# Ways of Concluding: Solitary Engagements and Living-Together

Quintus Immisch

► To cite this version:

Quintus Immisch. Ways of Concluding: Solitary Engagements and Living-Together. The (Un- )eventfull. A Transdisciplinary Journey, Windpark Books, pp.87-92, 2024, 10.22029/jlupub-18638 . hal-04880096

HAL Id: hal-04880096

https://hal.science/hal-04880096v1

Submitted on 11 Feb 2025

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>
# The (Un-)eventful:
a Transdisciplinary Journey

edited by Paul Kaletsch and Quintus Immisch

## Contributors:

- Taylor Borowetz

- D. M. Braid

- Arnaud Miranda

- Quintus Immisch

- Mrunmayee Sathye

- Paul Kaletsch

- Saskia Schomber

- Felix Berenskötter
## Imprint

Publisher
windpark books
kontakt@windparkbooks.de
Leonhard Fuchs, Felix Hofmann-Wissner, Jana Marei Matejka, and Paul Jürgens

Edited by Paul Kaletsch and Quintus Immisch
Designed by Daniela Sonnabend (info@doppelaugen.de)
Typeset: Adelphe by Eugénie Bidault (https://typethequeunjuge.com/genderfluid.space/)

https://doi.org/10.22029/jlupub-18638
https://windparkbooks.de/produkt/the-un-eventful-a-transdisciplinary-journey-ebook/ISBN 978-3-949363-35-1

## License

This book is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

You are free to:
Share—copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
Adapt—remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

Under the following terms:

Attribution
You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

The text in this book is authored by various contributors. Each author's contribution is indicated where applicable.

Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed in this book are those of the respective authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of windpark books or its editors.

This book is a digital version of a title that is also available in a print-only edition. Please note that the content, layout, and formatting may differ between the digital and print versions. The print edition may contain additional design elements and layout specifics that are not present in this digital format.

Order the print edition and find more releases at:
https://windparkbooks.de/produkt/the-un-eventful-a-transdisciplinary-journey/ (ISBN 978-3-949363-36-8) or say hello by email kontakt@windparkbooks.de
<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

# Ways of Concluding: Solitary Engagements and Living-Together

Quintus Immisch

## 1) Social structure

To begin with Proust, the only thing more difficult than adhering to a regime is not to impose it on others: "il y a une chose plus difficile encore que de s'astreindre à un régime, c'est de ne pas l'imposer aux autres."<fnref n="1" /> *Ré-gime* here can mean many things, from a medical indication to a diet to a general lifestyle. Proust's aphorism contains a skepticism about being with others. Apparently, the normative coercion of such a régime becomes easier when we can direct it at others. At the very least, Proust makes us think about our desire to impose rules on others. Rules may not be a bad thing at first: We need rules to cross the street safely, not just once, but every day, as often as we want. Rules make life a bit more expectable, they introduce repetition and repeatability, seriality. They are a way for us to structure time, to shape it through specific, perceptible events. A clear disad-vantage of rules, on the other hand, can be that they are exhausting or boring to follow; sometimes they seem pointless, meant for other people and situations. Maybe this or that is just not *your* event. This is certainly also the subtext in Proust's skepticism: the *ré-gime* imposed here is above all a temporal one, referring to the novel's central topic: time. The *Lost Time* of the novel's title is, after all, that time which is no longer available because we are too much influenced by modern life and its regulations, its temporalities, its structuring events. One can certainly think about this in a 7-volume work of fiction, which, by the way, is often boring and makes us *lose time*. Since we had less time available, we took other paths. We wanted to explore the concept of the event while considering how the academic norms of thinking and writing, the academic *ré-gime*, could potentially be set aside: We wanted to deal with the event, but without prescribing a way or manner or *ré-gime* (Paul calls this 'undisciplined').

Now, if our premise to this edited volume was to prescribe neither a concept nor a definition of the event from which to explore a thematic field, epistemic constellations, experiences, and practices, then, this antholo-gy could have been, in a sense, a solitary affair. After all, we haven't even determined a 'method' or right way to proceed, and, instead, have embraced the uncertain. A theoretical exploration, an affective protocol, a narrative, something figurative: everyone could do what they wanted, "stumbling among snatches, between the bounds of different fields of knowledge, flavors".<fnref n="2" /> Within or between these fields, we would have all gone in different directions, seen different things along the way, we would all have had something different, a different story to tell: as many kinds of events as people. Indeed, if having a method means "to fetishize the goal as a privileged place, to the detriment of other possible places", in our solitary explorations, we all preferred the unmethodical and "eccentric path of possibilities, stumbling among blocks of knowledge."<fnref n="3" />

