde drljača) – will reproduce these traces on the
body of the condemned (convicted). It (harrow-machine) performs its work according to the
model in which the pattern of the lines drawn by the former commander (is, takes place) on the
slip (shred, strip, leaf, sheet) that the officer has in his pocket (where the pattern of the lines of
the former commander is drawn on the slip (of paper) officier has in his pocket). It executes in
both (two) senses of the word. The Latin says for it (says it) also perimere [destroy, kill, wreck,
annihilate, exterminate]. Perimere means to destroy only because it means first (of all) to acquire
or to take, to buy (obtain, gain), to (up until) the end (to the bitter end; through and through?).
The harrow executes completely and without discussion, peremptorily (zapovednički,
nalogodavno), the redemption of the fault of which the convict is (found-judged to be) guilty.
The convict (condemned man) pays with (in) his blood, in full, until the exhaustion – he pays
with his life the authority of the forgotten, violated presription.

I find also the original meaning of praescribere and preascriptio: to write in (on) the head (in-on
the lead), akmost to titulate (entitle, give a title to), and to enjoin (narediti, urgirati, uputiti;
zabraniti?). The command of the former commander is a prescriptive sentence (phrase). Its form
is: Do this, do not do this, etc. Here one would want to (should) examine the modalities of
prescription. I will name with (from) the letter D3 all these modalities, which deploy the color
chart (graph) of rights and duties: the obligation, the forbidden (prohibition), the license
(permission), the tolerated (consent-concession?). Depending on whether one is subject to it, one
is the recipient or (i.e.) the addressee, one has duties. To the extent that one can subject others to
one or another of these modalities, one is in the position of the sender or the addresser of the
prescription, one exercises a right to oblige (compel), prohibit, allow (permit), etc. The
prescription as an order that comes from the old law is reflected aesthetically in the regulatory
line, the praesciptum that the machine will follow to execute the final inscription (inscription).
3
Devoirs et droits – duties and rights.
I said that praescripta had an aesthetic sense for two reasons, one weak, the other (one) strong.
The weak one is that the prescription of the former commander must be transcribed from the
words that compose it in lines (into the lines) that impose themselves on (se nameću na, se
nanose na) the designer (drawer; dizajnera-crtača). Here it would be necessary to (should) reflect
on the relation of the letter to the drawing. There is no guarantee, following the Kafka’s text, that
the writing in use (usual writing) in the penal colony is alphabetical. At the limit there would be
no need for transcription if this writing were, as they say, ideogrammatic – if it were in the
kinship of (related to) the drawing, like the Chinese writing or the pharaonic hieroglyph.
Aesthetic, therefore, in a noble sense. Noble because we know, from the Zen Buddhist tradition
in particular, that the formation of a sign with the brush dipped in ink requires of (from) the
painter-scribe a sort of asceticism, of emptying inside (of internal-interior emptying), the
elimination of all (any) passion or idiosyncratic intent. An aesthetic state of emptiness or absence
of (as to) everything that is not, (let’s) say, the spirit of the sign (that is) to be inscribed. The
body of the scribe must redeem the fault of living, feeling and wanting, by a mortification
(suzbijanjem telesnih želja-poriva). The aesthetics required is the elimination of what we call
aesthetic: of the obsessive (occupying, worrying) influx of the sensible (osećajnog, osetljivog,
opažajnog). But the path (way) opened by writing-drawing is not the one that Kafka follows, so I
go on (proceed, pass on).

The strong reason, and, this time, relevant (appropriate) to call the work of the machine aesthetic,
is that its [work’s] challenge (task) is to transpose (shift, transcribe, transform, move) the verbal
formulation of the law into its bodily impression. Freud may have said: transcription of
representations of word into representations of thing. But here it's more than representation, even
(than) thing. Finally (After all), it is something other than representation. Other than
hallucination, dream, phobia etc. If one has to dig into the Freudian catalog of symptoms, one
will find the acting-out,4 the passage to the act (the acting out) as a reasonable approximation of
what the convict undergoes (suffers).

The body carries out (accomplish, efectuate, execute) the law, presently (in the present), in actu
(in the very act, in reality, in actuality), on itself. Like (in the case of) the hysteric whose wrist
hangs (stiffens, locks), or the nasolabial wrinkle contracts, or the stigma in the hollow of the
palms bleeds. Freud somewhere notes the privilege of the body in (regarding, when it comes to)
the inscription of the unconscious. A privilege called hypochondria. The body – but what do we
say by (with) the word body? – the body exposes itself not only to express the fault, that is to say
the unbearable (intolerable, insupportable) fulfillment of desire, but to pay for it by its suffering.
Its extreme disorder (disturbance, confusion) is death. I recall the chain of these passionate
reasons (causes): the hysterical symptom is found in all neuroses, as well as somatization; the

4
It means: to perform an action in contrast to bearing and managing the impulse to perform it. The acting done is
usually anti-social and may take the form of acting on the impulses of an addiction (e.g. drinking, drug taking or
shoplifting) or in a means designed (often unconsciously or semi-consciously) to garner attention (e.g. throwing
a tantrum or behaving promiscuously). The opposite attitude or behavior is called acting in.
hypochondria is always associated with melancholy, a loss of love object never found (restored,
raised?); the body accuses itself of this loss, it assumes the accusation (charge – preuzima
optužbu) at least, it tries to redeem the fault of the loss by its suffering – by the reminder of its
perishable nature.

Why to name (call) this fabric (tissue) of motives (reasons, patterns), this memento mori,
aesthetic? To be (exist) aesthetically (in the sense of the first Kantian Critique) is to be there,
here and now, exposed in space-time and to the space-time of something that comes (affects,
touches) before any (all) concept(s) as well as any (all) representation(s). This before one (we),
obviously, does (do) not know, since it is there before one is (we are) there. It is like birth and
childhood, which are there before we are there.5 The there in question is called body. It is not me
who is born, who gets birth. Me, I will be born afterwards, with language, coming out of (on
leaving) the childhood, precisely. My affaires (businesses) will have been handled (processed),
decided, before I can respond to (answer) it. And that, once and for all, this childhood, this body,
this unconscious remain (stay) there all my life. When the law comes to me, with (together with,
bringing with itself) me and language, it is too late. The things will have already taken a turn
(tour) (zaokrenule, krenule u drugom smeru, promenile se). And the turn (round, ciklus, red,
poredak) of the law will not succeed in erasing the first turn (round, red, poredak). That first
touch6 (affect, impression). The aesthetic is about (concerns, relates to) this first touch that
touched me when I was not there. This is not the place to develop this negative aesthetic that
commands (governs, orders, directs, leads) all great art, all writing, and only shows up in the
open in (with) modern art and literature (is only revealed in the light of modern art and
literature). Its obligation, its constitutive prescription is to accomplish (fulfill, perform, achieve,
exonerate) the insensitive touch by the means of the sensible.

This touch is necessarily a fault as to (with regard to, according to, in relation to) the law. It has
its (occupies) place and moment in a wild (savage) or peregrine (outlandish, alien, wandering,
nomadic) space and time, foreign to the law. And as long as it is maintained – as it persists –
according to (within) this immemorial space-time, the faulty savagery or peregrination is always
there, as the power of the body. If the law is not only to be declared (stated, enunciated), but to
be obeyed, it must overcome the resistance of that fault or of that power of fault constituted by
birth. I mean: it must have come (arrived – morao bi da potiče, da dođe) from being born (from
when one has been born) just before being (he has been) born (in)to the law. For the law, the
body is in excess (too much?). The aesthetics, even the negative aesthetics I'm talking about, is
not enough (sufficient) to absolve (exonerate; fulfill?) the fault that is the body (of the body) as
the space-time of the touch. In a sense, on the contrary, it aggravates the fault. At least (in the
least), it [aesthetics] repeats the savagery of the childhood-birth. It is the fault of art, this fidelity

5
U poređenju s Hajdegerovim Dasein-om – bilo bi to neko biće čije je Da pre njegovog Sein.
6
Može značiti i: key (ključ), note (beleška, zapis), coloring (bojenje), painter's stroke (slikarski potez četkicom),
manner of painting.
(loyalty, faithfulness). Nevertheless (however), the law has to (must) worry about (care about,
take into account, pay attention to) this too much (this excess) of the body.

