Nothing As We Need It: For Chimeric Writing is a thesis-work in which a new form of critical writing is imagined, enacted, and studied. Shaped by encounters with literature not translated in English, by the polyphonies, artifices, and concealments of a bilingual self, by the sense of speechlessness and haunting when writing of works that cannot be instantly quoted, this form is named chimeric from the mythological Chimera: a fire-breathing monstrous creature made of three different parts, impossible in theory but real in the imagination and in the reading of the myth. Similarly this thesis-work is a composite of interrelated parts written in different styles, some of which may seem impossible, monstrous, disturbing. It demands and proposes neologisms, a new vocabulary, and wildly imaginative approaches to reading, and to the writing of research. As a work of critical writing about critical writing, it merges practice and commentary without demarcation. Recursive, composite, and polyphonic, it questions linear ways of presenting scholarship in words, and proposes possibilities for citation beyond the limits of inverted commas. It argues for, and once manifests critical writing as enmeshment and conversation with its subject matters.
A ‘chimera’ is also the object of a yearning deemed unattainable: this thesis-work exists in such yearning, in the tension between words and that which exceeds them. The critic who writes is exhausted by such yearning, rather than owner of exhaustive knowledge; scholarship and knowledge are chimeric, longing beyond their limits.
Nothing As We Need It was prompted by encounters with the prose of Alejandra Pizarnik, Cristina Campo, Roberto Calasso across time, languages, non-translation and mistranslation, silences. Instead of writing monographic studies as a distant critic, a three-voiced character speaks with them, inhabits their words, yearns to become them, and shows what composite and impure forms critical writing may take when words seem to be missing; how to transmit material that is untranslated, barely audible, or so close that it smothers; what types of bilingualisms, beyond the literal, are at play. The thesis-work practices Pizarnik’s idea of criticism as ‘tie’—the unspoken substance that connects a writer to the subject of her study through kinship—and demonstrates with Campo and Calasso that to write criticism is to be attentive to faint signals, and make them heard.
The polyphonic author of this thesis-work writes in English as a second language: she is a stranger. No matter how fluent, she is never entirely in synch, a small variance is always perceived. Writing as a stranger entails the perception of both loss and haunting: the loss of references when working with Italian writers not translated in English, and how these writers haunt the text even if they cannot be quoted. Chimeric writing takes shape beyond and before translation.
