“Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any lived or liveable experience. It is a process, that it, a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived. Writing is inseparable from becoming:… to become is not at attain a form (identification, imitation Mimesis), but to find the zone of proximity, indiscernibility, or indifferentiation…” (Deleuze, p.1, 1993/1998)
Deleuze invites us to consider the power in writing, the ways in which through the act of writing the writer gives voice to the world. He contends that language is what makes the world possible, that through the writer’s private senses they present a created history and geography, the words functioning as a bridge and reinvention of the lived experience. In this context, he tells us writing is an endless process of becoming in which the reader completes the interrogations. He explains that the writer does not write with their own neurosis – neurosis is the interruption of the process. To write is to go beyond “the excess of reality as through an excess of imagination.” (Deleuze, p.2, 1993/1998) The writer, he tells us, “possesses an irresistible, and delicate health that stems from what he has seen and heard of things too big for him, too strong for him, suffocating things whose passage exhausts him, while nonetheless giving him the becomings that a dominant and substantial health would render impossible.” (Deleuze, p.3, 1993/1998) Health as literature, he goes on, invents people who are missing. The writer recounter the singular always pointing to the universal, giving word to the ‘minor people’, the ones who are dominated, always in process of becoming – literature as ‘the collective enunciation of a minor people, of all minor people, who find their expression only in and through the writer’(Deleuze, p.5, 1993/1998). In this sense, writing is always a revolutionary act that flouts the dominant discourse.
With those ideas in mind, I command you, our reader, to join us into the impossible task of filling the gaps, finding the words to describe what cannot be apprehended by language and still calls us into understanding. Our current issue of Critica invited explorations on “Change. Climate.Psychoanalysis”. The many lenses with which our contributors explored this theme fell into those three broad categories. Some considered the nuances of change, in oneself, in the world, in the community, in the planet, both within and from outside, navigating the foggy landscape of dreams in their precarious interrelatedness with reality. Others considered psychoanalysis as a field, a holding space where emotional experience expands into an always fleeting understanding, a possible language to make sense of what collectively we create and destroy. Still, some reflected on climate, the earth, the ways in which our planet is calling us to act by simply making itself present in its silent and loud screams. We struggled together to approximate a language that moves beyond, always insufficient, always in conversation, an incomplete dialogue.
I also invite you, the reader, to let yourself be moved by the flow of our submissions, presented to you as a short (long) narrative that pieces together fragments of our current and inefable reality.
As always, I feel compelled to express gratitude to our contributors, and even more deeply to my editorial team, who dedicate and volunteer many hours of reading, writing, reflecting, interacting, designing, considering and exploring together. Critica would not exist without the quiet work of many hands. ●
References:
Deleuze, G., (1993/1998). Literature and Life (Smith,D.W. & Greco, M.A.Trans.). In Smith and Grecco (Ed.) Essays on Critical and Clinical. Verso (Original work published in 1993)
