My disinterested perception of this happy procession was brusquely interrupted by the loud irruptions of a sub-human howling, the source of which was unlocatable. It was howling as if from a dark, dank cave, where some deformed brute had been chained and tempted since time immemorial. The howling did not cease even after the last of the wedding party had disappeared from view.

(Gillian Rose, Love’s Work)

Stoke Newington (not Hendon). “It was I who was howling, in utter dissociation from myself, the paroxysm provoked by the vivacious contrast between the environing judaism and the epiphany of protestants, the customary, laborious everydayness broken by the moment of marriage, the cloaks of the clandestine pious cleaved by the costumes of those weightless, redeemed beings”. It’s one of the moments in Love’s Work, a scandalous memoir whose lyrical (and wholly proper) self-absorption is torn at by passages of intense dissonance and tonal violence, that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up: it’s behind you! One might describe such dissonance using a term taken from music theory: simultaneous false relations, the grinding together of a note and its raised or flattened self, the fission of disjunct tonalities.

“Utter dissociation”: as when Rose, her bowel ravaged by malignant tumours, serenely describes her colostomy bag:

Deep brown, burnished shit is extruded from the bright, proud infoliation in a steady paste-like stream in front of you: uniform, sweet-smelling fruit of the body, fertile medium, not negative substance. It hangs hot in a bag, flush with the abdomen, with the raised temperature even of congealed life. This is to describe a new bodily function, not to redescribe the old. The organ of this facture has achieved that pipe-dream of humanity: evacuation of the body is far removed from the pudenda, pleasure and pain. There are no nerve-endings and there is no sensation in the stoma.

Facture? I had to look it up; it means making, poiesis. The foreign-sounding, erudite, Latinate terminology - “infoliation”, “abdomen”, “evacuation”, “pudenda” - does not merely garnish this discourse on shit, but punctuates it, breaks it up: “[i]t functions like a ham-slicing machine, removing portions from the associative flow: the anus and the flow of shit it cuts off…” (Anti-Oedipus). In other words, it substitutes for the missing anus, performs the functions of scission and dissociation, interrupts the “steady paste-like stream” of lyrical consciousness with irruptions from another world, another register.

This (the exception, the Fremdwort) is the rule throughout. If not medical terminology, then Freudian; or Hegelian; or theological (“jewish” or “protestant” or “jewish protestant”). The object is not merely the pedantic display of erudition, although perhaps it is also that (like all interlopers, Rose is never certain when her credentials should be displayed and when they should be disguised). It is to put the memoir to work, so that it is no longer the consoling fiction (Murdoch: “all that consoles is fake”) of a specular identity, but a virulence within the body of the archive, a machine that drives all the other machines. A monument that shakes itself apart.