Work in progress

“Every written work can be regarded as the prologue (or rather, the broken cast) of a work never penned, and destined to remain so, because later works, which in turn will be the prologues or moulds of other absent works, represent only sketches or death masks.”

So Georgio Agamben, echoing or paraphrasing his mentor Walter Benjamin, for whom ‘the work is the death mask of its conception’.



What was open and fluid – the work in progress - becomes closed and immobile. It can no longer develop. Its elements assume a kind of necessity, and it becomes impossible to imagine that it might have been otherwise.

This is the melancholia inherent to composition: always the awareness that you have proved inadequate to the realm of possibility that you opened. Even though you know that possibilities are always locked out, left to starve.

The death mask analogy reminds us how this is true existentially. Its either John Berger or Walter Benjamin who remarks that someone who dies at 35 is then seen, always, as someone who was going to die at 35. In other words, his life, which was open to infinite possibility, congeals into the closed shape of a Destiny.

To tarry with the work in progress, or, in life, to occupy a space in which all possibilities remain open is not to write or to live at all. It is to remain virtual. But to commit oneself to a course of writing or a course of life entails the foreclosure of many precious ‘conceptions’, and this leaves always death’s watermark.

Where Benjamin uses the phrase ‘The work is the death mask of its conception’ is notable. It occurs in the very much ‘open’ text called One Way Street, in a section named ‘The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses’. This section of text simultaneously lays bare the rules by which the text is produced. Indeed, other sections of OWS, like ‘construction site’ reveal the textual wiring of what is in front of us on the page – the rules and grammar of ‘conception’. They are about production and also an invitation to produce.

Here, the open-endedness of the work in progress enters the content and form of the work. ‘The work is the death mask of its conception’ is countered by a writing which is not allowed to assume the finish of a ‘work’, which claims only to be a construction site.