If the law is to be executed, it will have to be incribed on the body, (it) too, as a touch. The body
of which I speak has nothing to hear of (from) the law, it hears nothing, not being in the order of
the address (appeal, discours – obraćanja, oslovljavanja), of the destination of D according to
(within, depending on) the duties and the rights. It [body] will have to be touched, according to
its cruel aesthetics. It will have to be started up (initiated, led off, launched; induced?
instigated?). That is to say, cut and incised. The root of the very late (Latin) intaminare [to
desecrate, profane, pollute, contaminate] remains tangere [to touch], the touch, a touch towards
(to) and inside (in). It will be necessary that, in the manner of a savage touch, the writing, the
holy writing, be inscribed on the body which does not belong to it. This body will be sanctified
(consecrated) only by this prescribed inscription of the prescription. This inscription must
supress (remove, eradicate, eliminate, excise) it [body?] as an outlaw (unlawful) savagery. Only
its death can redeem it, absolve (save, atone, exculpate) it. Redemption requires expiration
(expiry, isticanje perioda validnosti-legitimnosti-legalnosti).7

We (can, would) say: blood debt. But there is blood and blood, sanguis [life-blood], and cruor
[blood from a wound], the blood of life in the arteries and veins and the blood spilled. The first
one feeds (nourishes, nurtures) the flesh. It gives him its bluish, its pinkish, its pallor, its
yellowish; its freshness of dew, its infinity of juxtaposed nuances which enrages the painter and
the philosopher. An immaterial matter. As for (As regards, with regard to) the law, this
innocence of flesh is criminal. It has to (must) be atoned. The blood that runs out (flows out) is
called cruor. The atonement is cruelty, crudelitas [cruelty, barbarity] against fidelitas [fidelty,
loyalty, faithfulness].

The theater of cruelty is the machine of The Penal Colony. The aesthetics of the spilled blood
required by the ethical law when it is executed. Between the first touch and the second and the
last, that of the incisive harrow (prodiruće drljače) or the law, the aesthetic changes its meaning.
Here it is now, on and in the tortured body of the convicted, put (placed) at the service of
(serving) the old law.

The traveler (passinger, voyager) asks the officer: „does [the convict] know the sentence [sein
Urteil (his judgement)]? – No, said the officer“ (16; 150). The traveler insists: "He does not
know his own sentence [sein eigenes Urteil (his own judgment]? – No, repeats the officer.” And
here, Kafka inserts this staging indication („cette indication de mise en scène“: this indication of
the stage setting, this indication of the stage arrangement): „No, repeated the officer, stopping for
a moment, as if to allow the traveler to explain his question more precisely“ (16–17; 150–151).
The executor of the law knows that the child's (children, infant) body knows nothing and can
know nothing, in the sense of knowing (cognizing, cognition), of the law if it is not incised into

7
Prescription which annihilates the pleadings after a certain delay.
him until bleeding (with the blood). What it can know, it can (know) only in the sense that
sapere [to know, to be wise, to taste] is savourer (savor, relish, enjoy): to be aesthetically
sucseptible [„passible“]8, to be touched. The officer adds, indeed, after this silence: „It would be
useless to let him know [the sentence] since he is going to learn it on his body (because he will
learn it on his body)“ (17; 151).

The traveler insists: „He still knows (He knows, all the same) that he is the subject of a
conviction? – No more, said the officer to the traveler, as if he were waiting from him more of
such strange questions (as if he were still waiting for other such strange questions)“ (ibid.). The
traveler, the Westerner – let us remember that he is Westerner – persists: So he also does not
know (ignores) what one did for his defense (what to do for his defense; what he should have
done to defend himself)?“ The officer's response: „He did not have the opportunity to defend
himself.“ And here again, the indication of a stage play or a play with tone (a play with staging
or a tone): „As if the officer spoke to himself and he did not want to humiliate the traveler by
exposing him to (the) natural things“ (ibid.). The officer knows that his office, the office of (to,
at) the machine, that is to say the necessity for the law to slaughter (slay) the body to death, to
execute it (in order) to execute itself, has reasons that are elusive to the Westerner. Because the
Westerner has forgotten the blood. (Because) He thinks he has already redeemed the body by
some incarnation, once and for all. By a law that became flesh at the price of a bloodshed, a
cruor, but once and for all (Jesus, Louis XVI). This lightness (ležernost) of the West with
(regarding) the law, its absence of (to) cruelty. All he wants to know about the cruelty is pretty
much (almost) the cook's recipe: one does not make an omelet without breaking the (some) eggs.

The traveller is indeed scandalized (revolted): „Nevertheless, it must be that the convict could
have defended himself? (Nevertheless, it couldn't be that the convict doesn't have the opportunity
to defend himself?)“ (17; 151). And the officer, at the end impatient by the blind ignorance that
he nevertheless knows and recognizes, the ignorance of the crime which is the innocent body
(the ignorance of the crime of the innocent body), the ignorance of the fact that, because of this
body, the subject of law and duty, subject D, is never obtained (acquired, reached – zadobijen,
dostignut, stečen) – the officer, hence (therefore), takes the traveler by the arm, shows him the
convict, who puts himself at attention (who stands in attention; koji zauzima-staje u stav mirno),
in perfect complicity (saučesništvu, saglasju, pokornosti) with his leader (chief), and the latter
finally explains to the traveler: „I am responsible, despite my youth, to do (render, restore)
justice in this colony. Because I have always assisted (sekundirao; aided, seconded) the
commander for all matters of discipline, and I am the one who knows machine the best. The
principle according to which I decide is: the fault is always certain (definite, doubtless)“ (18;
152).

I would make (gladly, readily, willingly) „a word of the end“ (of it; from it). This is the word of
the beginning. The fault is certain – that we have been touched (of having been touched) "before"

8
Capable of feeling or suffering; susceptible to sensation or emotion.
that the law touches us. The law can only retouch us (alter us, touch us up; izmeniti nas,
„retuširati“, doterati... „naknadno dotaći“). The alteration („retouche“, editing, retouch) retouches
(alters) only if it is peremptory (naredbodavno, konačno, nepobitno). That is, if it puts an end to
the différend (dispute) of the "before", that is the body, with the "after", that is the law. I say: the
différend (dispute). There is no court to seize (grasp, understand, capture, confine) this conflict
between aesthetics and ethics, and decide. A disputatio (debate, dispute, discussion) would be lie
(untruth, deceit, falsehood) here. The body does not argue: „If I had begun by summoning the
man and interrogating him, said the officer, it would have only resulted in confusion. He would
have lied; if I had managed to refute his lies, he would have forged the new ones, and so on –
instead (of) that now I hold him and I do not let him go“ (19; 153).

Between the body and the law, the différend (dispute) is inconvertible in litigation (dispute).
Only the sacrifice of the body maintains the sanctity of the law. The sacrificial execution will
have to be repeated every time the criminal birth (rise, nascency, nastanak, rođenje) occurs,
without debate or reasoned (reasonable) judgment, automatically. Cruelty will be mechanical.
The convict is not saved in another (some other) world, he is thrown, dead, to the mass grave. It
is the law that is thus (thereby) affirmed, and in the (this) world. If the law is to be executed, it
will therefore arbitrate (decide, take a decision; slice through, cut) in the body, with the means of
the body, but against them [against its means]. With the blood, but (in order) for it to run out and
flow away (so that it runs out and flows away; so that it flows out and disappears).

