Cobussen and deconstruction

[1] What 'is' deconstruction?

The use of the quotation marks should make clear that the question cannot in fact be posed like this. cf. Deconstruction: Between Method and Singularity.) A first option for a description of deconstruction is offered by the dictionary. In the French dictionary, Littré, the meaning of deconstruction progresses along two lines. (1) Grammatical. Deconstruction means change, the disruption of the construction or the composition of the words in a sentence with the purpose of producing other, new meanings with the same words (i.e., not to deny them!). (2) Mechanical. Deconstruction indicates disassembling, taking apart, dismantling, disintegrating (Derrida often uses the word 'demontage.

The first description in particular shows that destructive and constructive aspects are at work simultaneously. Deconstruction not only encloses and unlocks, it also gives access to new spaces. Deconstruction means a dismantling in order to create something new. The grammatical meaning puts more emphasis on the affirmative nature of deconstruction than the mechanical meaning of the word.

What should i do now ?

What should I do now?

There’s a lot I don’t understand about myself, and it seems it's getting worse with age. Paradoxically, the deeper I got into theory the less interested I became in the details of my inner workings (which is yet the most important...). I’m not sure why. It isn’t because I arrived at any great insight, for sure. I still experience the almost visceral sense of puzzlement over matters of my mind and selfhood that drew me to the field. What happened, I think, was a shift from one preoccupying question, “What is theory?” to another, “What should I do to cope with?”

It left me less inclined to bother about self-understanding and making business than to consider the value of things, metaphysics, moral and aesthetic. How best to live? But here’s a nagging thought: might those two preoccupying questions turn out to be one and the same, like the evening star and the morning star? Thanks to Paul Broks about expressing myself about all that.

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What is the question of literature ?

The question of literature cannot be —What is literature?

Since the latter is a question where the interrogative force rests wholly with the —What“ and
where the existence of literature is reduced to the fact that underwrites the analytic task.

To ask —What is literature?“ is to take for granted a by no means incontestable ontology and to range the question of literature along-side other enquiries into the properties and dispositions of determinate beings.

For Blanchot, literature is less a fact than a self-conditioned impossibility. Hence it does not lend itself to the reflective and cognitive question. This holds likewise of philosophy.

Were philosophy to ask itself —What is philosophy?“ as a reflective and cognitive question, it would presuppose the reflective and cognitive character of philosophy and thereby betray phi-
losophy‘s long-standing definition as the interrogation of its own definition.

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métabole
hypertexte

Some questions about digital texts

What difference does the machine and machinic processing make? What new formal and generic properties can we see within digital texts?

On what basis - computational, formal, institutional, aesthetic, practical, or otherwise - may we group together digital texts into a literary field?

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-PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Reading and passivity

It's strange to think we can read --and we used to for a long time in history-- without any principle of hypertextuality (is it really true to say such a thing?...)

Because more often than not, readers are encouraged to comprehend and understand what they are reading. Rather than question a text, they are urged to assume its authority, a perspective that encourages without any doubt acceptance without question, passivity over active reading.
(see texts from Dornan, Rosen, and Wilson)

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See that post with different algorithms in metabole
See the journal French Metablog with today different posts