I return after many months to this blog, about bodies of literature and the heft of words, for I've reached that feeling - which uncannily revisits me every year- that I need to write. A golem of matter has been forming, a skeleton of an article, a theory, or some words, outlines and shadows of so many “forms” that I begin to search for the spirit which can give life to them, blow into their nostrils or carve the name of God on her forehead.

Today I read Lacan (Seminar 20, Lecture 5) who talks of the "other satisfaction" – which I take to be intellectual as well as sexual. In my tentative understanding, this different type of pleasure "does not stop being written" and "produces the jouissance that shouldn't be/could never fail."

(Making sense of Lacan is like making sense of a piece of Talmud, whose lines trip over themselves, and you are sure there is a mistake in the manuscript but you have no way to be sure other than testing your own logic. And in that black hole you write yourself into the lines.)

You can never stop writing, nor does text stop writing itself. Perhaps that is the "other satisfaction" - recognizing the limitlessness of the chaos of interpretation and taking part in it. "It shouldn't be" – for you can never write the truth or write the text again – but it "could never fail" because interpretation has infinite reincarnations. Like desire we are always revolving in the continuous loop of seeking perfection - of partners, of touch, of fullness. Desire is precisely the absence of perfection. And yet it can never fail, because in the moment there are no measurements, no others, no truth (Can we truly be in perfection– there is only before and after, fantasy, desire, memory and so on).

And so too you can never stop writing. Perfection is out of our reach but only just one more sentence out of reach, forever.
 

An article I wrote about Esther's suit to make the Megillah part of the canon was posted on Matan's webcite in honor of the month of Adar. I wrote about the underlying moral responsibility that comes along with our communal memory of Purim.


 

My first recorded class online! You can hear me speak on "Writing our own Aggadot" at the last JOFA conference from their web site. It was a writing workshop so you can listen and write if you like.