[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoKnzsiR6Ss&NR
Each time that I write something,
and it feels like I’m advancing
into new territory,
somewhere I haven’t been before,
and this type of advance
often demands certain gestures
that can be taken as aggressive
with regard to other thinkers
or colleagues ?---
I’m not someone who is
by nature polemical
but it’s true that deconstructive
gestures appears to destabilize
or cause anxiety
or even hurt others ---
So, every time that I
make this type of gesture,
there are moments of fear.
This doesn’t happen at the moments
where I’m writing.
Actually, when I write, there is a
feeling of necessity,
of something that is
stronger than myself,
that demands that
I must write as I write.
I have never renounced
anything I’ve written
because I’ve been afraid
of certain consequences.
Nothing intimidates me when I write.
I say what I think must be said.
That is to say,
when I don’t write,
there is a very strange moment
when I go to sleep.
When I have a nap and I fall asleep.
At that moment
in a sort of half sleep,
all of a sudden I’m
terrified by what I’m doing.
And I tell myself:
“You’re crazy to write this!”
“You’re crazy to attack
such a thing!”
“You’re crazy to criticize such and
such a person.”
“You’re crazy to contest such
an authority, be it textual,
institutional or personal.”
And there is a kind of a panic
in my subconscious
As if…
what can I compare it to?
Imagine a child who does
something horrible,
Freud talks of childhood dreams
where one dreams of being naked
and terrified because everyone sees
that they’re naked.
In any case, in this half sleep
I have the impression
that I’ve done something criminal,
disgraceful, unavowable,
that I shouldn’t have done.
And somebody is telling me:
“But you’re mad to have done that.”
And this is something I truly believe
in my half sleep.
And the implied command in this is:
“Stop everything! Take it back!
Burn your papers!”
“What you are doing is inadmissible!”
But once I wake up, it’s over.
What this means or
how I interpret this is
that when I’m awake,
conscious, working,
in a certain way I am more
unconscious than in my half sleep.
When I’m in that half sleep
there’s a kind of vigilance
that tells me the truth.
First of all, it tells me that what
I’m doing is very serious.
But when I’m awake and working,
this vigilance is actually asleep.
It’s not the stronger of the two.
And so I do what must be done.
