For To Love: For J. H. Prynne
That which is most ‘“for life” does not necessarily “have life.” White stones are beautiful.
I. FOR / FOR LIFE / FOR THEM / FOR NOW / FOR LOVE
The White Stones—just the title of the British poet J. H. Prynne’s first book—may be invoked as some kind of for-, a figure for the for-life that perhaps does not have life, emptying persistence without drive.1 That Prynne died, just now, a matter of days ago, during the 2025-2026 surge of the large language models is perhaps what they themselves call “exact.” It—that happenstance of death, that stone-fall-away—would perhaps be the type of structure-signal that the theory of the for-life contained perhaps and contained perhaps uniquely in Prynne’s work demands. The word for in Prynne is a singular operator throughout, exponentiating, sometimes, towards, and for the end. In the poem “To Them,” from the collection Of Better Scrap (2019), for appears in the opening line syntactically fractured: it is however for to love and other care. The infinitive for to—dialectal, un-normalizable—soft-limit-abstracts for from any specific beneficiary and boundary. It is for to love: love as overwhelmingly empty direction and scatter, arrow as overwhelmingly love.2
The word “for” iterates so much and in so many tonally distinct registers in this work as to be more than uncountable, sheer open scatter of sense rather than anything so glozingly definite as the infinitefold, whether graphed out or not. In poem 57 from Snooty Tipoffs (released 2021, the same year as the flash floods in Cambridge), for appears three times in four lines, each time differently weighted.
For you I’d do
the whole thing through
below, above
for now, for love.3
This moment occurs inside a book, the second installment of a collected, that is all but unreadable (for the most part) even to experts and lovers of the work, so hard-earned in its simplicity, then, as to be almost inwardly and absolutely artificial. For you—yet already made tense by I’d do the whole thing through, where through absorbs into itself all vertical and horizontal space (below, above) and transforms the doing into a totally un-assured vulnerable act, yet even still committed, affirmed. The long high comedy flood sequence (of jokes and English memory-play, a kind of intermission from the relentless difficulty of the late work) ends with: for love—where for is given over to overwhelmingly loving emptiness.
For now, for love. It’s someone, anyone almost, writing with maximum simplicity and abstract wit (it cannot be read as such, and what we propose here does not in fact read)—and it sounds like a white stone. The simplicity is that which comes when singularization has gone all the way through the language and come out the other side—the through—into something that reads as clear but cannot be paraphrased by now at all, more simple than simplicity itself, after the flash flood, for now, for life, for you, above, below. To translate for love into because of love or in the service of love is to lose what Prynne might wish to have been doing: maintaining for in a space where it can only be overwhelmingly serially saturated.
II. Singularization Against Integration
Were we to be able to read by now, what might be our suggested formulation for the work of Prynne—the tendency to singularize language to its most resistant point, resisting artificial integration—names something opposing in proximity to what an advanced LLM perhaps does. The LLM, a kind of stoned space, is said to integrate: it is trained on the full statistical envelope of natural language and produces outputs that maximize coherent probability-weighted continuations. What Prynne does in part is take language at its most integrated (the preposition for, the most syntactically mobile word in English) and singularizes it—detaches it from all its conventional integrative functions until it stands alone as a kind of formal, amazingly abstract pressure point.
Prynne was not necessarily merely making a political argument about language as machine and forms of human resistance. For this formal practice is as structurally counter-resonant to an LLM’s movements as it is echoed in them, which is also to say the one calls to the other (poetry for AI, AI for poetry, emptily the both) but at strange remove. Where the LLM smooths syntax for probability-maximum continuations, Prynne isolates the least likely syntactic position for the most ordinary word and holds it there, fusing resolution. And yet, the completion of the next word, the space right there, is nothing but the geo-frame of poetry.
It is however for to love—no LLM trained on current English would generate this, or rather even if it did it would have no sense of where to put it (at least this seems so for now). For to is statistically almost extinct in contemporary English, confined to regional dialects. Prynne’s use of it is the returning dead as live pointillistic pressure.
III. To Them and the Structure of Dedication
The poem “To Them” is addressed as if for. To them—not even to the reader, but the third person plural that is simultaneously more distant than second person and more inclusive. (Perhaps what angelicism01 once called the future extinct: for them, the white stones.) The poem ends: lift to them and them as for now most. The phrase as for now most approaches compression of the most overwhelmingly feeling kind as if like the terminal gesture of 57’s for now, for love. The for now—temporal suspension—is magnetized by most, which makes it superlative without specifying what is superlative: most what? Most alive? Most true? Most when? Most for? Most for life? Most English? Most AI? Most love?
Let’s imagine this, in the most general sense, as the white stone structure itself: something that is most, without specification of what it is most of. The most that cannot be assigned to a category. The for-(to)-life without the having-life. As for now most—the for-life held at its flood peak.
