Abstract: In your name you are destiny, for me you are destiny. Everything began, you remember, when I pronounced it, you had your hands on the wheel, and I know that I am writing this, destiny, fate, chance, when on the envelope I risk, which is indeed how I feel the thing, when I risk the first word of the address. I address myself to you, somewhat as if I were sending myself, never certain of seeing it come back, that which is destined for me. And when I am able to pronounce it, when I softly call myself by your name, nothing else is there, do you hear, nothing else, no one else in the world. --Jacques Derrida (1) MY LOVE IS DESTINY, IS WRITTEN INTO MY STORY FROM THE BEGINNING. But despite that, because of that, I am vulnerable, vulnerable in and as for There is simultaneously indeterminacy and a force of determination. story, told by me, should be of love, its verbal force directed towards another object, which is receding away somewhere else. But call it her, and it is at once decisively feminized, substantialized. The suggestion of object for verbal power is now its entirety, and washes it away. My is now love, beloved. She is everywhere, and I can find nowhere for myself. My is destined to be the one who alienates my for her. Because she occupies all its possibilities, all the possibilities of love, I am vulnerable, alienated in the midst of determination. This is also the condition of Wordsworth's Blessed Babe in The Prelude, who holds mute with mother's heart by intercourse of and by sight gather from her eyes. It is the birthright of his being, a of love that is at his poetic origin. His is undefined, and must first make contact with an earthly soul, the touch of which is the breeze which vivifies, combines and organizes the elements of his mind, makes them into a mind. This bond enables him to return to her nature, but with active, original force, mind as poetic imagination, nature as new creation. (2) Andrzej Warminski shows that this origin, however, is difficult, does not coincide with itself as original. Poetry is the elaborated, linguistic bond of self-consciousness, yet here it comes from a glance, a touch, merely perceptual sensations: In other words, unlike the Babe's reading of the Mother, [this] phenomenalizing, phenomenological interpretation cannot read passion--because it wants to think it in naturalistic, perceptual, preconscious, prelinguistic terms; i.e., as a need--and hence cannot understand the origin of language. As Paul de Man puts it in a footnote on the erotic in Hypogram and Inscription: Rather than being a heightened version of sense experience, the erotic is a figure that makes such experience possible. We do not see what we but we in the hope of confirming the illusion that we are seeing anything at all. (3) The origin of poetry is not poetic, forcing Wordsworth into illegitimate imposition which makes dialogues of touch and articulated gathering of out of sight. In the passage from Derrida, the speaker is constituted by his for a who, once she is reached, dissolves the possibility of that trajectory away. In the same way, Wordsworth seems to formulate the erotic as art loving nature, the empirical perception of the feminine the desire of masculinity's transcendentality of mind. Yet that transcendency, as transcendency, to be itself must have constituted feminine nature from the start and so cannot have been itself--which of course also means that nature cannot be entirely natural either. The discipline of is language making itself into language at the point where it precisely cannot have been linguistic. My passion for beloved, at the point she appears, washes me away. As de Man puts it in the footnote quoted by Warminski, the beloved does not make us love, but we in order to make the beloved the beloved, to make possible. …
Publication Year: 2001
Publication Date: 2001-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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