Infinitely Dividing Sunflowers

Or, How To Avoid The Void, Part 2.

What we are really talking about—see Part 1—is the sovereignty of the mother. Since the sovereign is for Derrida the most undeconstructible, then sovereignty of the maternal type, for she is most sovereign, and the knowledge of the mother, are the least deconstructible. When it comes to Wang’s book, you will recall that we were talking about a tricknowledge of deeply ambiguous nature. Such is the mother, as well. The ocean mother in whose holding I slip and slide with the Giant Nipple is everything I come to know, lose and keep as secret. Is the truth secret, or its keeping?

To talk about The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void , we can continue to make the cryptogram into a parallelogram and talk about Cixous. In her We Defy Augury, Cixous simply asks,

What does your mother know?

Again, this is the mother as sovereign and the mother as tricknowlege or absence of knowledge. The mother knows: that is our primordial misogyny and that is our primordial knowing how not to know. The sovereignty of the maternal means that if we go back and look, muteness takes over because of whence we come. Cixous goes on,

I am not lying. What my mother knows, she could well not know. She knows how to know without knowing, that is her magic.

What saves us from the void is this tricknowledge and the way I have of knowing I have it, which is to say knowing how to avoid and void the void by not knowing. Magic is being delicate enough to not know what I know, there where the throat tightens when I speak, which means to stop.

This is why the lesson in The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void is presented as a secret and a mystery play. Because it is. Casting the spell, or not, we are unable to simply reveal a thing. The idea of ‘big reveal’ has never been a viable one anyway. Try to reveal the Big Idea, and everyone falls asleep.

Without her magic we could never have lived until now without losing our lives.

Life depends on it. Life depends on our tricknowledges. Life depends, that is, on the primal entanglement of denial and negation, and on the primal tangledupness of avowal and reveal. We live in the age of extinction(s), and yet who has ever seen that big reveal work?