W.’s decided to stage an intervention, he says. He’s had enough. He’s going to intervene in my life.

‘Your life is the complete opposite of everything you know is right’, W. says. I’ve taken everything that Blanchot’s done and said and done and said the opposite.

‘When are you going to take philosophy seriously?’, W. says. ‘You haven’t read anything in years. Are you retiring from philosophy?’, he asks. ‘Have you given up?’ I haven’t, I tell him. – ‘Then why don’t you write some philosophy? You have to externalise yourself. You have to experience your shortcomings’.

W. knows my problem: I don’t want to do actual work, W. says. I don’t want to face the sheer anonymity of it all. – ‘No one’s going to pay any attention to you’, he says. ‘No one’s ever going to care what either of us is going to write. But you have to believe you can change things. You have to believe that you can write something great’.

That’s what W. believes, in his heart of hearts, he says: that our collaboration might lead to something great. Why can’t I see it? Why have I given up on him? On us?

It’s not that I don’t write. There’s all my writing on my blog, he says. Writing that is largely about him, of course. W. says this ... W. says that ... No one I actually respect would write anything like that. Do you think Kafka would have a blog? Would Blanchot?

Despite everything, I want to be liked, W. says. That’s my problem. I want an audience. That’s why I’m so deluded about the internet. That’s why I believe so vehemently in the blogosphere. – ‘It’s a way for a maniac like you get some attention’, W. says. The real thinker understands that that kind of attention destroys the possibility of thought, he says. Thinkers have to be obscure, W. says. Kafka was obscure. No one knew anything about him. Blanchot was obscure. The thinker has to become imperceptible: didn’t Deleuze and Guattari say that? The writer has to be el hombre invisible: didn’t Burroughs write that?