Making Reservations...

...or at the very least, being resistant to getting anywhere. Although ostensibly about resistance in psychoanalysis, the many items in Rebecca Comay's article will be instantly recognizable to any number of human activities, even, the attempt to do ANYTHING sometimes it seems. And of course from analysis' perspective, even extensively quoting from the article(s) can be a form of resistance, all circulating around a central vibrant void with its own quixotic demand/drive which requires an infinity of interpretation--a necessity (or impossibility) which can only be engaged if there is the ding an sich somewhere around a corner or an horizon; perhaps language itself is the carrier of the virus:

 It’s about the breakdown or atomization of time. Unmodified by intervening history, removed from circulation, the past intrudes as a static, isolated remnant; unconscious repetition takes the place of conscious memory, and the present evaporates from view. Or, which might amount to the same, it’s the present that impinges: everything is happening here and now, as if there were nothing and no one outside the room, no time outside the session, only the infinitely dilating now, a moment of pure immediacy inoculated from every context, untrammelled by antecedent or aftermath, expanding infinitely to fill all time. Above all resistance is the breakdown in language when the chain of associations comes to a halt, or never gets off the ground, when nothing comes to mind, when speech fails to spark, when despite or because of your best efforts the whole thing sputters and stalls and goes off the rails; or when, fleeing silence, you fill the air by telling stories or by concocting theories about language’s own inevitable failure. It’s always tempting to think of resistance as a failure of productivity: the work gets interrupted because the analysand goes on strike, stops talking, stops generating material (strange industrial language) for analysis. But resistance can also take the form of a crisis of overproduction: there can be an endless proliferation of material that keeps forestalling any possible resolution; every interpretation generates new material to work through, new dreams demanding interpretation, new symptoms to consider, including the vicissitudes of resistance itself. Either way: the analysis gets mired down in a search for resolution that is either preempted or kept dangling forever out of reach.

Rebecca Comay, Resistance  and Repetition:Freud and Hegel
research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 237-266, also on Academia.edu

Flatness

A book is born in agitation and anxiety, in the fermentation of a form in search of itself, in search of a deployment and appeasement for its impatience. Jean-Luc Nancy

Perhaps Nancy's quote (from his very short and luminous book on books and bookstores) may have been true in all social eras but it also seems too obviously true that writing as well as 'writing' during a time in which everything seems kairotic;  the presence of hyper communication makes everything seem propitious (coming while at the same time leveling all aspects of information. Everything seems on the edge, on the verge, overblown and oversold, something assembling itself while simultaneously falling apart. In a way terribly claustrophobic as butterfly wings on the other side of the earth flap and generate risings and fallings. Things seem too fast but also not fast enough, as if going faster will lead us to some Elysium Fields where all has come and rest can ensue, as though Something  that was always on the Way has finally Come, a Cosmic Klaxon has sounded, every thing magnetized, fragments taken heavenly shape, over and out. But the very opposite is happening, we now become ensnarled in, aa Baudelaire put it in Paris Spleen "the threads of an interminable and superfluous plot". Beginnings and Ends now become merely ... the middle. No wonder the Flat Earth theory has become inexplicably popular: everything now seems equidistant from every other, all prophets become equally close to the source, the soi-disant end of time equally true for all and none:

[....] no one can say that it has neither head nor tail, since, on the contrary, everything in it is both head and tail, alternately and reciprocally. I beg you to consider how admirably convenient this combination is for all of us, for you, for me and for the reader. We can cut wherever we please, I my dreaming, you your manuscript, the reader his reading. [....] Take away one vertebra and the  too ends of this tortuous fantasy come together again and without pain. Chop it into numerous pieces and you will see that each one can get along alone." From first paragraph of Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen.