In love, the lovers do not succeed in coinciding with each other, so to speak. Fashionable sadness! Love, however, is the proximity of the other—where the other remains other. I think that when the other is ‘always other,’ there is the essence of love.
Jacques Derrida, “Roland Barthes”
Jacques Derrida, “Roland Barthes”
Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes
The wound can have (should only have) just one proper name. I recognize that I love — you — by this: you leave in me a wound I do not want to replace.
The very being of man (both external and internal) is the deepest communication. To be means to communicate. Absolute death (non-being) is the state of being unheard, unrecognized, unremembered…. To be means to be for another, and through the other, for oneself
I am the finite that wants its infinite. Love infinites me.
Hélène Cixous, Poetry in painting: writings on contemporary arts and aesthetics
Hélène Cixous, from Poetry in painting: writings on contemporary arts and aesthetics
To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one’s self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray.
(via viperslang)
Witness, then, is neither martyrdom nor the saying of a juridical truth, but the owning of one’s infinite responsibility for the other one (l’autrui). It is not to be mistaken for politicized confessionalism. The confessional is the mode of the subjective, and the representational that of the objective… In the poetry of witness, the poem makes present to us the experience of the other, the poem is the experience, rather than a symbolic representation. When we read the poem as witness, we are marked by it and become ourselves witnesses to what it has made present before us. Language incises the page, wounding it with testimonial presence, and the reader is marked by encounter with that presence. Witness begets witness. The text we read becomes a living archive.
Little Bristling Soul 