| The King takes all my time; I give the rest to Saint-Cyr... |
What's left after the law, obligations, love, friends, duties, families, jobs, pleasures, take what is due to them is that empty marker I. Without substance, without content, without existence, it is nothing more than a giving of what has never been its own anyway.
What, asks Descartes, is most incontrovertibly me? Take away from me all my actual attributes: even if everything in the world I know should be nothing but illusions produced to deceive me by the wiles of some Evil Spirit, what is left? Even in this extremity, suggests Descartes, there is one thing I can't doubt, and that is that I doubt, that I think, even if that should only be to doubt. I think, and therefore, triumphantly, I am. (Zizek suggests somewhere that far from being a radical break with the Cartesian subject, the fluidity of online identities and avatars in MUDs and chatrooms is the Cartesian subject at its purest. The Matrix as a big-budget remake of The Discourse on the Method.)
And yet I am only in the sense that I am an empty I think. I am not because I think of anything, but just because of this empty activity of thinking. What I might be thinking of is quite irrelevant to my being. That empty I am is nothing, just what's left when everything is taken away, which is nothing, nothing at all. This is why Serres can say, "This verb to be is also a blank domino, a joker. The hand is no longer a hand when it has taken hold of the hammer, it is no longer a hammer, it flies, transparent, between the hammer and the nail, it disappears and dissolves, my own hand has long since taken flight in writing". It is why "when I think tree, I am the tree, when I think river, I am the river" (Genesis 30).
When Zola, in the Dream, returns to a completely blank book, where proper names are lost, where the traces of bodies are erased, where the marks of sins are effaced beneath the immaculate cotton, under the chrism of extreme unction, when Melville, across the seven seas, chases the white whale to the death, white with fright, white with ecstacy, when the whaler dies from meeting up with it; when Musil constructs a space and a being without qualities, when I call forth the ballet of Alba, we are all in search of what Plato called the chôra, a smooth and blank space prior to the sign: it is the dancer's body and it is the blank page, the virginal wax, where the choreographer writes. (Serres, Genesis 44)
