30 August 2008

spectral

Special thanks to the OED, always.

spectral, a.

Isaac Taylor (attr.), A Natural History of Enthusiasm (1830)

"A spectral resemblance of piety, unsubstantial and cold as the mists of night."

deleuze and delirium

Gilles Deleuze, "Literature and Life," Essays Critical and Clinical (1997).

on the minor (c.f. Melville's Pip, Father Mapple):

"This is the becoming of the writer. Kafka (for central Europe) and Melville (for America) present literature as the collective enunciation of a minor people, or of all minor peoples, who find their expression only in and through the writer." (4)

on delirium (c.f. Durkheim, the delirium of collective representation):

"Literature is delirium, but delirium is not a father-mother affair: there is no delirium that does not pass through peoples, races, and tribes, and that does not haunt universal history. All delirium is world-historical, a 'displacement of races and continents.' Literature is delirium, and as such its destiny is played out between the two poles of delirium. Delirium is a disease, the disease par excellence, whenever it erects a race it claims is pure and dominant." (4)

on syntax (c.f. William James):

"There are no straight lines, neither in things nor in language. Syntax is the set of necessary detours that are created in each case to reveal the life in things." (2)

Syntax, experience and revelation; bosh! and "finally, breath-words, the a-syntactical limit toward which all language tends." ..."suspended exclamations as the limit of language, as explosive visions and sonorities." (5)