What the officer describes is the absolute condition of morality. Its cruelty to(wards) innocence.
This is certainly a sin (offense) because it knows nothing of good and evil. It is not jenseits [on
the other side of], beyond, but hither (along here), diesseits [on this side of]. The law prescribes,
but not in the sense that it inscribes itself in the head (mind; front, foreground) or in the title
(headline). The title, which comes first, is not the commandment, it is the birth (nascency) or
childhood (infancy), the aesthetic body. It is so (in that way) pre-written (written in advance,
beforehand; pre-registered), on this side, diesseits, that the law itself can only be inscribed by
repeating on the body and in the body an inscription analogous to that which instituted
(established) it. The law is always an afterword (after-face, after-side, after-front) to the body. It
tries to precede (be the preface to) the preface that is sanguis [life-blood]. In doing so, it [law]
turns it [blood-sanguis] into a cruor, a blood that flows away (runs out) to death. The opposite of
a transubstantiation.

I return to the praescripta, the sketches (being) on the sheet of the former commander, which the
officer has in his pocket and by which he guides himself to arrange the gears of the designer in
order to move the harrow so that it finally engraves the words of the law on (to) the body.

It's not just about shedding the blood (the bloodshed), morally. Cruelty must be exposed. It's its
theater, its aesthetics. The body is grasped (here) spatially as the surface where the letters of the
law are cruelly cut up (cut in, notched, incised; urezana). But the time of the body (body time)
too must be captured and touched by the retouching (alteration, modification; retuširanje,
popravka ili ispravka, izmena) of the command (commandement; komande, zapovesti). The law
requires the death of a guilty innocence, but it also requires a time of death, and that innocence
agonize (be tortured; da nevinost bude u agoniji; da se nevinost muči).

The officer shows to the traveler the sheets (leaflets) carrying (bearing) the praescripta, the
regulating lines (traces, patterns) drawn by the former commander, used to (which served to)
program the movements of the harrow. „The traveler would have liked to find a word of
congratulation (felicitation, praise, approvement), but he saw only a labyrinth of intersecting
(interwoven) lines which covered the paper in such a great numbers (to such a great extent) that
it was difficult to distinguish the white spaces that separated them“ (22; 156–157). The traveler
confesses (admits) that he can not decipher anything. The officer laughs: „Yes, he says [...], it's
not a writing model (template, style, pattern, design) for children (a child) (it's not a child's
writing template). It must be studied for a very long time“ (23; 157).

It is not a writing to read, to give (someone) to read to learn (how) to read. The child can not
decipher it with his eyes (visually). Yet it is this same indecipherability that will render (make) it
decipherable, eminently, exclusively and peremptorily, by the childhood of which I speak, the
criminal innocence of the body. A writing that does not need to be read and will never be read,
but a course to feel, a line of suffering (a stroke of pain) (but a path (trace) to feel (be affected), a
line of suffering). The scrambling, the scribbling (vrludanje, podrhtavanje, škrabanje, zbrkanost)
of the line for the eyes has the function of prolonging the test (trial, examination) of the body
subjected to the notching (izloženog zasecanju, urezivanju). The officer explains: „Of course one
can not use a simple writing, it should not kill on the spot, but, on average, within (in) twelve
hours; it is at the sixth hour that the execution should (really start to) take its shape (to emerge).
It is thus necessary that the writing properly speaking is accompanied by a crowd (host, horde,
herd) of arabesques; the inscription itself only surrounds (encircles) the body with a narrow belt;
the rest of the skin is for ornaments“ (ibid.).

The article of the old law (meant) to be engraved on the convict at the execution attended by the
traveler (and the reader of Kafka) says briefly: „Respect your superior“ (16; 150). To stick to
this single text (this text alone), the body would be quickly surrounded by its incision. Would he
(even) die (from it) (at all)? One can imagine it. Our capital executions, at ours (for us),
Westerners, are in principle of this expeditious sort (brzog, ekspeditivnog tipa). The old law, on
the contrary, requires a delay of twelve hours. What does it expect from this post-scriptum? Why
this delay in inscription (writing), why the arabesques overload the text of the law to make it
indecipherable?

The law requires and expects (awaits) another decipherment (deciphering). The officer describes
the agony of the convicts: “As (How) he becomes calm at the sixth hour! (Even) The stupidest
(most foolish, mindless, weak-minded) spirit then opens (reveals itself). It starts around the eyes,
and then radiates and extends (expands). (It is) A spectacle (show) that would tempt you to put
yourself under the harrow too. It happens nothing else (Nothing else happens), the man only
begins to decipher the inscription, he moves his lips as if he is reading it (spelling it, watching it).
You have seen that it is not easy to read this writing with the eyes; well, the man deciphers it
with his wounds! It's a big (demandig) job, certainly (without doubt); it takes him six hours to
finish it“ (24–25; 159). After which it is "socked (skewered, izrezbaren, izrovaren, izboden,
nataknut) completely" on (by) the harrow and thrown to the pit.

According to the (computation of the, timetable of the) Gospel of Mark, Jesus is crucified at the
third hour, darkness extends (spreads out, unfolds, falls, starts to rise) from the sixth hour and
Jesus expires (dies) at the ninth hour.

Six hours for the wounds to decipher the law, during which, says the officer, "it happens [...]
nothing else". The agony proper, the fight (struggle, battle) of the body against the law, ceases at
the sixth hour and, if nothing happens then, it is because the re-touch (alteration, correction, re-
tuširanje) of the command, its re-mark (remark, dictum), has erased (cleared) the initial mark
(stain, impress) or touch. The immemorial aisthesis (sense-perception; čulna percepcija) from
(in) which the innocent body draws its savage resistance to all accusation and judgment is,
virtually (so to speak), reduced (limited, diminished, minimized, transformed). The first six
hours are given up, perhaps lost, for resistance (to resist). Resistance (which is) fierce, as we
(would) say, forastica [late Latin: from without, outdoors], foreign (wild, savage), whose
strength is taken (is drawn from, originates from) outside the law because (it is, it has been)
before it, diesseits („on/from this side of“ – as opposed to the 'metaphysical' „on/from the other
side“, i.e. „of/from beyond“). The torture imposed by what we kindly (gently) call moral
(spiritual) education. As for (As regards) sentimental education, there is none (there are not any).
The sentiment (feeling) is either badly bred (nurtured, brought up, fostered, exalted) or dead.

This delay required by the law for its decipherment, it seems that it is not the law but the body
that needs it, because it remains the hostage of a touch, blind (unsusceptible) to all justice. The
law (right – pravo) calls extinctive prescription9 a "mode of discharge (release) of the obligations
(bonds)" (isticanja-isteka obaveza, oslobađanja od obaveza). This mode is determined by two
kinds of conditions: „conditions determined by the law“, which are written here on the sheets left
to the officer by the former commander; but the prescription is also, in the words of (in the terms
of) D,10 as I have said, a „means of acquiring (gaining, obtaining) or liberating (to acquire or to
free) oneself for a certain period of time“. The prescription is a phrase D (which is) authorized by
the duration (durability, continuance, constancy, permanence). Uninterrupted possession – of
thirty years – is worthy (valuable) property (worth of appropriation), when it is necessary to
acquire (for it to be acquired; when it needs to be acquired). And for the extinction of a debt, an
uninterrupted service (I suppose, I say service for want of anything better (some better term)), a
spontaneous servitude (enslavement), a passibility, uninterrupted, are worth acquitting the fault

9
English: Extinctive prescription is a legal term referring to the expiration of a legitimate inheritance as the result
of prolonged failure to claim said inheritance (French: Prescription extinctive (or discharge) is the fact, for the
holder of a right, to lose it because of his prolonged inaction).
10
Devoirs et droits – duties and rights.
(vredna oslobađanja od krivice). This sense of prescription, that German expresses as (by)
Verjährung (German: limitation, lapse – ograničenje, isticanje (roka), istek), the extinction
[extinguishment, disappearance, vanishing, passing, (reduction in the intensity?)] of crime by
time, can (may) even apply to the repression of crime. We commonly say that there is a
prescription when a time has passed that makes the crime obsolete (outdated) and the punishment
inapplicable (neprimenjiva).

