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LUCE
IRIGARAY

Elemental Passions
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 LUCE IRIGARAY

Elemental Passions
Translated from the French
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by Joanne Collie and Judith Still

 First published 1992 by
Routledge
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711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN

First published in France 1982 by

Les Editions De Minuit, Paris
as Passions élémentaires

Routledge is an imprint o f the Taylor & Francis Group,

an informa business

© 1982 by Les Editions de Minuit

English translation © 1992 The Athlone Press

Publisher’s Note
The publishers wish to record their thanks
to the French Ministry of Culture for a grant
towards the cost of translation.

Library of Congress cataloguing information available

ISBN 0 415 90691 1 hb
0 415 90692 X pb

Ail rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
'means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without
prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by Blackpool Typesetting Ltd, Blackpool

 Contents
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Foreword 1
I 7
II 9
III 13
IV 19
V 23
VI 31
VII 37
VIII 47
IX 57
X 63
XI 71
XII 77
XIII 81
XIV 89
XV 95
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Foreword

Nuptial Quest

M a n is divided between two transcendencies: his

mother's and his God's—whatever kind of G o d that
may be. These two transcendencies are doubtless not
unrelated but this is something which he has
forgotten.

H i s mother is transcendent to him because she is

of a different genre and she gives him birth. H e is
born of an other who is always Other-inappropriable.
For centuries, at least in the so-called Western tradi-
tion, that transcendency has seldom been recognised
as such. The mother is seen as the earth substance
which must be cultivated and inseminated so that it
may bear fruit. The father is the one who gives
form to the child, who uses earth to create him. The
father is i n the image of G o d the creator. The
mother is occasionally deified because she is capable
of bringing a divine son into the world. She is
revered as the mother of a son of G o d but she does
not have, or no longer has, any divinity deriving
from her sex, apart from her maternal status. This
means that there is no longer any woman G o d , any
G o d the mother of the daughter; there is no longer

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 Elemental Passions

any spirit of divinity circulating between mother and

daughter, between woman and woman, etc.
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While man has a spiritual and natural reference as

he becomes a man, woman no longer belongs except
biologically, and the world of man has made that
biology its own. M e n exchange virgin daughters i n
order to establish tribes or families or states, they
marry women to found their dynasties, they impreg-
nate them to become fathers and have a posterity.
Such traditions as these do not encourage love
between women and men. Lovers fall back into a
mother-son relationship, and the man secretly con-
tinues to feed off the woman who is still fertile
earth for him. A n d so she never accedes to her iden-
tity as a woman. She remains at the disposal of man
- the lover, the citizen, the father - having already
been a currency of exchange between the fathers,
uncles or brothers of her family and those of her
future husband's line.

Because of this dependency, woman is submitted

to all kinds of trials: she undergoes multiple and
contradictory identifications, she suffers transforma-
tions of which she is not aware, since she has no
identity, especially no divine identity, which could
be perfected i n love, Quite apart from any explicit
violence on the part of men (incest, rape, prostitu-
tion, assault, enslavement) woman is subjected to a
loss of identity which turns love into a duty, a
pathology, an alienation for her.
In order to escape this situation, a certain number
of women have decided to become men's equals.

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 Elemental Passions

This does not solve the problems of the amorous

economy between men and women, nor between
women for that matter. Identifying with men allows
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them a sexuality which seems more free and ^sporty',

part masculine, part feminine. It does not fulfill
them either emotionally or culturally.

It is a choice which also, i n the end, neutralises

society. If it is composed of unisex citizens, society
risks quickly losing its regenerative resources, since
these are to be found not only i n genetic reproduc-
tion but also i n sexual difference: the most radical
difference and the one most necessary to the life and
culture of the human species.

For this culture to advance, therefore, new models

of sexual identity must be established. Woman must
be valued as a daughter (a virgin for herself, and not
so that her body has an exchange value amongst
men), as a lover, and i n her own line. This means
that she should not be subordinated first to her
father, her uncle or her brother, then to her hus-
band's line, nor to the values of a masculine iden-
tity, whether these be social, economic or cultural.
She therefore needs her own linguistic, religious and
political values. She needs to be situated and valued,
to be she in relation to her self.

Women today can sometimes say /. The most

difficult thing for them is establishing a relation
between / and she. Sometimes they can do it empiri-
cally when they stay amongst women. This does not
resolve the question between / and she. It does not

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 Elemental Passions

solve the problem of a feminine transcendency,

which is necessary to construct a valid female iden-
tity and non-hierarchical loving relationship between
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the sexes. The paradigms of masculine transcen-

dency, which is sometimes considered neutral or
bisexual, must be modified in order to establish a
feminine transcendency.

Elemental Passions offers some fragments from a

woman's voyage as she goes i n search of her identity
in love. It is no longer a man in quest of his Grail,
his G o d , his path, his identity through the vicissi-
tudes of his life's journey, it is a woman. Between
nature and culture, between night and day, between
sun and stars, between vegetable and mineral,
amongst men, amongst women, amongst gods, she
seeks her humanity and her transcendency. Such a
journey is not without its trials. But these do not
discourage her from her quest, as she attempts again
and again to discover how I-woman can enter into a
joyous nuptial union with you-man. She finds that
this cannot occur unless you relates to he and He,
and I relates to she and She,

Women and men can only be wed beyond an

already defined horizon. A n other sunrise, an other
relation between nature and culture, a new human
identity, all this is necessary for both to agree to
nuptials between microcosm, macrocosm and god(s).

A t the furthest extreme of love, it is a question of

the divine. Because we are not God(s), individually

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 Elemental Passions

or together, love has become sorrow, degradation or

enslavement. A love between the sexes, i n which
natures and gods are united and fertile, is essential to
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the discovery of an individual and collective happi-

ness, one which is both empirical and transcendental.

Luce Irigaray
31 July 1988

(written for the Japanese edition of Elemental Passions and

published here in English for the first time)

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White. Immense spaces. White, a rush of breath. Be

swift, marry this breath. Remain in it. Make haste.
Let it not abandon me. Let me not turn from it. Be
swept up: my song.

You give me a blank white mouth. M y white

mouth, open, like an angel i n a cathedral. Y o u have
stopped my tongue. What remains is song. I can say
nothing but sing.

A song, for you. But that 'for you' is not a

dative. Nor that song, a gift. Not received from you,
not produced by me, nor for you, that song: my love
with you. Intermingled. Escapes from me. A cloud.

You do not hear. So many words divide us.

Divide us from the song. H o w could that white effu-
sion reach you? That intense candour still cannot be
heard. That white candour does not listen to itself:
is in mourning for a tongue.

Spilling out without a break. Without obstacle

save an imperceptible limit or term, everything is
suffused with my life impregnating the air. Unseiz-
able suspense, it nourishes the body of your words.

Call yourself. Give, yourself, names.

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 Elemental Passions

Recall yourself once more: I insist, into the air.

Seeing, hearing, speaking, breathing, living, all

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these wait to be made fecund by an innocent

potency.

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II

Was it your tongue i n my mouth which forced me

into speech? Was it that blade between my lips
which drew forth floods of words to speak of you?
A n d , as you wanted words other than those already
uttered, words never yet imagined, unique i n your
tongue, to name you and you alone, you kept on
prying me open, further and further open. Honing
and sharpening your instrument, till it was almost
imperceptible, piercing further into my silence.
Further into my flesh, were you not thus discovering
the path of your being? O f its yet to come?

A n d I was speaking, but you did not hear. I was

speaking from further than your furthest bounds.
Beyond the place you were penetrating to reveal the
secret of resistance to your tongue. From outside
that mouth which you still wanted to give me. A n d
mark it for your own. From deeper than the rent
you made to reveal the darkest part - the black, the
white, or the red. From a captive and forgotten
childhood lying beneath any of your potential
gestures of mastery or appropriation. From an inno-
cence which no shame held back yet which you left
outside the reach of your tongue.

A n d it was not that I was withholding myself

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 Elemental Passions

from you, but that you did not know where to find
me. Y o u searched and searched for me, i n you.
Wanting me still to be virgin material for the build-
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ing of your world to come. But how could it ever be

reached if, i n that quest, once again you wanted
yourself as you already are?

I was speaking, not so that you would stay where

you already were, but so that you would move
beyond. Y o u did not hear. Nothing from outside the
place where you already are reaches you any more.
A n d even if something suddenly calls out i n your
memory, once again it comes from your own past. It
is you again who will have called out i n that way to
the beyond. A n d would you not dig up the earth all
around so that not a single root survived except the
one from which you sprang? Except the one you
produced by your beginning?

A n d , when you think you have repossessed what

is yours, you leave. Your tongue revived for a while.
Having drawn sap again from your past. But is the
earth not arid now you have taken back what you
made it produce when you sprouted there? Was it
not you who made it flow with milk, blood, sap?

You leave. Where you no longer are, there is

desert. So you create your own mourning: i n your
absence everything is sterile.

Y o u sow that doubt in every place you go: your

suspicion of barrenness. Y o u plant it deeper than the
point where something could be conceived which did

[10]
 Elemental Passions

not stem from you, you alone. Y o u come back one

more time, a time without end, into the depths of
the deepest point of my mouth, a little further than
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the point where it would open, where it could speak

of you. There you create a void. Artificial cavern.
Empty waiting for the present of your appearance.
For your coming to build and make a home from
what is still available. For your taking hold of what
has been held i n reserve, making it fecund, accord-
ing to your plan.

Nothing exists outside that plan. A n d deeper than

your longest day and longest night, you deposit that
pledge of nothingness i n any still-virgin flesh. U n -
mindful of how, intervening, you disrupt fertilisation,
dividing and denying what took place before you.

That ancient wound which bleeds only from the

imperceptible pain of nothing, an incrustation of
your nothingness i n the most innocent part of my
flesh, is that not the present which again and again
you leave me i n place of what you take? H o w many
times, without end, will you return to make use of
that gift within me? Leaving, ceaselessly leaving, so
that you can come back and create, i n the spacing of
that ever more repeated to-and-fro, a nothingness
which you seek to master by dint of repetition.

But do you not make it greater, by dint of repeti-

tion? A n d nothing divides us, and we are divided by
nothing. Y o u cling to me as to your ancient home,
and you open up between you and me, me and you,
that gap - death.

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 Elemental Passions

But, when you think you have rediscovered in

yourself the hard kernel of your being, that circle
where at last you would be restored to yourself, you
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still find me entwined. Still there holding you in my

arms. A n d , when you want to repossess yourself in
solitude, demarcate the territory which belongs to
you, return to your own country, you are ever
further in flight from yourself. Y o u leave your home,
seduced by what is distant. Y o u fly off into an airy
void. Charmed by the abyss where a secret echo of
yourself could resonate.

A n d do I not still have to keep watch when you

rush away from me? A n d have to measure how far
you have leapt, keep track, so that each time I can
hold fast the thread as it unwinds? A n d remind you
of the distance you have travelled from yourself.

Imperceptibly, I wind you i n , letting you believe

that you know the way on your own. I speak to you
in silence so that you open up to my voice. A n d ,
sometimes, I save you from useless torment, going
before you on your way. Miming, without speaking a
word, your next step. Protecting you from the
worst?

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Ill

Deep, deeper than the greatest depths your daylight

could imagine, once again I caress you. Luminous
night, touched with a quickening whose denseness
never appears i n the light. Neither permanently
fixed, nor shifting and fickle. Nothing solid survives,
yet that thickness responding to its own rhythms is
not nothing. Quickening in movements both
expected and unexpected. Your space, your time are
unable to grasp their regularity or contain their fold-
ings and unfoldings. The force unleashed has an
intensity which cannot anywhere be measured, nor
contained. Can never be obliterated unless it is
poured out i n mortal ecstasy.

Deep, deeper than anything you could dream of

taking or giving beneath the surface of my skin, that
is where I am. A n d because of forgetting that
darkest life, if you come close, you retreat into your-
self again. Enveloping yourself-myself i n you, in the
certainty that you exist. Y o u raise yourself up higher
from having sunk so deep. Already you begin forget-
ting again. Y o u continue to forget.

A n d I understand the mystery of your power. Y o u

get close to my gift, my renunciation of any limit,
the intensity which floods out i n the abandoning of

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all reserve, and you take it back into yourself. Y o u

limit it within the horizon of a skin which stretches,
swells, and gradually expands. A n d you are erect: I
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am. Such is, being. A n d whoever cannot contain

that force, is not. Outside you is nothingness.

Outside you, that life to which you return in order

to experience what gave you being. Your power?
Delimit what can happen if you leave the shore.
Keep fast the gift which came from crossing bound-
aries. Experience, while never weighing anchor.

Y o u took me into yourself. Y o u took me back

into yourself so that you could get back to that
sameness whose origin remains a mystery to you. To
get back to that sameness, you took me inside outside
yourself. A n d so you continue to suck me up: my
life. Y o u continue to absorb me, inside you, turned
inside out, i n this cavern where I am still alive.

Your body is my prison. But since you possess me

from the inside, since you pierce inside my very
skin, I cannot cover myself in skin again in order to
return to the outside.

