Sieging Enclaves

For Adorno, parentheses are generally not to be used in writing for they “[create] enclaves (…), whereas nothing in good prose should be unnecessary to the overall structure” to which he opposes dashes which “block off the parenthetical material from the flow of the sentence without shutting it up in a prison” (1990: 304 – yet what good is a prison if not for the opportunity of storming it, to free the incarcerated, to change the space it occupies into something else and violently crush the violence it imposes on us, burglarize it hole-in-the-wall style. Katherine Everitt declares emphatically that “if the Parisian peasants are to storm the Bastille, if you and I are to fall in love, then we must bring the complete openness of chance back to earth. We must place space. We must transform the open space of chance into a particular, evental place” (2025, so that’s just what we ought to do whichever way we can and at the level of the text we must alter the limited space of the page, and open: (the sentence to the chance of its interruption, and when that openness closes: ) there are still other interstices we have opened previously not quite fully populated until the final limits shall all collapse on us at once for “the limits of my language are my world’s limits, and that when I speak, I limit the world, I finish it. And one inevitable and mysterious day, death will come and abolish these limits” (Godard 1967, but it has not come yet, as of now we are still free to limit, to cut, to differentiate, and what better and more secluded alcove can we find than between a ( and a ) in which to fall in love or load a gun? Digging evental places, textual trenches from which to fire it, the bullet instantly unmoving caught in the “time differential, a vanishingly small instant in which change had to be confronted for what it was (… (- .- -.–)) where velocity dwelled in the projectile though the projectile be frozen in midflight, where death dwelled in the cell though the cell be looked on at its most quick” (Pynchon 2006: 105, but the sentence traverses these places of chance and change; and the projectile can keep its perfect frozen death, the bullet need not hit for the holes to form, “rabbit holes; holes in memory; holes in narrative; holes as positive nullity, gaps but also tunnels, the connectors in a hellish rhizome” (Fisher 2016: 57, each hemorrhaging meaning onto, through and into each other, mixing it among names, years and numbers each asserting its own claim at authority within the phrase but as each prison-house is broken into, each tomb unearthed, the orgiastic potential emerges, the borders reveal their arbitrariness and the necessity of our transgressing them towards α Being ω that is not parenthetical, not defined by the limits beyond which it is absent for “a conception of being founded on an external cause cannot sustain the necessity or substantiality of being” (Hardt 1993: 7, so, like love, if change is to have a chance it must happen by transubstantiation, (un)shifting some deeper layer. For Adorno parentheses may relegate their contents to un-necessity, but if they manage to differentiate their content from the text without differentiating the text from their content, one need only empty them () to see the visual resemblance to the side-wound of Christ that must again open and not stop bleeding so that we might all get drunk in endless perverse Eucharist without ritual, affirming the very necessity of being in the process of pure internal differentiation in which “difference is the state in which determination takes the form of unilateral distinction” (Deleuze: 1994: 28 – so wine-distinguished-from-blood-undistinguished-from-wine shall inebriate us into the ultimate high of pure affirmation that we will ride towards the consecration of all existence into “holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch” (Ginsberg 1955)

The (H)Our of judgment has come and passed and the verdict is that nothing is ours as each is relegated to the hyper-individualistic milieu that each has not designed, human archipelago begging the sky to collapse on it for a transcendental unity that (never was) (in the ((name of the Father)the Son and the Holy Ghost) sophisticated Hegelian triad with paternal beginnings and (immaterial (ending), who describes absence in triple masculine, essential lack who is the (Fa(r)ther-machine (who is not whole itself but by its strange presence announces my (ever greater (meaning more distant) lack greater than his, greater than of himself (yet absence is the bugle which sings the immanence inherent in (empty (space( inhibiting all forms as long as there are none) (art is thus one of emptiness when at its most creative (etymological incest as the principle of creation (Latin ars– Old English eart (which is looking for a final H so that it might describe matter yet the (h) has been stolen by the brackets and jumped at the front of the text to abolish us all in the name of time (of history which can no longer be capitalized, not now, not ever (meta(modern)narratives collapse)) yet we must learn the (e)art of (un-)being if we are (to be (truly homologous with any god (any material collectivity (first person plural) ought transform in the second person singular (not pronoun but verb (formulating the poor grammar of absence) at its most anachronistic to bear the history through which it prescribes movement (Gurnemanz tells Parsifal “time here becomes space”) and so  in(ebriated) we shall tread the scarred landscape of fertile incisions in pilgrimage (through time as space) towards (heaven(ly Outside which affirms the perpetual movement and pull in its direction and had become hell as it folded into dense, static, artifical Inside), our duty now to unfurl).

but until then we are bound) by rules of resonance and recursion) of syntax, norms and militarily enforced borders) all so many sutures holding tight our guts yearning to be spilt in some greater cosmos than the one we’ve been promised) that in the name of order) bring everything to a close without closure) and out of the ruins to build a new Bastille, a new Empire which is the same one, which has never ended, the walls of the Black Iron Prison as suffocating as ever, yet just as cracked, as structurally unsound and as these slits are furtively enlarged, we might still catch a fleeting sight of the sea, a whiff of salt air promising structural erosion  until the load will be too much to bear, the tar swept away, the colors beneath revealed). (

Works cited

Adorno, Theodor W., and Nicholsen, Shierry Weber. 1990. “Punctuation Marks” in The Antioch Review, Vol. 48, No. 3.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition, trans. en. Paul Patton, Continuum, London and New York.

Everitt, Katherine. 2025. A Throw of the Dice through Space, Socrates on the Beach. 

Fisher, Mark. 2016. The Weird and the Eerie, Repeater Books, London.

Ginsberg, Allen. 2009. “Footnote to Howl” in Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems, Penguin Books, London.

Godard, Jean-Luc, dir. 1967. Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle.

Hardt, Michael. 1993. Gilles Deleuze, An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, Regents of the University of Minnesota.

Pynchon, Thomas. 2006. The Crying of Lot 49, Harper Perennial, New York.

bio

Radu Corfus has a BA in literary theory with a thesis on ergodic literature, and is currently a master’s student at CESI, researching post-/trans-humanism and inorganic agencies in cinema. In his off time, he writes fiction that blurs the line between prose, essay, and poetry.