Kindle Notes & Highlights
All these texts aim to flee the fatal nail, the sword, the knife, the axe which threatens to fix, to nail, to immobilize them in, by, death. Their first and best ally in the evasion is the poetic use of the languages of language. If only we listen, a language always speaks several languages at once, and runs with a single word in opposite directions.
Language’s tricks are the allies of the artist who goes into resistance or exile. Joyce said this a hundred years ago and Montaigne five hundred. Every language artist is an artist of the struggle against the condemnation to death. Sentences and their words always lead elsewhere than the place we were expecting them. Neither the reader nor above all the author knows, foresees, commands, calculates, anticipates, prepares for the event of revelation. This incalculable is the text’s promise and taste of triumph.
All literature is scarry. It celebrates the wound and repeats the lesion.
stigmata on the body are as noble as they are ignominious, depending on whether it is Christ or the outcast who is marked.