M y death is inside your own. W e shall die

together if you do not let me go outside your
sameness.

Living inside me inside this mucuous fabric he

possesses me - my life. Surrounded by this warm

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and supple home, he sucks me up: my life. H e is

touched and touches himself - at first - inside this
living flesh. It is not yet the contact or separation
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between two skins. This covering, this first living

home, does not yet have the sharp consistency of
skin. It lives within itself, inside the skin. This first
fleshly dwelling will be forever lost. It will remain
forever locked inside its skin.

H e can only touch himself from the outside. In

order to recapture that whole sensation of the inside
of a body, he will invent a world. But a world's
circular horizon always conceals the inner movement
of the womb. The imposition of distinctions is
the mourning which their bodies always wear.
One -I- one + one . . . separated out. A n d the gather-
ing of all into One will never amount to the living
quality of a resting place which, always pouring out
liquid, blurs boundaries.

Your skin and mine, yes. But mine goes on touch-

ing itself indefinitely, from the inside. Secreting a
flow which brings the sides together. From which
side does that liquid come? One or the other? Both?
So which is one and which is other i n that pro-
duction? Neither? Yet it exists. Where does it come
from? From both. It flows between. Not held or
held back by a source. The source already rises from
the two caressing.

Is it necessary to come out of that flowing

between the two touching each other? W h y should

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 Elemental Passions

the solidity of an erection be more valuable than the

fluidity of a flow between two?
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The framework you impose and posit as a given,

is your skin. Y o u shut me i n , in your protective
skin. Your appropriation - my tomb. Y o u forgot,
left out of your economy whatever moves across
boundaries from one to the other. For you, a limit
exists, with some things under, some things over.
Infinity is an aporia or an excess.

For me, nothing is ever finite. What does not pass

through skin, between our skins, mingles i n our
bodies' fluids. Ours. O r at least mine. A n d as mine
are continuous with yours, there is no fixed
boundary to impose a definite separation. Except
from you. Except by you. When you say: I am, or I
exist. O r : you are this. Fencing in our natures,
turning our bodies into private properties or ready-
made homes. W i t h doors or windows, open or
closed.

But when I leave, there is a gap in your horizon.

A hole in your skin. If I hold back from your con-
summation, you discover an opening you never knew
existed. A n unsuspected mouth. A voiceless call. A
need that lacks intention or direction. Your whole-
ness crumbles, flows away into nothing that could be
named. It is not even the night. Your night. The place
from which you take me, the umbilicus of your body. O f
your world. The place you neither sense nor see.
From which you never sense nor see me any more.

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But what am I for you, other than that place from

which you subsist? Your subsistence. O r substance.
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To contain it and retain me, you have to have a

protective envelope. The surplus over what you need
to live becomes a shelter for your reserve. The
excess of your consumption builds up the solid walls
of your house. Surrounded by walls which are the
boundaries of your property.

Proprietor, your skin is hard. A body becomes a

prison when it contracts into a whole. When it
proclaims itself mine or thine. When a line is drawn
around it, its territory mapped out. When the
universe of its inner, or outer, possible or permissi-
ble, movements is already traced out, as is its life.
When it is already positioned as one, in a field of
vision. When it is there, stays there, is erect there,
standing on and in a world. To which it is con-
nected by a network of relationships, but which it
unifies.

To retain-contain the oneness of this whole, you

push out to the limit whatever has the greatest
denseness, will not be pierced or puts obstacles to
any passage through or, simply, between. Y o u
separate within from without, inside from out. Y o u ,
and the rest. The rest? Where is it? Where and
what has become of me?

When you say I, you, he, or she, if she says: I,

where and what becomes of you? Thinking that she

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 Elemental Passions

has now become one in your image, according to

your model, you take fright at what you begin to
sense: how enclosed you are, how unattainable to
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others. Y o u strike, knock, cut, wound, rub raw this

living body to rediscover the source of life. W h e n
the way to it is never closed. When it flows on
forever, outside as well. When it only dries up if it
is covered by you or imprisoned i n you, by you. If
she says: I, is that not to remain open, and yours?
To escape capture, escape the net you draw around
your catch, the ice in which you store your property,
the mirrors where you conserve and freeze your
desires? To become once more that constantly
moving life she is. Flowing everywhere without
boundaries - deathly boundaries.

Do not strike so hard, you are paralysing her,

stopping her flow. Those blows are only aimed at
you. Y o u are the one who needs to be opened up
again.

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IV

Is life hard? W h e n I return to life, the obstacles to

something more distant, remote and inacessible melt
away, are easy to cross. Already I am further than
the furthest you could imagine. Elsewhere. But not
in the beyond of your world. Not even of your
body. Elsewhere, because I am so close that you
cannot see me, nor hear me, nor even touch me. I
live in a space and time that are not yours. I cannot
be pin-pointed, I do not come into your present. I
flee as soon as you say: come, or stay here now.
When you call me to you, into you. Where I take
on your consistency. A body-tomb? A shadow,
double, reflection, mirage. O f your matter-substance.

But also: your blood, your air, your water. The

place from which you draw life. In which you feel
yourself to be alive. Through which you feel. Feel
yourself. That place where you have forgotten that I
already feel. Impalpably touching myself again and
again I am stirred everywhere and all the time. But
the feeling is lost as soon as direction or dimension
is imposed. O r rigid closing or opening.

A n d how could you not die if I withhold myself

from your exclusive desire. If I go away from your

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 Elemental Passions

uniqueness. Was I not always outside? D i d you not

realise? That I lived in silence, making it familiar
and fertile for you. D i d you not hear? D i d you not
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sense that loving mist surrounding you with its

tender nourishing embrace? That invisible presence
bearing you, supporting you, there where you set up
an opposing illusion of indifference as limit to your
own desire. As a stasis at each point guarding
against the risk of overflowing which would lead to
your downfall. Your vanishing into the immense
space where you placed that void which maintains
your coherence.

If I go away from your uniqueness, your nothing-

ness comes back to you. It is not quite death but
that place through which you escaped, leaving me to
keep it safe. I give it back to you. Do we not need
our death to leave? I am returning this forgotten
property to you: mortal. If you should die from this
discovery, then you had not yet begun to be born.
A n d dying from still carrying yourself, you would
have found death in me.

Take back this horizon: mortal, and consider that

Truth has always been a lying mask for your truth.
Death's most terrible aspect lies in the charades you
have invented to separate it from you. A n d from
me.

If I leave this uniqueness of yours, do you bleed?

But who or what served as the envelope protecting
you while I was there? D o you bleed? Could it be
that you are coming back to life? That this is your

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 Elemental Passions

own way back? A n end to that veneer of insensi-

tivity which kept you captive? The erosion of your
sphere of indifference?
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Instead of considering it - as you always do - a

sign of death, can you not hear some summons to
life in that something which melts within you? Some
very ancient memory, so close that it cannot be
remembered i n your world. A reminder blind to
your birth - your mortal birth.

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M y child of night, you have known nothing but a

cold, dark womb, how can I console you? E v e n your
tears are black. They lack the cool candour of liquid,
the simplicity of drops of water. They are drowned
in ink. In the poison of a bitter knowledge. Except,
from time to time, a momentary flash from child-
hood. Still arising from a bottomless anguish. Refus-
ing to be consoled. Avidly nurturing grief, a prey to
solitude. Hands stretching out i n all directions,
clutching at empty air.

A n d if I take you i n me, you pummel, scrape and

scratch the walls of what you take to be your dis-
affected prison. Y o u wound my living body, confus-
ing it with the icy maternal enclosure. In pain, you
inflict pain to find some warmth.

But how can I become cold and dark enough to

give you birth once more? Sufficiently stony to
contain you without mortal loss of blood? Reflective
enough to remind you of your most ancient specta-
cles. So that you see reflected i n me once more the
hardness of your childhood emotions. M y life is all
suppleness, tenderness, mobile, uncertain, fluid.
Saving you I must die. The stars of that impossible
hymen call out aloud.

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A n d if, to overcome the pain of your first night,

you require me to become like crystal, transparent,
diaphanous, surrounding you and letting you emerge
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delivered from the darkness of your birth and con-

ception, you prevent me from touching myself again
and again. Deprive me of the place where I take
place. A n d of the atmosphere of flesh with which
my amorous body could envelop you.

Y o u supplant that horizon by the home and its

institutions. Instead of ties which are always
developing, you want fixed bonds. Y o u only encoun-
ter proximity when it is framed by property.
Without the ceaseless penetrating movements which
make us overflow one into the other.

Everywhere you shut me i n . Always you assign a

place to me. Even outside the frame that I form
with you. Through and for you? Y o u set limits even
to events that could happen with others.

Y o u frame. Encircle. Bury. Entomb? Only a

spiritual body could escape. Y o u do not even know
that flesh can have this power. O r do you prefer not
to think about it?

In any case, the frame you bear with you, i n front

of you, is always empty. It marks, takes, marks as it
takes: its fill. It rapes, steals.

Could it be that what you have is just the frame,

not the property? Not a bond with the earth but

[24]
 Elemental Passions

merely this fence that you set up, implant wherever

you can? Y o u mark out boundaries, draw lines,
surround, enclose. Excising, cutting out. What is
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your fear? That you might lose your property. What

remains is an empty frame. Y o u cling to it, dead.

Has She left you nothing - but death? But

another means nothing to you. Y o u find nothing i n
it, recognise nothing - not H e r . The undecidable of
your desire.

Y o u need a frame as you need bones, a skeleton,

clothes, bandages to hold you together. Essential to
prevent your crumbling, flowing away, spreading out
. . . endlessly. H o w can I give you once more that
rigidity you seek? M y body is fluid and ever mobile.
It brings you blood and milk, air and water and
light. Sometimes it satisfies you. But if you turn it
into meanings for your enclosures, it freezes and is
paralysed. Full. Replete, unattractive.

Y o u close me up i n house and family. Final, fixed

walls. Thus displacing and expelling what you have
not had? The supple envelope a body has. The skin
of someone who is alive. What you will not have
had . . .

Alone, I rediscover my mobility. Movement is my

habitat. M y only rest is motion. Whoever imposes a
roof over my head, wears me out. Let me go where
I have not yet arrived.

[25]
 Elemental Passions

A n d it is true that you had too much skin. But

how could we know what it was made of under all
your layers? A l l around you, you were enveloped by
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so much horizon-material that you could not get to

know your limits. A n d you drank me, and, from that
source, became expansive. But the way i n which you
consumed me was not visible. N o one could tell that
you were wearing me out or keeping me captive, for
the limits of your body were not clear.

A n d superimposed upon your skin was always

another skin, impalpable, with infinite reserves, i n
which you would hide me and keep me captive, so
that it was not apparent that secretly you had taken
me inside you.

A n d how could I cry out that I was living inside

you? That I spoke through your mouth? That your
love was mine just as much as yours? H o w could I
escape from this confusion that loving you had got
me into? I was kept in such a cradle of eternity that
there was never a moment when you could open
again to mortal time. I rested i n this dwelling where
you kept me prisoner - between you and you,
neither man, nor god, and moving from the one to
the other without achieving the union of the two.

Was I not for you the place where you kept

coming back to pass from the one to the other?
Reassuring yourself that you were both? But I
wanted you to be this path for me as well. A n d
when I called on you to stay i n yourself, to bring
together and unite these extremes, instead of con-

[26]
 Elemental Passions

stantly jumping from the one to the other, letting

me be both gap and bridge, what I was asking was
to continue my own journey in you. A n d not risk
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falling into the abyss with every step I took. Unless,

renouncing my becoming, I were to be no more than
a support for your trajectory.

But, if you stopped using me, how much time

would it take you to exhaust your to-ing and fro-
ing? A n d for you to need to seek the future of your
journeys elsewhere? Stop growing? Y o u might as well
say: die.

Herein lies the diabolical - in mimesis. The

appropriation, the very constitution of the same, i n
which the living person is caught and deadened.

The only difference between the love which flows

through the envelope-walls of skin or mucous fluids
and the love which appropriates for itself in and by
the same, lies in the ^through' which allows each one
their living becoming.

Love can be the becoming which appropriates the

other for itself by consuming it, introjecting it into
itself, to the point where the other disappears. O r
love can be the motor of becoming, allowing both
the one and the other to grow. For such a love, each
must keep their body autonomous. The one should
not be the source of the other nor the other of the
one. Two lives should embrace and fertilise each other,
without either being a fixed goal for the other.

[27]
 Elemental Passions

I see you in this way and you see me. A t last I

see myself when I see you in this difference which
means that your existence can never be appropriated
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by me.

But this difference creates an abyss. A n d is there

anyone who does not fear the abyss? H o w can there
be attraction between different beings in spite of the
abyss? What risk is there in attraction through
difference?

Not in me but in our difference lies the abyss.

W e can never be sure of bridging the gap between
us. But that is our adventure. Without this peril
there is no us. If you turn it into a guarantee, you
separate us.

