The possible is a false notion, the source of false problems. The real is supposed to resemble it. That is to say, we give ourselves a real that is ready-made, preformed, pre-existent to itself, and that will pass into existence according to an order of successive limitations. Everything is already completely given: all of the real in the pseudo-actuality of the possible. Then the sleight of hand becomes obvious: If the real is said to resemble the possible, is this not in fact because th real was expected to come about by its own means, to “project backward” a fictitious image of it, and to claim that it was possible at any time, before it happened? In fact, it is not the real that resembles the possible, it is the possible that resembles the real, because it has been abstracted from the real once made, arbitrarily extracted from the real like a sterile double.
– Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Zone Books, New York, 2006, p. 98
It’s all been done.
Life is possible, e.g. on other planets.
No other life is possible, e.g. on this one.
I can’t.
We are stuck here.
This could happen.
Stories deal with possibility.
Scientific facts deal with reality.
That could not happen.
We are doomed to repeat ourselves if we don’t know how we got here.
The future is full of possibility.
The past has already happened.
We are at the present time in history.
Nietzsche dooms us to repeat ourselves by pretending there is a will to power when there is no will.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Assess the possibilities.
Attempt the impossible.
A very will to impossibility!
To making a representation that is then thrown back onto the past and for which the past is somehow held responsible – as if it had a will!
A will to limitation.
A will to self-sterilisation.
A will to limit the play of difference.
A will to co-opt oneself as the puppet of the power,
as the sterile double,
as the subject of the will,
as the representation,
as the bad actor,
the excluded,
banal and monstrous,
the other,
the special, the chosen one:
For me all things are possible,
for I am no other.
…
To find the element to which I am opposed is an affirmative act. And a creative act, since as it resists or opposes me so I accept it.
Isn’t this the way a hunter works?
To go looking for that which opposes, which one opposes, and accept it, in the great denial?
– Aldo Busi, photograph by Salvino Campos, Napoli 2001
This would be a portrait of the writer Aldo Busi: to affirm in opposition as if that No! could precede both what is and what is not, both what I am and what is not me. Since the writer, for Busi, must give himself over to the great and all encompassing No! And attending to all that is in reality, to all of it, in all its different aspects, deny it.
To say to both the possible and the impossible, ‘No!’
But this doesn’t mean the writer is on the side of the possible or is allowing himself to say ‘I can’t go on,’ and, ‘This is impossible.’ He is not a science fiction writer. And to be on the side of the impossible would be to find a starting-point on a new plane. Like the writer who complained that he couldn’t write, to whom Henry Miller’s advice was start from there: ‘I can’t write.’ No.
To accept it. And to destroy it. As William Burroughs wrote: Destroy all rational thought!
– William S. Burroughs
Or David Byrne: Stop making sense!
– David Byrne, photograph by Karen Kuehn
Do you have to change something before you can do this? No. To do is change, will change – without the will, to which you’ve said, ‘No!’
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