Dyears All that was to come to us, Jane Sautière develops a retrospective look but above all a questioning of the present: not “who am I today?” » but “what is happening to me, happening?” “. Old age, illness, the absence of the world before are synonymous with the emergence of something new. It is this novelty which is primarily the subject of this book.
This newness is measured in terms of what is no longer, what has disappeared, has fallen into absence: what I was is no longer, the world that was is no longer (“ Vincennes has disappeared, nothing materially remains “). The book is constructed by this look at the past, that of the time of youth, of lesser old age, that of other eras, other people, other ways of thinking, of living. Another world existed, another body, other bodies, other possibilities. Growing old means realizing that possibilities fade away One by one, that the opening gradually closes. It is experiencing that we become foreign to ourselves and to the world: we no longer recognize ourselves, we no longer recognize what surrounds us – a form of loss of ourselves, of others, of the world. A form of solitude, and self-effacement: it is not simply the old world that disappears, it is us, me, who disappear in this world: how to exist, continue to exist, to act, in a world which is no longer your world, my world (“ we no longer know how to make our presence visible to the world ) ?
All that was to come to us unfolds this experience of aging which is an experience of oneself, of the world, an experience of time, of temporality through which a dispossession takes place, a progressive disappearance of everything, including, for others and for oneself, a disappearance of oneself . Time moves forward, the past absorbs and crushes, the present which constantly imposes itself is charged with a novelty which dispossesses me of my self, of my world – time being that which forms me or deforms me and that which is the most foreign, or that to which I am the most foreign.
Time is what happens, what happens to me, to me who can only endure it without escaping from it, to me and to no one else in my place. The experience of time, of aging, is that of a form of solitude which is also the solitude inherent in existence: not that we are necessarily alone, but what we experience we can only be alone to experience it, including illness, pain, loss of self, imminent death and, in a sense, already there. This is what the “I” of the text testifies, which is first of all the singular, irreplaceable “I”, to whom this experience of time, of existence, of solitude occurs. Within the totality of the world, the general course of things, I am the one to whom this happens – this loss of everything, this collapse of everything, this destruction of me and of the world, and the conscious experience of all of this. This kind of reflected consciousness implies the encounter and the relationship with something other than oneself as well as, paradoxically, the dispossession of the I: I experience myself absolutely by experiencing what, different from me, acts on me, absorbs me, undoes me , erases me. Autobiography, here, is less the discovery or expression of a constituted and sovereign I than the story of what integrates the I into processes which crack it and scatter it, which refer it to itself as much as ‘to its collapse: the body, time, thought, the social, etc.
All that was to come to us does not offer the assessment of a Life but the drawing of the lines of a life: desire, the social, the political, a certain way of being in the world, with the world – a way of being oneself and other something that is oneself. A life would be said in the plural, being a multiple arrangement with others, with something other than oneself, the self grasped within a multiplicity of affects, thoughts, acts, perceptions. Guidelines seem to remain (desire, political commitment, writing) although they are also mobile and transform (“ this wildness will always be there » ; “ We can not resign ourselves”).
In this book, a life is as much made up of what has taken place (acts or thoughts) as of what could have taken place, of what exists in the mode of the possible or virtual without having been actualized, of what has existed as absence. For example, even if from the point of view of what would be an assessment we could speak of a political or romantic failure, from the point of view of life it would be a question of affirming that, yes, definitely, the world has indeed been affected by our action and that we were affected by the world – we were therefore not dead –, that this love story which was not lived was nevertheless lived in a certain way. Even if this existence involves encountering obstacles, failing, failing, life implies that something has happened and it is this thing that remains as such – an action or thought or emotion by which the world was also produced, invented, created, by which the I was also and remains alive, a point of view of life on life (“ No Nevertheless in the desire to live, it is a pure essence “).
The drawing, the map which, in the book, forms the landscape of a life, is partially erased, blurred, integrates new lines that we do not recognize, in which we do not necessarily recognize ourselves but which are, however, still something like “me”, “my” life, this singular life which is “mine”. And which are still life, which are life at work as a new creation. To live here means to be affected by a novelty which redistributes what I am by including, including, the unrecognizable. This new one, at the end of the book, takes the form of an illness, the beginnings of an illness more serious than the ailments that may have previously been suffered as a result of aging. One day, the diagnosis names what is happening, the new event, the new line: “ degeneration », progressive and irreversible loss of faculties, of thought, and perhaps, undoubtedly, of words, of writing, of oneself.
The diagnosis names a condemnation and forces one to think about the end, death and the control of one’s own death – that which happens to oneself, to this singular and solitary being who is oneself, alone in living life. And the death that is “his”. But what happens is also, inseparably, something new again, that is to say still life with its possibilities. In this book by Jane Sautière, even the announced ending carries an event that must be experienced. Until the end, life is said, written, life still. And, paradoxically, in a sober and powerful way, a certain joy is affirmed: “ It seems happy to you to make the journey, to go to meet him until the total whiteness “.
Isn’t illness here a sort of acceleration of what happens in aging, which happens in general in life? Wouldn’t it be a faster, more radical way of life? Life in its most “raw” process? Jane Sautière then perceives the language that would be that of this life: “ Poetry as an outcome, as writing without standards, judgment, or arrangement, with the words that remain and the gaps in the text. Poetry as supra-life “.
Jane Sautiere, All that was to come to usEditions Verticales, April 2024, 80 pages, €10.
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