An Inexperience

Abstract

‘This experience of conversion’ is a phrase of Derrida's. It struck me as something that couldn't be imagined: ‘not an as if.’ Nor a fantasy, nor a pretence. Not mediated. A magic word. That is what I managed to imagine. I had no idea (that is, no image) how to bring an experience of conversion about—not for myself, still less for you. But, I told myself, a word can be read, and read out. And I told myself: the point, with a word like this, is to speak it, or speak to it …