begin again now with rather less force, because you want to let them speak and you want to know the fate of those particular seeds. So far there are just a few grainy images, epiphotographs: you find the thought of looking into them frightful. Frightful but necessary, as a first scene and as a way of thinking about dissemination, while putting the threat and anguish of disappearance in touch with the desire to speak. That is: you wanted to read, to think – and write. Write it down, as the saying goes. Perhaps you were simply hoping to get in touch with some old friends. You imagined the future and you wanted to hear from them. You thought to summon them, but first – you are not there. Then you find out you have blown upon them. Not every spark wants to become a flame. And in all of us there is a Little Pig, scared to death of being eaten alive. We come to that thought again later. But something is already at the door. It is not a Wolf. Behind the door of personification and the stories we have heard before, the weather is changing and with it the future. The ideas, for example, of eternity, or of individual death. All this – curiosity, scattering, menace – was already implied by the thought of the trace: ‘erasure of the present and thus of the subject, of that which is proper to the subject and his proper name’.1 A more rigorous language, a loosening thought. It occurs to you that what is required of you is the ability not to be: mobility, corruptibility, the capacity to imagine yourself as some sort of ‘mortal germ’ (‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, p. 289).

Don't ask for information about your condition and your future. You don't want to know. In Macbeth, Banquo is tempted to question the Weird Sisters:

He dreams of getting perceptual access to what he thinks they might know. The demand is urgent. He wants to find out what does and does not have a future.