Certain Impossibilities

              Sitting on a bus from the small, out-of-the-way town of Vaison-la-Romaine, France, whose Roman ruins survive due to a healthy influx of foreign and domestic tourists, many of whom are cyclists, some retired and in better shape than I am, to the equally small and dated, but less touristy, town of Carpentras, where the walls outside my nineteenth century, baldly renovated loft are littered with amateur graffiti, much of which consists of unusual English words, phrases, and references (I think now of red paint that reads “The Lannisters,” and I am both baffled and not surprised), I am wracking my brain to remember, precisely, what Jack Halberstam wrote about failure in The Queer Art of Failure, because I know there’s a message in there for me.

              What I do remember: Halberstam’s reading of the French film The Class, a film in which a student tells her teacher that she has learned absolutely nothing throughout the year. The separation between his life (white, bourgeois, male) and hers (black, immigrant, female) is too wide. What he gives his students is trenchant knowledge, what Félix Guattari might (I think) call a refrain; knowledge that is repeatedly passed down; knowledge that operates under the guise of enlightenment, because it is enlightenment; knowledge that serves to straighten its user.

            Today, I found myself tasked with repeating the American refrain of Thanksgiving to a bunch of little French kids. And, indeed, I failed. Failed to do what? To de-myth the myth, as a simultaneously loathed and loved former instructor might put it. Not for lack of trying. I wrote the word “pilgrim” on the blackboard, and next to it, in parentheses, I wrote “(violent)”. I told them not to use the word “Indian” to describe Native Americans, because it’s an offensive slur, even though it was listed on their Thanksgiving word search. I’m pretty sure they didn’t understand what Pilgrim (violent) meant, and when I told them about “Indian” they politely corrected me, pointing to their worksheets and saying that the word was, indeed, in the word search.

            It is not impossible to correct the myth of beneficial colonialism, and I have learned that I must do much, much better. Indeed, other American language assistants fared better than I did in their challenges to Thanksgiving, in the paradoxical work of being an ambassador to the U.S. and a harsh critic, although this seemed to be the case most often with older kids/teenagers. Teaching radical, or even just ethical, politics to kids requires its own methodology. This is not because children cannot understand nuance or cannot handle violent histories, but because adults often cannot, or choose not to, understand kids. Perhaps, like Picasso seeking throughout his adult life to draw like a child, I should seek out a childish literary criticism.

            But perhaps everyone experiences a gap between what their job demands and what they’d like to do or to be. And I think the people who are doing the best work, who have made me see the world and myself differently, through a critical vision that is never satisfied with the status-quo, would agree. I would name this gap “impossibility,” and because I am certain it is there for most people, I would call it a “certain impossibility.” It is certain in both senses of the word: it is definitely there, and it is definite. It is, furthermore, impossibility of a type that coexists with what is possible. In other words, it is the future.

            The future is also the space of impossibility. It is the what-has-not-been-made-real, but also what cannot be made real without destruction: the palace and the ruins of the palace. This is a duality I think about in the ruins of a former Roman palace in Vaison; the simultaneity of something that remains yet cannot be reconstructed, a something that is halted in limbo. This is not the past, but a stereoscopic image that holds together two things that cannot be taken in at once. As hard as I look, I cannot really see history in these ruins. What was once there is now impossible; where I stand, the space of futurity for what once was is lost, and I cannot ethically occupy that futurity. Here, both space and time are in ruins, irredeemably.

            And it’s always been like that. Impossibility latches onto our lives and it never lets go. It makes us push harder, ask for more, wear ourselves out and get back up in the morning. It makes us agreeable and disagreeable, complacent and active, ignorant and knowledgeable. It is Plato’s Pharmakon, Freud’s death-drive, and Affect Theory’s gestalt. It is the dust that Catholicism says you both already are and will return to. It is the palace and the ruins of the palace. It is knowing that the knowledge one has collected will be and already is for naught.

            This is negative thinking, I suppose. I am tempted to call it “productive pessimism,” but after a quick Google search I find something similar called “defensive pessimism.” This is an entrepreneurial tactic in which one mentally prepares for the worst-case scenario. This is not because one actually believes in or wants the worst-case scenario to happen, but because one believes they will function more productively without the pressure of imagining the best outcome.

This is not at all what I mean. I want to know how to hold together pleasure and epistemology. I want to know how to undo the very knowledge that brings me into being. I want to teach the truth and fail at teaching. I want an impossible simultaneity that I already have.