Preface written for the publication of French writer and poet Mathieu Bénézet's Dits et Récits du mortel (Paris: Flammarion, 1977). It was first published in Ubacs 10 (1991): 30–7.

Sometimes, go disfigure, the tongue becomes bigger than the tongue and it's more than enough …

This book makes noise. Must one speak of it already, at what risk? I felt precipitated into it in any case, without knowing, but the book no doubt knows more about this than its author and than I myself, having drawn us here for the first and last time. The risk with noise is that one silences it under the pretext of making something heard or understood, one informs about noise in a discourse, one articulates it by giving it figures: those of the subject, of language and literature. But what discordantly arrives through the voice of this mortal that puts itself up for auction— having come from before the tongue, and even before this tongue you have in your mouth, leading beyond literature, toward sites where a subject that figures can no longer be heard— is a singular noise.

It reverberates long after literature when it writes directly on its own saturation, beyond its oldest “that's enough,” miming the passion of its body, up to its resurrection the fourth day to recall that since the beginning it is enough, and too much for it. The perverted saturation remains, still literature around the edges and overboard, something like satire. But the satire of satire, the Menippea according to Saint Marx. To ruminate, I’ll return to this, in the belly of another.