© Denise Startin

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 →