kristeva-jouissance

September 19, 2024

As for jouissance, be it of language, meaning, or transcendence grasped from within, in pure literary style, you are barking up the wrong tree… All that remains is the tune, without notes… Not even the worship of Death… The three dots… Less than nothing, or more… Something else… The consuming of Everything, of Nothing, through style… The greatest homage to the Word that was not made flesh in order to hoist itself up into Man with a capital letter but to join, body and language being mingled, those intermediate states, those, non-states, neither subject nor object, where you is alone, singular, untouchable, unsociable, discredited, at the end of a night that is as particular as it is incommensurable.

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Thought:

“I went to Oxford in 1979 to study classics and philosophy; I wanted the kind of formation that lunatic Pound had had, I also wanted to be able to tell a good argument from bad. So I spent an unconscionable amount of time reading the whole of Homer in Greek, the whole of Virgil in Latin (among many others); I decided at one point that I could not know anything about Greek tragedy unless I had read all extant texts, so I read the whole of Greek tragedy one summer. I didn’t have much money; I didn’t have much of a social life.”

Helen DeWitt

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