‘A Kind of Magic’

Abstract

Thank you my sweet friends, my adopted adoptive friends, my water in the desert, my acolytes in dreams for being here altogether with me. As I’m sure you will agree we share remembering, we share forgetting, we share trembling, we share wishing, we share witching, and we are all, all of us, fellow para-practitioners. You won’t be surprised if I tell you I am not ready, I am not finished, as that also we share. And I think it is the fault or the undecidable magic of the terrible subject of this conference that has chosen us. I think it is very much beyond each of us and all of us to imagine anything stable when talking of this momentous subject of analysis, whomever it aims at. I won’t tell you—preterition— I won’t tell you the story of the lecture I wanted to deliver today, which was called ‘Promised Belief ’, as of course it tricked me. And although I brought it here, there is nothing behind. That is technology, the technology of forgetting, and obeying the tricks of the unconscious. So, it has come fatefully purloined and I am going to do something else, partly improvised. I was going to talk of a kind of magic, a kind of magic, that is, s/witch. While gathering these notes and trying to think all the time of, about, with, around, JD, it happened that I lost a word. The lost one was the name of a circuit breaker; I was looking at the blank face of the thing, which remained mute. Asking it its name, feeling wounded, lost. Time passed. Eventually, the word came back, leapt on cat’s paws, on my desk, innocent of course, blameless, and the name was interrupteur.2 Interruption of interruption, theme of my talk. That was what we kept doing, Jacques Derrida and HC, interrupting, enterrupting, interruption, interrupting interruption, with a switch of witch/which tongue, with a whip of an invisible pliant rod. Moses’ compliant rod. Moses’ interrupted tongue, relieved by his interpreter. The mono-dialogue of words and music.