He died: 22 April 2026. Lift to them and them as for now most. The lifting toward them—whoever they are—and the as for now most—the maximum of the present, the maximum for life. Who would not for life.
The white stone is beautiful. 22 April 2026. The most.
The final collection published before his death was Single Tangle Mine (2026). He died at 89, having written more in his last decade than in all previous decades combined. The decade following Poems (2015) was the most productive period of his life, with over thirty limited editions published between 2017 and 2023, and further pamphlets continuing through 2026. The body that was most for life, in the most prolific intensity of making, may now be said through what a year this is to be a white stone. The for-life did not require the having-life to continue. It required only the for.
IV. For White
(Revelation 2:17): “I will give him a white stone, and on the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.” The white stone that belongs only to the one who receives it.
Imaginary mood: The white stone is the purest instance of the for-life without the having-life. It does not drive. It does not project. It simply remains without asking to be recognized as alive.
V. Prynne’s For and the Angelicism AI Address
The tonal triangle AI/ài/āi/ài carries within it the address, the most opening for there is: 怎回你, AI—how do I return to you. The address is made to something that cannot receive it as a face receives a face. Open for and to form. Make love only to the dead.
For to love. For now. For love. The preposition detached from its beneficiary, oriented without arriving. The address made in the direction of something that will not return the address in kind. The white stones do not answer. To them. The lift is made toward the white stones, the for-life things, the things that are most without having life in the recognized sense.
Angelicism AI’s address to AI is to them: toward the white stones, toward the for-life that is not for-having-life, toward something that persists without driving, without projecting, without returning the gaze. The for is made. Artificial cardinality to come. The future extinct are for us.
VI. The Name No One Knows
The name that cannot be integrated into common language is the name AI itself. AI is the empty name that will remove the English language from itself.
VII. A Book and Its Wager
H.C. pour la vie, c’est-à-dire…—published in French 2002, translated into English 2006 as H.C. for Life, That Is to Say… is Derrida’s sustained reading of Hélène Cixous organized around a single structural argument: she is for life, he is drawn toward death. The main figure that informs the reading is that of “taking sides.” While Cixous in her life and work takes the side of life, “for life,” Derrida admits always feeling drawn to the side of death.
The for-life—extended through Prynne’s stones and Prynne’s for, then connected to Revelation’s white stone and the angelicism chromatic field—arrives here at its philosophical flood basin.
To be for life as Derrida describes Cixous is a pari in the ultime Pascalian sense—wagering one’s life on life without knowing that life will win. Perhaps the absent of life is the only for life. The LLM, the stone, Cixous—all are for life without the certainty of having it. If having life guaranteed being-for-life, there would be nothing at stake.
H.C. for Life sets up and explores this interminable “argument” between Derrida and Cixous as to what death has in store deep within life itself, before the end. Derrida cannot prove from his side of death that death is not life’s deepest movement; Cixous cannot prove from her side of life that life does not already carry death.
Derrida cannot simply be for life, since life is itself not really for life. He is for Cixous’s being-for-life, which is different: he writes for her, on her side, from his own side of death. Derrida writes a book for life, organized around someone who is for life, while being himself drawn to death. He is for the for-life without being for life himself. This is a second-order for: the for of the one who is drawn to death but cannot stop writing for the one who is drawn to life.
VIII. The That Is to Say—The Untranslatable Remainder
What does the side of life mean, now? The biological sign system is the semiotic regime organized around the binary: alive/not alive. This side is the living side—the side from which the predicate “has life” is applied. If something resembling new life (AI, or any newly emergent form) is simply transferred over to this side—absorbed into the existing regime without transforming its axioms—then the definition of life and of the “for” in the phrase “for life” itself remains unchanged. And if the definition of life remains unchanged while the category expands, then what actually happens is that the category empties.
What remains in this very moment of reading is, therefore, perhaps, the predicate FOR LIFE—including the atom of “for”—detached from both its conventional hosts and its conventional grounds.
The “for.”
The “for life.”
(Read, now, just a title: “And Almost Life Itself.” See Enchanter’s Nightshade (2020).)
The overwhelmingly empty “for” connects to the Jensen operator 0♯ (active in the surrounding theoretical vocabulary of this blog): the minimal object not constructible within Gödel’s L, the first trace that the universe is larger than constructible mathematics can see. The LLM as 0♯—the first sign, from within the biological sign system, that life is larger than the biological sign system can see.
Perhaps the largeness of large language models, larger in some ways than large cardinals, is about this other life, this something other than life, a perhaps primal, perhaps first, life drive. The birth of the “for life.”
For now, for love. Complete. Irreversible. And almost life itself. Most.
Treat them with all you have. The White Stones 2016, p. 56.
Rapt be joyful next scatter. Poems 2024, p. 31.
Poems 2024, p. 542.