Writing, whatever else it is doing, is always getting at something that it never quite obtains. There is always something unsaid, something that clings to writing like a shadow.
The demand for clarity, in this sense, depends on repression. First, to make such a demand one has to deny the inherent excess in writing. It always goes beyond meaning, because it is matter: which is to say, it is sensuous, aesthetic. [...] Writing does not simply store information but, through th…
Over and over I replay in my head the implications of what we've just done. We told the Haitians that we couldn't physically stop their government from torturing and killing, but that if they told us in detail who was doing it and how, we'd bear witness and seek justice. Eventually the world would …
In which some rarefied notion of ‘civility’ is prized above all else
So what O’Hagan does, in summoning the spectres of his childhood (a Daily Mail reader’s fantasy of hard-working salt o’t’earth types who “refused to see themselves as victims”), is offer an anticipatory self-defence that appeals to precisely the sort of material analysis he is attempting to discred…
