Things You Cannot Do With Words

[thingsyoucannotdowithwords]

[thingsyoucannotdowithwords]

[thingsyoucannotdowithwords]

And if the assumption of responsibility for ones discourse leads to the conclusion that all conclusions are genuinely provisional and therefore inconclusive, that all origins are similarly unoriginal, the responsibility itself must cohabit with frivolity, this need not be the case for gloom (xiii) ... Derrida seems to shown-nostalgia for lost presence...The structure of reference works and can go on working not because of the identity between these so-called component parts of the sign, but because of their relationship of difference. The sign marks a place of difference.(xvi)

Translators Preface, Of Grammatology, Gayatri Spivak

[lovevoltaireusapart]

Language sustains the body not by bringing it into being or feeding it in a literal way; rather, it is by being interpellated within the terms of language that a certain social existence of the body first becomes possible. To understand this, one must imagine an impossible scene, that of a body that has not yet been given social definition, a body that is, strictly speaking, not accessible to us, that nevertheless becomes accessible on the occasion of an address, a call, an interpellation that does not “discover” this body, but constitutes it fundamentally. — Excitable Speech, Judith Butler, p 5 [information theory]

Time Immemorial.:  

[lovevoltaireusapart]

[timeimmemorial]

Language sustains the body not by bringing it into being or feeding it in a literal way; rather, it is by being interpellated within the terms of language that a certain social existence of the body first becomes possible. To understand this, one must imagine an impossible scene, that of a body...

[timeimmemorial]

Charles Thurston Thompson, Autoportrait, 1853

[timeimmemorial]

In fact, I’ve just published a study that shows that almost all Nobel laureates in the sciences are actively engaged in arts as adults. They are twenty-five times as likely as average scientist to sing, dance, or act; seventeen times as likely to be an artist; twelve times more likely to write...

[thingsyoucannotdowithwords]

Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me any thing, to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about.

Walden; Henry D Thoreau

[undr]

Victor Meeussen

Wapperend wasgoed in de omgeving van Scheveningen (1950-1959)

[insipidexpectations-deactivated]

[timeimmemorial]

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according to which nation. French has no word for home, and we have no word for strict...

[thingsyoucannotdowithwords]

Postcards from Socrates to Freud.

[5th June 1977] I would like to write you so simply, so simply, so simply. Without having anything ever catch the eye, excepting yours alone, and what is more while erasing all the traits, even the most inapparent ones, the ones that mark the tone, or the belonging to a genre ( the letter for example or the postcard), so that above all the language remains self-evidently secret, as if it were being invented at every step, and as if it were burning immediately, as soon as any third party would set eyes on it.

Jacques Derrida (11)

[thingsyoucannotdowithwords]

Only in the Meantime You return, usual day, shattering the air right where the air had grown like walls. But it illuminates us brutally and in the simple nausea of your clarity we know when our eyes will drop, our heart, the skin of our memories. Of course, in the meantime, there are prayers, there are petals, there are rivers, there is tenderness like a damp wind. Only in the meantime.

Mario Beneditti; Only in the Meantime and Office Poems

[thingsyoucannotdowithwords]

As Joseph Brodsky wrote: if one were to assign the life of an exiled writer a genre, it would have to be tragicomedy. Because of his previous incarnation, he is capable of appreciating the social and material advantages of democracy far more intensely than its natives do. Yet for precisely the same reason (whose main by-product is the linguistic barrier), he finds himself totally unable to play any meaningful role in his new society. The democracy into which he has arrived provides him with physical safety but renders him insignificant. And the lack of significance is what no writer, exile or not, can take.

Meerzon, Yana. Performance, Exile and America in “The American Landscape Reconsidered: On the Theatricality of Urban America in Russian Émigré Writings, with Special Focus on the Works of Vasily Aksyonov.”,  Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

[thingsyoucannotdowithwords]

He who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinise its estranged form, the objective power that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses. Theodor Adorno. Minima Moralia.

[thingsyoucannotdowithwords]

   The consideration of the maternal is, by necessity, a foray into origins, an expedition into the nature of beginnings. More specifically, it throws critical light on the fundamental notion of the beginning pervading the traditional patriarchal space and logocentric history of Western provenance.

     In Search of the Maternal; Kraus

[yeahbirds]

Irigaray’s response to this exclusion of the feminine from the economy of representation is effectively to say, Fine, I don’t want to be in your economy anyway, and I’ll show you what this unintelligible receptacle can do to your system;

Judith Butler. Bodies That Matter.

i lol’d quite much.

(via yeahbirds)

[amongthegoblins-blog]

“In Wolf Erlbruch’s Duck, Death and the Tulip (2011), Duck befriends death.  At the very end of the book, she dies. Death carries her to the river, and, placing a tulip on her chest, “laid her gently on the water and nudged her on her way.””