Reciprocal blogrolling is kind of gay, and should therefore be embraced with manly fervour - if the fear of being implicated in something that an unsympathetic observer might choose to describe as a “circle jerk” is sufficient to prevent one from embarking on the very real and meaningful commitment of adding a link to the blog of someone who’s added a link to yours, then the terrorists have won.

The pathos of unreciprocated blogrolling is a topic for another day; I would only observe that not only is it always possible for a blogrolling to go unreciprocated, but that every blogrolling is constitutively unreciprocated, insofar as it is marked from the outset by this possibility. Doubly marked: not only may the blogroll of the linked blog not contain a reciprocal link, but also the linked blog itself may at any moment be deleted, the domain name gazumped by a porn site or the archive of blog posts erased by a server glitch.

Such is the chance to which each blogrolling submits itself, each time: with every mouse-click (coup de souris) the link is broken and forged anew. What would it mean to think reciprocity under these conditions? Can the figure of the circle (even a circle of jerks, of twitches on the line), of annular engagement or the eternal return, even be sketched on such a substrate?