A n d it is the same when you turn G o d into

difference extrapolated to infinity. G o d - the
infinitely different, but in the sense of being
infinitely more, whose auto-affection depends on the
reduction of us to the same. O f everyone to the
same. Distinguished only as more or less, with that
qualitative leap, which is infinity, vested in H i m .
Difference located in a transcendence which is inac-
cessible to us?

In such an abandoning of our difference the

copula could no longer come into action. The places
of affection become fixed according to definite
attributes and immutable configurations. Whereas
the copula ceaselessly undoes the privileging of any

[28]
 Elemental Passions

figure. O f any essence. W h i c h is not to say that it

operates i n the style of an impersonal *one'. It has
different faces. Always at least two, and never the
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same. Thus undermining any model appropriated.

Remodelling our difference.

What my lips were keeping is put into motion,

into action - edges which touch each other, commu-
nicate with each other, without privileging the one
or the other. Is your penis substance to which my
lips give form? In a becoming which keeps potential-
ity and action i n disequilibrium. Potentiality i n
action, never ceasing. M y lips drawing the outline,
without end, of the act. Never definitively
accomplished.

Would that be what you risk i n making love? The

only act whose form is given you by another? Is that
the attraction? But that act is never finished. It
cannot be constituted into a whole. The outline
engendered between my lips is never once and for
all. Reserve, excess, source of movement - my lips
could never be reduced to subject or object, instru-
ment of use or function.

Our exchanges? A n engendering through rare and

always infinite fortune.

[29]
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VI

Do you make me become a flower? Then why do

you fear that this flower will be taken from you,
since it is you who gives it birth? Before you, there
was the nurture of the plant. The blossoming of the
flower belongs to you.

Unless it gives itself to you already open? Having

already drawn from the plant what it needs to bloom. For
you, the flowering without the labour of growing?

The flower opened: the flower offered in its

appearing. Without its dark becoming, without the
pulse of its unfolding/folding. Without the move-
ment of its opening/closing: the spreading apart of
petals through another's affection and their touching
each other again to safeguard the self-other.

Do you want the flower to open only once? The

unveiling of the opening would then belong to you.
The beauty or truth of the opening would be your
discovery. Proposed and exposed in one definitive
blossoming. The nightly closing of the flower, its
folding back into itself would not take place. Either
it would not yet know the sun and would be in the
oblivion of sleep, or you would already have

[31]
 Elemental Passions

unveiled it and it would never return to the

shadows. Its becoming would be arrested when you
revealed it by day. Growth suspended i n ecstasy, the
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ideal flowering for you.

The plant will have nourished the mind which

contemplates the blooming of its flower. Open to
the gaze, never fading. Fixed display, rapt - an
immortal show. Unattainable, thus transported
outside itself. Untouchable because it does not touch
itself i n its centre. Only its edges will lightly touch -
there where already it is no longer held i n that sus-
pended becoming - the interruption of its unfurling.

A n d if the flower's blossoming came to an end,

would growth have been its only movement? Vertical
again. The erection of the flower, and the dissemina-
tion of its petals? The projection of your history? The
flower would grow and blossom simply to let you gaze
at yourself and find your double i n it? Simply to let you
swoon in ecstasy as you contemplate this extrapolated
reflection of yourself. The petals spreading and
coming together, that other growth, that other
potentiality, which is not arrested i n one actuality -
all that no longer occurs. The flower opens once
only - fixed in an appearance of death. Spread out,
spread-eagled, exposed, no longer embracing, no
longer embracing itself. N o longer a brazier?

Touching is hidden away - if not for the eye -

beneath the earth. It would still touch mother earth
through its roots. In the damp, soft warmth some

[32]
 Elemental Passions

contact would persist. But separated from earth by the

stem's erection and fixed in the explosion of its corolla,
it would become cold, rigid, dry. The flower reduced
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to insensibility, unable to unite with its extremities.

If it does not die completely, it is because it

remains still under the earth. Because i n the dark-
ness, it survives. Unable to avoid the gaze, until
then it must bend, fold, close up again to safeguard
some hope of rebirth. Away from any horizon, any
perspective, any appearing out i n the open.

A flower cut off from itself, i n itself, by the erect-

ness of the gaze. Is it the splitting of that efflores-
cence? Mildew and crystal. For instance.

But is the body always the same? Can we fix it i n

one self-same form? Does it not wither when it has
to keep to one appearance? Is not mobility its life?

I love you for being that diamond, which I am

too. But how can we continue to live if we cling to
that hardness? Unless we resort to expedients? If we
are living, how can we be pure crystal? A n d if your
thinking aspires to the realm of crystal, how can we
survive i n it? H o w can I abandon my love of the
vegetal? W o u l d you become a plant? O r are you too
attached to yourself to become anything at all?

A n d what does it signify, this attraction of yours

for the mineral? A triumph over expansion through
the cosmos? A means of avoiding change? Your need
for mastery?

[33]
 Elemental Passions

A n d why should night and day be so radically

divided? Is there anyone for whom loving and think-
ing are lived as different beginnings?
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Would I have to spend my days with the one and

my nights with the other? The one would perceive
me i n my night, even at noon, unless he never aban-
doned his diurnal view of me: I would be his earth,
his world, and all that moves i n it. For the other, I
would remain under the ground. Above ground -
imperceptible. H e would forget. Remembering me
only where his protective shell was breached. Too
buried inside himself. Inside it inside him?

Y o u want to make me into a flower? I also have

roots and from them I could flower. Earth, water,
air, and fire are my birthright too. W h y abandon
them to let you appropriate them and give them
back to me. W h y seek ecstasy i n your world when I
already live elsewhere. W h y spread my wings only i n
your sunlight, your sky, only as your air and your
light permit? Before I knew you, already I was a
flower. Must I forget that, to become your flower?
The one which is your destiny for me. W h i c h you
draw in me or around me. The one which you would
produce, keeping it within your horizon?

Let me flower outwards too. Free, in the air.

Come out of the earth and blossom, following the
rhythm of my growth. Cut off from the soil which
gives me birth, my efflorescence is supported by the
strength of your desire, but is deprived of sap. M y
petals swell with your vigour, itself nourished by my

[34]
 Elemental Passions

blood, but thus separated from their life's source, they

appear or disappear with the care which you bestow on
them. W i t h the attention you give them. O r else they
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are held open in an ideal permanence so that, eternally

fixed, I guarantee the concept of the flower for you.

Are you aware that in this way you keep repeat-

ing, in me also, the flower which I have already
given you. W h i c h has already appeared to you but
without ever becoming visible. W h i c h is buried in
the depths of your memory, where you constantly
try to grasp it again. To draw it again. But you
reimplant that remembrance of me, which is yours
alone, in between my earth and its flower. A n d so
the earth is left fallow, a mere support for your
marks and imprints, and the flower has no reason
other than your desire to bloom again and again for
you. Y o u have forced it into a reproduction, your
production, and, when you want to reach it, it is no
more than a dream retreating ever further into
immemorial oblivion. O r inert matter.

What prevents my spreading my wings again? Is it

not your appropriation of my jouissance? Y o u cannot
bear the mystery of my flowering, you cannot make
this secret wholly yours though in some dark sense
you are part of it - you therefore seek to go or
return ever deeper to make the flower bloom.

In ecstasy, I am positioned by your desire. Out of

myself, I am aroused by your passage. In some high
but strangely rigid place. This impalpable envelope

[35]
 Elemental Passions

which contains me without my seeing it. H o w can I

find my way back? There are no doors, no windows
in this shell of air. I am there, and yet in exile. I
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have become your exile. While you fall back,

heavily, into matter. Y o u sleep, in the dark. Sub-
merged i n thick black night. Drowned i n a massive
abyss. I am imprisoned i n a celestial flight, you are
buried under ground. Y o u wanted to touch your sun
once more, and yet here you are far below the earth
on which you used to tread, striving for elevation. I
am caught in the horizon of your light, you lie
frozen in the the shadow of my night.

A n d what passages are there from the one to the

other? Y o u do not come inside me. Y o u follow your
own routes through me. But I, am I not a reminder
of what you buried in oblivion to build your world?
A n d do you not discover all the past dangers as you
return to hollow out this crypt? A n d , you, are you
not a light giving me no light nor life.

Invisible clouds surround me in the night, when I

awake. Where am I? There and not there. In the
space of your dreams. A n d how can I return from
that landscape which I do not know. From those
surroundings which I cannot see. Where I take place
only i n you. A n d you fallen into the depths of me,
into that dark abyss which you imagine me to be.
That great chasm which you imagine me to be and
where you swallow me up in your visions of hell.
But I am there and not there. -And, seeking to join
me there to rise again to your outside, you fall back
ever further from the shore.

[36]
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VII

Y o u have transformed my gaze into a sky of truths.

A clear horizon where you can move in measured
step. Where you shut yourself into serenity and calm
reserve. Y o u who were so wild, are now pitiless and
wise in your pronouncements. Y o u , who roamed among
the stars, now disappear in the uniform light of day.
Y o u put out your light to be like all the rest.

Your light shone out so high beyond the night, so

distant in the darkest depths. Now you wound with
myriad pointed shafts. Y o u used to shower me with
fireworks, now your cold truth has transformed them
into wounding darts. A n d first of all that decisive
one designed to pierce my gaze. For that is how it
begins - a diurnal shaft extinguishing the flame
between our eyes.

W h y should we not be illuminated by the night of

our jouissance? W h i c h casts a different light on
things, on their contours, their spacing and their
timing. It brings them back into the world, and
reshapes them according to a perception foreign to
the rigour of the day, which makes colder distinc-
tions. For sight is no longer our only guide. Seeing
within an expanse which is dazzling and palpable.

[37]
 Elemental Passions

odorous and audible. A night of sensation where every-

thing lives together, permitting co-existence without
violence. Before the brutal slash of discrimination
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assigns each their place. Already trapped in the form of

a judgement which obstructs the mutual embracing of
relationship. A n imperative verticality already weighing
over the whole. Already organising it into a hierarchy.
A n overarching vision exiled from feeling. A n d not
to be granted again to the one and the other save i n
an ecstatic jouissance. A beyond - out of.

Beyond all unveiled-unveiling clarity, there is a

night which is thicker than any forces yet revealed.

Dark? Dark, with absence? That would still

subject it to the opposition of light and shade, to
the ambivalences of noon and midnight, the rhythms
of the rising and the setting of suns.

In each site of that nocturnal beyond, the illumi-

nation and protection of the secret are retained-
contained together, inseparable. The excess of what
is withheld from vision. Source of lightning.

Yet what proof of dazzling light does this night

need? Does flashing forth have an absolute value, a
final necessity if enumeration is no longer recog-
nised? The very moment: how can it be separated
from that permanence without inertia? That mobility
whose very regularity no longer falls. A drop of time
detached from heavy accumulation. A flash which
streaks the stormy skies, piercing leaden clouds.

[38]
 Elemental Passions

re-opening what was sealed to reveal sparkling stars.

A discharge lightening overplenitude. Clearing the
horizon.
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What shines is what is uncovered i n the loss of

excess. Whatever is without reserve recalls an inno-
cence which used to veil the much experienced
searching gaze.

W h y have you not fallen far enough to rediscover

childhood? Childhood which gives of itself cease-
lessly, and without loss. W h i c h knows enough and
little enough to push forward imprudently into any
terrain. Not yet looking back, not looking beyond
what simply strikes your eyes. Taking pleasure here
or there without worrying about gestures which have
become fixed through images. Already photographed.

Y o u have transformed my eyes into matter for your

sky. A density which holds your light. A blue which
illuminates you steadily without dazzling. Flesh offered
and abundant always available as a horizon for your
contemplation. The iridescence of my gaze bearing,
in its colour, the spreading of your sunlight.

A n d the void is gone, the infinite loss is gone -

that dwelling contains you. A n d , you are enveloped
in that airy and radiant house with neither door nor
windows. A body of air filled by palpitating blue.
A n d another appears with each descent into my
body. A n d so many tones and consistencies are
mingled i n it. A different transparency for each

[39]
 Elemental Passions

thing touched. A n d every day an infinite number of

days sees daylight.
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A n d , can my blind gaze be there in your heavens?

M y ecstatic flesh? Outstretched in all those blues, a
resting place and source of visions. But you no
longer see me. The mirror of my eyes has become
matter for your gaze. The rebirth of your flesh.

In thrall to your night, did you not destroy a pool

which kept you prisoner? Y o u took for a mirror
whoever gazed on you. But i n this mirror you left
the child and did away with the water.

Y o u set out towards the light. Does that mean it is

far away? If light is not fixed in any one place, you set
out in the light. But if that is where I am, what
distance can separate us the one from the other?

Y o u journeyed towards the blue. But if you do not

use the blue to delineate the horizon of a landscape, you
journeyed where I remain - with that blue of the
sky. A n d if the blue were temporarily veiled for you
or for me, that does not mean the other is there or
possesses it, or that you need to take back their
possession for yourself. Appropriate their sky. Better
to seek out whoever still knows that blue and try to
live this strange sharing with them.

