Duras: “not measurable on the scales of knowledge”

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“May ‘68 has shown that without project, without conjuration, in the suddenness of a happy meeting, like a feast that breached the admitted and expected social norms, explosive communication could affirm itself (affirm itself beyond the usual forms of affirmation) as the opening that gave permission to everyone, without distinction of class, age, sex or culture, to mix with the first comer as if with an already loved being, precisely because he was the unknown-familiar. [...] “Spontaneous” communication…because of that one could have the presentiment that with authority overthrown or, rather, neglected, a sort of communism declared itself, a communism of a kind never experienced before and which no ideology was able to recuperate or claim as its own.”

“declaration of impotence” [representational politics as declaration of impotence]

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“…evil as ‘the malady of death,’ … concerns first of all the other, and the other — someone else — is the innocent, the child, the sick person, whose complaint echoes as the ‘unheard of’ scandal, because it exceeds understanding, while pledging me to respond to it without my having the power to do so.”

“Everything is decided by an initial ‘you’…”

(Vous devriez ne pas la connaître, l’avoir trouvée partout à la fois, dans un hôtel, dans une rue, dans un train, dans un bar, dans un livre, dans un film, en vous-même, en vous, en toi…)

“Love may be a stuumbling block for ethics, unless love simply puts ethics into question by imitating it. Likewise the distribution of the human between male and female creates problems inthe various versions of the Bible. It is well known, and there was no need to wait for Bizet to learn that ‘love has never known any law.’ Is this therefore a return to the wilderness that does not even transgress prohibitions…cannot be satisfied with a society of two where the reciprocity of the ‘I-you’ would reign, but prefers to invoke the original, precreational chaos, the night without end, the outside, the fundamental unhinging? (For the Greeks, according to Phaedrus, Love is nearly as ancient as Chaos.)”

“…for the ‘I’ and the ‘other’ do not live in the same time, are never togethr (synchronously), can therefore not be contemporary, but separated (even when united) by a ‘not yet’ which goes hand in hand with an ‘already no longer.’”

“A death, by definition, without glory, without consolation, without recourse, which no other disappearance can equal, except perhaps for that disappearance that inscribes itself in writing, when the work which is its drifting is from the onset the renunciation of creating a work, indicating only the space in which resounds, for all and for each, and thus for nobody, the always yet to come words of the unworking.”

(Blanchot)

The Global Pool of Money

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=355

Clarice Lispector entrevista (parte 1)

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since feeling is first

who pays any attention 

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you;

 

wholly to be a fool

while Spring is inthe world

 

my blood approves, 

and kisses are a far better fate

than wisdom

lady i swear by all flowers. Don\’t cry

–the best gesture of my brain is less than

your eyelids\’ flutter which says

 

we are for eachother; then

laugh, leaning back in my arms

for life\’s not a paragraph

 

And death i think is no parenthesis

what does literature have to do with the real world?

If I want to talk about politics what does that have to do with literature? How can I make the leap from the literary to “real” world? Who cares, or why should one care, about literature anyway?

I hate these questions and yet they are the heart of the matter. It is one thing to say, á la Barthes, that the same cultural codes that organize our understanding of the world shape literary texts.  This is a more persuasive answer than various theories of mimesis, even if mimesis may claim longevity in a way that nonrepresentation theories of language can.

Language, breaking language, recreating meaning: these are the aspects of the literary that have the strongest political potential. Is this to say that the literary embodies language differently than other forms of linguistic expression? What is special about literature? Literature has the ability to reveal the non-representational quality of language in a way that a legal decision (for example) does not. But what is the political potential of literature? It is not enough to point to the novels, poems, or literary experiments that have put pressure on the fault lines of language-as-carrier-of-meaning?

Duras: en rachâchant

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notice the empty chair that the professor keeps trying to fill

and the little boy’s words that repeatedly dislodge him from his position of mastery.

“un nouveau method” he says

the teacher never learns what he does not know

the little boy, Ernesto, earnestly and wordlessly tries to convey a different sense of the world. finally, frustrated, he leaves. His empty chair evoking the withdrawal from a position of submission in relation to knowledge. His empty chair is yet still more full of potential than the empty chair that the professor-master attempts to occupy.

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what the child knows cannot be conveyed through the same words that the professor uses. the de-linked sound-image couplet suggests that the new method of knowing is between: between sound and image, between word and thing, between sense and meaning.

(punctuation art)

write away…

Punctuation, literature, memory, forgetting… I have to figure out what these things have to do with one another.