However, our project turned out a less lonely affair because, as a matter of fact, we did feel something like an epistemic proximity. In fact, during our explorations we all went to similar places, got into areas and fields of 'knowledge' where perhaps one of us had already been or was yet to go. While we might have been in the same places, topoi, fields of knowledge, in some kind of shared space, we certainly visited at different times. That being said, did this topical proximity ultimately lead us all to do the same thing, somehow? Certainly, in our contemporary moment of the post- after postmodernism and poststructuralism (amongst others), we struggled to imagine that we could discover anything 'new' whilst walking on such familiar paths.

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,

I took the one less traveled by”?<fnref n="4" />

Alas, today, I must burden Robert Frost's spatial imaginary with the fact that probably both of these roads are suffering from epistemic overtourism: All paths have already been trodden extensively. That one can neither be original in 2023 anymore nor innovative is a given. And so the stories of our 'roads taken' will resemble each

<footnote n="1">1 Marcel Proust, *À la recherche du temps perdu*, vol. V, *Sodome et Gomorrhe II*, Paris: Gallimard 1924, p. 190–191.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 Roland Barthes, *How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces*, edited by Claude Coste, translated by Kate Briggs, New York: Columbia University Press 2013, p. 4.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 Barthes, *How to Live Together*, p. 133.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken", *The Atlantic Monthly* 116/2 (August 1915), p. 223.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

other, the narratives of the paths we have traveled may be similar to each other, just as “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another”.<fnref n="5" /> Exploring the same ‘fields of knowledge’, we will somehow quote each other and everything that has already been written about it, with our contributions establishing a corpus full of similarities.

Similar, yes, but not identical either, that is why, when looking at our panorama of paths taken, we can see some overlaps, while other features may not be shared by all the contributors. It is precisely these ‘family resemblances’ that I will now focus on. Several of the contributions in this volume have in common that they interrogate the event–albeit on very different levels–from similar directions: In similar ways, these texts only construct the event as an effect of their mode of questioning, uncertainty, and not knowing. This is not simply the modern pose of denial, but these constitute productive approaches to the event as something that may not even exist. While this vagueness might steer us in various directions, we’ve still forged an important similarity: the social dimension of the event in the epistemic community of this edited volume. I aim to illustrate these twin aspects—the concept’s vagueness and its social implications—using the Saskia and Paul’s contribution on *Lost Highway*, Mrunmayee’s “Penelope Unravelling,” and my essay on Proust.

Paul and Saskia provoke a whole set of questions right away in their exploration of *Lost Highway*. They show how unclear an event, that is, in this case the event of a movie and its events of life and murder in a marriage, can be concerning the involved parties: Who is this event for? From whose point of view? What are its consequences, and for whom? And even more generally, who exists at all: Who is there? As if this uncertainty of people involved wasn’t enough, they reflect these questions on the level of their writing, offering us two readings of a film whose appeal is to momentarily create an eventful constellation of, indeed, Saskia and Paul: for once, they allow two perhaps disconnected thoughts to make sense to us and become a crystallization of pleasure. And these two are so sneaky in letting us have fun, yet they annoy us with their questions, questions, questions. The ambiguous arrangement of characters in this interpretation of *Lost Highway* confounds our scientific protocols, which typically involve a researching subject studying an object. However, amid the myriad transformations within the film and Saskia and Paul’s creative exploration, it becomes challenging to ascertain if we can even continue discussing ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ in this context. Despite all this ambiguity, one thing remains certain: the event brings people together—not just Saskia and Paul but also within the film itself. Let’s not forget that in *Lost Highway*, on one hand, the event occurs in the midst of a married life, a paradigmatic form of institutionalized living together. On the other hand, it is linked to an idea of murder, that is, to the elemental ‘betrayal’ of human community.