In the penitentiary colony, at least such as the officer wants (desires) it, there is never anything of
this last prescription, the law remains imprescriptible11 in any case. That is to say, always
applicable. Any offense (crime, violation) is imprescriptible because it always testifies to the pre-
inscription of an aisthesis (Latin: sense-perception) indifferent to D, to rights and duties. And the
application of the law always includes the same extinctive prescription: twelve hours of agony to
fulfill the unmistakable fault (to be acquitted, exonerated, absolved of the unmistakable fault),
which is not to be born (emerge, ensue, originate, be made) first to (in, by) the law, but to (in, by)
the aisthesis and through it. The arabesques are – in the program of inscription put (set) in
machine – the prescription of this prescription, the command(ment) of such a delay.

Why does the old law prescribe (require) that its execution, its incision on the guilty body, be so
delayed? Why not death, fast (quickly)? Because death is jealous of (envies the) birth. Or if you
want: the law jealous of (envies) the body. Or yet: ethics jealous (envies) aesthetics. The law is
jealous because it comes second, and the sanguis has not waited for it to circulate "freely". The
body has had (is having) its time before the law, where it does not have to answer, not being
addressed. This primary time also has to be paid. Thus (In that way) the handicap of the law will
be removed (suppressed, eliminated, done away with). The law must be (It is necessary that the
law is) too much of a death for the body because the body has the advantage of too much birth on
(in regard to) the law. The incision of the body by the law must be such as to delay the decision.
The gap between the decision and the incision repeats and cancels (annuls, eliminates,
suppresses) the gap between aesthetic birth and ethical birth. It repeats it because it maintains the
body (with)in the aesthetics by (through) the suffering from its wounds – it cancels (annuls) it
because this aesthetics of cruelty takes (has its) place and time only under the title (heading) of
ethics.

In the last six hours, the law will have been passed (will be passed; će biti donesen) first
(authentically, originally), not only as it claims (itself to be) (asserts itself, professes itself,
declares itself), but as the body hears it. One can only decipher it at the cost of bloodshed (spilled
blood, shedded blood). And that's the only way the law is decipherable. In the eyes of the
incorporeal mind (spirit), of the traveler or of the new commander, it remains indecipherable,
like the inextricable traces on the papers of the former commander. As for the officer who knows
how to read these papers and who serves the machine, he also knows that this reading is nothing,
that it has no value with regard to (regarding) the law. It will be necessary, it would be necessary,

11
Unable to be taken away by prescription or by lapse of time.
that his body is flayed (odrano, oguljeno) by the teeth of the harrow so that he ceases to be the
overzealous servant of the law and its machine, in order to become the victim, or better yet: the
henchman (acolyte, devotee; sledbenik, zagovornik, posvećenik). It's not fair (just, enough) to be
the celebrator (onaj koji proslavlja, slavi – nekog ili nešto) of the law, one must be the sufferer.
That is why, as we know, he will (go to) lie down under the harrow after having set (set up,
adjusted, fixed, settled) the program's design corresponding to the article of law which he breaks
by serving the (very same) law. And that article simply says, "Be just (fair, right)".

One must therefore concedes (grants, acknowledges) that the law needs the body, and its delay
(hold-up, leeway, lateness) on (at, with, in) the body, and the resistance of the body, to be able to
inscribe, that is to say, to execute (implement, discharge) itself. And that it [the law] can not be
just (fair, right) without being cruel. If it does not shed blood, the law is not decipherable, and
therefore is not at all, it does not exist. And this cruelty, necessary to (by) itself, is also the
homage (tribute) which the law pays (makes) to the body, its way of recognizing a pre-
inscription older than its (own) inscription, its way, after all (at last), of being just (right, fair)
with (towards, regarding) the aisthesis that has not been born (out) of it. (It is) A jealous way of
justice – which is just because it's (being) jealous.

The Latin names (calls) praemium [Latin: reward, prize, gratuity, favor, recompense, premium]
that part of a loot (booty) that belongs to the victorious god or general before the winners
(victors, conquerors) share the whole (everything). (It is) An excepted (izuzeti) part of sharing
(division, partition, dividing). The aesthetic childhood of which I speak is (such) a part that does
not belong to the division (sharing) of good and evil (bad). It is excepted from (izuzeto od)
address D. The execution of the law, by incising (zasecajući; incurring, zadužujući se, praveći)
this reserved part, stamps it with the title, with the praescriptum, of the partition (division). Thus
the body, excepted through (because of; izuzeto kroz/zbog) its pre-inscription, is in principle
placed under the prescription of the law, it is obliterated (izbrisano; istrto) and proscribed
(zabranjeno, isključeno). Praemium, it was not meant for D. The winner (victor) or god to whom
and by whom it has been reserved is the aisthesis; the god or the demon. Indivisible
(Imparable?), it (praemium – aesthetic childhood) was intractable (neupotrebljivo, neizrecivo,
nekontrolisano) to (for) the prescription of justice. On (Upon, From, Out of) this difficulty, with
the harm done to this body (with the wrong that this body undergoes), the question of community
and politics arises.

One does not see how to get out of (break out of, come out of, leave) the aporia. The former
commander and his officer-celebrator have established what I have named (called) the absolute
condition of morality in such a way that the re-inscription of the intractable under the title (the
praescriptum) of justice succeeds only by failing. The officer knows the aporia. (But) He persists
nevertheless. It is because he admits that (He admits that) justice is "injustice", in view of (with
regard to, regarding) the pre-inscription that is the body which it (justice) seizes (zaplenjuje,
grabi, okupira), since (as) he ignores it. But if it (justice) renounced her necessarily torturous
inscription by being (letting itself be) intimidated by some Habeas Corpus,12 justice, he thinks,
would simply not happen (take place). And then it would be unjust under the prescription of the
law. The law not only prescribes what must be done, it prescribes that it be done. The D-phrases
that it writes, under the (title of) juriscriptio (as the juriscriptio; Latin: writing of the law?),
require to be enacted in the sense of a scriptio in actu (writing in practice, in action). The act
differs from the code by the support of insription. The law is written on the paper, the act of
justice (up)on (in) the real. The machine transcribes (performs the transcription) from one to the
other. And the real is necessarily what resists it (the law), innocently, not being addressed to it
(in any way).

The delirium of the Kafka's officer expresses this absolutely aporetic condition of morality. The
execution of justice, in principle intended to erase an offense, must automatically cause harm, a
mortal wrong (fatal injury). This wrong is not occasional, it is constitutive of the essence of
morality as it is. And this wrong does not fall under the law. It (law) can not treat it or repair it,
since it (law) settles (establishes, founds) itself on it (this wrong). Once again, it (wrong) is its
(law's) condition, in the sense in which one says condition of possibility or realization and, also,
human condition. But here, (it is an) inhuman condition.

