A voice preceding me

Posted in lit, theory by yacob on February 3, 2010

“I would really like to have slipped imperceptibly into this lecture, as into all the others I shall be delivering, perhaps over the years ahead. I would have preferred to be enveloped in words, borne away beyond all possible beginnings. At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking, in its interstices as if it had paused an instant, in suspense, to beckon to me. There would have been no beginnings: instead, speech would proceed from me, which I stood in its path – a slender gap – the point of its possible disappearance”

-Michel Foucault, 1972 (“The Discourse on Language” In The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon. Pg 215)

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Tagged with: Foucault, origin stories, speech

Pray tell…

"[His] ideal of producing a work consisting entirely of quotations, one that was mounted so masterfully that it could dispense with any accompanying text, may strike one as whimsical in the extreme and self-destructive to boot, but it was not, any more than were contemporaneous surrealistic experiments which arose from similar impulses. To the extent that an accompanying text by the author proved unavoidable, it was a matter of fashioning it in such a way as to preserve 'the intention of such investigations', namely, 'to plum the depths of language and thought...by drilling rather than excavating' so as not to ruin everything with explanations that seek to provide a causal or systematic connection" -Hannah Arendt, on Walter Benjamin, 1968. (Illuminations. Walter Benjamin. Hannah Arendt (ed). New York NY: Schoken)

Epigraff