Jacques Derrida
In order to find an analogy […] we must take flight. — Jacques Derrida, The Derrida Reader: Writing Performance. (University of Nebraska Press January 1, 1998)
Category: Writing
Hélène Cixous
We must learn from things; we have everything to learn from them. How to let things make themselves known by themselves, before any translation… — Hélène Cixous, Coming to Writing and Other Essays (Harvard University Press September 1, 1992) First published January 1, 1986.
Jacques Derrida
[A] point of pure passage: a language without discourse, a speech without sentence, without syntax, without parts, without grammar, a language of pure effusion, beyond the cry, but short of the hinge. — Jacques Derrida, The Derrida Reader: Writing Performance (University of Nebraska Press January 1, 1998)
Kenneth Rexroth
The transcendent and the immanent are not somewhere else. They are the thing itself, not the thing in itself, just itself.— Kenneth Rexroth, American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (Seabury Press January 1, 1973)
Gaston Bachelard
This house, as I see it, is a sort of airy structure that moves about on the breath of time. It really is open to the wind of another time. It seems as though it could greet us every day of our lives in order to give us confidence in life. In my daydreaming, I… Continue reading Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry. ― Gaston Bachelard
Gerard L. Bruns
Hegel famously thought art was “over and done with.” The same has been said (almost routinely) of modernism. Many will be disappointed that I have very little to say, almost nothing, about postmodernism. My passing thought is that maybe a postmodernist is just someone who has made the art and literature (and even philosophy) of… Continue reading Gerard L. Bruns
Rainer Maria Rilke
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point… Continue reading Rainer Maria Rilke
Gerard L. Bruns
[P]oetry may be, Levinas says, “an alternative modality of the otherwise than being,” that is, a modality of transcendence in which our relation to people and things is one of proximity rather than conceptualization and control. Levinas says: The proximity of others is ethics, the “proximity of things is poetry. — Gerard L. Bruns, “Preface,”… Continue reading Gerard L. Bruns
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in… Continue reading Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Vale of Soul-Making 