Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader. Nicole Brossard

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СКАЧАТЬ that is luminous, that illuminates, that penetrates the darkness of/in language.

      We have elected to close both ‘Futures’ and the Reader with another homage to Brossard’s innovation. In Picture Theory the reader discovers Hologram, a book within a book. A similar discovery occurs when we turn the page to find Mauve Horizon within the covers of Mauve Desert. Books hold worlds of possibility, even other books! Avant Desire ends with another book: And Suddenly I Find Myself Remaking the World. This full text was translated, as we mentioned, in part by Oana Avasilichioaei and in part by Rhonda Mullins. Each translator leaves something of her imprint on the text she has read and translated. This motion to and fro, from one thinking perspective to another, is part of the invitation we offer in reading Brossard’s essay, which crisscrosses translations and translators. Here, too, the electric energy of Brossard’s work is made multiple through these engagements in translations, as well as book design.

      Deep in the incandescence of language we surface and spiral back and forward to what is the ‘avant’ of desire: not original, as though existing in some mythic beginning, and yet there is something of the grandeur of myth in the Brossardian oeuvre. What comes before desire? Is there a before or does desire start with desire? This would suggest a kind of impossible trajectory, for how can desire leap toward desire? But perhaps that impossible movement in and out of itself is key to understanding how the concept of avant desire might come to embrace something untranslatable in Brossard’s writing (a reminder that tending to the present moment, to the body and word and thinking of the moment, we hold our own power, and in that holding of the present moment we have the possibility of creating our future. Or futures. We, all who are present in the text we have before us, wherever and whenever we are, we have the power. We occupy space in utopia when we are together, thinking, listening, and talking. We are in ‘the meeting place of our desires’ and ‘the future can’ and will ‘still be swayed.’²⁴

       Desirings

       LOGICAL SUITE

      from Nicole Brossard: Selections

      tr. Pierre Joris

      everything gels white

      in happy time

      deep dark also

      all chaos when your hand passes too much

      then departure for

      belly thus all is there

      as sprout as latency

      oversteps the mark and never restricts itself

      curved line never gels in the past

      what the belly espouses up front

      in my saying naked

      the colour though fictive so true

      cuts in the delirious black

      mutual attractions

      when intimate renewal

      appropriates from

      us locks in together

      displace the shadow so slowly

      around us

      that the bonds move very initiatory

      between the lines the liquid slides

      and imposes itself novel

      thus from the body pleasure gushes

      delicious humidity the mauve rests

      and inscribes itself radiant fixity

      afterward it’s so little

      once time’s slid out of reach

      afterward it’s however

      to retrace one’s steps

      when the figures put forward rip

      it’s only initial and doesn’t stop being so

      the movement

      displacing distorting

      the horizon the horizon broken

      always too imponderable

      to act and tend

      in the risen night

      toward the hidden places

      to act swaying between

      the world rhythm the authentic

      doubly silence pours forth carnal

      again and without cease

      entrancing contrast

      that reworks the outlines

      draws them away from the goal

      forces our orientation

      again

      and time shakes from not being eternal

      there is the palpable night shifts feverish

      that is to say disconcerting verbal variant

      oh how the invariable ‘elsewhere’ tames the pronoun

      in this imprecise zone of the present

      never was the ephemeral so close to the trap

      yet it is a matter of the same saying

      between charm and trap, it oscillates

      suspension of the act

      to understand is a sojourn

      excluding any definition

      to breathe to show nothing

      though СКАЧАТЬ