*

With any jumble of possibilities speed - the nature of speed, the right
speed - must be taken up. Movement from one position to the next;
abandoning one understanding to take up another; undoing a specific link to
allow for another, all these undertakings - undertakings that bring with
them an inevitable necessity, especially in their formulation - cannot just
happen. Positing brings with it an inescapable foundering.

*

Allowing for speed - the right speed coupled to the actual possibility of
movement - returns insisting considerations.

*

With speed, with the possibility of the orchestration of a movement the
inherent complexity - its inhering as anoriginally present - will emerge.

*

What is there, will have been there, is the site of an intrusion. The
intruder is neither enemy nor friend. Intrusion marks the presence of a
primordial relation that will always defy simplicity.

*

Who intrudes? Whose intruder? What is it to live with intrusion?

*

Intrusion places the gift. The gift intrudes. Intrusion cannot be
refused. With this presence there is more than one. And yet there cannot be
just two. At work here is that which exceeds addition.

*

Intruding by becoming the given creates place. The more than one that was
always more than one will come to define the nature of place. Being more it
allows for relation. In allowing it, it spaces.

*

Spacing becomes the site of the more than one. Space is opened up by the
already present though primordial intrusion of the gift. The material
presence of that which cannot be refused.

*

With what will it be necessary to write? Initially it may have been
envisaged as a forlorn and at times deepening task that, in its work - in
the work of its unfolding - all that was there would have come to bear
down on the activity itself. Working away in the night of thought at an
activity that while awaiting daybreak holds it away - holds it back - for
with its arrival, in the breaking of that time, the activity comes to be
sundered by what it allows to be awaited. The elements of these still
apposite images - apposite because of their enacted distancing of ends -
will need to be questioned. How will the "all" of this day, the "all" that
is there, be understood? What is it that arrives? What ends? Finally,
though there can be no real end to the procession of questions, can the
sundering be redeemed? In other words can there be a holding beyond the
sway of metaphysical destruction, and thus the holding of an-other
destruction? One will hold to the other's destruction.

*

At the very least, there will be questions.

*

Within this promulgation of mood - too quickly to be thought of as a
tone set by questions - there lies a way proceeding; a way that occurs with
the question. Not in the essential nature of the question nor in what is
held therein. What will count here is that to which the question holds.
Holding to it, the question - and this will be true of questioning in
general - is allowed, by this act, by the holding outside that becomes a
turning inside, to be held as a question. The question gives itself within
the act - thus within the acting out - of its own self-constitution.

*

The question in succumbing to the process that it identifies - the act
of questioning - will work to preclude finality by holding to a finitude
that opens. The infinite and the finite are recast such that they are held
together rather than inevitably excluding. Here the demise of the
inevitable retains.

*

The question's opening, its holding fast.

*

Being a question will be a turning from an outside, constituting an
inside as a question. All that is harboured - held within by the question -
is its enacted constitution. The truth of the question is its constitution
as a question. A movement, that in bringing outside and inside together
resists the enforced dominance of that formal set-up.

*

In abeyance, therefore, will be that take on the question in which the
question - the truth to which it gestures - is thought to be already
carried by the question itself. In the place of the already present will be
the insistence of the process of constitution. The continuity of activity
will comprise the truth of the question. The question's propriety.

*

The move from the abeyance of the dominance of the already present
towards the continuity of activity enacts the other possibility for
destruction. Again, it will be a possibility that retains and in retaining
allows centrality to be given to repetition.

*

The question of writing's activity; is it to be taken as an opening that
gives to thought the possibility of its own enactment? The process of its
being enacted? And yet the act - the enacted task that must inevitably
characterize activity - may seem, by that very designation, to be marked by
the necessity of a loss; a specific loss enjoining bereavement. What is
intended, the task of enacting, may always seem to fail. In failing what
will emerge as obligatory - the next step after the presence of an
impossibility - will be mourning. This via negativa however must be
greeted with suspicion. Perhaps what needs to be elicited is another
passion?

*

Passion may work away at the negative. Not as a work that negates but
as a movement that works from an-other place.

*

In all of these notes - even in the admitted luxury of their
presentation, the continuity of a compilation that need not recognise the
demands of a certain narrativity - what is there as forcing presentation is
the ineliminable presence of time. Of the times in question there are two
that insist. The first is the work of speed. How is the question of time's
speed to be understood? The second, and it is a question that will already
be marked by an enforcing actuality, is the present. What is the time of
the present? It should not be thought that these times admit of any easy
separation.

*

Already there seems to be the division and with it the periodisation of
the essay. Perhaps their circumvention will occur by conceding their
initial presence while allowing an-other possibility? The difficulty will
always be the thinking and the presenting of any specific other. What this
demand brings with it are requirements whose provision will involve more
than specific formal procedures.

*

Alterity needs to be thought outside the confining logic of the
either/or, and beyond the work of positing. Alterity is neither the given
other, nor is it posited difference. Difference must be located both in
terms of its own constitution and in that which differentiates it from
either variety or simple diversity. Again there will be the centrality of
movement; again there will be the ineliminability of ontology.

*

Continuing means that what must be worked with will eschew the negative
by affirming the discovery that the via negativa is a path that emerges
from (thus also with) the recognition of the impossibility of a specific
project. It arises because of an assumed possibility and accepted point of
departure. It is a path that is constructed, it is not just there to be
uncovered. However, the necessity of construction may be forgotten. The
inherent threat therefore lies in either the naturalising of the negative,
its having an ineliminable presence; or the assumption of a possible
necessary completion, what in the end would amount to a banalising of the
theological.

*