hey all! thanks for a great meeting yesterday. wanted to post a few things i had mentioned during the meeting that perhaps not everyone has had the chance to read as yet. i don’t like finding myself talking about stuff without explaining myself, so…

i posted:

1) a couple versions of Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (also translated as “On the Concept of History”, originally articulated as part of The Arcades Project. (see under: a v helpful page from Stanford U: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/benjamin/) — the Theses is a text, strangely, that i have a “long term relationship” with and yet is one of those pieces that, like some poems, will feel completely understood by me one and then the next week, when returning to it again, is yet utterly strange and confusing to me… it is therefore, to me, a poem, if a most strange one, and one that i live with as it were.

2) a pdf of Jacques Derrida’s essay, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” originally a presentation given in 1966 at the conference at Johns Hopkins which (is remembered as having) introduced — a “French invasion” not unlike The Beatles’ “British invasion”? — poststructural theory to the U.S. — of which Derrida is one of the denizens. Pat Laurence, you had mentioned the trace last night; in this article JD talks, if I recall correctly, about the “trace of play” and indeed a # of the ideas that would become important Derrida concepts (and important concepts for poststructuralist thought) have some presence in this essay — which I love alot and also see as quite the dramatic performance! (if only I could have seen him swooshing his hair while giving this talk! Derrida actually passed away while I was teaching Derrida and my students were actually worried about me, Will you be able to go on teaching? ) …aside: i would say, Pat, that one of the big ideas related to all of this is Mary Ann’s “Elasticity,” the idea that language is elastic even when/if it doesn’t want to be — poetic language (which you mentioned last night) wants to be elastic, it plays up and on and heightens the elasticity that is resident in language and is the condition of language (despite the grammars). language itself, Derrida might say (except better, and more elastically, and he did say it thusly), is elastic — and the fact that it is? this is important in response to what Josh was saying last night, in response to regimes (eg., the fascist regime that stole our white house) and their propagandas. language deconstructs, cannot do otherwise than, even when it wants to hold together, and that is, for me, one of the cores in Derrida’s thinking and the question of traces.

3) i also put there a fascimile of Giorgio de Chirico’s painting, “The Enigma of Arrival and the Afternoon”, which I had mentioned and which i LOVE but don’t understand… however, given Mary Ann’s remembrances about “Elasticity” yesterday i am now thinking about silence in this painting for the first time and also, incidentally, ordered up my copy of the novel she also mentioned y’day, Hebdomeros, which… just arrived! i only ordered it late last night and (boom like magic!) it’s here! (see photo attached!)

4) lastly is a little twopart piece by Medbh McGuckian (Belfast poet, living, student of Seamus Heaney), the first part a poem called “Crystal Night” (the title translating the term “Kristallnacht,” the night of broken glass and the poem using the idea to talk about the nights of broken glass in her Belfast), the second part a diary, her first diary of the Troubles, called “Rescuers and White Cloaks.” there are two things that prompted my including it here: a) she appears to have taken on Walter Benjamin’s aim of (finally) producing a text that is entirely derivative, that is made up entirely of marked and unmarked citations (Benjamin believed that he would [finally] have produced his best work as author when doing that, which as far as I know he never did but which he approaches in the Theses, which he approaches in his work on tragedy, and so on — McGuckian appears to have done that but not because of Benjamin). i’m actually writing something, soon…, on her diaries and the Theses, treating Benjamin as a creative writer, poet, which i think is overdue and thinking about intertextuality as a version of translation, tho not translation per se. and thinking about all that in and on the concept of history… i just thought our friends here might find her and these pieces of some interest. ps: my book on silence is on this poet, btw.

please forgive me friends if i sound lecture-y, i really really really don’t mean to… just wanted to share some stuff that seemed important from y’day. the documents are in the “library” on this site.

also really really really looking fwd to being with this group next week again!