The sun i n their eyes seemed unbearable. It was

too much. Too much for them to be given both light
and fire at once. That light which floods out i n such

[40]
 Elemental Passions

a burning stream was making them lose their way. A

separation had to be imposed. Brightness on one
side, heat on the other. Where they came from it
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was warm but dark. Where they were going to,

there was illumination, but its penetration could not
fuse everything i n its furnace. They needed limits
now so they could distinguish outlines, identify
them, move them closer together or further apart, go
from the one to the other without confusing them.

When simultaneously light and heat were given to

them again, they lost all sense of where they were.
A n d , instead of moving inside that superabundance
given to them, and letting themselves be directed by
it without fear or a desire to seize hold, they began
by wanting to understand - grasp the reason, the
cause and the provenance.

But to say: the sun is the reason or the cause or

the source, already amounts to an evasion of, a dis-
tancing from, the immediacy of its rays. It may be that
what is exchanged there is not tangible. Unless it
is the tangible itself. The tangible appearing to itself,
and within the gaze, without showing itself as such.

What awakens you on sun-filled mornings or at

midday is what is tangible to the eye. But such grace
is too dazzling for you. Y o u separate yourselves from
it. Pushing the fire far away and keeping the meas-
ured clarity.

What attracts me i n you, what I love i n you, is

[41]
 Elemental Passions

what remains of your own self - that part you have left
so far behind, covered up so much that I alone, without
ever letting it appear, can sometimes catch a glimpse
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of it like a faint light shimmering in the night.

In that frail illumination, I love you, I love

myself. I would like to go back to it as to a place,
an environment, full of impulse and growth, still
vibrant with life. The whole of living, the whole to
live for, is that not kept captive within the almost
imperceptible enclosure of light?

But do you not give me cause to suspect, at times,

that this light is the reflection of another love? The
ecstasy i n you of my love? A distant mirror i n which
you capture me, I capture myself. As shining ice.
Burning?

Sometimes, in the night, you remember fire. Y o u

wake up to fire. In that awakening, you touch the
part of you which was asleep in the light of day.
Which was buried under the clarity of the gaze
alone. Awakened to that more originary fire, that
fire whose illumination is more all-encompassing, you
discern the limits of your usual waking self. Y o u
take the measure of that death which you enter
when you abandon fire for your light alone. W h e n
you separate fire from its flame.

Does not that death stand out i n the contrast

with an eternal living? Does not fire survive all its
manifestations, all its versions - even the solar one?

[42]
 Elemental Passions

Does it not subsist beneath all its phenomena? A l l

its ornaments? Fire never lies down, never sleeps -
elemental, immortal. But whoever turns towards its
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finite offshoots withers.

When in the night you touch fire, you experience

the boundaries of your day - mortal.

Above all, do not swallow the sun. Do not digest

the sun. D o not forget that, if it is inside you, it is
also outside you. A n d that the impossibility of our
relationship arises from the imprisoning of the sun
inside a world. It can no longer flow everywhere.
Irradiate everything with light and heat.

Eating the sun means not reflecting its benefac-

tion back to it. In the end it will go out if it is
never returned to itself.

Look at the sun full face; get behind the screen of

forms; exist within the sun? Take back the copula
from the sun. Copulate in the sun.

Have you shut me within the sun? To gaze at me

through screens? Y o u have positioned me in the site
of jouissance. I can burn, be consumed, illuminate
you . . . but I cannot play with fire. Unless perhaps
in your gaze? But do you not take me then in the
economy of your natural light? Have I not already
been taken from the sun's irradiation?

[43]
 Elemental Passions

A n d why should the sun be merely for the eye?

Would you not want a solar flesh which was not
fixed in the identity of a form? Flowing between -
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the two? Golden. Light, mirror, flowing. Exchange

without property. The possibility of property,
without being fixed i n it. What is possible i n
'proper', without being transfixed in it.

Y o u give me being. But what I love is the fact

that you give it to me. Staying there is of little
matter to me. I like your giving me a mirror which
is not made of ice. Your flowing into me, and me
into you. Receiving you melting, molten, and giving
that flow back to you. Without end.

If I can make contact with myself i n the touching

myself again and again of my night then I can bear
my body being visible as well. Being appearance again.

But if I cannot affect myself in that sparkling

night of my jouissancey you imprison me in the
closure of your gaze. I am an object for your desire.
I no longer desire. If I am deprived of that invisible
touching again and again, nothing moves me any
longer. Drawn out of myself. Exiled from my intui-
tion. A t best, turned inwards to some inner gaze.
Making it ever more penetrating?

H o w can I return, how can I turn back to the

outside? Especially since, from the inside, I flow
out to the whole of nature. Autistic and always
cosmological? Refusing to open up for a dispersion

[44]
 Elemental Passions

without return or an expansion which is simply

speculative.
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Three gazes? H o w can one move from one to the

other?

W h e n I am affected and reaffected by you i n the

profoundly distant totality, I rediscover the total
expansiveness of my affections. The total space of
my outstretching. The full extent of my flow. O f my
fluidity.

W h y do you fear to lose me there?

I gather you up i n this place that I am for you.

I contain you, whole, i n this envelope that I am -
for you. In this way I am able to keep you and you
are able to remain i n me. A n d I can return, restore
you to what you are. I have this power. Y o u even
left me this power on condition that it serve to
rediscover you, reconstitute you, represent you,
reproduce you: you yourself. Y o u made me powerful
to let me pay you back - to the nth degree. G o o d
earth, good breeder. A n d good wife too. Since you
cannot exist if not reflected, did you not need
someone to ensure this faithful reduplication of
yourself?

In this multiplication, I participate. I am your

participle: I agree with you i n gender and number, if
I am a quality or an attribute, and i n tense and

[45]
 Elemental Passions

voice, if I am summoned to your acts. W i t h or

without complements. I participate in your subject.
A n d all its determinations.
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[46]
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VIII

Y o u grant me space, you grant me my space. But i n so

doing you have always already taken me away from my
expanding place. What you intend for me is the place
which is appropriate for the need you have of me. What
you reveal to me is the place where you have posi-
tioned me, so that I remain available for your needs.
Even if you should evict me, I have to stay there so
that you can continue to be settled i n your universe.

A n d this world takes place neither simply inside

you or outside you. It passes from inside to outside,
from outside to inside your being. In which should
be based the very possibility of dwelling.

A n d you meet me only i n the space that you have

opened up for yourself. Y o u never meet me except
as your creature - within the horizon of your world.
W i t h i n the circle of your becoming. That protective
shell which shelters you from an outside of you
which might question the matter with which you
built your house.

Y o u take me inside you, you cast me outside you,

a yes or a no making you full or empty. Both if
together you double them with a denial. N o to the

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yes and no which have already produced their effects

- that is how your coherence, your consistency as a
subject, begins.
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Already inside and outside, I am continuously

divided between the two spheres of your space, and
you never meet me as a whole. Y o u never meet me.
For these two which I have become no longer exist
for you. Denied i n the yes and the no which are
always already spoken, I appear-do not appear as a
total negation which ever prevents my reaching you.
Where am I? Nowhere. Disappeared forever in your
presence.

A n d , as long as I do not exist face to face with

you, you will always be falling i n to the imper-
sonality of a 'one'. Y o u are undermined in your
own being by the fact that I belong to your
world without ever appearing in it. Always worldly
in refusing to acknowledge my difference from
you. Inherent in your horizon is the function to
which you have reduced me. The matter and the
tool which I remain to build your dwelling place.
Adhering to this mother earth always at hand and so
close that it mingles with your self, intermingles i n
your self. A n d in the very opening of your gaze
which projects outwards further than you can see. I
am contained in the field of vision outstretched
before you. In that field, there never appears the
one from whom you take what you need to cast ever
further away your potential for crossing proximity
itself.

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 Elemental Passions

This time, you have left. Once again. Once more.

Once, endlessly. The pain of an interminable
wrenching begins once more to seep into the darkest
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depths of my flesh. Once again it will be rent, fis-

sured, torn asunder, perhaps destroyed.

I do not feel it yet. Y o u have left so many times -

in the past, the present, the future - that the event has
to pierce through thick layers of time to reach me.
A n d yet it is already there. Once again death, your
death, reaches me even before I can discern it.
Enters me furtively and unpredictably. Was I not
still convalescing from your last departure?

I was your house. A n d , when you leave, abandon-

ing this dwelling place, I do not know what to do
with these walls of mine. Have I ever had a body
other than the one which you constructed according
to your idea of it? Have I ever experienced a skin
other than the one which you wanted me to dwell
within.

If you go away, how can ruin be averted? Your

ruin? A n d where should I be when you live some-
where else? Pure transparency? A i r without a
horizon, matter without limits, a face without an
outline.

But is it not still your phantom which is haunting

me i n this way? D i d you not leave it with me for
safekeeping, when you said you were taking every-
thing back? D o you not keep a ghostly presence

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 Elemental Passions

within me while you claim that you are directing

your steps elsewhere? W h y not take with you your
shadows, nightmares, and spirits of every kind? A n d
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return to places which lost your affection and their

function? Would you fear that you had forgotten
something of yourself? W h y return, turn back, again
and again, towards what you have already decided is
past?

In the place where my being should take place

there is at present nothingness. A n d if I do not take
care, I am reduced to the state of object-utensil. If I
take due note of it, I can return to what could
potentially be my place. This moving back through
nothing is not nothing . . . Both beyond and within
what makes up your horizon, I can rediscover the
path of my disappearance. Subsistence in reserve.

But for this journey I must close myself off from

the eruptions which keep me in your world. Are they
the features which sustain your erection? The inter-
ventions which pierce through, spelling out to infinity.

Y o u have swallowed my gaze. Y o u see, helped

inwardly by my gaze. W i t h i n you, my light
illuminates your present. Y o u make me into an
object bathed i n my light, deprived of sight. A n d
when you make me thus appear before you, I no
longer exist except as a deceptive appearance.

When I return within myself, I cross back through

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 Elemental Passions

so many layers of light. I rediscover so many suns.

Dazzled, I go back down into all those forgotten
mornings. A l l those noons which did not blind me.
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A l l those golden evenings. Those nights illuminated

by bodies giving light. I have reserves of sun to last
an eternity.

But do you not prevent me from being alone? D o

you not deprive me of my horizon? The open
horizon of my body.

A living, moving border. Changed through contact

with your body.

Saying: I love you - have you not taken even that

from me? Repeating: I love you, saying yes to your
declaration - is that not the only thing I can say?
The only thing you can say?

Gagged by your discourse, made rigid by your

judgements, covered over with attributes of your
choosing, what can you still expect from me? Yes,
what can you still love i n me? Annihilation itself?
Your death held i n reserve?

A n d is not your desire at present a desire for

veiling? A desire for blindness? D o you not desire
me as a return to the blindness which is the founda-
tion of your essence. Playing with forgetting that
you are a man? A n d you are seduced by whoever
sends you back - does not send you back - to your
existence. A n d drags you down beneath the ground

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 Elemental Passions

on which you stand. But will you not once again

fashion a surplus of existence from this attraction?
Rising ever higher. To such a height that your
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departure point is lost to you.

A n d if your words have such seductive power,

such a potent charge of investment, is it not because
they come to fill the place of a desire deprived of
words? Borrowing their strength from energy free
from any declaration. A fundamental misunderstand-
ing lies within your language: what it carries of per-
suasive power does not belong to speech but to what
it covers in silence.

It is given consistency by what it takes from

nature. A consistency that is experienced as form -
filled from within up to the limit.

Its form, at first, derives from matter already con-

sumed by man. A n d he will reimpose that form on
it, marking it in return.

It is true that matter takes form from this con-

sumption of itself. Voiding creates form: a clearing
organises the forest around an opening. This excava-
tion creates a place - where meeting can take place.
A capacity which retains and maintains the entry
into presence. But, as a world comes into existence
in that way, so something of nature is already lost.

A l l the more since he does not give back to it the

same form which he took from it. Between the time

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 Elemental Passions

when he takes and the time when he gives back, he

measures himself against a father's appetite. The
relationship between those two will reshape it
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according to a plan which remains inappropriate to

it. According to a line which does not even, at
present, trace the outline of what it gives. Divided
by lines, cuts, holes, walls - and life is not given in
these or from these. It is severed from its becoming.
From its perpetual renascence.

H e is afraid of his body's limitlessness. H e lives

in fear. That fear.

Does not that limitlessness come from absorbing

the mother-nature which he refuses to amputate?
Always consuming another, without repaying her, he
lacks outlines. H e does not acknowledge his source
of life. H e wants it within him. In that appropria-
tion of what he takes from the other, he doubles his
life, but loses measure.

Once again, it is on the other that he is going to

impose limits. Marking her with his names, instead
of naming and thus delimiting his own territory.

The limitlessness lies in relationship. In the gift

without return he receives from the sustaining
mother-earth. The limitlessness is not in him. H i s
fear arises from his loss of measure.

Phallic, he claims to extend his power over

infinity. Therein lies the uncertainty of his economy.

