More Last Words

January 13, 2013September 23, 2014startind

The Secret Language without a Secret

“It is not a noise, although at its approach everything becomes noise around us (and we must remember that we do not know today what such a noise might be.) Rather it is language: it speaks, it doesn’t stop speaking, it is like the void that speaks, a light murmuring, insistent, indifferent, that is probably the same for everyone, that is without secret and yet isolates each person, separates him from others, from the world and from himself, leading him through mocking labyrinths, drawing him always farther away, by a fascinating repulsion, below the ordinary world of daily speech. Continue reading →

The Last Word

January 8, 2013September 23, 2014startind

Death of the Last Writer

“We can dream about the last writer, with whom would disappear, without anyone noticing it, the little mystery of writing. To give a touch of the fantastic to the situation, we can imagine that Rimbaud, even more mythical than the real one, hears that speech fall silent in him, and it dies with him. Finally we can suppose that, throughout the world circle of civilization, this final end would be noted. What would be the result? Apparently a great silence. That is what it is polite to say when some writer disappears: a voice has fallen silent, a way of thinking has disappeared. What a silence then if no-one else spoke in that exalted way that is the language of texts that come accompanied by the rumour of their reputation. Continue reading →

Book

January 7, 2013September 23, 2014startind

Jasper Johns, Book 1957, Encaustic on book and wood

“The book’s obviousness, its palpable presence, is thus such that we have to say that it exists and is present since without it nothing could ever be present, and yet that it never quite conforms to the conditions of real existence.” Maurice Blanchot

Text reproduced from A Survey of materiality in Literature by James Stuart, for the rest of the article click here

Image reproduced from The disappearance of objects: New York art and the rise of the postmodern city

Incommunicado

December 20, 2012September 23, 2014startind

Dear Reader

Many apologies for the lack of continuous activity on the blog of late. Having recently produced a thesis for the MA I am undertaking (the effect of which has been to somewhat ironically kill my voracious writing and reading habits) the process has left me textually satiated, linguistically engorged and physically sick.

The thesis was part performative, part theoretical, part confession, part autobiography (which of course is a fallacy since one can only live one’s life not write it).The philosopher Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe develops this rhythmic train of thought particularly in relation to autobiography and music; ‘the need to tell, to confess, write oneself.’ [1] Perhaps having partly written myself into textual oblivion through examining my haecceity one has been left comparatively mute. To draw upon an analogy between writing and excrement ‘I’ have been evacuated. ‘I’ write myself, ‘I’ kill myself (after Derrida).

In Footnote 115 of the thesis I discussed the relation of the textual fetish and desire, here I quote myself “Elizabeth Grosz explains there are ‘two conceptions of desire – negative and positive.’ The one that concerns us here in relation to Freud and Lacan is desire as lack, that is ‘a yearning for what is lost, absent, impossible. Desire is posited as an economy of scarcity, where reality itself is missing something (the object whose attainment would yield completion), a linked to the death drive (the struggle for mutual recognition) and annihilation (which the object of desire threatens). Continue reading →

Thinking on Paper

November 7, 2012November 18, 2014startind

“A radical experiment in design and typography Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Un Coup De Des (A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance 1897) privileges form over content or rather form as content , such that blank space, varied typography and the material folds of the book augment and even transform the semantics of the text. As Mallarmé writes in his preface to the first issue of the poem:

“The paper intervenes every time an image on its own, ceases or retires within the page, accepting the succession of the others, and it is not a question unlike the usual state of affairs, of regular sound effects or verses – rather of prismatic subdivisions of the idea, the instant when they appear and during which their cooperation lasts , in some exact mental setting. The text imposes itself in various places, near or far from the latent guiding thread, according to what seems to be the probable sense.”

(For the French version and (albeit different) English translation click here.

Text reproduced from http://directory.eliterature.org/node/573 Image reproduced from http://www.wookmark.com/image/8624/crumpled-white-paper-texture-by-melemel-jpeg-2048-1536