In her marvelously open piece, Mrunmayee explores the possibility of events in postcolonial constellations. Following the mythological figure of Penelope, who unravels at night the threads of the fabric she wove during the day, Mrunmayee asks about iterative overwritings of colonialism in a world, in which “even the air you breathe is postcolonial”. But just as a cloud of breath quickly evaporates, in this harrowing contribution we need the patience of looking quite slowly in order to be able to accept that just an event, that one event, that *the* event here is apparently not enough. Events would have to happen all the time, with every breath. But if an event is obviously insufficient, can it still be an event? Or is it simply merciless time passing, second by second, breath by breath, a time imposed on us, by subjects, discourses, by society? This ambiguity arises from the fact that the event in “Penelope Unravelling” is completely dissolved by its strongly iterative nature: the frequency blurs it, and along with it, it blurs time. To cope with the postcolonial world, we tend to need permanently events: multiple events in one’s biography, but also multiple on a global macroscale. Indeed, we can see here, that emancipation or liberation from coloniality cannot be a single event, but must happen constantly, just as Penelope is unravelling not just one time but every night. This contribution obviously sees the event as a social instance. Penelope (protagonist, by the way, in a myth about ‘fidelity’ and marriage) asks quite explicitly about identities (and their boxes) and invokes the backdrop of global colonialism as a form of non-coexistence or forbidden coexistence, not without grasping its implications for the precarious present.

In my contribution on Proust’s *In Search of Lost Time*, a queer event emerges from the perspective of a minoritarian (i.e., marginalized but holding the potential for emancipation) epistemology and subjectivity,

<footnote n="5">5 Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel”, in: *The Julia Kristeva Reader*, edited by Toril Moi, New York: Columbia University Press 1986, pp. 34–61, p. 37.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /></figure>

evoking the question of how precarious subjects are endowed with a queer temporality and how they can re-
spond in and to a community that rejects them. However, the queer event is almost invisible, and can be easily
overlooked, which makes its relevance questionable. What is such an event supposed to accomplish if it doesn't
impose itself? If we must learn how to perceive it? One kind of dissolution here takes place in space: The event
is very literally pulled from its spatial margins and extended into its surrounding contexts and infrastructural
settings. In fact, this is a question of the agency of 'things', of the material object, that may seem familiar from
art theory: Is something 'art', because a special information is 'stored' in this thing, or does it become so only
by the context (e.g., us, who consider it as art)? Similarly, things in *In Search of Lost Time* first do nothing, and
the event can only unfold in the context of a setting. Besides questioning the event's epistemology, this contri-
bution also explores its social aspect: The contrast between chrononormativity and queer temporality focuses
on the question of life in community and its limits. Conflicts are, after all, always forms of contact, and difficult
coexistence, in which perhaps only one of the two antagonists 'lives', but both are involved.

These three contributions demonstrate an intriguing interplay, combining a radical questioning of a 'the-
ory' of the event with a firm emphasis on its social aspect: Their different ways of looking at the event are
enigmatic, questioning, and they only allow us to approach the event without knowing or knowledge. Rather,
the contributions question what we call knowing. Clear contours of events disappear here, overlap in part, but
also leave large voids. Are all our contributions enigmatic then? Is there even a reason to publish them side by
side or to read them together?

No tree sees the next one,
Every one is alone?<fnref n="6" />

Not quite. However solitary the explorations of these events may be: their events are not. In our solitary, rule-
free explorations, we have apparently failed to do precisely one thing: to think our epistemic solitude. Instead,
the events we engage with take place in joyful togetherness. Our events never happen to one person alone, in
an unobserved moment, at an unusual time. Instead, we seem to be dealing here with events that, whether
peaceful or conflictual, connect people with one another or, in any case, presuppose or thematize connections
between individuals and collectives. In fact, I think that all three contributions postulate a social structure of
the event. We do not have the event on one side and the subject on the other; instead, a multiplication of the
subject often constitutes the event.

## 2) Living Together

By understanding the event as decentered and placing it in the context of the question of living together,
these three contributions are not without predecessors or conceptual history. In his first lecture at the Collège
de France in Paris, literary theorist and semiologist Roland Barthes follows a personal 'phantasm', namely, the
idea of an *idiorrhythmic* life in a community, which would offer enough space for individual life rhythms but
would still create something like social cohesion. Barthes borrows the concept of *idiorrhythmry* from monastic
communities on Mount Athos in Greece, where the monks come together only for prayer and are free to or-
ganize their lives independently the rest of the time. The lecture circles the concept in various topics, figures
of thought and scenes, one of which is also 'the event'.<fnref n="7" /> Barthes observes that groups often are formed when
people wait together for an event. Waiting together endows the group with a *telos*; no idiosyncratic togetherness,
everything has its purpose.<fnref n="8" /> Certainly, for Barthes, these telos-driven groups lack appeal as he favors intrinsic
motivation as the basis for being together. Discouraged by such teleological examples of living together, he
turns to solitude: "Because Living-Together, especially idiorrhythmic Living-Together, must incorporate the

