An Unpublished Text (from "The Difference Which Makes No Difference" in "Les Textes Inedites" by Jacques-Louis Charlatan (Prospero, 1987, 450FF) Translator's Introduction To recover what is insignificant is always more significant than what is significant. In translating what is not-written, the translator allows us to recognise ourselves as the empty yet ever-changing place within which what does not exist may yet fill the space of writing. What is trans-lated _overflows_ in its replenished void and yet circles around forever in its vertigo of insignificance. In his book "Qu'est-ce que c'est le point?", Professor Rene Gade proposes the End of Writing as the most formidable transgression of post-modernity. How are we to write After Writing? This is the challenge posed to the intellectual at the site of superfluity, where the (literal) pointlessness of the text intersects with the (virtual) interminableness of sentences which deconstruct themselves after their "author" has been dethroned. Such is the question addressed by Charlatan in his newest outrage. "How is it possible to ask any longer for the conditions of possibility of a _question_? To ask a question is to set in motion a possibility of a discourse of truth and thus of a stage upon which "meaning" may parade its authority in face of the multiplicity of disposals (1). If there is no truth, then to pose as interrogator is to enter the seat of pretended power of judgement of anticipated answers, to allocate to each one its measure of relevance. To go beyond relevance (relevance) is to seek relief (relief): to ask a question is to execute a sentence, to circumscribe the possibilities of all responses. In future, answers must be freed from their questions and the chains anchoring my sentences together are to be dissolved without resolution." Author's Postscript These words were rediscovered (retrouve) from a wastepaper basket. In consigning them to the region of disposibility they are displaced and decentred beyond their own principles of coherence. They assign the mark of pure disfigurement by which the simulacrum is distinguished from the "original". But what privileges the original from the residue? By what right does the blank piece of paper claim priority over the crumpled text salvaged by the impatient writer? All paper is merely potential waste-paper. Just as words evaporate into the silence of the inaudible, so too does the solidified page leave no trace of itself in its self-erasure... (the manuscript breaks off at this point) (1) Translator's Note: Charlatan distinguishes disposal or disposition (dispositif) from supposition (suppositoire); the former is the exteriorisation of that which is not necessary; the latter is the insertion of something-into-the-behind. _______ [Originally published in Here & Now No 12, Leeds, March 1992]