From Spectres Of Marx

@lifeasweshowit Derrida is, like Barthes, a thinker I enjoy reading as if his works were more literature than theory, though it also is.

— Andrew Ty (@EnterDuration) October 22, 2011

was my reply to

I love the way Derrida always mourns in his work. Very few thinkers think with their hearts as well as their minds.

— Masha Tupitsyn (@lifeasweshowit) October 21, 2011

Masha tweeted that right after she multi-tweeted the following bit from Spectres Of Marx:

“The time is out of joint. The world is going badly. It is worn but its wear no longer counts. Old age or youth-one no longer counts in that

— Masha Tupitsyn (@lifeasweshowit) October 21, 2011

way. The world has more than one age. We lack the measure of the measure. We no longer realize the wear, we no longer take account

— Masha Tupitsyn (@lifeasweshowit) October 21, 2011

of it as of a single age in the progress of history. Neither maturation, nor crisis, nor even agony. Something else. What is happening is

— Masha Tupitsyn (@lifeasweshowit) October 21, 2011

happening to age itself, it strikes a blow at the teleological order of history. What is coming, in which the untimely appears, is happening

— Masha Tupitsyn (@lifeasweshowit) October 21, 2011

to time but it does not happen in time. Contretemps. The time is out of joint." Derrida, Spectres of Marx

— Masha Tupitsyn (@lifeasweshowit) October 21, 2011

Ann Lauterbach on John Ashbery’s “Litany”

 

I have come to believe, or think, or understand, that when someone dies, the most acute sense of loss is that of his or her voice. (For a while, one can “hear” a person’s voice in one’s inner ear, but slowly that fades.) This is odd, since sound is of course immaterial; one would think that the body would be the most felt absence. But sound is a distinctive marker of living presence more than any material object can possibly be; sound and lived time are indissoluble: they are, so to speak, part of the continuity of a landscape rather than the singularity of a portrait. Sound is embedded in spatial context.

via From Conjunctions:49, Ann Lauterbach on John Ashbery’s As We Know.

(Ron Slate on) William Matthews on Narrative and Time

Emphasis mine:

Matthews knew the dangers inherent in narrative, as spelled out in another Curiosities essay, “Dishonesty and Bad Manners”: “Things happen consecutively in narrative that happen simultaneously in psychic life, and there are many critics and poets who prefer the experience of consecutive time to simultaneous time because it makes moral discourse easier, and because causality and guilt are easier to assert as religious or quasi-religious principles in narrative than in any of the many other experiences of time.” His dream was for an upshot of psychic immediacy in the course of a riff, a disruption of the poem’s official time zone.

via on New Hope for the Dead: Uncollected William Matthews, ed. by Sebastian Matthews and Stanley Plumly (Red Hen Press) | On the Seawall: A Literary Website by Ron Slate (GD).