"GAPs are my starting point."

“Gaps are my starting point. My impotence is my origin.”
Paul Valery, Monsieur Teste
Epigraph to John Kelsey, “Stop Painting Painting,” Artforum, Oct, 2005, p. 222

“it is what I contain of the unknown to me that makes me myself. It is my clumsiness, my uncertainty that is really myself. My weakness, my frailty…Gaps are my starting point. My impotence is my origin.” Monsieur Teste, extracts from logbooks, Paul Valery, Monsieur Teste, translated by Jackson Mathews, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, p 38)

“C’est ce que je porte d’inconnu a moi-meme qui me fait moi.
C’est ce que j’ai d’inhabile, d’incertain qui est bien moi-meme.
Ma faiblesse, ma fragilite…
Les lacunes sont ma base de depart. Mon impuissance est mon origine.”
(Valery, Monsieur Teste, (Editions Gallimar) 1946, 1896, p. 64

ecart – divergence; difference (de chiffre, de temperature); disparity; gap (entre, between).; supprimer l’ecart entre , to close the gap between; MILIT: error; deviation. FIG: lapse, slip (de conduite); flight (d’imaginations); error (de jeunesse); lapse, slip (de langage). (Larousse, F/E)

lacune – lacuna, gap.
What is the difference between ecart and lacune? “mon impuissance” does not have to be “my impotence” – can be “my powerlessness”, “my helplessness.” “unknown” is a gap.

“Yet, crucially, for Valery, Teste often, perhaps always, experiences his own consciousness as discontinuous and unknowable. He states rather unphenomenologically, that ‘it is what I contain of the unknown to me that makes me myself. It is my clumsiness, my uncertainty that is really myself. My weakness, my frailty…Gaps are my starting point. My impotence is my origin.’” Monsieur Teste, extracts from logbooks, Paul Valery, Monsieur Teste, translated by Jackson Mathews, (Princton: Printeon UP, 1989, p 38) cited in Deppman, Jed "Re-Presenting Paul Valery's Monsieur Teste, symploke - Volume 11, Number 1-2, 2003, pp. 197-211, p. 4.

Une soiree avec Monsieur Teste was written in 1896. Fits in with 1900, year of the gap. When was the logbook with this quote written? b-logbook. The ellipse (my frailty...Gaps) is in the text. Ellipse - a gap. "discontinuous and unknowable" - discontinuity makes a gap.

“Monsieur Teste, Valéry's character famous for his social withdrawal and rigorous intellectual life, made his first appearance in the world in 1896 in an analytical near-narrative called La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste. 1 Published in the second issue of Le Centaure, a "Recueil trimestriel de Littérature et d'Art" under the direction of André Gide and others, this Cartesian meditation was Valéry's youthful reach for an intriguing, uncompromising ideal. Since the journal itself survived only two trimesters, one could say that in the death of the ephemeral Centaure the mythological hero of thought was born.
“Over the next fifty years, Valéry returned again and again to Teste, trying to understand, explain, and give new births to the figure that had happened upon him in his youth. He made new editions and supplementary texts—we now speak of the Teste cycle—and masses of notes, but no definitive inscription; at the time of his death in 1945, he was once again gathering material for another incarnation. Monsieur Teste as he left it is a difficult, heterogeneous mixture of literary description, narrative, poetry, letters, testimonials, notes, and philosophical fragments. Although Poe and Huysmans are clear intellectual precursors, the assortment is unassimilable to any clear-cut literary tradition. A kind of inverse or anti-Candide, it represents, not so much a work of fiction as an arguably unsuccessful but unarguably tenacious intellectual attempt to grasp and portray the activities of a consciousness unlike any other.”
Jed Deppman "Re-Presenting Paul Valery's Monsieur Teste," symploke - Volume 11, Number 1-2, 2003, pp. 197-211