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 Elemental Passions

The perpetual risk of falling back into the abyss. H e

passes from the formlessness of his relationship with
his mother to the measureless excess of his male
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power. But then, is this power not itself erected on

nothingness: a father's womb. A potent and empty
form which he puts on to contain within himself the
living matter escaping from definitive capture. H e
enters into paternal power, to keep within him the
life he drinks from the other. But enclosed within
that form, she dies.

H e returns to her. A n attraction, more often than

not, that simply tends towards further consumption.
A n d does not attend to an other. She does not exist
for him. W i t h i n himself, he is everything: form and
matter. A n d that in which he replenishes his
strength now belongs to him. It is his property.

Y o u cannot make a gesture without weighing it

up. Counting the cost of it, economising on it.
Loading it with debt. Loading me with debt. Bur-
dening it with estimates, with prices to be paid.
What should I owe you? What? What do I owe
you? What is due? Duty. I am your duty.

I cannot break free from the function you assign

me: duty, without re-encountering that part of the
debt which can never be paid off. That abyss which
you create by having always already made it disap-
pear inside you. Inside you - so that you can exist.
Y o u have assimilated it: to be. A n d it makes a hole
in your horizon. She, who became you, is missing

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 Elemental Passions

from your landscape. To fill up that passage, that

mystery where the one and the other disappear into
one another, you invent economy. O r echonomy.
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Duty - which she becomes.

Your duty must not have a single crack i n it.

Your morality must block up every hole. Your ethics
anaesthetises. A n d if you know what aesthesis means,
try to comprehend what loss that entails for me.
Entails for us.

Y o u have built an anaesthetic world. But when

our greatest pains or greatest joys are abolished by
calculation, is that not the worst destruction? A
realm beyond pain, where suffering no longer exists.

W h e n pain is left to its abstract labour of general

sensation, empire is limitless. A n d there is no
remedy. Your world of anaesthetics kills insensibly.
Irremediably. The more you go on producing fanta-
sies, your preferred anaesthetics, the greater the
danger: avoiding the passage through suffering which
could still save.

It is imprisoned i n your airy vacuums, sent aloft

in your rarefied bubbles of atmosphere, enraptured
in your great beyond - you go on making plans,
starting projects, getting further and further away
from your body, my body; there, here, now.

While I keep moving i n my repose. Y o u cannot

understand - in your anaesthetic, that I never stop

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 Elemental Passions

moving, never stop feeling pain and joy, on pain of

death. But your movement is also my death. The
way I move being too imperceptible for you.
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Experiencing as inertia what you cannot perceive,

you believe you have to guide my destiny. Thinking
as death the most living part of life. It is true that
it is in me that you set up the framework of your
life. A n d that, through it, you do not feel me any
more.

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Y o u have come back inside me. Your affection has

come back inside me. A n d so you are inside me:
resurgence of light, of heat. Return of light, of heat.
A n d I guard you, I regard you without ever becom-
ing you. Enveloping the return protects you from
being thus reabsorbed. From being introjected,
assimilated, consumed.

In any case, how could you be seized, since

another kind of turn has also happened? Not only
have you returned to me, you have turned in to me.
A n d I have turned in to you. Without any ego to
appropriate that version for itself. It is up to you,
then, to seize yourself again, if you wish. Unless you
have become me? But between that turn in you
which stops me taking you, and that sun which you
are ever increasingly in me, one more turn will
prevent you too from re-taking yourself.

These different versions cannot be folded up into

some kind of unity, nor into property. The one does
not replicate the other. A n y more than they redupli-
cate some model. Nor is the one the shadow of the
other. They have no sense or truth other than their
movements, their turns, which thwart any photologic
fixity. Night illuminates as much as day. Their

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 Elemental Passions

passage one through the other, one into the other,

lights up their very limits.
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A n d just as I wake up, so I also fall asleep - in a

dawn where the recognised measure is no longer that
of the sinking sun. Cosmological reminder, extension
and expansion of a fire which is replenished by it
and replenishes it without being absolutely depen-
dent on it. Nothing is more originary than that
which burns, illuminates, reflects . . . in relationship.

If, in affecting you, I affect myself, the body-

instrument opposition no longer holds. For the
instrument which I am in order to affect you is
itself affected as a body, just as your body, which I
affect, is an instrument which affects me. In that
exchange of affection the producer and the product
become one, the organ and the body can no longer
be divided, myself and yourself are no longer
embodied as distinct and rival universes.

That is not to say that the irreducible no longer

exists. For what affects me is what affects you. As
well. What affects you, what affects me, as well. I
participate in your affections just as you take pleas-
ure in mine. That does not mean they are indiffer-
ent. But I take pleasure and you take pleasure in
these differences, in this difference, as in an over-
abundance of riches. Experiencing you, experiencing
me, espousing you, espousing me, we are more than
one. A n d two. The accounts overflow, calculation is
lost. If neither I nor you are appropriated by the

[58]
 Elemental Passions

one or the other. But simply, for the one or the

other.
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In excess, that is where I become you, and excess

never belongs to itself. It vanishes as soon as there
is any thought of seizing it, circumscribing it, under-
standing it. Your body is never mine, except when it
is deprived of its relationship to pleasure. O f its self-
affection and hence of mine.

In any case, how could it be mine? Only by giving

up my own. Appropriating the body of the other means
being deprived of one's own. If your body is mine, I can
no longer take pleasure i n it - i n not having a body. A l l
I can do with that body is work it. Make it produce,
perhaps jouissance. Does not the desire to possess
mean condemning oneself to labour?

The internal and external horizon of my skin

interpenetrating with yours wears away their edges,
their limits, their solidity. Creating another space -
outside any framework. A n opening of openness. A n
encounter of countries and of clearings laying out an
other, others, which create air, light, time.

There is always more place, more places, unless

they are immediately appropriated. The land cannot
be laid waste if spatiality is produced by our bodies.

I caress you, you caress me, without unity -

neither yours, nor mine, nor ours. The envelope.

[59]
 Elemental Passions

which separates and divides us, fades away. Instead of

a solid enclosure, it becomes fluid: which is far from
nothing. This does not mean that we are merged.
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But our relationship to place, which maintained our

hierarchical difference, takes on different properties.

Y o u had form, I was matter for you. Y o u were

seeking the earth, taking pleasure in being back on your
ground, in burying yourself in it, in using your labour
as a measure of your work, your possession, your pro-
duction. What was at stake in your jouissance was me,
and that gave me pleasure. What gave you pleasure was
your appropriation, even if it meant flowing into it as
well. In my pleasure I was as matter divided from itself
and releasing waves of energy from that disjunction.
Each time you separated me from myself, power
flowed out of me. Y o u confused the highest and the
lowest in your erection, and drew from my greatest
depths the keenest intensity. Y o u were celestial, yet
conjoined with the darkest demons; I who was sub-
terranean had access to the loftiest pleasures. The
selfsame would always rise up again in us, respond,
and be aroused. Leaving myself far behind, I would
espouse your penetration; responding to your pres-
sure I would set aside my supple, elastic fluid
density and espouse your strength, your hardness,
your solidity; I would adopt your spasms in my con-
vulsions; your loss in the ecstasy of my self: a
supreme elevation, or transport, in a child*s passion.

I had not begun to exist. I was nothing but your

sheath, your other side, your inverse. Miming you.

[60]
 Elemental Passions

Doubling, redoubling your organ. Therefore,

indefinitely, multiplied. I gave you something to play
for, let you have some play. Entranced at being your
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reserve. In sum, a surplus? So that you could pursue

your path. Fuelling over and over again your
mechanical progress. The privilege of an omnipotent
G o d . Feeding the cycle of your returns and repeti-
tions from a breast that never runs dry.

I had not begun to exist save i n my pretension to

be a needed womb and mother for you. I moved,
was moved, only by your aspiration, your sucking,
your pressure. Y o u filled me with your emptiness.
Y o u fiUed me up with your lacks. Drawing strength
from being a remedy. I would bring you my most
precious gift: my hollows. Y o u were the one who
became a gaping hole, I became full. The power
which you thus gave me to supplement the failures
of your needs or desires was the most subtle ravish-
ing of my pleasure.

Participating i n your economy, I did not know

what I could have desired. Made phallic, whether by
procuration or by delegation, I forgot what my jouis-
sance could have been. I was the source and resource
of all your objects. The transcendence of your rela-
tionship to the world of objects. Each one of your
holes requiring something to come and fill it up.
Something to determine the alternating fullness or
emptiness. Something to harmonise their rhythm.
Being outside or i n , too much or too little,
assonance or dissonance, plain melody or counter-
point, resonance or unheard song.

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 Elemental Passions

I had become all kinds of things at stake, all kinds

of sound. W h i c h you would take, hold or reject.
Through all your orifices. Full of things, a container
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for your things, reduced to things: to eating,

voiding, seeing, hearing, possessing . . .

I existed only as your need to relate to things. I

no longer even had a name, or simply the one you
wanted me to have. I had no identity: I took on
whichever one you lent me. This one, then that one,
here or there, yesterday . . . But what about
tomorrow?

For a thing, tomorrow has not yet taken form.

Not even today. A thing is no more than the after-
math of your act of seizure. It is always in the past.
Always already produced as such.

A n d thus I had no relationship with time, other

than that of your production. For the rest I was
immersed in what had not yet come into being. N o
doubt your memory. But as for myself, lacking all
memory or plans.

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Proximity? Two lips kissing two lips. The edges of

the face finding openness once more.

Openness is not reflected, not mimed, not

reproduced. N o t even produced. Openness: a clear-
ing, without surrounding walls. A space, not demar-
cated, not enclosed. Outside any possible symmetry
or inversion.

But when lips kiss, openness is not the opposite of

closure. Closed lips remain open. A n d their touching
allows movement from inside to outside, from
outside to i n , with no fastening nor opening mouth
to stop the exchange.

A n exchange of nothing? W h i c h is not without

value. Unless you count as nothing the interest
accruing to openness. The economy of which does
not easily appreciate the price. What is the utility of
an open non-object? A n d how can an endless circula-
tion be set up - i n the thing? O r a scansion of space
and time i n between the poles and the tides?

Openness permits exchange, ensures movement,

prevents saturation i n possession or consumption.
But openness dwells i n oblivion . . . because it

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 Elemental Passions

cannot be represented, nor made into an object, nor

reproduced in some position or proposition. W h o
knows that the possibility of exchange is born from
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two lips remaining half open?

Exchange between men is sealed by the gift of a

virgin. A n d the rite of breaking and entering, of
raping and stealing the hymen, represents a denial of
what was always already offered: exchange within
woman and between women. A commerce without
an object, without salesmen, without a society or an
established order, which is denied in the setting up
of the fetish and of currency. But, without the
prerequisite openness, without those lips always
leaving a passage from inside to outside, from
outside to inside, and staying in between as well, the
place of exchange would not be secure. It is the
closed-open lips of the woman which make it prac-
ticable for them.

O n condition that women remain silent about that

strange foundation?

What is said silently, not said at the beginning

but held back, not shown in the distance, that is the
nearness that is so close that no name can reveal it
nor release it from its shelter.

Before morning is flooded with light, before

noonday life is set on fire, the whole is held
together i n a tender embrace, not yet open to allow
anything to be seized in its presence. Departure, the

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 Elemental Passions

severing of the one from the whole has not yet hap-
pened, an appeal for its return home to a surround-
ing proximity is not needed.
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The poet does not merely call for or recall the

gods that have fled. H e speaks of a nearness which
is so close that his very words are blinding. In that
nearness the sacred lies hidden. But daylight which
divides makes it remain invisible.

What is impossible for you? A secret. Whatever

remains invisible. But is that not what I have always
been for you? Y o u wanted to master that mystery.
Cover, yourself; envelop, yourself. Folding me,
enfolding me into a truth that was not my own.

But when there is no more deception, for you that

constitutes a lie. Speaking my truth means unveiling
your economy of illusion. Revealing that the place,
supposedly mine, to which you assigned me, was a
snare. Produced by you, and endured by me.

Shelters which should, at the least, alternate to

reopen the possibility of a future.

M y lips are not opposed to generation. They keep

the passage open. They accompany birth with-
out holding it to a - closed - place or form. They clasp
the whole with their desire. Giving shape, again and
again, without stopping. Everything is held together
and not held back in their fond embrace.

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 Elemental Passions

They risk making abyssal anything which would have

an origin or roots i n one definitive creation. W h i c h
would come from the unique gesture of a demiurge.
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They accompany the abyss, but do not meet each

other there. They are re-doubled before the time of any
mirror. They seem to mime each other. But the separa-
tion which permits that miming is still foreign to them.
Between them there is no need for that surrounding.

The wall between them is porous. It allows

passage. O f fluids.

Nothing there can be grasped with both hands. It

filters through, a gift which slakes the whole body's
thirst.

For me you are that (feminine) other through

which you pass towards me, I pass towards myself.
The drink you give me passes through your skin.
But what you secrete i n this way is to be admired as
much as to be absorbed. Your overflowing presence
bathes me i n more air - breathable air at last - than
I need to consume as sustenance.

