Nilling Quotes

“I felt that readerly desire achieves its lastingness, its pleasurable sense of suspended duration, in a complicitous nilling, a charged refusal. That is to say that in reading, I undo a text, as I resist my own autonomy. The undoing animates passivity, all that negates and resists rather than insists. It is a slightly unpleasant thought, and it pertains to the ambivalent discomfort of pornography.   That the descriptive representation of erotic pleasure could produce discomfort is partly the unfortunate result of a reader’s embodiment of sociomoral anti-corporeal values. But the discomfort has to do with other difficulties too. If the pornographic text is specifically a work of the imaginary, we could ask where that imaginary works, what it works upon. I’d like to consider the possibility that Histoire d’O is less the signifier for genital eroticism, than it is the song of inconspicuousness, the place where will and its self-negation twist and enlace.”
― Lisa Robertson, Nilling: Prose

“Sometimes my sadness in reading is that I can’t stay. I fall away from the ability to receive. So that the life-long work of reading is the process of situating and elaborating within myself techniques that might guide or permit the lengthening duration and affective expansion of my receptive capacity. Within reading I desire lastingness in tandem with the falling away.   Writing proposes itself as a possible technique towards lastingness. My body becomes a desk. I lay the book on my chest; the notebook was waiting behind it, propped on the sloping lectern of the top of my thighs.”
― Lisa Robertson, Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretiun, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias

“O is a story about how being born, writing, reading and loving as a female is a fall into alignment with the minor time of a nilling. It is also a story about the way resistance animates the figure of an obscenely overdetermined identification with abolishment. We cannot know if the abolishment is of the female, of the identification or of the will. Her figure keeps moving.”
― Lisa Robertson, Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretiun, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias

“What do poems have to do with an ethics of conviviality? Poems are beginners. The urgent social abjection of the poem might act as shelter to a gestured vernacular. Covertly the poem transforms that vernacular to a prosodic gift whose agency flourishes in the bodily time of an institutional and economic evasion. Let us suppose here that poems are those commodious anywheres that might evade determination by continuously inviting their own dissolution in semantic distribution. In”
― Lisa Robertson, Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretiun, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias

“Now language and money circulate using the same medium, a grammar which is digital, horizontal and magnetic, and politically determined. Maybe all language will be eventually administrated as an institutional money: a contained and centrally monitored instrumental value. On the other hand, the digitization of value could mean that language in its vernacular expression can infiltrate and deform capital’s production and limitation of social power. If it is to be the latter, then vernacular language’s magnetism will reorient the polis.”
― Lisa Robertson, Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretiun, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias

“in the popular sense; all people, of any class or gender, speak and sing and seize a vernacular; at any point in history, a received potentiality of living language has situated us as human. For Dante, the vernacular of lyric, whose “sweet new style” was turned from the incipiently wandering language of women and of exile1 by the Stil Novo poets, was a matrix of potential resistance, radical mobility, and human dignity. Written during Dante’s own exile from Florence, De vulgare eloquentia seeks to consolidate a vision of a unified national language by claiming an exilic vernacular as the exemplary speech of the citizen. In”
― Lisa Robertson, Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretiun, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias

“following the movement of thinking, a woman escapes the confinement of identity, moving into the open of language. The most temporary membranes serve as shelter. Amongst these membranes, speaking begins, plays its tenuous continuities near and in spite of the accreted institutions that compel anyone to obey, violate and buy, to be situated by identity’s grid. But”
― Lisa Robertson, Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretiun, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias

“For Meschonnic, poetry is the critique of the duality of the sign, and rhythm is the poem’s – and thus the subject’s – agency. It is only within such a continuously enacted critique that the subject can emerge as irrevocably ethical. He used the term “geopoetics” to prise open the conventional cultural and geographic borders that disallow the free movement of subjectivization as continuous rhythm. Within his proposition, politics does not refer to the spatialized economics of governance, but to the necessary proposition of a shared linguistic duration. And, too, within this proposition, we don’t know definitively what language is – this is why it can remain open as an inquiry. Meschonnic’s work on rhythm claims orality as the mode of the political. In his words, in Politique du rythme:”
― Lisa Robertson, Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretiun, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias

“continuing clandestinely to publish as Réage, while she also maintained her professional and familial roles as Aury and Desclos. For me, the startling and stimulating fact is the seriousness with which she played the game of identity, and that she apparently played it on terms she herself posed and maintained. I would like to consider how her text itself acts out a splitting, a severance within the structure or texture of identity. For me this split is the site of an extreme readerly discomfort, as well as an identification. The heroine O’s participation in her own erotic identity as a nilling is as problematic as it is compelling.”
― Lisa Robertson, Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretiun, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias

“Chiaroscuro is also the technique of the uncanny. I am etched with unknowing as I continue. I have crossed into a material reserve that permits a maximum of intuition, the “as if ” of a speculative thinking, which is outside of knowledge. Reading shows the wrongness of the habitual reification of “the social” and “the personal” in a binary system of values. It submits this binary to a ruinous foundering. And so, an erotics.”
― Lisa Robertson, Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretiun, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias