Translation by Mathilda Cullen
“It’s already a lot to go on, most don’t realize it. I could let go, slacken my hands, let them slide along the ropes, or choose something else, softer, easier.”
— Danielle Collobert, Murder, trans. Nathanaël. 94
1
You are trapped all alone in the catastrophe in a tiny ray of light.
2
A room, white, long, stretched, the curve of a skull
3
Michael P. talks about attending conspiratorial trade union meetings just so he can see Danielle Collobert again
4
Dire II unfolds a sequence of actions without a grammatical subject, over the course of which the white of the page takes up more and more space
5
Shifting algorithms of the imploding world.
Collobert’s texts represent a circular trap in which the discovery of a truth coincides with its erasure
6
Records of a trip to Indonesia in 1970, accompanied by a Norwegian couple, are only discovered by chance
7
Someone is watching you. You forget the things that happen behind your back
8
Drifting through the streets as though your entire life were determined by chance. In the midst of an unstable universe
9
Your reflection in the mirror reflects more than what you see
10
Accepted into the École Normale but took a job at the Galerie Hautefeuille, where she had the freedom to live and write as she pleased. She completes Totem and several texts that later find their way into Meurte
11
Meurte is a book of of the most varied states of consciousness permeated by war
12
Staggering through a fading memory, falling syllables of another language. A world that could be read just as easily as text
13
The blood that rises and briefly reassembles the body
14
A rat runs through the room all night. You hang your clothes high on a nail in the wall
15
The body and words become one in the immediacy of language in Dire (an earlier draft titled Parler seul). The sentences are nothing but the hollowing out or extension of the meaning behind the language of shifting identities
16
What is language if it is intimately connected to the body in the process of its creation? The body as an indeterminate, fleeting entity
17
Cycles of connections of different intensities and forms. One traces the utopian remainder
18
How to plausibly distance oneself without changing one’s language?
19
In her youth, she could not get the body of the man who had been hanged from a tree and left there for several days by the Germans as a deterrend out of her mind
20
A crazed and powerful force that gathers and breaks
21
She lights a fire between her legs
22
Over time, the hope of escaping oneself gives way to exhaustion
23
Two years before her death, she sells her apartment to finance her travels (or escapes). Apart from a bag, a few clothes, and an old copy of Têtes mortes, she kept nothing
24
Along with her colleages from the magazine Change, such as Mitsou Ronat, Jean-Claude Montel, and Jacques Roubaud, she is pushing for a MATERIAL CHANGE in the fabric, the forms of language of the poetic function
25
Transitions from the I to the You where it is unclear whether that I is male or female, a subtle indecision whereby language insists on definition
26
In the winter of 1969, she paid several visits to the Giacometti Retrospective at the Orangerie des Tuileries. She was fascinated by the tiny figures, focusing on the most fragile. The work of the penknife, capturing the moment before everything crumbles to dust. Jupiter clutching the lightning in his hands
27
One is permeated by language. One is language
28
As if Collobert’s words were not in front of us, but behind us. As though we were only ever stepping back in an attempt to understand and never taking the leap forward
29
You can’t shake the feeling of being inside an echo chamber. Following the flow of the body. Il donc. A rhythm takes shape, syllables accumulate, obstruct, drift away
30
She wrote: I no longer have a center. And realized that death is at the center of everything. The death she carried with her almost too easily. Every death is a murder
31
Distancing oneself to the point where dissapearance finds its fulfillment
32
The tiny explosions of your mouth. Carried by the sound of language, the succession of distant connections. The operation of poetry
33
Just as Ulrich was the man without qualities in Musil’s novel, Danielle Collobert could have been the woman without qualities in an infinite totality of possibilities
34
When something finally tips over, accelerates, unleashes, and crushes the meaning (the last remaining one?). As if the skin had been peeled off the texts. And you see what you shouldn’t. Impossible to reverse it
35
Talking about D.C. by remaining silent. Far from representation. The encounter of the inner eye and the outer eye
36
Leaving debris behind, the remnants of a page, passed beneath the hand, disintegrate. A window of time, closing
37
Places of passing through spectral scenes, aimless wandering. A restlessness that is useful insofar as it is confirmed by a voice each time. A patience that clearly costs her
38
Searching for a balance between the real and the imaginary. To capture the unbearable in a state of persistent banality
39
Bodies torn apart fragmented perforated broken lonely separated. Following the laws of their own gravity, they are pulled to the bottom
40
Poetry is irrefutable
41
Living in isolation, as though behind a door that doesn’t open. Through the tiny window, the glistening sunlight spread across the floor endlessly distant
42
She refused to join an institution, group, or party. Simply living in resistance. And she worked for the FLN as a suitcase carrier (porteur de valises) for some time. She never spoke about it, avoided all unnecessary and emphatic statements
43
She disappears in total silence
44
The OAS follows her. Calls her home. She flees to Italy (Rome, then Venice)
45
You write, you publish, you keep writing. Then what?
