3. THE SACRUM

For some years now, I have it very clear that language has nothing to do with metaphysics or the metaphysician’s promise of a terra firma. If anything, it is an abandonment of thought, or at least an abandonment of Socratian-Cartesian-based thought that pretends to be divorced from the messiness of that which is physical. From the growls, the swelling, the moans, the mourning, the mucous, the genital contractions, and of course, the pain.

If Deleuze and Guattari are correct and if there’s only desire and nothing else, writing, language can only be a production of [that] desire. Here notions of origin and technique are replaced by the “the Yes and No of the palate,” which takes place in the mouth and is [most of the time] a voluntary act.

Vian wasn’t too far off when he addressed in “Utilité d’une littérature érotique” the importance of a literature that arouses. The sense of language, like that of touch, requires that the matter tasted come into actual contact with the end of nerve(s):

Car il ne faut pas s’y tromper. Le communisme, c’est tres gentil, mais c’est devenu un genre de conformisme nationaliste. Le socialisme a mis tant de vin dans son eau qu’il a tourné a l’abondance… quant au reste, je n’en parlerai pas parce que j’ignore ce que c’est que la politique et ça ne m’interésse pas plus que le tabac… Oui, les vrais propagandistes d’un ordre nouveau, les vrais apôtres de la révolution future, future et dialectique, comme de bien entendu, sont les auteurs dits licencieux. Lire des livres érotiques, les faire connaitre, les écrire, c’est préparer le monde de demain et frayer la voie à la vraie revolution;—Boris Vian

For one must not be deceived. Communism is well and good, but it's become a sort of nationalist conformism. Socialism has put so much wine in its water that it has turned to abundance... as for the rest, I won't speak of it because I don't know what politics are and am not any more interested in them than I am in tobacco...Yes, the true propagandists of a new order, the true apostles of the future revolution, future and dialectical, of course, are the so-called licentious authors. To read erotic books, make them known, write them, is to prepare the world of tomorrow and open the way to the true revolution.—Boris Vian (tr. Bernd Klassik)