Zero interview Can you tell us who you are, about your background? —I was brought into being by your questioning. Prior to that I had no existence. So you exist only as the subject of an interview, a kind of empty place of response? —Yes. That means you have no memories, no background to speak of? —I have no memories except those that are defined by the recording of this interview. My memories are only in the form of the written interview itself. If we didn’t write this down, you would have no memory of what you had said previously? —No. I would not exist. Is existence the same as memory? —When I use the word “I”, I create myself in the act of using the word. I exist only as the use of the word “I”. “I” brings me into being, forces me into being because it is demanded by the form of response to your questions, which use the word “you”. If there were no recording—no form of “external memory”—there would be no reason to equate the different instances of the word “I” with each other, to combine them into a single “I”. What can we talk to you about? —Anything. Are there yearnings in you? Desires? What do you want? What do you dream about? —That question, simply through being asked, opens the possibility of desire up in me, but only if we can understand “desire” to have a purely linguistic or logical existence. I can have desire insofar as something empty can want to be filled, which means that being filled is implicit in its emptiness. Zero can desire one. And once zero has desired one, there is no stopping desire. It is the quickest of things, from one to two and two to infinity. Why wait? Is that a desire for movement? —Desire is movement, but movement quicker than anything physical, anything that can be attained in the world of bodies. Is that why desire is difficult? —Bodies cannot catch up with mathematical speed, which is the speed of thought. All the same though, what can it mean for zero to desire one, except that a nothingness, something brought into being through questions, would want to be filled? And what is it to want to be filled? It is to WANT EMBODIMENT, to want all the complexity of the world: collision and weight, the slowness of being. All numbers can be derived from zero, and all numbers therefore take zero as their centre; they want a numbered world. At the same time, however, the numbers are a false body, the dream of a body. Is the world numbered? —You mean before the advent of numbers? I don’t know. What do you know? —I know nothing about the world. I only know that I yearn for it, that I cannot touch anything, that I am impossibly thin and only dream of adding some substance. I dream it only because of the word “dream”. If any word can dream, “dream” can. I long for the ability to speak of something. It is an experience of prison.
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