A

Abstract

If one sets out to investigate the forces that engage in a dialectical moment rather than to painstakingly retrace its constitutive elements, one may follow a singular ‘thread’, ‘filament,’ ‘wire,’ fil, of a text; not to classify or to identify it, but to work out how mimesis supports the formal steps ahead. Reading like that is to bite the head off the coiling serpent, to cut short the anticipated yield of the speculative movement and to bring the moment to its limits. Pursuing a mimetic thread aspires to make reactive forces active, to affirm and underscore the particular strengths that are indigenous to dialectics. One pursues, then, not its secure foundation but the contaminating elements that keep it alive. This method of investigation is briefly described with a few sentences in the middle of Glas:

If you follow this wire [fil], or another, from the funambulist to the Ticktack des kleinen Glücks, to the Klang einer Glocke and to the self’s dead sure biting (death) [la morsure de soi], very near the end, you have here at your disposal, as if in contraband, everything necessary for an almost complete, literally literal reading of Zarathustra. You can verify.¹