Deathbed

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Letters to ∅. From the deathbed

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Dear ∅,

The days are passing in stillness here. The condition worsens. Sometimes I feel like the ingrowth is hollowed, but then it deepens again. The extraction gets harder with each cut. I can’t tell anymore where the I ends and where it begins. It was so much easier this past winter. The split was more drastic. But the closer we seem to get, the more of I passes with it. They say that it will not be much longer and that the extraction will be complete. I wait.
The I. Through pale blue rooms. I, defended. Windows shut tight. Smooth and cold. I, found and chiseled in stone. I of I. Worn as one’s own. Festive. Cherished. Whole. Never to fade. I chose to dwell in this chamber. This cage is my own, but it is not working out.

∅, you will not believe what their response was. They said, “shedding the symbolic is not a one step procedure. Even the being that is aware of its hole cannot opt out of the name that is its periodized placeholder. The simple denunciation of the name does not make the carcass of this name disappear. You might come to love your cage, but it will still be a cage nonetheless. Is your mere claim to a negation of the name ever enough while the traces of the real are played out in the imaginary? Can you ever shift your subjective position by subtracting from the name alone? You might think you are getting rid of the name by simply not responding to it, but only if you accept that the whole symbolic structure takes place in discourse alone. This assumption constructs a new totality indeed.”
Ah ∅, what an intolerable arrogance! I am sick of the scrutiny of their gaze. Yesterday I spent all day under a bright light, on a cold and hard bed. As a regular procedure, a speech like this is usually followed with the clinking of a box of tools. I don’t resist of course. I just think of you and the weave we formed. I said I would submit to the cut and come to you ∅ all new. But as time passes it seems that you get farther from me. Sometimes I think that we will never be 0 again. This relationship is like an asymptote.

Dear ∅,

Yesterday I was quiet. They were gathered over my head for hours, debating incessantly. This time the extraction left me even blanker, indifferent, spaceless. I was pretending to be asleep in an effort to eavesdrop.

“Well, then what of the law of the imaginary that hosts the mark of the symbolic, isn’t this where the materialization of the name takes place?”

“Yes, the performance of the law of the name is what constitutes the space of placement for this name that she claimed to have subtracted from. We might agree that it is not just the name, but that the splace of this name is what she is resisting as well.”

“But then there is still the flesh, nothing in itself, but so structured by and pressed between the force of the symbolic and the imaginary. It is impossible to re-carve the flesh in itself, since it never takes place in matter alone, but on the edges of the name and the place. She has no flesh.”

At that point I dazed out thinking of you ∅ and without recollection I must have motioned a movement of flight. Alas, I was instantly identified. They swarmed closer to me at once.

“This is where the impossibility of his mission gets most interesting. As we think of any area of knowledge, any given name lies somewhere in this triangle, but never in one corner alone.”

“Again, we are never able to separate and study the material away from the social and the occult. What is her God?”

“Yet we fail in the effort to point at the perfect spot where she is located.”

“The rebinding of the nerves and the reconstruction of the flesh is not enough to restore the flight, as the flight once removed from the knot of being is nowhere to be located.”

“Well of course, the flight is a fuckup of some over-determination caught in the asymmetry of the triad.”

At once they got disinterested. They gave up and left me in the dark again.

Oh ∅, I think at last we are closer to each other. Now I know I am a knot and nothing more. But what is the material of my knot?

When I close my eyes I feel like I am zooming close to the monuments, silent and still. The shells of names once animated. Performed, now hollowed. Depleted, but still so stubborn. Lurking in cabinets called nostalgia. Traumas faded, or just renamed. Different basements built. Chambers re-furnished. There was never a wholeness, only folders neatly reorganized. Now my drawers feel empty. Extraction, cut, purification. All they do is clean me out, but this blankness is reliant on the sterility of this environment. You won’t believe how clean it is here, though I feel even farther from you ∅.

Recently I realized that there is a difference between blankness and you ∅. The blankness caused by this extraction only leaves me more hollow, somewhat depleted, almost guilty of my emptiness. I feel like I am positioned directly against my ingrowth. Cut, extraction, less ingrowth, less of me, but at the same time a lot more of me, just hollowed. I am a proper vessel now. I can hold any matter.

Dear ∅,
Today I am still a vessel, though maybe a slightly different kind. Today I am dripping right through. The last extraction must have been very efficient. Not only can I channel matter now, but I can also pass it right through me.
They speak of me as cured. Or maybe more like someone who is so cured, so clear that I’m not even there anymore. To them I am a perfect subject now. A bleached stain, an ever becoming-shrinking-woman-animal, a total deterritorialized variable. I slip between the molecules; I’ve become an unidentifiable particle in an infinite meditation on the infinite. I am null.
Dear ∅,

I am not even a vessel anymore, but a host of the infinity of phalluses. They all pass through me now. They purify through my particles. If before I was a vessel, now I am the void around every phallus.
 

Dear ∅,

I have nothing to say anymore. I have fallen off the earth. Thus they still have the Phallus.