<footnote n="6">6 Hermann Hesse, "Im Nebel", quoted from Gunnar Decker, *The Wanderer and his Shadow*, translated by Peter Lewis, Cambridge, Mass/London, England: Harvard University Press 2018, p. 720.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 Roland Barthes, *How to Live Together. Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces*, edited by Claude Coste, translated by Kate Briggs, New York: Columbia University Press 2013, pp. 84–86.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 Barthes, *How to Live Together*, pp. 46–47.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

values of Living-Alone as its paradigmatic opposite.”<fnref n="9" /> In this exploration of the solitary life, Barthes engages with Daniel Defoe’s *Robinson Crusoe*. This novel tells of Crusoe’s shipwreck, and then of his life on an island, where he first lives solitarily and eventually comes into Friday’s company. Living alone on an island, Barthes analyzes, means above all uneventfulness. Here, Barthes dismisses a classic, intuitive attribution when he links uneventfulness with pleasure, but event with pure boredom. In fact, the modern novel—let us think of Proust—namely, suggests quite the opposite: the uneventful boredom of the novel contrasts with the exciting and eventful modern world where everything is getting faster. Completely different is Barthes, who discovers pleasure precisely in the absence of events: “Its charm is precisely that of a day-to-day existence with no events.”<fnref n="10" /> And as soon as the events on the island set in, something is lost for Barthes. “I find I’m no longer able to fantasize about the way Robinson Crusoe organizes his life, his domestic set-up, the hut, the vines, the bucolic.”<fnref n="11" /> The events distract from the cozy imagination; indeed, for Barthes the events fill up, and quite spatially obstruct the imaginary space that had been opened by the eventlessness. The active subject of a reading *écriture* (that is, a reading that actually ‘writes’ the text, ‘produces’ it) becomes a rather passive hermeneutic subject that does not imagine, but only awaits the chronology of events.

The event turns me into a different kind of subject. I become a subject of suspense, of the murder of the Father-I’m no longer a subject of the nest, of the Mother: the event as Father (Oedipus and the protocol of the event; all events are Oedipal). The charm of Robinson Crusoe = the non-event.<fnref n="12" />

The event mirrors the question of living together on a narrative level. Barthes recurs here to his own theory, set forth in *Le plaisir du texte*, that there are two different kinds of reading, to which also correspond two different kinds of texts. One kind is the text of *plaisir*, which is ultimately boring. It aims only at its end, lives entirely from the plot. Barthes classifies it as Oedipal, just as in the myth of Oedipus, the final revelation shows that Oedipus killed his own father, symbolizing the release of narrative tension. To read such a text would be “an Oedipal pleasure (to denude, to know, to learn the origin and the end)”, and “every narrative (every unveiling of the truth) is a staging of the (absent, hidden, or hypostatized) father”.<fnref n="13" /> Such a reading runs towards the naked truth, and consequently represents a guided, ultimately second-rate pleasure. In contrast, Barthes positions the *jouissance* found in modernity, which focuses not on ultimate, progressive revelation, but momentary flashes; this would be the ‘true’, genuine desire. Let’s go back to Crusoe: While reading Defoe’s novel when events are still absent in the plot, there is a whole world to imagine. However, the introduction of the event piques the reader’s curiosity, channeling it towards the end of the novel (‘what happens next?’). In so doing, the event-plot precludes momentary pleasure and points to a later pleasure to be found at the end of the narrative; the event is thus paradoxically never related to the moment, always to the future. Barthes, on the contrary, desires momentary, present pleasure, which is then to be found in the uneventfulness and the imagination fueled by it.

That being said, Barthes concern in novels we may not know or even want to read, isn’t just a literary game. Instead, a social phenomenon is evident here. Barthes prefers uneventfulness not just as a sort of literary taste, but also in society, as his critical analysis reveals: “[O]ur entire civilization is in the Will-to-Act”.<fnref n="14" /> Against this hostile society, populated by events and fathers to be killed, Barthes thus seeks the uneventful community: “To fantasize Living-Together as an everyday reality: to refuse, repel, violently reject the event. The event is the enemy of Living Together”.<fnref n="15" />

And that’s why he so fastidiously avoids the event throughout his lectures. He provides no definitions, no spectacular finds. Nothing much happens (we might think of a queer temporality of these lectures). Instead, he declares the lecture a failure and postpones its completion into the future: the event that is to come. This proleptic character of the lectures<fnref n="16" /> is connected to the suspension of the event that makes the lecture a space

<footnote n="9">9 Barthes, *How to Live Together*, p. 84.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 Barthes, *How to Live Together*, p. 84.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 Barthes, *How to Live Together*, p. 84.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 Barthes, *How to Live Together*, p. 84.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 Roland Barthes, *The Pleasure of the Text*, edited by Richard Howard, translated by Richard Miller, New York: Hill and Wang 1998²³, p. 10.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 Barthes, *How to Live Together*, p. 85.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 Barthes, *How to Live Together*, p. 84.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 Cfr. Patrick ffrench, “How to Live with Roland Barthes”, *SubStance* 38/3 (2009), pp. 113–124.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_6.png" /></figure>

for pleasurable imagining.

