“You are drowning in your own blood because you are afraid. The desire for absolution. The nostalgia for a shelter. A shelter. Like a spell.”
— Rhea Galanaki, tr. by Karen van Dyck, from “The Cake,” written c. 1980
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“To read is to find meanings, and to find meanings is to name them; but these named meanings are swept toward other names, names call to each other, reassemble, and their grouping calls for further naming: I name, I unname, I rename, so the text passes.”
—
Roland Barthes, S/Z
The reader is light, divided, dispersed, never still, and so is her reading.
“If this book of mine fails to take a straight course, it is because I am lost in a strange region: I have no map. I sometimes wonder whether anything that I am putting down here is true. I felt that afternoon such complete trust when she said to me suddenly, without being questioned, ‘I’ve never loved anybody or anything as I do you.’ It was as if, sitting there in the chair with a half-eaten sandwich in her hand, she was abandoning herself as completely as she had done, five minutes back, on the hardwood floor. We most of us hesitate to make so complete a statement—we remember and we foresee and we doubt. She had no doubt. The moment only mattered. Eternity is said to not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.”
— Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
Anonymous asked:
Can you explain Deconstruction? I'm interested but confused.
heteroglossia answered:
Who isn’t. Hah. When I was “beginning” (and the more you read of Derrida, the more you will see that one is simultaneously never beginning and always beginning) I compiled a list of every cogent definition/explanation of the term that I could find; I’ll link it here. Keep in mind, however, that by its nature deconstruction resists defining. Nevertheless, my personal favourite on that list: “[Deconstruction is] to be deeply concerned with the other of language.”
My own explanation, in so many words, would be to say that deconstruction is not synonymous with “destruction” but with, quite literally, de-constructing: “to undo the construction of, to take to pieces.” This undoing, this taking into pieces, is really a form of restructuring, rebuilding, re-figuring, not demolishing. To read and write deconstructively is to bring a text to life in a way it had not yet been alive or imagined, in a way it had been yet been “ordered” or “constructed,” still, by the sum of its parts, alive in its own difference.
This more practically involves a politcal praxis, an empathy toward the unforeseeable other, a focus on anti-essentialist discourse, and a recognition of the impossibility / the spectre of a transcendent or transparent language. Etc. Etc. Ad infinitum. Deconstruction is not a mode of reading but a mode of living–one which haunts.
“How changed, how full of ache, how gone,”
— John Keats, from The Complete Poems and Selected Letters; “Endymion,”
(via violentwavesofemotion)
“Memory, wherever you touch it, gives pain,”
— George Seferis, tr. by Rex Warner, from Selected Poems;“Memory I,”