Hi all,
This post has nothing directly to do with Shakespeare, so my apologies for posting it in advance. I have an essay just out out on "posthumography" in Rhizomes.20 Summer 2010 that may be of interest to you. I may be develop it in relation to Shakespeare.
My essay is entitled:
"Putting Your Papers in Order: The Matter of Kierkegaard's Writing Desk, Goethe's Files, and Derrida's Paper Machine,
Or, the Philology and Philosophy of Publishing After Death."
http://www.rhizomes.net/issue20/
Thanks for your patience.
Best,
Richard
Professor Richard Burt
Department of English and Film and Media Studies Program
4314 Turlington Hall
P.O. Box 117310
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL
32611-7310
Phone: 352 373-3560
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/~burt/burtindex.html
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/~burt/Citations.html
And yet reading must find its rhythm, the right measure and cadence. In the measure, at least, that it attempts to bring us to grasp a meaning that does not come through understanding. Let us recall the epigraph to Allegories of Reading: "Quand on lit trop vite ou trop doucement on n'entend rien.' Pascal." (When one reads too swiftly or too slowly one understands nothing.) One should never forget the authoritative ellipsis of this warning. But at what speed ought one to have read it? On the very threshold of the book, it might have been swiftly overlooked.
--Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, Revised Edition, note 3, p. 88
But this very understanding was gained through the suffering of wanting to publish but not being able to do it.
--Søren Kierkegaard, deleted from the posthumously published The Point of View on My Work as an Author, 214
Differences of speed do seem to be determining. The rhythm differential counts a lot for me; it governs practically everything. It’s not very original when it comes down to it, you only have to be a driver to know this: knowing how to accelerate, slow down, stop, and start up again. The driving lesson applies just as well to private life and accidents are always possible. The scene of the car accident is imprinted or overprinted in quite few of my texts, like a sort of premonitory signature, a bit sinister. That said, I don’t believe that speeding up on the political highway has been, as you suggest, the result of media pressure.
--Jacques Derrida, “Others are Secret Because They Are Other” Paper Machine, 153
We can all remember personal versions of such a fall from grace, of such a loss of innocence. (I for one remember trying to drive down a Swiss street after having just read, in a local newspaper, that for every 100 metres one drives one has at least thirty-six decisions to make. I have never been able to drive gracefully since.)
--Paul De Man, "Aesthetic Formalization in Kleist's Uber das Marionettentheater," The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 277
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