Writing

To avatar is writing in electracy.  Helene Cixous, in Readings, raises Blanchot’s primal scene to a genre, whose features are inventoried in the poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, Tsvetayeva.  What is the drive that leads one into writing in this strong sense? (Writer as literate Shaman).  It is a particular experience, the first moment of self-awareness, initiated through a wound.  This experience has survival value and cannot be left to a specialized cadre in electracy.  It is this experience that the prosthesis must be made to support, augment, extend.

Blanchot’s primal scene (the grounding anecdote of The Writing of the Disaster), amounts to a commentary on Kafka’s parable “Before the Law,” Cixous explains.  Here we have the structure of every primal scene:  a doorway, threshold, portal opening onto an impasse:  a step/not taken (pas).  The awareness of this place is given in the mode of epiphany, whose vehicle is some quotidian feature mounted within an anecdote and whose tenor is a feeling.  The doorman’s question is “what do you want to know?”  The answer is “I  want to know.”  The feeling is not uttered but is preserved through a certain motion, a movement of arrested passage, an articulated prohibition, an impasse, aporia.  The impasse is the portal, in the way it marks an impossibility whose field draws the writer into its orbit.

Kafka’s capacity to show the scene of the Law is how he earned his designation as “abstract machine” in the study by Deleuze and Guattari.  In electracy, in which every person must function as category, every person must locate his or her doorkeeper (avatar). It begins with the composition of an anecdote, recovering a memory that serve as primal scene, one side of the Figure.  For example (in my case, in this blog):  The story of “Kindhearted Woman.”