A/Rose for Baudrillard
I have troubled sleep; nightmares become me. Recently I traded in for a copy of Sartre, Troubled Sleep, signed by him, scrawled signature to a friend. Barthes was hit by a van I think, all these men and some women but less women - Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Althusser, Lacan, bounded by what seems the cold war iron of Badiou. Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray, Wittig, perhaps are still alive. I raised myself on all of them and now they're divided among the militants, the academics, the pieces of 'deconstruction' applicable to any analysis where something or other falls apart, 'simulacrum' following DeBord's 'specta- cle' where 'revolution' became synonymous with natural skin care and something everyone did against the name of 'freedom.' I don't mean to say anything here, I wonder about the doubting that once swayed the world, Jabes, Blanchot, or what I read as doubting, never say anything unless said to oneself, withdrawn, proffered as kind of a peripheral speech. This wasn't them, my reading, what I garnered, that excitement, Merleau-Ponty, at the birth of the world, its bearing, re-borning. Vietnam is now mute, May 68 almost forty years ago and most of us humans have never thought of burning monks. Tibet is a foregone conclusion; can one imagine the Dalai Lama back at the Potala? Bohm kept on moving; he was close to insane with the stress of homelessness. I wait for my first stroke, but none of the others, none of them, none of you, will speak to me. I'll go to heaven or hell with stitches in my mouth. I'll try to say something about the world. My eyes grow wider and wider.