ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how historical approaches are better suited to describe the lecture's overall effect of an originality negated by its publication or externalization. The historical approach gives the reader a slightly stronger hold on a text whose central preoccupation is the vertigo of a time-bound singularity that disappears as it is entrusted to the voice in a public space. The lecture makes clear that the writing of waiting, of a consciousness that lets itself be filled with 'listening' and 'feeling,' and with the rhythm of others, reveals a difficulty at the basis of all writing when this aspires to be a form of knowledge. The lectures rely on the strange ethereality of a time-bound writing at odds with its actualization in space. In the American lectures the philosophical problem of writing becomes a woman's problem; Gertrude Stein engages our awareness of women's struggle to become public subjects.
