Sesame Undone: Negotiations of Virtual Space in Federman's blog [the laugh that laughs at the laugh....]

In an interview with Larry McCaffrey in 1980, Raymond Federman - the writer of Surfiction, Critifiction, and a host of experimental novels dealing with his life as a survivor of the Holocaust and émigré - talks about the notion of "opening up a space" in which to write fiction. For Federman, the dynamics of the act of opening up contributes to the creation of a fiction that is entirely preoccupied with projections of the self in the future. The fictional self which emerges as a future potential is bound to re-inscribe tradition and the sense of collective fate within a framework of virtual experience. My paper will engage with Federman's blogosphere from which it is clear that one way of dealing with the perception that the Jew is part of a single unified group is by emphasizing the ultimate collectivity and connectivity that the Internet as the pluris confers to the unum. The point in Federman is that the minute we leave a message (as a comment to one of his posts) is also the minute when we become part of his own Jewishness. The function of the reader is thus to ‘graph' the author's ‘auto' perception in a pseudo-biographical gesture.