Science, Medicine, and Anthropology
[All] [that was not her]
[All that] [was not her]
[All that was] [not her]
[All that was not] [her]
Lists, he made, a kind of series.
When is a series a set?
To close a set, the all, requires the exception: her.
Beverly as exception.
A woman.
This woman.
She whose existence lodges itself somewhere between [all that] and [all that was.]
A writing after the fact that fails a second time to write that which was impossible to grasp the first time.
The impossibility of writing her: she floats in those spaces somewhere between the words that do not represent [her].
The enigma, the void, the empty set, the [not] in the [that] [that was] Beverley.
The emptiness as necessary to positing that she exists, even if he cannot tell us who she was.
Who would believe him?
The not-all: Beverly as singularity against the universality of a class (logic and socio-logic).
A universality necessary for (or consequence of) the mark of this One life, against the lure of the image; his two Beverlies: lies, and Believers.
The image is deadly. To bin it, to let it fall, may also indicate having traversed a threshold.
Hope is on the side of inaction. An act must be brought to the power of the signifier. Suicide or otherwise.
A response from the letter. Not a note.
A mark of the Himpossible. Not a Himmoral tale.
To write hurt.
Her tuh.
Anthony Stavrianakis is a researcher (chargé de recherche) at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, based at the Laboratoire d’Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative, Université Paris Nanterre. He is the coauthor, with Paul Rabinow, of a trilogy of books about the form, logic, and ethics of anthropological inquiry, and author of Leaving (University of California Press, 2020), an inquiry into the practice of assisted suicide in Switzerland.