Berlin, March 31st 2008

Dear Inga, dear Paul,

I will try to respond. I feel that I have been invited to do so more than once as much as I have been asked to account for such a response, both explicitly and implicitly. But before I will respond I would like to say that I have and always will welcome your invitations as well as your demands. I read both of them with care. Here, they contract to something like an inner call, which again should be understood in respect to The Invitation and its logic. I also would like to say that I draw pleasure from our correspondence inasmuch I have been taking the communication within which the Faculty of Invisibility appears from its very beginning on absolutely serious. That is, with the strictness of the child’s play, its inimitable precision and dispersion.

As you know of course, I am neither an artist nor a designer. I am used to writing as a theoretician might and sometimes, if necessary, I do so as someone else. My writing requires some preparations, reading for instance, which again would imply the necessity of being unprepared. Thus the mode of writing, which I am depending on, demands itself a certain state of vigilance that would allow me for commenting on such relations and distinctions that are operative in between the time of haunting, the act of insistence and the very structure of the invitation.

In February Inga asked you, Paul, and me to confirm the dates of her request, 15 April to 7 May, for an apartment at the Blue House in Amsterdam. I have to admit at this moment I wasn’t aware that consequently such a confirmation would mean that I would have to be present in Amsterdam for the same period. For many reasons I didn’t pay the necessary attention to this circumstance, also since neither the financial situation was foreseeable then nor did we intend to enter a discussion on the practical realisation of The Invitation at all. Thus I always conceived of this period as an uncertain frame to be specified. A couple of days ago Paul invited you, Inga, and me to join both, The Invitation and the further development of the publication of the Department of Reading. Paul invited us to haunt, to enter this determined timeframe as if being there without really being there. He reminded us that such a presence is always an intrusion that consequently exceeds any attempt to be framed.

As the both of you I have been invited to haunt and I have been asked to substantiate the time of my presence in Amsterdam. That is, as if being exposed to a demanding call impossible to answer. Such a call could end up in an invitation that either suggests to retreat from the scene with a rather theoretical gesture or to economise on its aporia in taking the time to unfold its intricate logic. Of course, I am not sure, if that is correct at all. But what I am aware of is, that a question occurs at this point, which concerns a certain custom that would suggest a manner to actualise the mode of haunting and to make use of the determined time. I understand that this is precisely one of those questions that the Faculty of Invisibility has to face again and again, neither concluding with a theoretical discourse nor economising on the temporalisation of its representation. But that is also a question, which addresses my habit to write and read. What am I asked to compile with? What with regard to the very case of The Invitation?

I have to note here that I would be nothing but a guest in Amsterdam. I would either stay at Paul’s place or at Inga’s apartment at the Blue House. Both of you might claim the same, namely this state of being a guest. But I would disagree on such comparability. I would insist on a kind of mannerism that characterises my presence in Amsterdam, since I would be the guest of someone, who already is a guest herself, himself, the guest of a guest, who offered her, his hospitality and thus might have become a host. An asymmetric relation occurs. We are used to such asymmetries and, again, the Faculty of Invisibility shouldn’t conclude itself in unfolding and exposing such logics. But as much as the Faculty of Invisibility has to face all these kind of aporetic and mannered questions again and again, it itself has to be a suggestion in their respect. Maybe that is, what we have agreed on before, that the Faculty of Invisibility as a suggestion can be nothing else but a manner of appearing and disappearing within the very same gesture, matter of disengagement, contextualisation without relating, entering in withdrawing.

For the time being I am a guest. As such I have been invited to haunt, that is, according to The Invitation, to assume another identity in order to not to have to appear. I have already agreed to this intricate affirmation of a construction of identity that is involved in a number of serious questions, which, if at all, have been mentioned only incidental in The Invitation. With the strictness of the child’s play I disguise myself in white linen, a metaphor that almost perfectly suits my habit to read and write, which, following the instruction of The Invitation just a few more lines, is to be inhabited itself, precisely, not by a figure or discourse, but rather by a certain technique. Invited to haunt, of course, it seems as if I am in the end invited to haunt myself, to inhabit my habit, an intrusion that consequently exceeds any attempt to be framed. Thus it seems as if The Invitation falls back upon the self as a technique, its use and its custom to temporalise something already left unattended. Haunting implies condemnation. It might cause deep sadness, once acknowledged – a thought that almost makes me ask, if therein childhood founds its melancholic ground.

