A Note On Michelle Carter

‘Exhibit #30’.

Together with Mitchell Heisman’s Suicide Note and the entirety of Twitter since Trump was elected, Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy’s ‘Exhibit #30’ PDF (2014) is one of the few remaining repositories of great literature. I first read the ‘Exhibit #30’ PDF in a single night in 2019. Three things about it: when Michelle keeps on saying ‘listen to the song’ and Conrad doesn’t and he does that thing, after several days, where he finally does but is obviously lying because he messages back in a minute or so (not enough time for the song) and she says ‘did you really listen to the song’. After his ‘suicide’, she continues to message him, saying she loves him each night before she goes to bed. She also buys him a star.

But Michelle and Conrad also live in an interior world, perhaps like the one described in Strawson’s ‘Language Without Communication Intentions’ or even in terms of Jacques-Alain Miller’s 2006-2007 seminars which describe the effort of Lacan’s last years at delineating the contours of One alone before the Other, ‘the One-all-alone’. This is why they are terrified and why one of them must die, and why they never manage to meet, because they are both the One-all-alone. To meet would be to miss each other because in the place they are, there is no reason to go out and see one another: they are each One-all-alone, the each of the one without need of the other, the complete terror of the (sex)textual ‘I love you’ and then ‘I love you to’ [sic] as it repeats itself right up until Conrad’s death.

Imagine Michelle Carter as if she were right now in prison garb listening to ‘The Next Right Thing’ from the Frozen II OST without any possibility of seeing it that weekend, and still being reminded of how Conrad Roy never listened to that song in time.

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Extinction.