This aporia also (still) finds its expression in an order whose relevance and importance, I have
tried to show (demonstrate, manifest), the order of time. I said that the time of agony was
required as a compensation for the time of innocence, that is, for the enjoyment (jouissance) of
praemium "before" and outside (apart from) the law of sharing (division, partition). But since it
is a question of enacting (taking) the law by the body, this act which is a contradiction, that of
justice as wrong, must be manifested in the order of time, which is, with space, the order of the
act (action, deed), but in a temporally aporetic way, in an impossible twist of the time. I refer
here – nothing more – to the third Kantian Antinomy of the first Critique, while admitting that it
is not established exactly on the same contradictory basis as that of Kafka. The moment when
justice as actualization of the law is inscribed on the body to which it is wrong and even torture
can not be located (situated, defined in time and space). This moment consists, in effect (u
suštini), in the encounter between the time of an end and a beginning, on the one hand, and on
the other, (in) that which has never begun or finished (ended).

The justice exercised by the machine puts an end to an injustice, the identifiable offense of which
the convict is guilty, and by making him pay for this fault, it washes him of what is done
(accomplished), and prepares him for an action henceforth (odsad) freed from this past. It
(justice) emancipates him, in short. Hannah Arendt has often commented on this aspect of
beginning, novelty, even birth (the birth too), she writes, that involves free action (that free
action implies), and freedom of judgment in particular.

12
A writ requiring a person under arrest to be brought before a judge or into court, especially to secure the
person's release unless lawful grounds are shown for their detention.
But this time of renewal meets, in Kafka's problematics, a time of a different kind, that of the
pre-inscription of the aisthesis as a body before the law. What I have called here birth or
childhood has nothing to do, at first sight, with the birth of the (that entails, implies) free act
according to Kant or Arendt. In view of the reflective reason, the pre-moral, a-moral body is, on
the contrary, subjected to the regime of an irremediable heteronomy, because it is constituted
(constitutes itself) to have been touched even before being informed (aware, warned) of it, to be
able to respond (provide response) to this touch and to take responsibility for it (be responsible-
accountable-answerable for it (in charge for it)) (Ili: before being able to respond to this touch
and taking responsibility for it? Pre će biti ono prvo).

And when I say: to have been touched, I am not even faithful to the temporal status of this
passibility (passibilité), which would rather seem (we would rather declare) timeless, if at least
we confused (confounded, mixed up) temporality and chronology. Let us say rather that the
heteronomy of the body, which the harrow of justice retouches, does not mean anything to the
succession of causes and effects, nor anything to the impromptu (spontana, improvizovana)
temporality in which causality without cause arises (that is, which is the effect of nothing), the
causality proper (peculiar) to freedom. The heteronomy of the body does not mean anything to
physical time nor to ethical time because the aisthesis that commands it is neither chained-
chaining [linked-linking, connected-connecting, bound-binding] (in the sense of intelligibility),
nor unchained-chaining [unlinked-linking, unconnected-connecting, unbound-binding] (in the
sense of responsibility). It is the paradox of the time of the body, according to (depending on, in
accordance with, by virtue of) whether it consists (its consisting) of its non-belonging to itself, of
its primary divestment (divestiture; lišavanja, uskraćivanja, oduzimanja, deinvestiranja) – it is the
paradox of this time that it is not (in) the mode of any chain (chaining, link, bind). It is, I think,
what Freud meant by (wanted to say about-on) writing (inscribing, writing out-down) in
Metapsychology: "The processes of the Ics system [unconscious system] are timeless". I also
think he said it badly (wrong). They are timeless in the sense that time is chained and chaining
(linking, concatenation, sequence, sucession). But time is also stasis.13

Of the pre-intelligible and pre-moral body, we say that it was (has been) touched, and I repeat it
using the prefix pre-, and the Latin repeats it with prae-mium, a pre-purchase, a mortgage prior
to all sharing (division, partition). In truth this preordination to the aisthesis is the aesthetic
subordination, and it is not susceptible to („passible“: affectable by, liable to, chargeable to) any
alteration by (through) duration, it is imprescriptible. I would not (even, also) say that it is
permanent. Neither is it primary since it does not fit in (belong to, inscribe itself in) any
succession, where the secondary would come after it. Let's assume (understand, look at) its
paradox: when it takes place (occurs), there is not yet the time of (for) chaining (succession,
linking) (there is no time of chaining-succession yet).

13
A period or state of inactivity or equilibrium. Staza, zastoj.
At the sixth hour, justice passes over (on) or into the tortured body. (It is the) Meeting of
(encounter of) the time of redemption and the new beginning with the time of insistence or
resistance („sistance“; distance?) of the intractable. The officer describes (here we are at the
description; here it is a description for us) (what were) the great feasts (celebrations) of execution
at the time of the former commander. The whole population of the colony was assembled, as in
amphitheater, on the dunes surrounding the machine, the silence reigned, (and) the passionate
interest forced (compelled) the officer and his guard to dismiss (remove, send away) those who
wanted to see justice closely passing over the body of the convict (from close by how justice
pass over the body of the convict). „Everybody knew (says the officer): at this moment (right
now), the justice is being done (accomplished)“ (30; 165). The children nevertheless enjoyed, on
(due to, thanks to) the wise order of the commander, the privilege of being able to approach. The
officer describes the scene to the traveler: „You could have seen me often squatting there, two
little children in the arms, one on the right, the other on the left. What feelings did we (not) feel
when the rapture came to transfigure this tortured face! How we enjoyed bathing our cheeks in
the ray of this justice finally reached (achieved, attained) and already gone (parted)! Ah! What
time, my friend!“ (ibid.).

I leave (hold on to) the little children. We can easily see the relevance, the double relevance, of
the privilege granted to them: childhood of freedom, childhood of the body. And the officer is
himself this (such) bifrons (Latin: Janus (double-faced?), bifrontal) child.

This rapture to which they have the privileged access which the old law grants them, this rapture
is ex-actement (igra reči: ex-actly, ex-acting), that is to say in act, the moment when the two
childhoods are confused (merge). From this encounter emanates a ray, and this ray is justice
itself. The law is written in a writing that the body can decipher: in bloody wounds. Justice
"finally reached" because, at this moment, the re-touch (retuširanje, ponovni-dodir, altering) of
the body by the stylets (stileti, nožići, bodeži, iglice) of the law obliterates (briše, ukida) the
pressing or insistent touch that is its pre-inscription and which resisted. And also justice "already
gone (parted)" because this re-touch is as lethal as it obliterates (briše, ukida). How can an
aisthesis, or its analog, the engraving of the law be decipherable by what it touches, when
(whereas) it is this touch that constitutes what it touches? The esthetic body was not (has not
been) a support (backing, oslonac, potpora) for the inscription of the touch, it is that for the re-
touch, and that is enough to proscribe it (da se zabrani, isključi, progna). This is why justice is
accomplished only in (by) passing. It is prescribed in the three senses of the word: it is
imperative, it transcribed itself beforehand (it was previously transcribed) (transkribovana,
prepisana-ispisana) by (through) its bucklings (zavijucima, krivuljama, uvijanjem) in writing (on,
of) the body and it inscribes itself too late to be executable.

But at least the machine, when it was accredited,14 in the old days, offered to the community the
occasion of the Parousia (Second Advent; drugi dolazak) of justice. I said that it is not situatable

14
Officially recognized or authorized.
(able to be situated). In the site of the desert hills populated by the community waiting for its
law, justice can not incarnate (be incarnated), it can not live (live in, dwell, reside, lodge) (there).
Justice is a fugitive shine (glow, radiance) that passes over the face of the tortured, finally
justified (exonerated, vindicated) and almost already dead.

