Trembling with Desire

"Language is skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the top of words. My language trembles with desire"

Barthes

Literature

"Literature holds the mechanisms of repair. Literature has the capacity to ameliorate our society's ills...Literature stanches that wasteful draining away of conscience and memory. Literature experiences us as multidimensional persons. Literature deals with consequences."

Toni Morrison

Nothing in the world makes sense

"It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything. The stupider they are, the wider they conceive their horizons to be. And if an artist decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees--this in itself constitutes a considerable clarity in the realm of thought, and a great step forward."

Chekov

Books that bite us

"Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book does not shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe."

-Kafka

Words by Anne Sexton

Be careful of words, 

even the miraculous ones. 
For the miraculous we do our best, 
sometimes they swarm like insects 
and leave not a sting but a kiss. 
They can be as good as fingers. 
They can be as trusty as the rock 
you stick your bottom on. 
But they can be both daisies and bruises.

Yet I am in love with words. 
They are doves falling out of the ceiling. 
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap. 
They are the trees, the legs of summer, 
and the sun, its passionate face.

Yet often they fail me. 
I have so much I want to say, 
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc. 
But the words aren't good enough, 
the wrong ones kiss me. 
Sometimes I fly like an eagle 
but with the wings of a wren.

But I try to take care 
and be gentle to them. 
Words and eggs must be handled with care. 
Once broken they are impossible 

things to repair

History

The meaning of history is disclosed by language, determined by it. Language does not unfold within history. History unfolds within language

On Saussure

The object of man's conflicts

In appearance, speech may well be of little account, but prohibitions surrounding it reveal its links with desire and power. This should not be very surprising, for psychoanalysis has already shown us that speech is not merely the medium that manifests-or dissembles- desire; it is also the object of desire. Similarly, historians have constantly impressed upon us that speech is no mere verbalization of conflicts and systems of domination, but that it is the very object of man's conflicts.
-Foucault

Myth and Language

Myth is language: to be known, myth has to be told; it is part of human speech

A small scratch

I didn't notice, each of your words was like small scratch and I felt like I was gonna get away unharmed, but by the time you were done I was empty and everything on the inside was out.

-disembodied poetics

Form

Language is a form, not a substance

-Saussure

Nature is Written

"Why write? Just as life's squirming past leaves its traces in Earth's crust, so the here and now, exploding simultaneously and surreally with the reality of possibility and possibility of reality, is all that we have ever had. Why record it? It records itself. The authors of the Good Book were right: Nature begins as a text as well as earth. It is silly to write because everything is already written, at least to someone who truly knows how to read"

D. Sagan

The Ultimate Horizon

If phenomenology is precisely the science of the appearing-as-appearing, language is its ultimate horizon: the act of bringing things to light as appearances which does not itself appear as such

Kearney On Heidegger

On Structuralism

It is not man who speaks language but language who speaks man

Objective of the Human Sciences

The objective of the human sciences is

the expressive and speaking existence.

-Mikhail Bakhtin

The being of literature

Language is the being of literature , its very world

-Barthes