Barthes, whose skeptical attitude is certainly also fed by *the* event par excellence, May 1968,<fnref n="17" /> thus decen-
ters the event by removing it from our attention and banishing it from utopias; and, at the same time, he ties
it to living together. Apparently, as we are Editing, Writing, and Encountering the Event, Barthes is our specter,
or perhaps we, too, are Barthes’ specters. Stuttering around, do we follow his way, or does he follow ours?

There's something different about Barthes' events, though. By being so afraid of the event, he endows it with a mythology. The event is concrete, it has a face, it is something that can (and must) be feared. The whole discourse on the event, this lecture, is it not ultimately a struggle against the 'absolutism of reality'?<fnref n="18" />

We, in turn, are not that interested in the concept of the event. We break it down into a multiplicity and stretch it into spaces. Our event is not the Other, it loses its contours, its difference. It does not even have to be kept at a distance, but now allows for similarities and proximities. It's not a radical rupture or an *epoche*: Instead, it can be smooth and transient. Now this, now that may be an event; in conjunction with other qualities, with contexts, we may notice an event here and there. Just as in the concept of family resemblance, soon one characteristic joins with others to form a community, then dissolves again, leaving room for new connections: a short handshake, actually like Paul and Saskia meeting briefly in their interpretations of *Lost Highway*; or in "Penelope," where new events are constantly unfolding in the postcolonial contemporary. Everyday life, where nothing special happens, and the event are no longer opposites at all but can temporarily coincide. And perhaps this is precisely what leads nowhere: Just as this conclusion leads nowhere, dissolves. Just as our original travels and our epistemic proximities lead nowhere. And just as our concept of the event leads nowhere. But at least we're not imposing a *régime*, be it dietary or epistemic. Instead, these texts raise questions about how we want to approach 'subjects' of study in the future: with critical distance, devoid of emotion, following a systematic methodology as Felski suggests of Critical Theory, or exploratively, perhaps in an openly subjective way with attachment.<fnref n="19" /> Let's see.

<footnote n="17">17 Roland Barthes, "L'écriture de l'événement", *Communications* 12 (1968), pp. 108-112.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18 Hans Blumenberg, *Work on Myth*, translated by Robert M. Wallace, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press 1985.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19 Cfr. Rita Felski, *The Limits of Critique*, Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press 2015; Elizabeth S. Anker/Rita Felski (ed.), *Critique and Postcritique*, Durham: Duke University Press 2017; Rita Felski, *Hooked. Art and Attachment*, Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press 2020.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_7.png" /></figure>

Bibliography

Anker, Elizabeth S./Rita Felski (ed.), *Critique and Postcritique*, Durham: Duke University Press 2017.

Barthes, Roland, “L’écriture de l’événement”, *Communications* 12 (1968), pp. 108–112.

Barthes, Roland, *The Pleasure of the Text*, edited by Richard Howard, translated by Richard Miller, New York: Hill and Wang 199823.

Barthes, Roland, *How to Live Together. Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces*, edited by Claude Coste, translated by Kate Briggs, New York: Columbia University Press 2013.

Blumenberg, Hans, *Work on Myth*, translated by Robert M. Wallace, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press 1985.

Felski, Rita, *The Limits of Critique*, Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press 2015.

Felski, Rita, *Hooked. Art and Attachment*, Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press 2020.

ffrench, Patrick, “How to Live with Roland Barthes”, *SubStance* 38/3 (2009), pp. 113–124.

Frost, Robert, “The Road Not Taken”, *The Atlantic Monthly* 116/2 (August 1915), p. 223.

Hesse, Hermann, “Im Nebel”, quoted from Gunnar Decker, *The Wanderer and his Shadow*, translated by Peter Lewis, Cambridge, Mass/London, England: Harvard University Press 2018, p. 720.

Kristeva, Julia, “Word, Dialogue and Novel”, in: *The Julia Kristeva Reader*, edited by Toril Moi, New York: Columbia University Press 1986, pp. 34–61.

Proust, Marcel, *À la recherche du temps perdu*, vol. V, Sodome et Gomorrhe II, Paris: Gallimard 1924.