October 12, 2004
-
The Last Enemy
(See April 30)
“I was also impressed… by the intensity
of Continental modes of literary-critical thought….On the Continent, studies of Hölderlin and Rousseau, of Poe,
Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rilke, of Rabelais, Nietzsche, Kafka, and
Joyce, challenged not only received ideas on the unity of the work of art
but many aspects of western thought itself. Derrida, at the same
time, who for nearly a decade found a home in Yale’s
Comparative Literature Department, expanded the concept of textuality to
the point where nothing could be demarcated as ‘hors d’œuvre’ and escape the literary-critical eye. It was uncanny to feel
hierarchic boundaries waver until the commentary entered the text—not
literally, of course, but in the sense that the over-objectified
work became a reflection on its own status, its stability as an object
of cognition. The well-wrought urn contained mortal ashes.”– Geoffrey Hartman, A Life of Learning
In memory of
Jacques Derrida and James Chace,
both of whom died in Paris on
Friday, Oct. 8, 2004… continued…
(See previous three entries.)
Orson Welles
Mate in 2
V. Nabokov, 1919 “The last enemy
that shall be destroyed is death.”
– Saul of Tarsus, 1 Cor. 15:26
Knight move,
courtesy of V. Nabokov:Nfe5 mate
Knight:
Sir John Falstaff
(See Chimes at Midnight.)
