Tag: language

[T]he poet is someone who is permanently involved with a language that is dying and which he resurrects, not by giving it back some triumphant aspect but by making it return sometimes, like a specter or a ghost: the poet wakes up language and in order to really make the “live” experience of this waking up, of this return to life of language, one has to be very close to the corpse of the language. 

[…] The poet is someone who notices that language, that his language, the language he inherits in the sense I mentioned earlier, risks becoming a dead language again and that therefore he has the responsibility, a very grave responsibility, to wake it up, to resuscitate it (not in the sense of Christian glory but in the sense of the resurrection of language), neither as an immortal body nor as a glorious body but as a mortal body, fragile and at times indecipherable, as is each poem by Celan. Each poem is a resurrection, but one that engages us with a vulnerable body that may yet again slip into oblivion.

Jacques Derrida, “Paul Celan and Language,” in Paul Celan: Selections 
(via ecrituria)
Source: nemophilies

The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.

Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations (via socialclaustrophobia)
Source: pussy-strut

heteroglossia:

Language makes thought, as much as it is made by thought.

Thought inhabits language and language is its body.

Language disguises thought beyond all recognition.

Language speaks. Its speaking speaks for us in what has been spoken.

Thought thinks in us rather than we in it.

Language speaks us rather than we speak it.

Thought is in language and language is in thought.

We are the body of language, in speech and thought.

We are the vehicle through which language touches the world.