Suchergebnisse

This essay argues that Derrida's exposition of the quasi-transcendental adverbiality of yes unfolds by marginalizing the quasi-transcendental conjunctionality of and. I begin by exploring the challenges of conceptualizing yes, a unique verbal element that resists determination as one word among others even as it appears to be a formative force that underwrites any and every word. The second part of the essay shows how Derrida downplays the role of and in the course of elaborating his theory of Joycean yes-laughter. I conclude by asking what it would mean to have the last word on a conjunction such as and, which by nature creates connections more than it brings sequences to a close. This question, I suggest, is crucial for understanding the powers and limits of language that claims to say 'yes' to language.

AbstractTracing a trajectory of literary and philosophical texts from the ancient atomists to the late twentieth century, this essay explores the surprisingly consistent role that dust has played in the conceptualization of language. In Lucretius, Sophocles, and the New Testament, dust is as much a standard of representation as it is one object of representation among others. In the most extreme case, it becomes the defining medium of inscription. In Paul Celan's work, the attempt to articulate a rhetoric of negation that will put language on something other than a dusty footing comes perilously close to demonstrating that all verse unfolds under the aegis of the word dust. The essay closes by suggesting that Jorie Graham's poetry offers a new perspective on what it would mean to read the surface of a text, particularly when that text is dusty.

This essay explores the curious role that the word certain plays in Derrida's corpus and the texts of his inheritors. Both less and more than a mere adjective, certain posits a standard for verbal specificity that invariably proves impossible to meet. In this regard, certain is crucial for the conceptualization of syntactic praxes that escape the hegemony of the classical subject-predicate schema. In Derrida's reading of Paul Celan, poetry is understood as the art form that most directly confronts the demands of the language of certain.

This essay argues that a demand to be written on is intrinsic to architectural constructs. Beginning with the debates that surrounded the renovation of the Berlin Reichstag and the decision to preserve the graffiti left on it by conquering Soviet soldiers in 1945, wall writing is shown to be a profoundly unstable medium that fractures the historicity of its host surfaces even as it highlights their authority as systems of protection or exclusion. In Brassaï's photographs of the streets of modernist Paris, graffiti is understood as a uniquely auto-exhibitive discourse, a script that constantly exposes the limits of writing. In Walter Benjamin's study of Bertolt Brecht's poetry, this lapidary style is characterized as a kind of ex-scription that counters the formative, singularizing force of inscription with a trace logic that disarticulates the very schemas of surface and display that appear to ground it. Benjamin continues this discussion in his Arcades Project , revealing architecture and poetry to be two dimensions of a broader dynamic in which any sentence is a gesture toward the wall it will mark, if not render ephemeral, while any wall is a gesture toward the sentence that it will put on display and thereby potentially evacuate of its expressive or performative power.

jan mieszkowski is Assistant Professor of German and Humanities at Reed College. He has recently completed a book on the models of productivity and praxis that arise at the intersection of German Romanticism and classical political economy. His new project, Murmurs of Democracy, explores the politics of poetic abnegation from Novalis to Beckett.