ABSTRACT
Should not a text that dwells on the affects that move a certain kind of writing begin by examining ‘its own’ affects? From a certain perspective, it might be the case that the text that precedes this hovering postscript, simultaneously within and without this book, does not sufficiently make explicit the place from which its author speaks. Yet, my analysis was not concerned with the affects of Wagner as a person; nor was it interested in his subjective constitution. Rather, it was concerned with affect as related to the emergence of fissures in the texture of the writing that bears his signature. Moreover, and more importantly, the idea of anything ‘proper’ does not hold if one attempts to erase the metaphysics that grounds names through différance. The first-person singular is intended merely as a gesture of responsibility for these lines. To embrace the task of understanding ‘my own’ affects would be to ignore the impossibility of such a thing. If it is true that it is only possible to oppose something in the very language in which it is uttered, such language is by no means ‘proper.’ The obliteration of the ‘proper’ begins in language. Thus, the attempt to stitch together this text which ‘I,’ as a position in language (Benveniste 1971), sign, offers to the reader the possibility of engaging in the same kind of fraying that is posed for any text. To the extent that language obliterates the proper, there is no unified and/or coherent ‘I’ that might be the subject of analysis. ‘I’ can only exist in displacement. Like any other name. Thus, the process of erasure this book proposes is not ‘my own,’ but a possibility that is posed by the othering potential of language and arises from the discursive position of this ‘I’ that signs it. And as language has nothing one might call ‘proper,’ ‘my’ positionality, as well as the analysis that is carried out from it, remains as liable to further erasure as is the case with any writing, in which ‘I’ is a position of displaced authority.
