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 'organ of receiving' any work of art, wrote Adorno in Minima Moralia, is 'fantasy'. If writing, even at its most didactic, is an art, this would suggest something quite unsettling. It would imply that writers are, in part, at the mercy of the reader's fantasy life, and the importance th…
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…
[...] poetry, as Terry Eagleton argues, 'is something which is done to us, not just said to us. The meaning of its words is closely bound up with the experience of them.' The separation of truth from the materiality of language is a product of modernity, linguistic specialisation, and a specificall…
[...] poetry, as Terry Eagleton argues, 'is something which is done to us, not just said to us. The meaning of its words is closely bound up with the experience of them.' The separation of truth from the materiality of language is a product of modernity, linguistic specialisation, and a specificall…