Then comes the politics, that is, the new commander. Politics abhors (loathe, se gadi, gnuša) the
machine and cruelty. The new commander holds council (councel; is consulting; održava
većanje, se konsultuje) publicly. Politics deliberates, the new justice provides grounds (assign
matter, orients-instructs-directs matter) to disputatio (Latin: dispute, debate, discussion), to
complaint and defense, to court, to the respect of the human rights even in the condemnation
(sentencing, convicting) and application (execution, implementation) of the sentence. The new
authority metamorphoses (transforms) the curious traveler who visits foreign countries into an
international expert invited to come to examine the legal and penal procedures of the colonial
custom (practice) and to give his opinion, which can only be very unfavorable. The traveler
speaks the language in which human rights were written. Women, so absolutely absent from the
theater of cruelty, are admitted to the affairs of politics. Their delicate handkerchiefs take the
place of (are a substitute for) the polluted wad of cotton wool, which is desperately chewed (se
žvaće) and ruminated (preživa) by the person dying after a hundreds of others. By these
handkerchiefs, they blot out (brišu) all allusion and stifle (susprežu, suzbijaju) all suspicion of
allegiance to cruelty. At his death, the former commander was not entitled to (nije mu odobrena,
nije imao prava na) a consecrated burial. His tomb is hidden under a table, in a bistro pompously
named (called) (by the women, I imagine) "tea room", which is frequented by the workers of (at)
the port, "poor people humiliated people", writes Kafka (48; 185). The epitaph on (at) the
tombstone prophetises desperately the resurrection of the deceased: "Believe and wait" (48; 186).
It indicates that those faithful to the old law "no longer have the right to bear a name" (50; 185).

So many signs, I pass by, and everyone would deserve analysis – as many signs that the new
commandment, the political (the politics), has already triumphed, reducing the old to silence,
clandestinity, pseudonym and waiting. Signs of (from, by) the same that community reduced,
which (had) united (were meeting) for the cruel passage of justice around the machine. The
community henceforth associates itself (se udružuje, povezuje) differently, through deliberation
and tolerance. These are also signs that the harrow is already unemployed (without use, without
employment), as are the papers covered with arabesques, now indecipherable for the new man.

All this the officer knows, he describes it. He still resists yet (however), by virtue of his body
resistance. He asks the traveler to go to the deliberations of the new council and to give, by the
answers to the questions that will be posed to him, no opportunity for the new commander to
officially condemn the old procedure of justice. He even asks him to shout, or to whisper, it
maight be enough, his "irrevocable opinion" that this (such) procedure is just.

I can not enter here into the detailed examination of the (this) double request (demand), of which
the officer stages the episodes in a hallucinatory (hallucinated) anticipation. It would be
essential, however, to trace the contradictory logic, not to say schizophrenic, that commands
(governs, drives, directs, determines) his strategy of persuasion towards the traveler. It is too
clear that the officer does not want to know anything about who he is talking to, although he
knows it perfectly well. There is, in the delirium of these discourses, even more than in the
melancholy of descriptions, the motive of an insanity, but above all (especially) of a terrible
inanity (ništavnosti, ispraznosti, praznine); that of the body that hears that it is forever (for good,
u istom smislu) forgotten by the law.

Seized by the anguish of this prescription, here in the sense of expiry (expiration) due to time
(new time, modern time), the officer takes place on the bed of justice after having dislodged
(moved out, kicked out) the convict. Beforehand, he will have settled (set) the designer so that
the harrow inscribes on his body, with all the necessary bucklings (krivuljama), the presription of
all the prescriptions, the law itself: “Be just” (42; 177). It is in fact (indeed) only in this way that
the law, being acted upon, finally proves itself, by (as) a perfect tautology.

To carry out (effectuate, ostvariti, sprovesti, realizovati) the prescription of being just, it must be
engraved in the body, like any (other) article of the law. But "Be just" is a universally valid
prescription. It is not suitable to punish (for punishing) a singular fault. On the other hand, it is
suitable for all mistakes (faults) in (the respect) that (since) it applies to their essence of fault, to
the "certain fault", which is to be "born before" the law, outside the law. The impeccable
(besprekorni, nepogrešivi) officer is guilty only of this certain fault. By submitting to the
automatism of the sanction, he will verify for the last time the justice of the prescription on the
exemplary case that he is, and because he is exemplary (such exemplary case). Such is the
tautology: by inscribing on himself, a pure (perfect, outright) innocent, the prescription of
justice, he will prove the justice of the prescription. For command(ment) and punishment apply
(themselves) (are applied) precisely to the innocence.

The officer therefore ceases to officiate (obavlja svoju službu), he submits to the cruel aesthetics
of the ethical law. The machine, of course, understands all this, it does what’s needed (he should,
he needs) sponte sua (Latin: spontaneously, by itself). Then, you know, it gets out of order (goes
awry, gets wrong), the gearbox ejects its pieces. The officer will be deprived of the agony that
his faulty body owes to the law. Deprived also of that fugitive moment when the pure sainthood
was to radiate around his eyes. The steel needle passes through the scull and kills (slews) him,
the harrow breaks down, having kept a hooked body suspended (hanging) over the pit.

It would therefore (thus) be true that the body is forgotten by the law, true that justice will not
have been proved, true that the new law, which does not need the apparatus of cruelty (in order)
to operate (act, do its work-job, perform its function, be enacted, be executed), has already
triumphed (which has no need of the apparatus of cruelty to act, has already triumphed). Adorno
will say: true that death itself is dead.
But it is going (it proceeds) too fast (for one) to conclude. I will rather end with the interrogation
on (at) which the officer's body remains (hanging) (at which the officer's body remains
suspended). Is it true that the politics, as the Greeks and Romans acted (staged, performed,
treated) and repeated it in the past, as well as the Americans and the French two centuries ago, is
instituted (established, founded) only at the price of forgetting the absolute condition of morality,
cruelty?15 Is it true that, if the law omits what is absolutely foreign to it, which I have here named
the body of the aisthesis, and elsewhere the intractable, it escapes (eludes, shun, eschew, avoids,
looses) the status of its transcendence and abolishes (abrogate, repeal, rescind, revoke, annuls,
cancel, renounce, invalidate) the support (backing) of its effectiveness?

Or was it a delirium, an anti-modern, reactionary delirium, let's say (we were told so): the fascist
delirium? The truth of the law is not, on the contrary, as the modern commander thinks, that it is
written on the paper under the title (heading, declaration, designation, certificate, law-article)
(praescriptum) of a sharing (partition, division) axiom, which will have been agreed upon, after
deliberation, by speaking entities subject to duties and depositaries (spremištima, depozitorijima)
of rights? Does not justice consist entirely in this meta-principle according to which the sharing
concerns everything and must be the least bad for anyone (for each and for all)? According to
which, too, each and everyone are the only judges (for that)? And are not the good and the bad,
by themselves, all that is at stake in the question of justice?

Or, finally, must we distinguish the justice of the old commandment and that of the new, and
maintain them both, but separate? One good to (of, according to) morality and its aesthetics of
cruelty, the other to (of, according to) politics and its aesthetics of representation? But then, what
will be the relationship between these two justices? Will it be, is it not already, the relation of the
penitentiary (kaznenog) with (and) the civic (građanskim)? This relation itself, how can it be
just?

