That is a quote and an idea to really crack a hole in the skull! <fend le
crane> - it does open onto all sorts of views -
And what I like about RS's use of Levinas is that it is appropriation, using
useful bits, applying them to poetry, there's more quotes from Levinas & an
explication of the face to face, the dialogiic encounter with the face of
the other, in RS's Anti-Orpheus e-book free to download at Shearsman:
http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/ebooks/ebooks_pdfs/Sheppard.pdf
Also among many other uses of Levinas there's an essay which I really find
useful by Steve Mcaffery called 'The scandal of sincerity: towards a
Levinasian poetics' (in Pretexts) which looks at Cage, Anin, Burroughs and
Tom Phillips.
Best,
Edmund
Saying and said
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Fantastic quote from Levinas in an interview with Robert Sheppard on
Edmund's blog "Intercapilliary Space":
'Man can give himself in saying to the point of poetry - or he can withdraw
into the non-saying of lies. Language as saying is an ethical openness to
the other; as that which is said - reduced to a fixed identity or
synchronized presence - it is an ontological closure of the other."
Lying as non-saying, fixity, is a less definitive and yet more precise
definition than anything else I can think of. And the quote opens
beautifully into a thinking of what poetry is.
The interview itself is well worth reading - at
http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/06/signature-ethics.html
Best
A
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