                           An Unpublished Text
(from "The Difference Which Makes No Difference" in "Les Textes
Inedites" by Jacques-Louis Charlatan (Prospero, 1987, 450FF)

Translator's Introduction 
To recover what is insignificant is always more significant than what is
significant. In translating what is not-written, the translator allows
us to recognise ourselves as the empty yet ever-changing place within
which what does not exist may yet fill the space of writing.  What is
trans-lated _overflows_ in its replenished void and yet circles around
forever in its vertigo of insignificance.

In his book "Qu'est-ce que c'est le point?", Professor Rene Gade
proposes the End of Writing as the most formidable transgression of
post-modernity. How are we to write After Writing? This is the
challenge posed to the intellectual at the site of superfluity, where
the (literal) pointlessness of the text intersects with the (virtual)
interminableness of sentences which deconstruct themselves after their
"author" has been dethroned. Such is the question addressed by
Charlatan in his newest outrage. 
 
"How is it possible to ask any longer for the conditions of possibility
of a _question_? To ask a question is to set in motion a possibility
of a discourse of truth and thus of a stage upon which "meaning" may
parade its authority in face of the multiplicity of disposals (1). If
there is no truth, then to pose as interrogator is to enter the seat
of pretended power of judgement of anticipated answers, to allocate to
each one its measure of relevance. 

To go beyond relevance (relevance) is to seek relief (relief): to ask
a question is to execute a sentence, to circumscribe the possibilities
of all responses. In future, answers must be freed from their
questions and the chains anchoring my sentences together are to be
dissolved without resolution." 

Author's Postscript

These words were rediscovered (retrouve) from a wastepaper basket. In
consigning them to the region of disposibility they are displaced and
decentred beyond their own principles of coherence. They assign the
mark of pure disfigurement by which the simulacrum is distinguished
from the "original". But what privileges the original from the
residue? By what right does the blank piece of paper claim priority
over the crumpled text salvaged by the impatient writer? All paper is
merely potential waste-paper. Just as words evaporate into the silence
of the inaudible, so too does the solidified page leave no trace of
itself in its self-erasure... 
(the manuscript breaks off at this point)

(1) Translator's Note: Charlatan distinguishes disposal or disposition
(dispositif) from supposition (suppositoire); the former is the
exteriorisation of that which is not necessary; the latter is the
insertion of something-into-the-behind. 

_______
[Originally published in Here & Now No 12, Leeds, March 1992]