Survivig (Survivor)

I will begin by recalling some commonplaces, well known, poorly known, related (relative,
relating) to the very principle of what can be thought of as the "survivor". I owe it to demonstrate
how I question (interrogate) Hannah Arendt's thought here. The word "survivor" implies that an
entity that is dead or should be dead is still alive. With the thought of this "still", of a deferment
(postponement) or a halt (standstill) of death, a problematics of time is introduced, but not just
any one. (It is) A problematic of time in its relation to the question of being and not-being of
what is. More precisely, of a time when (in which) the being (the entity) is related to its
beginning and its end, as it is commonly said (in current (moment), fluidly, as usual). In relation
with the enigma that the entity comes to its being (from being) and that it goes (gets) away from
(of) this being. That it is therefore related (in relation) twice, necessarily twice, with "its" non-

15
Nađi i podseti se: Nietzsche, moral, system of cruelty.
being. (It) Appears and disappears. But as (like) when it is not, it does not have either "its" non-
being, or, to put it better, as the non-being is the unrelated, the enigma of which I speak is that of
a relationship with what is unrelated, with an absolute.

Familiar observation, if I may say so. Now, to try to be less familiar, one must ask: what is the
instance against (in relation to, in comparison to) which the survivor survives. He always
survives a death, but the death of what life?

Hegel says: death is the life of the spirit. In phenomenology, the spirit does not survive death, it
(spirit) is the awakening of the immediate life, thus at the same time this life as dead (past) and
revived, reviving. The spirit lives as (utoliko?) it died at the instance that it was itself. It (spirit) is
constitutively a mourning, in the sense of Freud, that is to say, the loss of itself as – invested first
in a formation – it objectifies it to know it (formation), as it becomes thus dead for it (spirit), and
because of this very fact it (spirit) returns to itself (narcissism of mourning) into a new
formation. The spirit (mind) is only objectivity, invested (that's it, an entity), and the new
objectification includes (implies, entails), contains, preserves the old but, (let’s) say, modalized,
according to the mode of no more (no longer). The mode of no longer (no more) is that of
necessity, or of the third person. The previous formation is no longer alive, the entity that I was
can no longer say "I". I can only talk about it (entity, formation) as it (he, she), then (so), in the
third person. It can not be other than what it was (it is its necessity): it is having been ("being-
been” (being-was; “future coming from the past”; bilost?), writes Heidegger). Hegel solves this
problem with an "us": him (that is, me then) and me (now). Mystery of this and.

To survive is understood, according to this thought where nothing is lost, like (as) being still
according (in accordance) to the modes of the ability (potentiality, power), capacity, eventuality:
event, (of) the indeterminate happens still (again)), whereas (while) one should not be, (can) not
be able (can not), (can) no longer be able (of it) (can not do it anymore).

The Hegelian raising (uzdizanje; preuzimanje; ukidanje-postavljanje; putting up; lift up;
transposing; part of dialectical process of Aufhebung) is from one mode to the other (is
switch/transposing from one mode to the other). It expresses in a sense the paradoxical
constitution of the moment for (of) thought: it is not t, but t.dt. The being-been (Heidegger;
“future coming from the past”; bilost?) implies in its determination both that it is no longer and
therefore could not be other, but also that it is the potentiality [ability, power] (the derivative) of
another instant, called "following" (“next”, “as follows”), from which it will be given (give
itself) as not being anymore (as it is no longer).

The mathematical and phenomenological formulation of the instant in (by) t.dt thus provides an
intelligence (understanding) of survival. What is, is alive, but contains its not yet, from where it
is already dead. Time thus ensures, sufficiently for the mind, the foundation of its idea of
survival, in the philosophical problematic of the mind (spirit) or of consciousness. Husserl's
Retention16 conceals (contains), in a sense, the whole secret of survival. In philosophy of
language, in the ordinary sense, we will say that time is only the game of modalities: no longer
able and can not do it anymore (not able to do it anymore). The impossibility and the possibility
of that impossible.

This time is that of consciousness or of the spirit, and this survival is its absolute sureness
(certainty, surety; izvesnost, safety; sigurnost, osiguranje), as its death is assured (certain,
assured; osigurana, sigurna, pouzdana). Assured in (the way) that it is always a beautiful death,
being (since it is) "contained" (retained, reserved) in the "we" that holds (connects) together me
now and me then.

A question, however, is whether in the return to the no longer, something is not forgotten, which
therefore does not survive, a remnant that does not remain. A question, however, is whether, in
the return to the no longer, something is not forgotten, which therefore does not survive, a
remnant that does not remain. What seems to (necessarily) have to be lost is the presence then of
what has passed now. What (That which) is now necessary, unchangeable, was then contingent
(slučajno, uslovljeno, zavisno). What no longer has potentiality [ability, power] (is no longer
possible) now was then a possibility (ability, power) or potency. There is a mortal sadness of (in)
that very thing which is retained and transmitted (transferred, coveyed, passed on,
communicated). Sadness of the owl (sove). Of what is bound (linked). The tradition (praxis) of
what was experienced then in the present is its betrayal. The past is betrayed by this alone that
the presence that it was was put (placed, stored) in absence. A moode (mode?, manner) fails it
(lacks to it, is lacking to it), the tone of life, even though (as) it is recalled.

In epistemological terms: its contingency, what Arendt, quoting Kant, calls the "sad (distressing,
ožalošćujuća, rastužujuća, grieving) contingency" (slučajnost). Sad (distressing) because
absolutely rebellious (in regard) to the sequence (linking, succession) requiring (necessitating,
demanding), universalizing, by causes and effects. But also sad (distressing) in (the way) that
(because) the singular flavor of being-there (that taste), which is ontological – the ordinary
memory can only lose. (Does it ever happen, this flavor? Is not it essential for it only to have
happened (occurred, taken place)? Does not this flavor result from this memory alone? Is it
something else (that is) lacking an effect, (i.e.) the effect of what memory misses when
remembering? Any photo, even recent, is it not essentially yellowed (misli kao na starim
slikama, požutelim, mutnim, jednobojnim)?) Treason (betrayal) of the living is contained by the
survivor in his tradition. It is required for some trace to persist of the old presence, necessarily
altered, "warmed up" („reheated“). The witness is always a bad witness, a traitor. But, howsoever
(kako god, ma kako; a last, after all), he testifies.

16
Zadržavanje, uskraćivanje, odbijanje od sebe, npr. od neke sume; med. zadržavanje, zaustavljanje, zastoj; psih.
sposobnost zadržavanja doživljaja posle prestanka njegovog spoljnog povoda, tako da on, pri docnijem sličnom
doživljaju, neprimetno ponovo iskrsne u svesti (lat.).
The question thus posed is in the context (scope, frame) of a philosophy of the subject or of the
spirit (mind), in a phenomenology. It is that of the synthesis of time, in Augustine, Descartes,
Kant, Hegel, Heidegger – which is also that of the subject.

It should be noted now that, (even) within this (very) problematic, if one designates (represents)
the life of the spirit (mind) as a survival, one puts the stress (emphasis) on the absence, on what
is lost in the preserved. The world is gray for the Hegelian owl; it is a disaster for The Angel of
Benjamin, whom (that? Pre će biti whom) the wind of the past pushes to the future backwards.
He only sees disaster in the past, as the owl is blind to the color of life. The Angel sees the past
only as a present disaster (disastrous present) [désastré]. The star [astre, luminary – light, gleam]
is the tone (shade, voice, key, tonality) of what is alive. And the question comes back (returns,
recurs): whether the past was indeed, as present then, a disaster, or whether it is to re-see it that is
(makes it) disastrous (a disaster). Hegel says this (the second?), Benjamin says that (the first?).
This makes a difference, the whole difference between the speculative and the post-speculative.
In (For) Hegel the mourning is done – at Benjamin it became impossible.

This impossibility to mourn the past presence (and to bring back (to restore) its strength to the
present self, thanks to the new objects) is called melancholy. If not the impossibility of
mourning, at least the emphasis (placed) on the irretrievable (irreparable) loss of presence, that is
(which is to say) death, of what was there. And according to this slope (nizbrdica, nagib, padina;
inclination, fall), even what is present now can be felt as being already destined to be no longer
there, and to be the object of a "preventive" melancholy: is it not already dead, which at present
looks so alive?