~maureen

Attachments:

You must be logged in to view attached files.

hey all! thanks for a great meeting yesterday. wanted to post a few things i had mentioned during the meeting that perhaps not everyone has had the chance to read as yet. i don’t like finding myself talking about stuff without explaining myself, so…

i posted:

1) a couple versions of Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (also translated as “On the Concept of History”, originally articulated as part of The Arcades Project. (see under: a v helpful page from Stanford U: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/benjamin/) — the Theses is a text, strangely, that i have a “long term relationship” with and yet is one of those pieces that, like some poems, will feel completely understood by me one and then the next week, when returning to it again, is yet utterly strange and confusing to me… it is therefore, to me, a poem, if a most strange one, and one that i live with as it were.

2) a pdf of Jacques Derrida’s essay, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” originally a presentation given in 1966 at the conference at Johns Hopkins which (is remembered as having) introduced — a “French invasion” not unlike The Beatles’ “British invasion”? — poststructural theory to the U.S. — of which Derrida is one of the denizens. Pat Laurence, you had mentioned the trace last night; in this article JD talks, if I recall correctly, about the “trace of play” and indeed a # of the ideas that would become important Derrida concepts (and important concepts for poststructuralist thought) have some presence in this essay — which I love alot and also see as quite the dramatic performance! (if only I could have seen him swooshing his hair while giving this talk! Derrida actually passed away while I was teaching Derrida and my students were actually worried about me, Will you be able to go on teaching? ) …aside: i would say, Pat, that one of the big ideas related to all of this is Mary Ann’s “Elasticity,” the idea that language is elastic even when/if it doesn’t want to be — poetic language (which you mentioned last night) wants to be elastic, it plays up and on and heightens the elasticity that is resident in language and is the condition of language (despite the grammars). language itself, Derrida might say (except better, and more elastically, and he did say it thusly), is elastic — and the fact that it is? this is important in response to what Josh was saying last night, in response to regimes (eg., the fascist regime that stole our white house) and their propagandas. language deconstructs, cannot do otherwise than, even when it wants to hold together, and that is, for me, one of the cores in Derrida’s thinking and the question of traces.

3) i also put there a fascimile of Giorgio de Chirico’s painting, “The Enigma of Arrival and the Afternoon”, which I had mentioned and which i LOVE but don’t understand… however, given Mary Ann’s remembrances about “Elasticity” yesterday i am now thinking about silence in this painting for the first time and also, incidentally, ordered up my copy of the novel she also mentioned y’day, Hebdomeros, which… just arrived! i only ordered it late last night and (boom like magic!) it’s here! (see photo attached!)

4) lastly is a little twopart piece by Medbh McGuckian (Belfast poet, living, student of Seamus Heaney), the first part a poem called “Crystal Night” (the title translating the term “Kristallnacht,” the night of broken glass and the poem using the idea to talk about the nights of broken glass in her Belfast), the second part a diary, her first diary of the Troubles, called “Rescuers and White Cloaks.” there are two things that prompted my including it here: a) she appears to have taken on Walter Benjamin’s aim of (finally) producing a text that is entirely derivative, that is made up entirely of marked and unmarked citations (Benjamin believed that he would [finally] have produced his best work as author when doing that, which as far as I know he never did but which he approaches in the Theses, which he approaches in his work on tragedy, and so on — McGuckian appears to have done that but not because of Benjamin). i’m actually writing something, soon…, on her diaries and the Theses, treating Benjamin as a creative writer, poet, which i think is overdue and thinking about intertextuality as a version of translation, tho not translation per se. and thinking about all that in and on the concept of history… i just thought our friends here might find her and these pieces of some interest. ps: my book on silence is on this poet, btw.

please forgive me friends if i sound lecture-y, i really really really don’t mean to… just wanted to share some stuff that seemed important from y’day. the documents are in the “library” on this site.

also really really really looking fwd to being with this group next week again!

~maureen

Attachments:

You must be logged in to view attached files.

[chiara caputi]

Thank you very much Maureen!

Ottieni Outlook per Android(https://aka.ms/ghei36)