To Not Happen

Abstract

The theme of this academic journal is that of 'Disturbing Spaces' and my contribution plays with a photograph that is never to happen but which in not happening —and with reference to Foucault's 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe'— forces us to apprehend an irreducible distance between speaking and seeing. Although knowing of this distance appearing in the work of Gilles Deleuze on modern cinema, this body of research produces a new direction in taking the very matter to the question of the 'human' voice being founded upon a division between speaking being (human) and living being (animal), which Giorgio Agamben alerts us to in his philosophical and political writings. The coda of this work brings into view the significant issue of this research, which is that of finding new ways to think of voice and the very notion of means. The context of this research is the continuance of the endeavour to create encounters with language and to understand — through a methodology that is constituted only in and by the act of writing— what it means to say 'There is language'.