Antiquitopia

Ferdinand de Saussure, whose Course in General Linguistics (really a book that is a conflation of his students' notes of his lecture) spawned the movement we call "structuralism" (and, therefore, also "post-structuralism") that has been so influential in linguistics, anthropology, mythology, etc., has an interesting one-liner when talking about the fraught, ambiguous, and ultimately arbitrary relationship between language and writing: Writing is not a garment, but a disguise. His point is that often, particularly in French, a written word has absolutely no relationship to its phonetic representations--his example is the french oiseau ("bird") that does not have a single letter that corresponds to its pronunciation [wazo]. But I wonder if we can take this further a bit, and say that not just writing, but language is not a garment, but a disguise. By altering one's speech, one alters one's identity, others' perspective of you--rightly or w...

Translation attains its full meaning in the realization that every evolved language (with the exception of the word of God) can be considered a translation of all the others.... Translation is removal from one language into another through a continuum of transformations. Translation passes through continua of transformation, not abstract areas of identity and similarity. (Walter Benjamin, "On Language as Such and the Language of Man," in Reflections ; trans. Edmund Jephcott)

Death mingles and confuses itself with our life throughout. Decay anticipates its time, and even insinuates itself into the course of our growth. (Michel de Montaigne, "On Experience," Essays 3.13; trans. J.M. Cohen) There are perhaps two major themes I have seen arise in most of the works of literature that we have studied this year in my Literature Humanities class. The first is the power, duplicity, and ambiguities of language; the other, death. From the Epic of Gilgamesh , the Iliad , etc., to Montaigne's Essays , Death interweaves itself, or, in Montaigne's terms, insinuates itself throughout my entire fall and spring syllabus, whether in the attempt to overcome it through undying glory ( Iliad ), establishing great works ( Epic of Gilgamesh ; Aeneid ), gaining or failing to gain immortality ( Gilgamesh ; Genesis), or seeking a beatific afterlife ( Divine Comedy ) or, here, through the complacent acceptance of its inevitability. In this more mature vision of ...

No...this is not Derrida; it is Michel de Montaigne: Our disputes are about words. I ask what is Nature, Pleasure, a Circle, and Substitution. The question is couched in words, and is answered in the same coin. A stone is a body. But if you press the point: And what is a body? -A substance.- And what is a substance? and so on, you will end by driving the answerer to exhaust his dictionary. One substitutes one word for another that is often less well understood. (Michel de Montaigne, "On Experience," Essays 3.13; trans. J.M Cohen) Words refer only to other words, which refer to other words. Meaning is always deferred, even diminished, and never stable. It is the endless field of signifiers, a signum of a signum of a signum ad infinitum with no res .

Picture a space at the heart of the world, between the earth, the sea and teh sky, on the frontiers of all three parts of the universe. Here there are eyes for whatever goes on, no matter how distant; and here there are ears whose hollows no voice can fail to penetrate. This is the kingdom of Rumour, who chose to live on a mountain, with numberless entrances into her house and a thousand additional holes, though none of her thresholds are barred with a gate or a door. Open by night and by day, constructed entirely of sounding brass, the whole place hums and echoes, repeating whatever it hears. Not one of the rooms is silent or quiet, but none is disturbed by shouting. The noise is merely a murmuring babble, low like the waves of the sea which you hear from afar, or the last faint rumble of thunder, when storm-black clouds have clashed in the sky. The hall is filled by a crowd which is constantly coming and going, a flimsy throng of a thousand rumours, true and fictitious, wandering f...

Fromm Dinosaur Comics , a website I just found: For all of you people with imprecise speech, or, as my friend Kyle wrote about this, for all of you who celebrate "five-month anniversaries"!

One of the things I have been teaching my students this semester is to pay very close attention to the details of the text, how the details of a text can question, invert, and toy with broader themes. I especially force them to pay attention to repetitions and what is added and taken out, for example when Achilleus tells his mother Thetis about his interactions with Agamemnon? It appears highly repetitive, but when you look closely, he alters certain words to give different nuances, and he adds a little and omits a lot. We did the same with Persephone's personal account of her abduction by Hades and the narrative point of view of the same event. Both cases are children recounting events to their mothers, and manipulating their speech for different ends. In some ways, they may be playing a part, a role, in order to tell the other person what they want to hear or in order to get what one wants. Both Achilleus and Persephone did this. What's this have to do with politics? (...