ABSTRACT
The epigraph from Blanchot with which this chapter began declares writing, é criture or l' é crit, to be the disastrous ruin of thought. In the space of ten lines the text morphs through several genres of writing, from straightforward clause to allusive, elliptical chiasmatic aphorism, each one a fragment. This writing takes enormous risks; indeed it is risk itself, the Blanchotian interruption of the incessant: it interrogates itself in terms of any continuity other than its continuation and interruption, its consistent inconsistency. From Discours, figure forward, Jean-Francois Lyotard explores strategies for avoiding 'metaphysical language' by creating new heterogeneous forms for theoretical writing. Totalization, in any metaphysical sense, is quite simply not available to writer/thinker or to reader who share the 'dissensus' of burdened writing and its ruin. But this burdened writing's pressure gives it added force: the enigmatic force of the chimerical that haunts all fragmentary writing.
