The middle notebookes

the long version

Nathanaël's philosophical notebooks propose a poetics of intimate engagement with mortality. The Middle Notebookes began in French, as three carnets, written in keeping with three stages of an illness: an onset and remission, a recurrence and further recurrence, a death and the after of that death. But the narrative only became evident subsequently; the malady identified by these texts was foremost a literary one, fastened to a body whose concealment had become, not only untenable, but perhaps, in a sense, murderous. It is possible, then, that more than anything, these Notebookes attest both to the commitment, and the eventual, though unlikely, prevention of, a murder. All of Nathanaël's prose seeks the terminal poem, the poem that passes into action, that passes through the window, invents the outwards of being, which is not being but becoming, innocently. There is no more prosaic poem than what today Nathanaël'swriting attempts. For this poet narrative speaks of nothing, it doesn't evoke, nor does it convoke: this writing is in movement toward the new man, the origin and the end of all philosophy as of all literature. In hatred of the novel and in hatred of the cinema, Nathanaël invents a new manner of registering and of representing the humanized living. Let us name this an erotic pictogrammatology.