Courtesy of my ten year old son, Wiley:
"Mulch Ado About Nothing," the title of an episode of a _Curious George_ DVD he was watching. The episode itself has nothing to do with Shakespeare.
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
Language itself is language. The understanding that is schooled in logic, thinking of everything in terms of calculation and hence usually overbearing, calls this proposition an empty tautology. Merely to say the identical thing twice--language is language--how is that supposed to get us anywhere? But we do not want to get anywhere. We would like only, for once, to get to just where we are already.
Martin Heidegger, "Language," 188
Maybe it really is better to write without an addressee.
-- Jacques Ranicere, The Flesh of Words: the Politics of Writing, 145
Heidegger said in a moving way: one of the most silent and timid of men suffered the torment of being obliged to cry out and, enigma following enigma, what was a cry risked becoming idle chatter. Nietzsche's admonition, "the written cry of the thought"--a cry that took form in the disagreeable book that is Zarathrustra--in fact came to be lost two ways: it was not heard, it was heard overly well; nihilism became the commonplace of thought and of literature.
--Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 143
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
|