46
In 1962 she met the sculptor Natalino Andolfatto at the Hautefeuille Gallery as part of the group exhibition Art Construit (they would remain together for the next 15 years). In 1968, during the Prague Spring, they spent four months in Czechoslovakia.
47
So now it is high time to speak of the disembodiment of reality, this sort of breakdown which, one would think, is applied to a self-multiplication proliferating among things and the perceptions of them in our mind, which is where they belong. (Description d’un état physique — Antonin Artaud)
48
A kind of loss of control that precedes writing: and without which a progression or continuation, however fragmented, would not be possible
49
She has a taste for doubling. Multiple perspectives
50
She recommends Artaud’s Héliogabale ou l’Anarchiste couronné to her friends. A text that touches her deeply
51
This is the end. For real this time. Believe me
52
In front of an insatiable crowd, you begin to devour fire
53
Locked onto her singular track, which she follows across continents. As though she were eluding her own appearance
54
Without having to worry that I’m not capable of anything else today
55
A kind of cartography of thought. Always a place of searching
56
How can you escape me
57
There is a sound I make with my soul
58
They come back, make more than just a little noise. They scream, unrestrained, pathetically. They look at me and don’t understand
59
It’s a terrible thing to burn. Within reach of others
60
You will find a double world of various interpretations. The right suture for your suffering
61
Reaching the surface. Gliding silently along. Without a trace
62
With the face she tried to cut off, behind her ears, at the hairline.Vanishing points
63
I am not defeated
64
An increasingly frenzied pace at the core of my being, a movement multiplying in a self-sufficient vortex. Trying to see the chaos from two directions
65
An imaginary language that represents the extreme opposite of linguistic poverty
66
A spark measured by its own destruction
67
The flight from language into language
68
There is the worst. And all the rest
69
You see that I know nothing
70
That the world cannot have just one center for reasons of reason
71
Saying who you are, where you are, to really be there. A labyrinth into which you try to gain entry. What comes next
72
What we know, we know not only from what she says or does not say, but from the impetus of what she withdraws from ordinary life
73
Lung breath gasping in fear (Survie). Hurled into chaos without armor. The Prometheus Soundtrack. The atomization of meaning/sense
74
The body of speech is brought to a standstill. What had begun twenty years earlier. The hook hisses in air
75
Danielle, Alix Cléo Roubaud, and Agnès Rouzier together in a photograph. You stare at them, looking for a sign
76
Her texts do not help us understand anything. It is not easy to understand nothing
77
The few existing photographs of her have no intention to reveal anything. To really reveal
78
You look out for a dream, the point at which she looks up briefly, the sharing of a common horizon
79
How can you know everything if you can’t see or recognize everything
80
The body is a thought you can touch
81
Writing seems almost impossible for her. Life, too
82
With unusual urgency, she asked Uccio Esposito-Torrigiani to translate Survie into Italian in the spring of 1978, before it could be published in French
83
Last thoughts converge in a movement that carries your face, floating. Circles on water
84
Water doesn’t dissolve fear
85
Dive into the blue cosmos. A vertical journey (Survie)
86
When consciousness flows through the body, it is also a body that emerges from it
BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)) 