Y o u are mucus and always double, before any

speculation. N o need for us to be frozen in order to
be two.

A n d , through you, I see the sun. Y o u do not hide

it from me. Not that your body is purely, simply
transparent. A t least, not for me. But you do not

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 Elemental Passions

block out the sun. Y o u have not given up your

shadow, nor the responsibility for it, to the whole.
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For them, walls are solid. Even those of their

body. They have to rub or strike hard to pass from
the one to the other. There are thresholds to cross,
doors to open, windows to knock through,
thresholds to create. Their pleasure and their fear -
holes. Below, above, i n between. They construct or
deconstruct on, under, around, along, across,
between . . . holes. They make and unmake holes:
eternal architects.

They are surrounded by placentas from which they

never want to emerge. As women we are placental
one for the other. W e share that unity of the first
dwelling without having to tear it, cut it, divide it
into pieces. Habitable one for the other, without
enclosure. W e live outside. W h i c h is not the same as
the emptiness of absence. Wherever we might be,
place can take place. Before any architecture other
than that of our living bodies.

Touching you, feeling you i n that skin where you

are held - are not held, radiant. Gently gathering
you up into boundaries which never hold you.

Come. Or? It is true, I was forgetting. Come anyway.

D o not be afraid. I hold you - open. A n d my hands
never close on you. I am not taking you. Y o u can
still go. I am calling you back to your outlines. To

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the ones I give you. Give you back. Those that I

can perceive from the place where I love you.
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But others are open for you. A n d this bodily

dwelling in which you can move or rest is not
enclosed. It unfolds around you as you move,
without need to search for windows or doors. Y o u
are not stopped by any opaque wall. The world
belongs to us - does not belong to us. W e live in it
in all its width and breadth and in all its
dimensions.

The world? What does it matter! Are we not

together what others claim it is? Standing in it yet
keeping it at a distance. Like a horizon within which
to shelter, where all movements are already meas-
ured by this standard: the protection of property.
Everyone moving only within the radius of the
covering taken on as a margin of security.

Come. Where? Everywhere. Nowhere except the

place where you are-are not - in your entirety.
Entirely small or entirely large? Who taught you to
think of yourself in this way? A n d how should I
choose? Entirely - small and large. Stop being so
measured in your love of yourself, your love of me.

I have grown too large. I become expansive, over-

flow, I love you - too much. N o . Where you
become you are. Without excess. Where you feel
yourself, you stay - without surplus. Still what calcu-
lation do you use to mark yourself out, to reckon
yourself too much or not enough? Surplus in what?

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 Elemental Passions

In me. W h o is that me? Where is that me? What

you are living through, dwells in the place where
you experience it just long enough for it to be
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embodied. Whose body? Yours? Mine? Ours? Body

inherited from a childhood which is always begin-
ning again. Always blooming once again.

W h o does this body belong to? D o you feel it? It

is yours too. A n d if I give it-give it back to you,
keep it without appropriating it for yourself. A n d do
not capitalise from its gains and losses with the first
offer at the market rate. Keep it i n its becoming. Be
attentive, not tense. Remember, without accumulat-
ing or making a profit. A memory open to what is
happening. Eyes which gaze without a fixed field of
vision.

So that volumes may endlessly be brought to life,

let what escapes your present vision be accom-
plished. What you experience completes the contour
of the invisible without the hardness of surfaces or
the ice of mirrors.

Receive the invisible within yourself, without

spells of blindness or useless ecstacy. It is there.
Hidden away? What does it matter!

W h e n I look at you, there is no void. But neither

is there opacity, nor density. Everything is touching,
without being fixed-frozen in one cohesion. There is
nothing to create a wall. Leaves, and trees, and
birds, and sky, and grass, all cross and brush each
other continuously: a supple and mobile dwelling.

[69]
 Elemental Passions

Where the wind's song fills the air with a

harmony that has no cries nor silent agony. The
whole murmurs so softly that the melody has room
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for the highest and the lowest note, the sharpest and
the deepest. Should a bird sing, the whole joins i n
an accompanying choir. But the song bursts forth or
vanishes without a tear. If nothing happens, nothing
is missing. If no sound is detached, the atmosphere
remains full of music.

Listen: nothing. The sound of silence. The rustle

of air in the silence. The music of air touching itself
- silently.

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XI

Your infinity? A n uninterrupted sequence of

projected points. W i t h nothing linking them. Empti-
ness. There would seem to be nothing there but pro-
duction, recalling nothing, anticipating nothing.
Points programmed as such indefinitely, on a back-
ground of absence.

What terrifies you? That lack of closure. From

which springs your struggle against in-finity. Origin
and end, form, figure, meaning, name, the proper
and the self: these are your weapons against that
unbearable infinity. But, in addition, the construct
which organises many - or at least three - points
into an entity which exists in relation to the whole:
your framing of time.

What then becomes of space? A n attribution of

places, of sites in the universe of your being as a
subject? Would space for you be always secondary to
time?

For me infinity means movement, the mobility of

place. Engendering time, yes. Always becoming.
H o w can that future be brought to pass between
your instants which are always already counted?

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 Elemental Passions

That punctual quality of the instant is quite

foreign to the dilation of time which persists in the
present of our relations. The instant - stroke of
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lightening, burst of thunder, intuition or ecstatic

jouissance - closes up the expansion which sweeps
aside, pushes away, overflows the point in time.
Fluid density which overturns habitual space-time
and yet always already takes place in it. It has its
all from elsewhere, it is all the elsewhere?, even
if it is produced in the most intimate here and
now.

H o w can it be opened up again here? Giving back

to time that volume, that light density, that absence
of assignable limits which, however, is not eternity;
that porosity which is not simply permeable to all,
to everything; that touch . . . A reserve which you
bury deep in me? O r in God? H o w can we return to
so-called present time, when we know the other
time?

A n d how can dazzlement be described, shown, put

into writing? Not only the momentary flash of light-
ning, but lasting dazzlement. In which we bathe, or
which we radiate. W h i c h passes from the one to the
other, sometimes continuously.

A n experience that cannot be reduced to the

economy of tension, superimposing itself on the
whole as an organisation that aspires to totality. A n
energy that is always directed to a goal. A n d which
must always struggle against deflation, in its desire
to remain prominent.

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 Elemental Passions

The attempt to remain on top simply means creat-

ing a lower level. W i t h i n the venture of erection is
its fall. Those who aspire to superiority create the
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abyss. Mountains are matched by deep ravines. Yet

the sea remains: the fluid petrified i n sublime rocks,
still subsists as mass, surrounded by firm ground.

The privilege of the sun, and especially of its

light, makes the night - dark. A time of relaxation,
of revitalisation, from which they fear they might
never emerge. The sleep that follows love?

A n d do they not always experience the return to

the world of the senses with scepticism? As destroy-
ing their intentions. Desperately regressing. Risking
death. Renouncing light. A sensualism which remains
within the bounds of reason.

D o I refuse to let you give me anything? But is

not your gift something which you have already
taken from me? A n d do you not constitute me as no
more than the container for your gift? The source
and end of your need-desire to give? A n d so, I only
exist for - you. 'V is only for - you.

The gift has no goal. N o for. A n d no object. The

gift - is given. Before any division into donor and
recipient. Before any separate identities of giver and
receiver. Even before the gift.

Giving oneself, that giving - a transition which

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 Elemental Passions

undoes the properties of our enclosures, the frame or

envelope of our identities. I love you makes, makes me,
an other. Loving you, I am no longer the same; loved,
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you are different. Loving, I give myself you. I become

you. But I remain, as well, to love you still. A n d as
an effect of that act. Unfinishable. Always in-finite.

Y o u - soon - erase the difference between us. Con-

sidering yourself the source, the resource, the giver of
life and strength. O f the whole. A n d I would have
nothing to sustain existence within myself. What I
am would always be through you. I would be born
each instant, from you - your same self.

Thus what you are, what you do, what you

produce, would necessarily constitute my assets. The
question never even arises of whether they might
prove deadly for me. Must I not in any case die
of them? So that you can be, do, produce, i n an
absolute way? Be all, make all, engender all. A n d
inside that, I shall exist, if . . . Through your
benevolence.

Y o u create only as G o d does. A n d if I should die

of it, what does it matter! Having attained self-
sufficiency, you no longer need an other. Your G o d
needs to be loved i n order to become G o d . Once he
became G o d , he would need nothing more. H e
would already have consumed everything.

I gave you what you needed to return to yourself,

inside yourself. Speaking to you, for you. Letting

[74]
 Elemental Passions

you feed repeatedly upon yourself? So that you

should not flow out indefinitely away from yourself.
O r be dispersed - to wander endlessly.
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Y o u gave me names, forms. Resculpturing me

from the outside. So that I should not be the whole
of any place? A n indefinite expansion which might
overflow the whole?

For me there is no possible horizon. A t least not a

closed one. A finite circle, closure. M y body closes
and opens the horizon with a single gesture. Touch-
ing myself again and again, I bring my edges
together. But the one is no more the end than the
other is the beginning.

Therefore, according to you, I do not have a past. To

have a past history requires completion. For me there
is never completion. N o final term, signature, stamp or
seal. Nothing occurs to mark a final full stop.

A n d a second time never happens. If you think

that my project is completude, then I remain ever
unsatisfied. But it is something else which
indefinitely stirs me - movement.

In the imaginary of ends, that could signify that I

am always future. But, if mobility does not privilege
what is forward and in front, then I am no more yet
to come than already there, no more future than
permanence. I remain: through the becoming of the
whole.

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XII

If being no longer belongs to you, if you are no

longer devoted to it as you are to your language
enclosure, if being means permanent advent between
us, our bodies become living mirrors. Sense mirrors
where the outline of the other is profiled through
touch. N o longer the site of a frozen, fixed
appropriation-expropriation. Already a womb of the
ideality. Ecstasy in an abstract transcendence of the
flesh. A n d not that mirror which does not reflect
truly, does not captivate as it captures. But remains
the support on which each one's body is deposited,
projected, recalled, anticipated. Laid out, without
any folds. Without any secret or mystery, were it
not for forgetfulness?

In the home, it is possible to privilege the walls,

the outline determining a place as closed off, or the
atmosphere: the environment. Eventually, the
environment would efface the walls and the walls
would destroy the environment. W o u l d we not find
each other again, separated in that way?

The body? Either sketched on the horizon of

orgasm. O r deposited as a memory of what orgasm
forgets.

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 Elemental Passions

But what, of the body, is constituted as forgotten?

What is that structuring which orgasm gives? Both
fragile and sure at the same time. What dwelling
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does that structuring provide in which it is impossi-

ble in truth to remain. A n impalpable envelope
which does not last. Always renascent. Always being
brought into the world again. Each time as a first
and only time. A n d , yet, a permanent birthing. A n
incessant blooming. Never fixed in one single
corolla.

Two petals which meet and embrace endlessly:

movement-trace of the copula? The engendering,
metastable, of one petal by the other, the engorging
of the petal, at the same time for both. Not the out-
pouring from the one to the other, nor even from
the one into the other.

The mysterious energy of the copula, rediscover-

ing a buried source. Hidden before the separation of
the elements? Before hatred?

The flower already individual, formed, open.

Appearing in its proper being? Developed, built,
organised, interpreted, as more of the one and more of
the other, stem and corolla. A flower for which all that
remains would be a relationship within the selfsame; in
which the copula would be that relationship with the
selfsame. Reflection, repetition, the eternity of contem-
plation. Appearance in the illusion and immortality of
that unfolding.

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 Elemental Passions

The oriental lotus and the mystic rose: different

flowerings.
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Jouissance i n the copula engenders form-body.

W h i c h is not limited to begetting a child. It has the
power to do so. But that product is often a substi-
tute for the profile of our bodies, recalled, invented,
pursued by love. Our embraces redefining the cons-
tantly renewed outline of our bodies. Bringing us
into the world once more. Making us appear,
endlessly?

W h i c h does not presume that we are separated

from the act of generation: as seed, for example.
Fertilising, or lost. Our sexual organs too are given
form again i n that act. Their project cannot be
posited outside themselves. Unless they become pure
instruments.

The technocratic destiny of the sexual - an epoch

inscribed i n the metaphysical. The body, long since
forgotten, is retained there i n a bottomless truth. As
if it were self evident. Were it not for death. A n d
even then . . . What kind of death? Reduced to
erogenous zones, objects of attraction and manipula-
tion, and ground for exploitation. Tool-machine for
producing jouissance or children. Disembodiment?

In the gift, what happens to me is not that I

become a thing thanks to your offering, but that I
touch you without any system of mediation-screens.
In that touching, I become you, also. A n d I receive

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 Elemental Passions

from you, of you, in giving myself. In that gift

which touches, *we' becomes a flow, fluid.
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In that living body, nothing and no one can be

fitted in exactly. Whole without parts. Indefinitely
mobile. Impulse, change, the process of becoming,
these cannot be imposed from the outside, from
something considered as a law or principle.

