Gestures of retreat: ...
acts of separation, of secession ... : whether the gesture obviously fulfils,
comforts the subject, or whether the gesture of retreat performed by another
makes us feel envious... by projecting us into its scenario.
R. Barthes, The
Neutral
There is a profusion
of writing these days: analyses, admonitions and calls to arms, peppered with
statistics and satire, and written by the wise, the ignoramuses, the desperate
and the desperados. Conditions are ripe for the awakening of one’s misanthropic
streak – retreat is on the cards. If retreat cannot be performed then
projection of oneself into a retreat scenario would have to suffice. I was made
envious of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s gesture of retreat and I have got Roland
Barthes to blame (or thank) for it.
I would ask nothing
better, says Rousseau in his Reveries of
the Solitary Walker, than to be let to stay in the isolated place where I
could have no communication or correspondence with the outside world. Rousseau
arrives in a little island in the Lake of Bienne, he sends for his books and
his few belongings and does not unpack a single box or trunk. He lives in the
house as if it had been an inn – a guest likely to depart at will – his books
safely packed, no pen, no writing desk.
“One of my greatest
joys was above all to leave my books safely shut up and to have no escritoire”.
To suspend writing – to do nothing – is to cleanse the mind from the clutter of
daily words, is to resist or shun the past and sculpt the future from materials
unknown.
“Everything is in
constant flux on this earth. Nothing keeps the same unchanging shape, and our
affections, being attached to things outside us, necessarily change and pass
away as they do. Always out ahead of us or lagging behind, they recall a past
which is gone or anticipate a future which many never come into being: there is
nothing solid there for the heart to attach itself to. [...] What is the source
of happiness in such a state? Nothing external to us, nothing apart from
ourselves and our own existence; as long as this state lasts we are
self-sufficient like God.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France, Penguin
Classics 1979 (first published 1782); Roland Barthes, The Neutral, trans. R. Krauss & D. Hollier, Columbia U. Press
2005.
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