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The Happy Depression

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The ‘Félix machine’ is situated at the point of maximum expansion in

the blossoming of a nomadic, provisional community. It also accom-

panies its dissolution.

It doesn’t work in a linear fashion, and therefore it cannot be consid-

ered a volition-driven, mono-planar machine. If we want to see it in

action, we also have to remember the people, the encounters, the con-

ferences, and then we have to remember the images; we even have to

repeat Félix’s gestures, the movement of his hands and eyes. We have

to find a hypertextual, translinguistic mechanism that would resemble

his way of treating linguistic and emotional matters. We should think

back to the mornings and evenings of times past, to the meetings that

we hadn’t found the time to attend. And then we have to understand

how all these things could have disappeared.

*****

We have never elaborated philosophically the experience of depres-

sion. In fact, we have foreclosed it and made it shameful, as if it were

something that cannot be addressed in public.

What a happy, felixhypocrisy.

In Félix’s work, depression appears under the rubric the winter years.^2

But we cannot reduce it to the winter years, for it’s not the winter’s

fault. Desire is cruel, and so are autonomy, beauty and the irrespons-

ibility of dancing.

Depression presents us with the bill.

The Subject can’t refuse to pay the bill, nor can the singularity.

Depression isthe bill.

*****

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