I'm not exactly sure what to do with or make of this work. Derrida is both more engaging and more disengaging in this than in the previous work of his we read for the class (Archive Fever)--meaning that in this text I find myself "discovering" nuggets of information that seem like tiny lumps of gold all the while swimming in a market where coal is the predominant currency.
The text, as it unfolds itself to itself (as well as to others) seems to provide many of the answers and insights to the issues that I want to provide, that I want to "find," that I want to share...as such, its genius silences most attempts (at genius insights?) because you realize that you can never be the first to discover and share what the author has set up for you (to be the first?) to discover and share.
As such, my(unspeakable/ unutterable?) thoughts linger essentially on the following passage:
Genius that is a gift of nature is not genius. Genius that gives out of natural generosity gives nothing. A gift that knows what it is giving to someone who knows what it is he [sic] is receiving is not a gift. It repossesses itself and cancels itself out in awareness and in gratitude, in the symbolic, the contract, economic circulation, in the symbolic. Silent genius surpasses both the symbolic and the imaginary, it grapples with the impossible. (75, my emphasis).
Derrida, Jacques. Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, & Genius: The Secrets of the Archive. Trans. Beverley Bie Brahic. New York: Columbia UP, 2003.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment