Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Jacques Derrida: DISSEMINATION (AC25.D45513)

To a considerable degree, we have already said all we meant to say. Our lexicon at any rate is not far from being exhausted. With the exception of this or that supplement, our questions will have nothing more to name but the texture of the text, reading and writing, mastery and play, the paradoxes of supplementarity, and the graphic relations between the living and the dead: with the textual, the textile and the histological. We will keep within the limits of this tissue: between the metaphor of the ‘histos’ and the question of ‘histos’ of metaphor.

Since we have already said everything, the reader must bear with us if we continue on awhile. If we extend ourselves by force of play. If we then ‘write’ a bit: on Plato, who has already said on the ‘Phaedrus’ that writing can only repeat (itself), that it “always signifies (semainei) the same” and that it is a “game” (paidia).

[Note: “‘Histos: anything set upright’, hence: I. mast. II. ‘beam’ of a loom, which stood upright, instead of lying horizontal as in our looms (except in the weaving methods used by the Gobelins and in India) to which the threads of the warp are attached, hence: 1. loom; 2. the warp fixed to the loom, hence, the woof; 3. woven cloth, piece of canvas; 4. by anal. spider web; or honeycom of bees. III. rod, wand, stick. IV. by anal. shinbone, leg.”]

Monday, May 23, 2005

I will not be able to borrow your voice anymore, it seems. You will tell me you have a life; you will not be able to call. But then I will ask you this: What child is a child if he loves not stars for not every star falls on his lap? Even after this letter is finished; after my watch, like me, dies of exhaustion from running in circles in vain; after I see my world in ruins and not have the strength to build it back; after I realise that, this winter, every word I speak will disintegrate into this Wichitan fog and every castle I build, fall from the air. Even after I have stopped loving you; I will start loving you all over again.
FOUR LINES

If it is the candle that you have lit
Why is it my heart that is on fire?
If it is not your soul that stares at me
Why is it my soul that burns with desire?
Love, like sexuality, is a historical construct.
--
L. , I think, specializes in ENT. She studies the Queen’s tongue.
What in the name of the holy fig am I doing here?