If you are so afraid that I should love some other,

is that not because you fear that it would make your
world explode? Taking the ground from under your
feet. A n d sweeping away what takes its place, the
enclosure of the earth.

Fire, air, water - are they thus to be dominated

by the earth? The outline of a womb-like maternal
body, based upon your need for solidity. For a rock-
solid home.

Is fire not joy? Is burning with you not grace?

The very lightest, dancing. The lightest, and the
densest. The most whole? Most elemental? For you?

W h y do you think of it as destructive, when it is

life itself? Are you afraid of not being able to save
your skin? Your solid envelope? Your dead body?

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XIII

Y o u love me - you say. A n d I feel that I am noth-

ingness. I desire you - you repeat. A n d what is this
void which fills me? Has life not deserted me at that
very instant? Instead of the feelings I had, an
unseizable void. Not the airy denseness of an
environment, but the gap of an inaccessible absence.
Devoid of memory.

A n d through your declaration, have I not become

blind, deaf, paralysed, numb? A n d how can I bring
my lips together to say to you again: yes? Between
my lips lies the obstacle of nothingness. Yes -
nothingness.

A n opaque blank, instead of what I saw with you

yesterday. A n d the music I heard no longer reaches
me. A neutral, frozen barrier shuts me off from it.
A silence intervenes - I listen, but the song which
moved me no longer reaches me.
A n d since you have only left me the world of the
senses, then when I am surrounded by that air of
reason, it is death which takes me unto itself. A n d I
do not even have a voice left to cry out that, in this
transparent prison, I still exist. A n d my mouth is
kept open. A n d I speak. But the gag of your noth-
ingness prevents me from feeling what I say.

[81]
 Elemental Passions

Everything which is born in me, of me, of you,

and of others: here it is, given in its entirety. I am
holding nothing back. Tomorrow can look after
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itself. As for today, here it is, all of it. Receive what

has taken place in me, and which I am obliged to
give you in order to safeguard your nothingness.

Take, master, this product is yours. A n d no voice

will utter a word about the destruction on which it
is based. Let there be silence about that act.

A n d while you magisterially spell out your Truth, and

while under that charm other lips are opened, your
nothingness has not lost what it feeds on. O f course it
is buried beneath your showy speeches. But even
there, in reach of an open mouth. Return to draw
from it what your hunger for semblance requires.
Sustenance and empty surround which you remodel
as you will. A n d digest it without loss of identity.

You are living in conceptuality, somewhere

between the imperceptible presence of nothingness
and the inertia of a corpse. What is the rigour of
your thought? The superb confidence of someone
moving inside a fleshy fabric borrowed from the
other. The limitless appeal of someone entrusting his
survival to the destiny of mortal women. The im-
placable, systematic quality of an organisation which
has already taken from living organisms the elements
it needs to be sustained and developed unreservedly.
A sovereign power, miming and undermining the
whole of the resources from which it draws.

[82]
 Elemental Passions

The fact that you no longer assert yourself as an abso-

lute subject changes nothing. The inspiration which
breathes life into you, the law or duty which guide you
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- are these not the very essence of your subjectivity?

Y o u feel you could abandon your *r? But your *r
holds you fast, having flooded and covered the
whole of everything it ever created. A n d it never
stops breathing its own emanations into you. W i t h
each new inspiration do you not become more than
ever that *r? Reduplicated within yourself.

I am twice separated from you by that mastery

which now surrounds you. As by your whole, never
breached by any movement towards the woman from
whom you draw matter with which to spin and draw
out your horizon.

A n d if I leave, does a wound gape open in it, in

you, and does that wound remind you of your
sensory resources? D o you not discard me, over and
over again, in order to feel the effect in you?

But I no longer want to dwell in your alternating

positions. N o r do I want my body to be hollowed
out, repeatedly, creating a place from which you
draw my substance so that you can experience your-
self. Where you take again what you have already
taken from me. Deliberately sinking that well in
which you experienced for the first time the descent
into the abyss. Marking out your prints like a
geometrician who returns to measure up the traces
he left in his wake. A n assiduous and scholarly

[83]
 Elemental Passions

erasure. Operating with cold instrumental precision

to calculate the power of his ascendancy.
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Enough of this testing which you need i n order to

estimate mourning at the level of abstraction neces-
sary to remove depth from the other and some pain.
W i t h the artifice of the equipment he requires to
surpass himself in the glory of a brilliant speech.
Does not drinking the milk of the honours awarded
to your work satisfy you for today?

G o . A n d do not come back to measure the strength of

love's effects. G o . Do not return to your birthplace in
the embrace. Leave me the opportunity of continuing to
become. A n d of being something for you other than a
tomb i n which you endlessly seek what you need to
sustain that oblivion which underpins your elevation. A
reminder of the boundaries of your absent presence, of
your present absence: the boundaries within which you
move with the ease of someone who can leave to the
other the first and last events which constitute the body.

A n d if approaching pain gives you a way of

recovering the memory of flesh, then go elsewhere. I
would rather march towards a new dawn. A n d bring
one more child into the world.

W h y mourn? W h y be nostalgic about this parting

from me? Whoever enables becoming remains
mobile, and flesh never repeats itself identically.

A wound may create the sky: that is so. But it is

[84]
 Elemental Passions

a sky which cannot be shared. Only those who have

suffered have access to it. The deeper they have
been cast down, the higher they can rise?
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But there are other skies. Those which lovers

create together. Those who share that taste and who
refuse to give it up i n order to enjoy their share of
the divine alone.

There is an infinite pain i n all of that, because

infinity was offered to share. H o w can infinity be
recovered? Unless the other be killed and made into
a G o d . A tragic act. W h i c h brings about a suffering
which does not simply appeal for help, but which
begs for remission. Grace.

Is not locating myself i n my in-finite the only way of

doing without the criminal intervention of the Other?
Renouncing the infinitely large so that at any moment
I can experience, move, relate, exchange myself as
incomplete. Having within me an infinitely small space
which prevents me from closing myself up as a whole.
Never whole in any place. Rather the melodious rhythm
of half-opening which makes my measure limitless. O r
limits a lack of measure. Concerned to hit the right
note without claiming to speak the truth.

Right, what can be sung now, and not what might

be true for all time.

From the place where I gave myself to you, a n i l

[85]
 Elemental Passions

existence now comes back to me. For you, the risk

of an airy void? For me, an opaque mirage where I
can no longer perceive myself. Emptiness, and
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matter still without form. Both. That impossible lot

falls to me, that impossible passage between me and
myself. Your return to me, barred.

A n d when, repeatedly, you want to come back

and nurture the development of your work, you
impose on me the covering of your choice. Y o u cross
through my invisible appearing towards what you
cannot apprehend, something beyond or short of the
flesh. Y o u drink me, as your self slakes its thirst at
its very source. Unreservedly abundant. Indefinitely
fecund. Beneath the skin.

Is not the act of your reproduction, in the

present, the essence of all generation? A n d does your
reason not claim to take every thing unto itself, even
the light in which it is bathed? A n d does it not
adjudicate upon all possible properties?

A n d perhaps you have not had the time to grant

me one? Having need of me to maintain the coher-
ence of your whole without any trace, stain or
memory of birth. If you recognised me as one (femi-
nine) in your creation, what would become of the
uniqueness of your world?

When you separate yourself from me, you still do

not recognise yourself, as distinct from some one
(feminine) but affirm yourself as one (masculine).
A n d you keep the remainder in reserve. O r bury it

[86]
 Elemental Passions

in oblivion. Going to seek elsewhere some other

ground where you can put down your roots.
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Y o u never leave me. Y o u abandon a place of birth

or growth. A n d you put a floor over it so that you
are no longer in danger of falling into it. Y o u leave
yourself a little, and what distress that loss entails!
But there is nothing at stake in that sadness other
than that part of yourself which you must leave in
order to construct or measure out your universe.

But if you create yourself in this way, isolating

yourself from what gives you birth, what gives you
your source and beginning, must I not keep myself
alive by protecting myself from the being with which
you confuse me so that you can give rise to the
origin of your essence as a man?

A n d saying that being is a stable base which is neces-

sary for the living person's becoming, for ensuring the
increase of its power, does that not mean forgetting that
once being is fixed life is already constructed as an
impalpable enclosure. A n invisible outline encircling
the vital flow. A truth whose factitious character
arrests movement, unless it is an accumulation of
power? A concentration of energy, not a fluid circu-
lation. But does not any reserve, the lesser and the
greater, already announce a mortal advent?

A n d asserting that the body needs the envelope of

a truth already proven, if only tacitly, in order to

[87]
 Elemental Passions

preserve the heart of its production: does that not

amount to shutting it up within a gaze that
originates i n it but detaches itself to constitute the
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identity of a subject that is always meta-physical.

A n d thus the cycle of return is brought to perfec-

tion: born of the flesh, the gaze emerges from it and
extends the horizons of its domination, but then
returns to it, only to come up against an icy trans-
parency. A fluid frozen because the body which gave
it birth is hated or forgotten?

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XIV

The whole is not the same for me as it is for you.

For me, it can never be one. Can never be com-
pleted, always in-finite. W h e n you talk about
Infinity, it seems to me that you are speaking of a
closed totality: a solid, empty membrane which
would gather and contain all possibilities. The abso-
lute of self-identity - i n which you were, will be,
could be.

For me? A fluid expansion, never enclosed once

and for all. Not even by projects or projections.

There, the id-is-flowing cannot be halted. Without

a limit, of whatever dimension or direction. A place
where everything is still possible. Prior to any differ-
ence or distinction. Giving only a world of half-
openings. Nothing determinable. The foundation of
all giving. A reserve of the dative.

But if I no longer belong to you, do you not still

abduct me to constitute the edges of your word? A m
I gone? Y o u take me again to take care of what you
call presence. The further I go away, the more you
puU me back by some bond so that you can at last
experience what you could not experience when I
was there.

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 Elemental Passions

Where? So close that, for you, I did not exist.

A n d you do not let me go. Repeatedly breaching

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or blocking the place where I could have appeared.

Often, your listening interrupts my thought. A r e

you stealing it? O r are you paralysing it? W i t h your
gaze?

When I am speaking to you, I sense something like

a dark and frozen chasm capable of engulfing every-
thing. Slippery and bottomless. The fall of a night
without illumination? The disappearance of the sun.
That of your intellect? O f your understanding? Is what
comes within the horizon of your day all that you
can perceive? Nothing more. The rest - an abyss?

Your order freezes the mobility of relations

between. It produces discontinuity. Peaks, pikes, fis-
sures. Energy no longer circulates. Is hoarded i n
forms that create closure. Is saved up i n phantasies:
captivating some, exhausting others. Whoever has
stolen it cannot dispose of it at will. It is taken, cir-
cumvented in a morphology whose outlines are over-
valued. A n appropriation that resists the possessor
himself and i n its struggle for liberation will neces-
sarily bring about aggression, violence, rape.

A n economy of property that leads to an energy

crisis. N o doubt it occurs when natural resources are
exhausted. But it happens as soon as there is a
monopoly of power, for it can only be sustained

[90]
 Elemental Passions

through exchange. A n d corresponding to a lack of

available power is the absence of desire i n whoever
is too firmly established i n property.
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Movements i n the world of the senses are almost

imperceptible. Only an attentiveness that is not rigidi-
fied within formal frameworks can detect this kind of
movement. A mobility which is incessant, yet furtive i n
relation to the categories of apprehension.

This kind of continuous movement is frozen into

blocks of time: past, present, yet to come. A spatio-
temporality which is already too clear and distinct
for this tissue of events. A tissue mortified into
bloodless semblances by the scalpel of the
intelligible.

It thus feeds off haemorrhages, drawing its poten-

tiality from them, and from convictions, and some-
times the flesh itself feels nothing, so precise is the
incision: all this could be the truth.

W h e n you gather your powers, reapplying them to

your intentions, just as these are beginning to be
realised, here and now, not reserving them for a
project always i n the future, a life i n eternal suspen-
sion, you redraw the outline of your body. Y o u give
yourself a present body again.

W h e n you use that power on me, discharging it i n

me, you open us up again i n a loss of limits where

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 Elemental Passions

our bodies no longer exist. Creating an excess which

leads to nothingness. Produced by the destruction of
the relationship between you and me. By the aboli-
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tion of the difference which keeps us other to each

other and allows us to come together: creators of
new horizons.

When you become the place where tensions are

capitalised, tensions whose purpose is always
deferred to some future perfection, to an omnipotent
infinity, tensions which you cannot contain without
the threat of explosion, you take me as a place of
relaxation. Y o u wound my living skin to safeguard
your claim to some divine ideal. Y o u abolish the
edges of our bodies to turn yourself into a G o d . The
only theophore?

But the only thing your G o d could give me is

wounds from an overbearing power, incapable of
creating harmony.

Return inside yourself, and measure out your

limits by working here and now within your powers.
N o more, no less than they permit you at any
moment in time. N o more, no less than the person
you are at each moment, dreamer and preacher of
infinity! Y o u have enough power, and not too much,
you are enough and not too much - to live. Allow-
ing us a present which can be shared.

