A Girl's Story

There are beings who are overwhelmed by the reality of others, their way of speaking, of crossing their legs, of lighting a cigarette. They become mired in the presence of others. One day, or rather one night, they are swept away inside the desire and the will of a single Other. Everything they believed about themselves vanishes. They dissolve and watch a reflection of themselves act, obey, swept into a course of events unknown. They trail behind the will of the Other, which is always one step ahead. They never catch up.

There is no submission, no consent, only the stupe­faction of the real. All one can do is repeat ‘this can’t be happening to me’ or ‘it is me this is happening to,’ but in the event, ‘me’ is no longer, has already changed. All that remains is the Other, master of the situation, of every gesture and the moment to follow, which only he foresees.

they are swept away inside the desire and the will of a single Other. Everything they believed about themselves vanishes. They dissolve and watch a reflection of themselves act, obey, swept into a course of events unknown. They trail behind the will of the Other,

I started to make a literary being of myself, someone 136who lives as if her experiences were to be written down someday.

One thing more,” she said. “I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in loving a person and saying so.”
It was not true. The shame of her surrender, her letter, her unrequited love would go on gnawing, burning, till
the end of her life. (…)
After all, it did not seem to hurt much: certainly not more than could be borne in secret, without a sign. It had all been experience, and that was a salutary thing. You might write a book now, and make him one of the characters; or take up music seriously; or kill yourself.’

The experience of living simultaneously on the inside and outside of your own body is very particular to the female experience I think – and not only in relation to pregnancy but in myriad other ways too. I like the measured, unforgiving way she works her way through the logic, or illogic, of that. I find her work extraordinary.’

own shame is the absence of blood, her immaculate underclothes.

her, long-term study now seems an endless tunnel, a sad, exhausting, endless, and impoverished time that will cost her parents dearly while keeping her dependent on them. Advanced studies have ceased to be the source of the happiness she had hoped for, as if everything she’d heard throughout childhood about the “mental exertion” of studying,

“It’s crazy how reasonable one can become under the influence of philosophy. By forcing me to think, repeat, and write, over and over, that other people must not serve as a means but as an end, and that we are rational beings, ergo unconsciousness and fatalism are degrading, philosophy has done away with my desire to flirt.”

But what is the point of writing if not to unearth things, or even just one thing that cannot be reduced to any kind of psychological or sociological explanation and is not the result of a preconceived idea or demonstration but a narrative: something that emerges from the creases when a story is unfolded, and can help us understand—endure—events that occur and the things that we do?

How are we present in the existences of others, their memories, their ways of being, even their acts? There is a staggering imbalance between the influence those two nights with that man have had upon my life, and the nothingness of my presence in his.

I do not envy him: I’m the one who is writing.