The birth itself, the beginning, considers itself melancholically as an illusion. What comes to life,
that is, the moment as an event – to come out of nothingness – is already destined to return to
nothingness. The only being-in-truth is not there. This reversal (inversion) of appearances can
give rise (lead, give place) to metaphysics. The eternal present, the living present, is always
absent. Being [L'être] is not being. Melancholy that we call "Western", since Platonism, I do not
know why, is found in all thought when it stumbles on its failure, which is also the passibility
[passibilité], the temporality, the modality.

The way for the thought not to betray the presence would be, it seems, to deny itself to all being
(everything) and to remain (stay, keep itself) in melancholy. To ensure (watch over, look after)
the perpetual withdrawal of the true being. The series of beings, instants, and instances only
unfold (unroll) the uncountable sequence (suite, chain) of false births, which are so (as) many
disappearances of truth. The presents are unemployed of (in) (put out of) the presence. A man
says to a woman, "No, I do not want a child, it will be another (one more) unemployed person".
He says (expresses) melancholy, the little (the lack of) faith in the being of being there [l'être-là:
Dasein?]. He does not want to betray. He feels that the transmission, the tradition of life is the
betrayal of the truth, which is other than life, "elsewhere" („somewhere else“). And as for (as
regards) the authentic mode of presence (who knows it?), every being is a survivor.
Now, I return (come back to) the emphasis (accent) (placed) on the disappearance. The
melancholy omits the other enigma in the relation of the soul to non-being or being, the enigma
of the appearance. Being thus offers (presents) itself in "objects" where it is certainly forgotten,
but at last (after all) it gives them. Something happens (shows up, turns up) anyway (nevertheless
/ nonetheless / still happens). I say "all (just) the same", "certainly" in the form of a concession
(ustupka) to melancholy. But in conceding, I obviously reject. Or rather, I emphasize what is
wrong with melancholy. What melancholy rejects (challenges, questions) is that there is "all
(just) the same" something rather than nothing. And that it is (the reason) why there is birth and
death, even if one conceives all birth as death and death as birth to the truth.

The rejection (challenge) of melancholy, or the refutation of nihilism, consists only in this timid
(tentative) question: if the truth is that there is really nothing, where does it come from that there
seems to be something (whence (from where) does it appear that there is something)? Or: why
does truth lie, why does death differ in birth and life? Even if with Freud of Jenseits [Beyond the
Pleasure Principle] one maintains that between life and death the difference is only (in) rhytm
(death quickens (presses), life slows down (breaks)), why are there two rhythms? In
thermodynamic terms, those that Freud inherits from Fechner, why differentiation,
complexification (neg-entropy), if the physical truth is to move on (advance, progress, proceed)
to(wards) the most probable, the simplest, undifferentiated state, which is the death of the system
(entropy)? This is (certainly) only "step back (move back, stand back, recede, recoil) to better
jump (leap, spring, blow up)". But why should one jump better? The Freudian hypothesis of Eros
remains faithful to the second principle of thermodynamics. It still presupposes that complexity
is only a suspension (suspense)17 of simplification, and life only a survival.

The fact remains that to scrutinize (in scrutinizing)18 the enigma of this “sur-“, of this “sus-“,
Freud, in his turn, has never been able to (could) name anything but an event. Whatever the
name, and there have been many. The event of sexual reproduction in the history of the living.
And in individual ontogenesis, the echo of the sexual difference, which is the event by which the
whole life of the individual is occupied (that occupies the whole life of the individual),
unconsciously, in "regulating" (adjusting, settling) the savagery (in order to regulate the
savagery) (divljaštvo).

But what is this event, stripped of its scientific or cognitive name (denomination)? It is the
enigma that there is a relationship (relation) with (between) what is unrelated: that knowing that
it is born and dies, the soul (the aptly named) testifies that there is not only what is, what it is, but
(also) the other of what is. And this relation, obviously does not take place when it takes place, it
took place and it will take place, therefore (so, thus), suddenly, it will have occurred, appeared
too late, disappeared too early, because (it is) only and always recounted (narrated, told). My
birth narrated by others, and my death recounted (told) to me by stories of the death of others,

17
The temporary cessation or suspension of something; obustavljanje, privremeno ukidanje.
18
Examining or inspecting closely and thoroughly.
my stories and those of the others. So that, as essential it is to this relation with nothingness
(where I come from and where I am going) to be myself related (with it?), as well (equally) is
essential to the presence of absence the relationship with others, from whom it (this presence of
absence) comes back (returns) to me. And still (also) essential is the fabula that gives a rhythm to
the pulsation of the beginning and the end.

One must (should) insist. If being or nothingness is not the whole truth, if the event is not all
deceit (deceiving, lure, trap, deception), then I say that the meaning of "survive" (surviving) can
be reversed. To form (Forming, constituting, establishing) complexities, organizations or orders,
where a power of arrangement or shaping asserts itself, where Arendt will say that the enigmatic
faculty of beginning is exercised, this survival can become truth too, and the alleged (so-called,
pretended) life, the dead survival of this birth. Is this the truth of reason (ratio, mind)? What
(That which) will be reason (ratio) will have been reason (ratio) of every beginning, of every
initium (Lat: beginning, commencement, initiation), that is the end and the end of ends, the
annihilation of ends. The reason we can have or give can only solve the most complex
polynomials by (with, in) the a = a of equality without the residue (remnant, remainder,
residuum, rest). This reason will have deduced and reduced, but it will need (will have needed)
something to pose (be) the problem. Perhaps it is necessary to go to the bottom of nihilism with
the last man, the one who knows the "banality of the evil", who suffers it or administers it, or
both, to find a joy – I resume (retake, take up again) the Pascal's word on purpose, the word of
the spiritual – the dark joy of a request all the stronger because it is more improbable, therefore
more threatened with annihilation and more openly confronted with the truth of nothingness.

By saying so, I do not intend to relapse (vratim, upustim iznova) into the restorative thought of a
Hegel. I would say without further explanation that this thought of life as of the enigma of
beginning is acceptable only if it is not a question of forgiveness (remission, opraštanja), nor of a
challenge (izazova, defiance, prkosa, confrontation, suočavanja), but of a scruple (skrupule,
dužnosti). The scruple of one as if. The spirit (mind) immersed in the melting pot (crucible,
rastopinu, misfortune, text) of nihilism, in the passage to despair and skepticism (which is
permanent), the spirit that knows that there is nothing to do and to say, no worthy being, whoever
(it) is (might be, should be), acts as if this were (has been) all the same.

The effect (implication, consequence) of this clause is by no means the cynicism, which remains
entirely dependent on nihilism and perseveres, through its activism, in the melancholy of nothing
is worth. The effect is nothing more (not either) the playfulness (“ludisme”), where a corpse
adorns itself with the colors of life according to a grimacing (nakežeanom, sa grimasom) and
macabre (jezivom, mrtvačkom) irresponsibility. It is nothing more (not either) an”artistic”
metaphysics (metaphysical "artist") of the will and values.

The effect (implication, consequence) is childhood, that knows itself (there? taj dodatak je
moguć i u narednim iskazima) as if, that knows about pain due to helplessness and about
complains of having arrived too early, (being) premature (as regards its strength), that knows
itself in broken promises, in bitter disappointments, in failure, in abandonment – but also in
fancy (reveries), in memory, in question(ing) (wandering), in invention, in obstinacy
(svojeglavosti), in listening to the heart, in love, in true availability to the stories.

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