There is more to say. While closely reading our recent correspondence, I had to learn about a kind of substitutability that seems to be ascribed to the very place that I have been invited to take at table. I had to learn that the less I would have been present there the more would The Invitation had to appear in between the both of you and others. Of course, that only sounds logic, and I wouldn’t have been such a guest to complain on the conditions of this invitation afterwards. I am curious, maybe strict in trying to think of an event in the past, left unattended, as becoming part of my presence, and I am serious about a technique that would allow for inhabiting my habit. But substituting, you might recall this distinction, can either mean compensating for what the other lacks or exiling oneself to the other as he or she is. This substitution no longer knows a place of its own, but the taking-place of every single being is always already common – an empty space offered to the one, irrevocable hospitality. And so on. I guess, it would have been up to me to relate this notion of substitutability, which opens up to an empty space as the common taking-place of every single being, to my habit to read and write. That might have been part of what I have been asked to compile with.

I have been writing before about the difficulty to respond to that, which insists and which draws one into a movement of advancing backwards. I have tried to think that insistence doesn’t simply aim at the continuous reappearance of one and the same figure, such a figure, which cannot appear according to the modes of identity. I have suggested that the visitation of a certain machine-, but also dreamlike inhabitation corresponds to the daily of insistence and causes rather a slight, almost unnoticed moment of confusion instead of paying tribute to the logic of the ghost or the uncanny. I mentioned that this might draw back into something that belongs to the past, but that at the same time that, what insists, might be without any cause and history, and that only in a rush one should have said that such a lack of history causes its insistence. The everyday of insistence, which never goes without the reappearance of the question of appearance causes without simply being caused itself the collapse of the chronological, but also arbitrary time, both of which are temporal modalities that designate, what can be called our time. I have tried to respond to this definition of insistence in speaking quite vague about demands for other states of vigilance, in which, for instance, the unfortunate of unaptness coincides with its indetermination and opens up to the time of acknowledgment differently. I have had the idea that in enduring each other’s involuntary inhabitation such an acknowledgment might address the concept of ignorance as a zone of non-knowledge, and would thus touch upon the intricate politics of redemption and the difficult question of forgiveness.

I can only enter in writing. With the strictness of the child’s play, its inimitable precision and dispersion, I prepare myself for being unprepared. I have taken the time of writing in account in order to address a state of vigilance that acknowledges and responds to an event that has taken place unattended. Maybe something like that. It could have meant a kind of dwelling in insistence. It could be to reflect on the performance that insistence is. This said I have already entered The Invitation, more than once. I have left unattended. I remain and I return. Maybe in order to comment on the relations and distinctions between haunting, inviting and insisting once again. I have realised, the empty space, my common taking-place at The Invitation could under no circumstances be bound to my presence in Amsterdam, or my being there without really being there. As much as that, what insists, can’t be measured in the registers of identities, might the figure of the ghost be just one of the phenomena of insistence itself. Maybe, since insistence might be a kind of transversal intensity that assembles within a series, a concatenation – of demands, invitations and calls that are impossible to answer, perhaps.

I apologise, if I couldn’t meet your expectations. I like to thank you for your kind invitations and for reminding me to respond. If I will have the time, I will try to speak about the difference of insistence as rhetoric and as performative, the space in between, its silences and gaps, which might inform the Faculty of Invisibility.

With all my best wishes,
Sönke

Department of Reading
http://www.reading.department.cc/
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The Department of Reading is designed to promote new ways of reading and to create new textures for already-existing texts. It allows for interventions in and on texts in the form of comments, questions, drawings, diagrams and images.