Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader. Nicole Brossard

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       THE AERIAL LETTER

      from The Aerial Letter

      tr. Marlene Wildeman

      We concentrate avidly on the processes. Of writing, of desirous being, of ecstasy. We concentrate a great deal on the self. We exert ourselves, and in so doing we summon the other within ourselves to a reality that is transformed. Fiction seeks its own fictional subject and memory alone does not flinch. Memory makes itself plural, essential, like the version that foreshadows an aerial vision. Authentic as a first written draft. With each page, the necessary willingness to start over.

      For each time I must enunciate everything, articulate an inexpressible attitude, one that wants to remake reality endlessly, in order not to founder in its fictive version nor be submerged in sociological anecdote.

      On the one hand, taking on sociological reality by taking risks within. In order to dissolve its fictive character, in order to foil the impostures of the day-to-day anecdote. Here, a question: the text as ID card or identity as a science fiction of self in the practice of creating text? Those who have never been able to speak the reality of their perceptions, those for whom the conquest of personal emotional territory has been precluded politically and patriarchally, will grasp that identity is simultaneously a quest for and conquest of meaning. Desire slowly emanates from what is inadmissible in her project: transformation of the self, and the collectivity. Inadmissible will to change life, to change her life. Imperatives with regard to what in the environment appears intolerable. Identity turns into project when the border between what’s tolerable and what’s intolerable disintegrates or, one might say, when it no longer holds up. This is when words make themselves void of sense or take on another meaning, take a new turn in the sequence of thought’s events. Words begin to turn round on themselves, inciting reflection, inciting thought toward new approaches to reality. And it is also when words begin to oscillate between derision and vitality, becoming, little by little, indispensable strategies for confronting reality’s two slopes: the actual and the fictive.

      On the other hand, tackling reality the way one takes on a project; so as to take by surprise equations, for they give to the surface of all skin its vitality, its reasoning, if you will. Bathing in the atmosphere of the senses and giving form to enigmas we imagine out of the white, while the certain body¹ refers us back to an implacable geometry: our feverish excitement, a fluidity of text seeking its source. Taking on reality in order that an aerial vision of all realities arises from the body and emotion of thought. Realities which, crossing over each other, form the matrix material of my writing. This text matter, like a fabulous mathematics, relates words to one another. All bodies carry within themselves a project of sensual high technology; writing is its hologram.

       ITHE ORDEAL: THE TESTAND/OR THE PROOF OF MODERNITY

      The text, the notion of text, has been, as we well know, subjected in the past few decades to several transformations; most have been a response to the necessity for politico-sexual subversion. The textual site has become the repository for the body, sex, the city, and rupture, as well as the theory that it generates, which in turn regenerates text. Text has systematically proliferated, profaning the state of mind of both the petit- and the grand-bourgeois. The ordeal of modernity (Rimbaud’s ‘one absolutely must be modern’) as initiation w/rite, has been succeeded by ‘one must be resolutely modern’ as political initiation project. The experience of text, understood as crossing through writing, will be transformed by experimentation, that is, by a strategy bound to disrupt.