When you get to the end of your life, you can see your entire future reduced to a comic book panel from the Flash comic book. You can wee where you are and where your corpse will end up. In the panel below, the Flash is paradoxically stationary at the moment you see him speeding along in the present.
"I want to pay tribute to his memory here and to recall all that I owe to the trust and encouragement he gave me, even when, as he one day told me, he did not see at all where I was going. That was in 1966 during a colloquium in the United States in which we were both taking part. After a few friendly remarks on the paper I had just given, Jean Hippolyte added, “That said, I really don’t see where you are going.” I think I replied to him more or less as follows: “If I clearly saw ahead of time where I was going, I don’t really believe that I would take another step to get there.” Perhaps I then thought that knowing where one is going may no doubt help in orienting one’s thinking, but that it has never made anyone take a single step, quite the opposite in fact. What is the good of going where one knows oneself to be going and where one knows that one is destined to arrive? Recalling this reply today, I am not sure that I really understand it very well, but it surely did not mean that I never see or never know where I am going and that to this this extent, to the extent that I do not know, it I not certain that I ever taken any step or said anything at all."
--Jacques Derrida,
"Punctuations: The Time of a Thesis," in The Eyes of the University, 115
For God's sake, Mr. Storyteller, you ask, where are they going? And I answer: for God's sake, Reader, does any of us know where we're going? Where are you going?
--Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist, 41
With all this, Madam,—and what confounded every thing as much on the other hand, my uncle Toby had that unparalleled modesty of nature I once told you of, and which, by the bye, stood eternal sentry upon his feelings, that you might as soon—But where am I going? these reflections crowd in upon me ten pages at least too soon, and take up that time, which I ought to bestow upon facts.
--Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
I gave this student an E grade (the assignment was to write a 50 word first paragraph of an essay, with a thesis at the end and a title at the top). I call BS.
"Camera Voyeurism in Blow Up
Through various scenes in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, Blow Up, one can see that the photographer is unaffected by what he sees as a voyeur through the lens of his camera, as the scenes in the park, but in the scenes where he does not use his camera, what he partakes in greatly affects him such as the mimes playing tennis."
Michel Foucault's reply to George Steiner's review of Foucualt's The Order of Things (George Steiner, “The Mandarin of the Hour—Michel Foucault,” New York Times Book Review February 21, 1971), “Monstrosities in Criticism” Diacritics 1, no.1 (1971) 57-60
from Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus, trans. John Wood, p. 63
Pausing to leave a text in order to find out more about what is being discussed and described; going a source like wikipedia to find out a little bit about or going to youtube to listen to a piece of music; returning to the text where you left. The text returns to you; you may reread it; you may finally read it after all; you may learn even more. Thedor Adorno; Adorno and Mann correspondence; Mann, Genesis of Doktor Faustus: The Novel of a Novel; Schoenberg; you read books and articles; you listen to more performances of Beethoven, more recordings; your learn about pianists who perform the piece--Maurizio Pollini); you learn about the piano sonata; about the sonata and classical music; classical versus romantic music; late Beethoven--quarterts; deafness, and so on.)
"Historical, in fact philological, consider- ations have slowly but surely taken the place of profound explorations of eternal problems. The question becomes: What did this or that phi- losopher think or not think? And is this or that text rightly ascribed to him or not? And even: Is this variant of a classical text preferable to that other? Students in university seminars today are encouraged to occupy themselves with such emasculated inquiries. As a result, of course, philosophy itself is banished from the university altogether."
Curtius, E. R. 1947. Die auslandiche wissenschaftliche Literatur der Kriegs- und Nachkriegsjahre ist mir bis auf verschwindende Ausnahmen nicht zuganglich gewesen. Auch die Bonner Universitatebibliothek ist seit 1944 in folge eines Bombenangriffs teils unbenuntzbar, teils verbrannt. Ich habe daher manches Zitat nicht meher vergleichen, manche Quelle nicht mehr einsehen konnen. Aber wenn die literature 'das fragment der Fragmente" ist (Goethe), muss ein Versuch wie der vorleigende erst recht den Charackter des Fragmentarishcen tragen.
During the war and postwar years, I lost sight of foreign literary criticism after it vanished and was thus inaccessible to me. Also, as a consequence of an air raid in 1944, parts of the Bonn University Library were unusable or burnt. I could no longer check various citations or consult many sources. But if literature is "the fragment of fragments" (Goethe), an attempt like this one in particular must exhibit a fragmentary character.] — "Vorwort," in Europaisches Literatur und Lateinische Mittelater, (my translation; not translated in the English edition of 195
Curtius, E. R. 1953. I have tried to show that humanistic tradition is from time to time attacked by philosophy. It may suffer a serious setback from these aggressions. Many signs seem to point to the fact that we are faced once more with an incursion of philosophers, existentialists... "Appendix: The Medieval Bases of Western Thought," European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages, 592
When do you have to go outside the text in order to understand it? Philology (history through etymology)
Philology as entry into history and culture: Life / Sex Life / End of Life = life, sex, and death=civilization
Reading is a vice which can replace all other vices or temporarily take their place in more intensely helping people live, it is an aberration a consuming passion. No, I don’t take any drugs, I take books, of course I have certain preferences, many books don’t suit me at all, some I take only in the morning, others at night, there are books I don’t ever let go, I drag them around with me in the apartment, carrying them from the living room into the kitchen, I read them in the hall standing up, I don’t use a bookmark, I don’t move my lips while reading, early on I learned to read very well, I don’t remember the method, but you ought to look into it. They must have used an excellent method in our provincial elementary schools, at least back when I learned to read.
--Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina: A Novel, trans. Philip Boehm (Teaneck, NJ: Holmes & Meier, 1990), 57-58.