Once returned i n this way inside yourself, you can

offer yourself, radiate yourself. Y o u , can at last be
received. Without excessive pretensions. Without

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promises that cannot be kept. Without semblance

erupting i n my flesh. This letting go will bring a
share of heaven if it is not made into some far-off
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goal, unattainable by you today. A t every instant

Heaven is created. Even if it extends before and
after us, it is also our own achievement.

But returning inside yourself, that is your

torment. Y o u always want to project yourself far
out, become ever greater, losing all measure i n your
nostalgic desire to be G o d . Achieve an ecstasy
beyond the present. Escaping from this wound:
being what you are.

The worst of failings? Existing alone, you alone,

without the support of some capital letter. Does that
not mean becoming permeable without mastery?
Neither over the other nor over yourself. A n accessi-
bility which is alien to bids for power. A porosity
now foreign to power proper. Yes, I can place
myself alongside you i n that excess.

A n d do not think that I want you to go round i n

circles inside yourself. But to take the measure of
your power, to allow the other a horizon, to enable
a meeting with the other. Your economy always
requiring at least two props to shore it up. Two
others functioning in secret, or i n your innermost
self, as your doublings. The Omnipotent and the
impotent. The Completely-Other and the not-other.
The Completely-Different and the indifferent.

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Is it really necessary to name them? They are

undefinable. Your doubles - invisible. From above
and from below. Luminous transparent shadow co-
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extensive with your G o d , obscure opacity of the

matter making up my body and yours. The source of
all your days, deferred to Infinity. A n everyday
resource that blocks the way to the beyond.

Does that mean you have a good doubling and a

bad one? The celestial envelope of the G o d from
whom all comes and to whom all returns. A n d the
infernal one, which robs the origin and the end of
their middle and surround. A G o d in whom the
whole of what is created finds its place and is kept
on the right course. A G o d i n whom is contained
the perfection of the Whole. A n d the other, turning
away from that absolute. Another who would be like
a G o d . Miming a God? W h o , the other?

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XV

Sunrise forgotten. The first outline of forms emerg-

ing. A world being born. Not yet caught within a
defined horizon - that circle which condemns it to
being endlessly repeated, governed by properties
already fixed. Poles determined irreversibly.

The sun rising - rays alighting upon things, lightly

touching them all over and gradually revealing them,
bringing them out of the enveloping mist.

This unveiling of the morning's beauty is renewed

daily. Yet man has forgotten how light emerges. H e
lives i n the full glare of day, where he can see
nothing.

A new East - the sun accompanying the birth of a

little girl. Another - the other - being brought into
the world. A dawning as powerful as that of the
Greeks. Giving birth to a veiled landscape. But not
a new origin.

Y o u are witnessing the revelation of the end of a

unique truth. Not as the advent of chaos, but as the
possibility of the copula - i n the sun.

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Yes, there, gently you took me by the hand. Once

again you had lost me. I was missing from your
horizon, absent from your domain. I had taken
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refuge i n such whiteness that you could no longer

perceive me. Without an outline, but bathing your
gaze in an invisible light.

A n d I was speaking to you, but you did not hear

me. Y o u were absorbed i n a closeness other than the
one which, defying distance united us - at the
nearest and the farthest point. Unforeseeable and
necessary reunions. Intertwining of gestures which
redefine the silent edges of our worlds of speech.

I was calling you, but my cry did not reach your

ears. Blocked by the sounds around you, the words
and noises surrounding you. Y o u no more heard my
voice than you caught sight of me.

Yet I was there, and remained there, like perma-

nent things which are forgotten. A n d how could I
make you remember my existence?

A t one point, you seized me to take a step.

Helping me over a fissure in the rock. Y o u were
holding me, I was i n you. Y o u were holding me
close, experiencing my body. Touching me, and I
could feel my form emerging once more.

A n d , from the depths of my memory, I was being

reborn. I had a face once more. Y o u could not hear
me yet, but you already remembered. I walked by
your side i n silence.

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In the deepest hidden depths, and beyond the

horizon, you seek me still. Opening up the limits of
what is possible. The scars of the beginning and the
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end of a story.

You gaze within me, and my past and my future

are offered without reserve.

Are you large enough? Receiving me whole, you

deliver what kept me captive within them. D o you
take me entirely? I become more than I was,
uncovering what still clamoured to be born. Y o u
seize me without reserve. Y o u free me from waiting
for a face, allowing me to appear as so many others,
crowding upon each other i n the hope of offering
themselves up to your contemplation.

D o not leave me behind. Y o u reduce me to sin-

gularity. A n d I die when I am imprisoned i n a single
unique sameness. W h e n I never go further than my
present, never escape that one life, the many within
me become impatient to blossom, to harmonise
colours and sounds and all dimensions, i n remem-
brance and as a welcome for everything which can
grow. A n d calmly offer themselves to cradle the
nostalgia for the return of the gods.

A n d let the shadow of sadness not make any land

sterile by blocking the sun trying to penetrate it.
A n d let no chill freeze what bears light and warmth.
For divinity abandons the solitary being who no
longer enjoys celebration. A n d joy is more immortal
than is care. A n d , even i n repose, it grants a starry

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awakening. A n d , in silence, the taste of lips which

move. A n imperceptible pulsing which refuses to
mourn for love, fixed i n eternal contemplation.
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I touch you. A n d if it is not always transparency,

if there are not always effusions from one to the
other, if daylight separates us, at least i n ceaselessly
bringing you warmth, I enable us to melt still one
into the other at a distance. So that distance should
no longer be an irreversible separation of our bodies.
Nor light, that cold lucidity which freezes each one
within a sealed identity.

A n d if the poison no longer comes into me, I may

remember what came before. Resonant song kept
back, exultation kept quiet, an appeal cried out,
filling the universe with its clamour. What arises out
of the furthest depth, emerging and unfolding, like
an airy flower opening with the intensity of impa-
tience. Petals already drenched in the gift of the
expected consolation. Attentive vibration picking up
the imperceptible tremor of your approach.

For the first time, I saw you appear. A n d it was

not midday. The sun was not any higher, nor the
light more intense. But what made you visible came
from you. Making you radiate from the inside
outwards.

A radiance touched to the quick. N o longer held

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 Elemental Passions

back i n its dark crypt. N o r suspended from some

inaccessible brilliance. A heavenly orb hanging over
the horizon of its distant source.
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N o shell hid you from me any more. The most

secret part of your face offered without anything
held back. Fearlessly welcoming its being revealed i n
another's gaze. Where your most impenetrable part
appeared uncovered to you, where your most unap-
proachable part returned to you.

Hearth returning to its home. Homeland which

you thought you would never reach so foreign did it
seem to you.

A n d you did not fix your gaze on the nearest or

the furthest point, but proximity was seen through
you. A n incandescence illuminating without consum-
ing, an ardour pouring out without destroying.
Burning i n a joyous amazement at the reunion.

A n d , rejoicing, you were calling out to receive

again, to give me again, what was the most irreduci-
bly hidden of what you had.

Between us, with open bodies, the sky was a

luminous cloud.

A n d I was changed into a cloud. Not i n ecstasy

nor dissipated into the air, but a body animated
throughout. Living and aroused i n each part of my
flesh.

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A n d I no longer knew death, but resided i n a

lightness where everything embraced everything else.
I had not lost my edges. Y o u caressed me to all
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the limits of my skin. Reopening all the tombs.

Stimulating new flowering from the deepest buried
depth or the infinitely distant. A n d nothing inert
remained.

I was created by you, still faithful to what I was.

A fruition of my becoming that did not remove me
from my past. Gathered up, not closed. Abandoned
and not deserted. Offered, without sacrifice. Espous-
ing you, like the whole which is offered without
closure.

A n d how could one tell what part of the densest

and the lightest was united? What part of the most
selfsame and most other was allied? Mingled, and so
calm and so vast - yet I was careful to allow you
your heaven. W e were intermingled and returned to
our selves.

A n eternity, and I knew that tomorrow it would

become more eternal still.

Indefinitely, I embrace you, you embrace me.

A n d it is not i n the mirror's shining silver that I
seek you, endlessly. Always lying i n wait for a face
to appear, dazzlingly. Leaning over a mirror, wait-
ing for a fascinating vision to emerge. A looking-
glass monster which fascinates with its brilliant
reticence.

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 Elemental Passions

But, I find you once more in the interweaving of

the whole of space. The invisible mucous tissue
which unites us day and night. Inhabits us and
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shelters us. Without the break of a departure, the

rupture pre- or post-exchange. Divided into parts
which call to each other, attract each other, respond
to each other, make up a whole. But do not wed nor
join together without a trace of laceration.

A n d how can we feel whole in this universe of

sutures? This tracery of scars?

A n d what kind of love remains behind? What

kind of wound always yearns to flow out and to be
bound up?

Rather be infinitely open to the anticipation of

the whole via the one or the other. A n insatiable
desire for intertwining and not an appeal to the
closure of the one.

D o not leave again. W i t h every step that takes

you away, touch me again, touch yourself again.
Remember this gesture of our embrace. Turning your
movement into living tissue to carry and envelop
you. Without the rupture which forces you to go
back. To the other edge of a solitary wound.

W h y retain such fire in your gaze? Burning to

keep captive the heat of the light. A hearth which
flashes lightning onto any ice. Gaining illumination
from the excess of its intensity. But limited by visions
still too fixed. Photographic frameworks where

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 Elemental Passions

passion is meted out with measure. Where mastery is

saved. Where desire is offered without the madness
which floods out beyond all limits. A gaze that
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becomes a marine vastness, a large expanse whose

mobile density resonates with the colour of the sun.

In golden light you flow. Firm density, so light.

Before the separation of earth and sky, sea and conti-
nents, light and dark. A mixture of rock, fire, water,
ether. Where violence can still espouse gentleness. The
heroic body overflowing with tenderness. Its weapons
still those of a native innocence. W h i c h blurs all
sharp distinctions and brings all divisions back to
their original nuptials. A n alliance i n which the
opposing parties unite i n an intense intermingling.

Waiting. Waiting for that wall which divides us to

be made porous by your arrival. For its limit to be
crossed. The line of the horizon temporarily effaced.

Waiting for the moment when there is no more

waiting for you to be there all the time. A n d your
place within me is not filled up with an uninhabited
dwelling. In which only the walls preserve the
memory of your passing through.

A n d why should waiting be the price to pay for

singing?

In this clearing, on that beach, a space opens up

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 Elemental Passions

where we can be revealed the one to the other.

In that enclosure which shelters and yet has no

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boundaries, you draw near, arrive, discarding what

binds and holds you back, deep i n your most inti-
mate self. Active and attentive the whole day long.
Preoccupied and concerned without a break. But
keeping yourself hidden away i n the secret which
inhabits you.

A n d she who thirsts for you will always remain

thirsty, for you do not deliver yourself i n this passing.
Y o u are found and you are not found. In an ecstasy, out
of reach. Veiled i n a silent dream. Contemplating
your reserve. Your gaze lost i n a very distant future.
The awaited landscape remaining i n the invisible.
Drawing you further than your furthest point. Not
knowing where your footsteps are leading you, you
walk on towards something which recedes as you
advance and eludes your attempts to grasp it. Spur-
ring your dream onwards towards the unattainable.

But i n this rush forward, you entrust your mystery

for a moment to me. A n d I receive what you keep
back most secretly as the present of your coming to
life. In a light still unstained by any shadow. Fragile,
unprotected by any darkness. Without refuge except
in my gaze. A horizon of sky endlessly receiving
your contemplation.

H o w many words to prevent or forbid closeness!

Space mobilized, immobilized, pre-occupied i n order

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to make encounter impossible. Attestations, quarrels,

protestations, disputes over identity or the identical,
distancing us, dividing us without any crossing of
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these barriers being possible.

W e are separated by so many similar things that

the flow which attracts us to each other is exhausted
as it beats against these obstacles. It no longer
flows, held back by boundaries that are too water-
tight. W e are divided by that part of the selfsame
and its theatre, which cannot be traversed.
Exchanged without a reckoning.

I look at you, identify you, recognise you in that

distance which constitutes us, distinguishes us, and
paralyses us in the certainty of being ourselves.

H o w can we still approach each other if there are

only coverings which are not porous enough, and a
void between those who no longer dwell in their
bodies in all their advents irreducible to closure
within well-defined forms.

A n d I shall sing all the day long. I shall fill the

air with the joy of you in me, of me in you. Guard-
ing you and guarding me in that incantation.
Sonorous home in which I shelter you. W h i c h pro-
tects me from the violence of the day. Childhood*s
cradle, where any rapture is given free play. A n
attentive hymn. Which does not falter and is not
interrupted. A n d whose tender fragility is never
breached by fixed duration.

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I opened my eyes and saw the cloud. A n d saw

that nothing was perceptible unless I was held at a
distance from it by an almost palpable density. A n d
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that I saw it and did not see it. Seeing it all the
better for remembering the density of air remaining
in between.

But this resistance of air being revealed, I felt

something akin to the possibility of a different dis-
covery of myself.

[105]