Citational Fragments

Thinking on Paper

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“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

Friedrich Nietzsche

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“The assumption of a single subject is perhaps unneccesary: perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general? A kind of ‘aristocracy of cells’ in which dominion resides? To be sure, an aristocracy of equals, used to ruling jointly and understanding how to command? My hypothesis: The subject as multiplicity. ” (Nietzsche 1968: 270)

For a short but informative passage about Nietzsche and the musical rythms (Also pursued in different ways by Phillip Lacoue-Labarthe and Julia Kristeva) in his texts click here

Text reproduced from Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies, Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Indiana University Press, 1994: p.122

Image reproduced from http://philossophy.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/modernity/

Word Flesh

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Pre/face © Denise Startin

“FLASH – an instant of time or a timeless dream; atoms swollen beyond measure, atoms of a bond, a vision, a shiver, a still shapeless embryo, unnameable. Photo’s of what is not yet visible and which language necessarily surveys, from a very high altitude elusively. Words always too remote, too abstract to capture the subterranean swarm of seconds, insinuating themselves into unimaginable places.

Writing them down tests an argument, as does love. What is love for a woman, the same thing as writing. Laugh. Impossible. Flash of the unnamable, woven of abstractions to be torn apart. Let a body finally venture out of its shelter, expose itself in meaning beneath a veil of words. WORD FLESH.  From one to the other, eternally, fragmented visions, metaphors of the invisible.”

Stabat mater, Julia Kristeva quoted in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Harvard University Press, 1986 p.99/100

The Flesh of Words > Derma[uto]graphic drifts

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Dermographisme [aka dermographism, dermatographismm or “skin writing] – Démence précoce catatonique, from Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière, Paris, 1904.

“Language is understood by Merleau-Ponty according to the self enfolding of the flesh. Language is not dependent on any voice but is what gives voice to the world itself. He writes that “language is everything since it is the voice of no-one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves and the forests.” Language, in short, is the result of or is made possible by the dehiscence or folding back of the flesh of the world. [Invagination?]. In this sense language too is ‘another flesh’, another ‘wild being.’ Continue reading →

Not all those who wander are lost

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Walter Benjamin, Pariser Passagen

In the Field Guide To Getting Lost Rebecca Solnit quotes a question from the pre-socratic philosopher Meno. “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” p.4 […] and goes on to write “To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrendering, a psychic state achievable through geography.” p.6

The current exhibition at the British Library 25th September celebrates this psychic state through the relationship of writing in Britain. Exhibits include extracts from diaries, notebooks, letters, artworks and sound recordings from a wealth of poets and writers including William Blake, Ted Hughes, George Eliot, James Joyce, J G Ballard, John Lennon, Harold Pinter and more. Writing speaks of walking and wandering [wondering], of finding and losing, of coming and going, of boundaries and horizons, pilgrimages and wild places. Writing and landscape mark each other reciprocally producing dream landscapes, barren landscapes, hostile landscapes, loving landscapes and sacred spaces where the human being who is most of the time caught up in human doing, can take time out and dwell [in the Heideggerian sense of the term] in being. To experience its chthonic heartbeat and return itself to its natural rhythms through walking and what is writing if not a walk on the wild side?

The title of this quote is reproduced from the exhibition and is from J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring.

Quotes reproduced from Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Canongate Books 2011. Image reproduced from http://www.hatjecantz.de/controller.php?cmd=detail&titzif=00002894&lang=en