More and more, it is becoming difficult to judge what is worth writing. Worth, in the manifold sense of the term. In cases where the subject-matter of my writing seems clear, that is, sufficiently objectified as objective thoughts, the question is: is this word or that adequate to the thought? The very act of converting the thought - which seemed so marvelous at first - into words is a bet, in that it simultaneously opens the thought up towards new uncharted territories and also narrows down what the initial event was capable of embracing within itself, diminishes the thought's richness. But when thought is not present in clear form, writing seems to continue either consciously or unconsciously as if a thread of signs - many of them - have a life of their own. And it is as if through this program that "worthy" thoughts are given the chance to emerge.
This, I think, is the basic psychology of an obsessive autobiographical writer, exemplified in someone like Jacques Derrida. Reading Peeters' Derrida: A Biography confirmed this hunch at least for me. Derrida explicitly says that he is obsessed with recording every moment of his life, "everything that goes through his head," that he is, to borrow his own phrase in a different context, afflicted with an archive fever. But this is not just a personal obsession of Derrida, which happened to have been realized due to the man's commitments. The desire to archive, or more precisely to bring to light the hitherto unnoticed movements of thought, is a basic constituent of philosophy. One could even interpret the Platonic anamnesis as the first gesture which made this desire itself explicit.
Writing is then a tracing, which can go in all directions and in all forms. The dialectic of writing, which Derrida explicates with such clarity in his earlier essays, reveals how writing has a seemingly unfathomable capacity to surprise its readers. For example, a text written in the form of a personal commendation of a philosophical text, or even as a flat-out rejection of philosophical vocabulary, could, if interpreted in the appropriate way, turn out to be part of a system of philosophy. In a metaphorical sense, philosophy is a "fractal" system in that the outside is perpetually threatened to become an inside, just as a seemingly "confined" and "limited" school within the totally of the history of philosophy may one day find itself in a position to re-define this totality from the outside.
Such is the negotiations which every act of writing, and especially in the field of philosophy - where the "in" here is of course given a certain ironical connotation -, inevitably must experience. Whether one succeeds or fails to establish a position of one's own - that is, to preserve and stay true to the initial thought which gave the feeling that one indeed is in the presence of an idea hitherto only clumsily and implicitly presented to oneself - does not depend on getting the starting point correctly. Nor can such an outcome depend on how well one lays out one's plans. In a sense, the acknowledgement of the beginning of thought as a methodically justifiable beginning, or of the plan as a workable plan, is already also an acknowledgement of failure. It is essential that, at the level of writing, one is working in the presence of the unfamiliar, that is, working with no inclination as to where this whole thing is going. That it is going somewhere can be reflected upon, but precisely where this is going cannot come to view during the process of writing.
This is the most abstract form in which I could re-interpret and unify the various dilemmas that crossed my mind more than once up until today. It is also a stance which, due to its sufficiently subjective or autonomous nature, can sustain me amidst the torrent of discourse which perpetually orients or tries to orient my thoughts, feelings, actions, desires, etc. towards dogmatic and unhappy directions - "unhappy" here being not merely the empirical "lameness," "boredom," and "despair," but also the critical aspect of thought (Hegel's "unhappy consciousness") and feeling (Haybron's "will to happiness") -. This stance will give me the strength to take what I write or think seriously and at face value. Up to a certain point, this is such an easy, indeed an inevitable and necessary, thing to do. But beyond this line, especially when it becomes impolite even to mention things lying in the beyond, some courage is needed. Blogging about it will do hardly any good, and I will not waste my time going into details, but suffice it to remind myself here that the issues are not "personal" at all, that on the contrary they have almost nothing to do with my purely private welfare. It has everything to do with how others related to me will, in a very real sense, think and act.
