LEO BERSANI
445
been containing in the excremental process; and in the time of an individual
life, the self is lost (it spends itself) among the multiple alien circumstances
in which it enacts apd dissipates its history.
If
we consider loss from the point
of view of what has been born, we see that the infant suffers the loss of its
origin; and, in the history of personality, each new gesture creates another
difference, however minute, which separates us irremediably from the per–
manently identical self which we might have preserved only by refusing any
performed
repetition at all, by refusing time itself.
It
is this terror at the separation of the self from itself which we find in
Anaud. The anus and birth are subjects of terror , but, if we accept the logic
of what I've just been saying, so is the very time of an individual life. The
cruel lesson which birth, defecation, and an individual history teach us is
that I am never entirely present to myself. As Derrida says, repetition makes
a present moment less fully present to itself. Part of what is in the present
was already
in
the past, and therefore the present
is,
so to speak, partly some–
where (sometime) else. I too am always somewhere else; and all repetition
is evidence of my being elsewhere. There are always spaces (physical and
temporal) between a present gesture and the gesture it refers to . But there
are no gestures from which all the others are derived; every moment in my
life sends me to other moments. And, to the extent that I yearn to find an
underived origin, I can only suffer from this experience of never being any–
thing but a derived self, one whose differences are inseparable from its re–
petitions, in short, a self always dropping away from-what?
The answer to this question obviously depends on our views concerning
the final term (or the origin) of our myths about origin.
It
seems likely that
the prenatal experience of living in the mother's body lays the basis for the
illusion of perfect presence. The notion of a transcendent being whose na–
ture is wholly concentrated in its unchangeable presence is perhaps the most
intellectually rarefied consequence of the prenatal confusion of our milieu
with our being. We never wholly rid ourselves of this confusion; or, more
precisely, we keep a nostalgia for a world in which being would everywhere
always be equally present to itself. Instead, the self finds that it is at a dis–
tance from the world which nonetheless contains it.
It
is neither identical to
the world nor is it clearly distinct from it; rather, it is always in the intervals
between two fictions, the fiction of a world from which the self is absent
and that of the self as a center without an environment, or as a fixed, non–
disseminated presence. The.physical separation of the infant from the par–
ent in birth is the most spectacular evidence we are given of the space be–
tween the self and the world as well as between the self and its own history.
Birth is the origin of derivation in an individual's life, although this is ob–
viously not the same thing as saying that it is the origin of Anaud's trauma-
