Poststructuralism/ Deconstruction/ Postmodernism Passages Flashcards
Foucault - “What is an Author” (1969)- 1635/ 390
What?
“one has already called back into question the absolute character and founding role of the subject… it is a matter of depriving the subject (or its substitute) of its role as originator, and of analyzing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse… The question then becomes: How can one reduce the great peril… with which fiction threatens our world? The answer is: One can reduce it with the author. The author allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty… with one’s discourses and their significations. The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning. As a result, we must entirely reverse the traditional idea of the author… the author is not an indefinite source of significations that fill a work; the author does not precede the works ; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses”
Foucault- “What is an Author” (1969) - 379
What? Theory of the work
“At this point, however, a problem arises: Whit is a work? What is this curious unity which we designate a work? Of what elements is it composed? Is it not what an author has written? Difficulties appear immediately. If an individual were not an author, could we say that what he wrote, said, left behind in his papers, or what has been colected of his remarks, could be called a “work”?… Even when an individual has been accepted as an author, we must still ask whether everything that he wrote, said, or left behind is part of his work. The problem is both theoretical and technical… How can one define a work amid the millions of traces left by someone after his death?… it is not enough to declare we should do without the writer (the author) and study the work itself. The word work and the unity that it designates are probably as problematic as the status of the author’s individuality.”
Barthes - “The Death of the Author” (1967)- 1469
Death
“Once the author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a concept suits criticism very well… when the author has been found, the text is ‘explained’- victory to the critic… In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered… the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refusing to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases- reason, science, law.”
Derrida - “Différance” (1968) - 135-6
“Does not the dis not the dis of différance refer us beyond the history of Being, and also beyond our language, and everything that can be named in it? In the language of Being, does not it call for a necessarily violent transformation of this language by an entirely other language?”
“There is no essence of différance; it (is) that which not only could never be appropriated in the as such of its name or its appearing, but also that which threatens the authority of the as such in general, of the presence of the thing itself in its essence. That there is not a proper essence of différance at this point, implies that there is neither a Being nor truth of the play of writing such as it engages différance.”
“Such is the question: the alliance of speech and Being in the unique word, in the finally proper name. And such is the question inscribed in the simulates affirmation of différance. It bears (on) each member of this sentence: “Being / speaks / always and everywhere / throughout / language.”
also see the footnote on 135
Derrida - “Signature Event Context” (1971) - 10
“Let us consider any element of spoken language, be it a small or large unit. The first condition of its functioning is its delineation with regard to a certain code; but I prefer not to become too involved here with this concept of code which does not seem very reliable to me; lets us say that a certain self-identity of this element (mark, sign, etc.) is required to permit its recognition and repetition. Through empirical variations of tone, voice, etc… we must be able to recognize the identity, roughly speaking, of a signifying form… this unity of the signifying form only constitutes itself by virtue of its iterability, by the possibility of its being repeated in the absence not only of its “referent,” which is self-evident, but in the absence of a determinate signified or of the intention of actual signification, as well as of all intention of present communication. This structural possibility of being weaned from the referent or from the signified (hence from communication and from its context) seems to me to make every mark, including those which are oral, a grapheme in general; which is to say… a differential mark cut off from its putative ‘production’ or origin. And I shall even extend this law to all ‘experience’ in general if it is conceded that there is no experience consisting of pure presence but only chains of differential marks.”
Derrida - “Structure Sign and Play” (1966) - 93
“Besides the tension between play and history, there is also the tension between play and presence. Play is the disruption of presence. The presence of an element is always a signifying and substitutive reference inscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a chain. Play is always play of absence and presence, but if it is to be thought radically, play must be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence., Being must be conceived as presence or absence on the basis of the possibility of play and not the other way around. If Levi-Strauss, better than any other, has brought to light the play of repetition and the repetition of play, one no less perceives in his work a sort of ethic of presence, an ethic of nostalgia for origins, an ethic of archaic and natural innocence, of a purity of presence and self-presence in speech-an ethic, nostalgia, and even remorse, which he often presents as the motivation of the ethnological project when he moves toward the archaic societies which are exemplary societies in his eyes.”
“There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology-in other words, throughout his entire history- has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play.”
That there is not proper essence of différance at this point, implies that there is neither a Being nor truth of the play of writing such as engages différance.
Derrida - “Différance” - 136
We believe only in a Kafka politics that is neither imaginary nor symbolic. We believe only in one or more Kafka machines that are neither structure nor phantasm. … A writer isn’t a writer-man; he is a machine-man, and an experimental man (who thereby ceases to be a man in order to become an ape or a beetle, or a dog, or mouse, a becoming-animal, a becoming-inhuman, since it is actually through voice and through sound and through a style that one becomes an animal, and certainly through the force of sobriety).
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 7
There is nothing that is major or revolutionary except the minor.
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 26
“It is among the figures of style, or tropes—from the verb “to fin” [trouver] comes to us—that this name is, in fact, found. This name is metonymy. … [ship example]… This shows that the connection between ship and sail is nowhere other than in the signifier, and that metonymy is based on the the word-to-word nature of this connection.
Lacan Letter 421
We see that metaphor is situated at the precise point at which meaning is produced in nonmeaning—that is, at the passage which, as Freud discovered, when crossed in the opposite direction, gives rise to the word that is “the word” [“le mot”] par excellence in French, the word that has no other patronage there than the signifier espirit—and at which it becomes palpable that, in deriding the signifier, man defies his very destiny.
Lacan Letter 423
Metaphor’s two-stage mechanism is the very mechanism by which symptoms, in the analytic sense, are determined. Between the enigmatic signifier of sezual trauma and the term it comes to replace in a current signifying chain, a spark flies that fixes in a symptom—a metaphor in which flesh or function is taken as a signifying element—the signification, that is inaccessible to the conscious subject, by which the symptom may be dissolved.
Lacan Letter 431
It is by touching, however lightly, on man’s relation to the signifier—in this case, by changing the procedures of exegesis—that one changes the course of his history by modifying the moorings of his being.
Lacan Letter 438
But the fact that the word designates a form of writing indicates the compulsion to return to a literary mode of being, as a form of language that knows itself to be mere repetition, mere fiction and allegory, forever unable to participate in the spontaneity of action or modernity.
The movement of this text—that could be shown to parallel the development of Baudelaire’s poetry as it moves from the sensory richness of the earlier poems to their gradual allegorization in the prose versions of the Spleen de Paris—recurs with various degrees
of explicitness in all writers and measures the legitimacy
claim to be called writers. Modernity turns out to be indeed one of the concepts by means of which the distinctive nature of literature can be revealed in all its intricacy. No wonder it had to become a central issue in critical discussions and a source of torment to writers who have to confront it as a challenge to their vocation.
De Man Literary 399-400
This grotesque language, particularly in its oldest form, was oriented toward the world and toward all the world’s phenomena in their condition of unfinished metamorphosis: the passing from night to morning, from winter to spring, from the old to the new, from death to birth. Therefore, this talk showers both compliments and curses…
Bakhtin Rebelais 690
