inf(l)ections

This bad reissue

This pure repitition, this "bad" reissue, would thus be tautological. Written logoi "seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructued, they go on telling you just the same thing forever." Pure repition, absolute self-repition, repitition of a self that is already reference and repitition, repitition of the signifier, repitition that is null or annulling, repitition of death‹it's all one. Writing is not the living repitition of the living.

Which makes it similar to painting. And just as the Republic, in its condemnation of the imitative arts, links poetry and painting together; just as Aristotle's Poetics associates them under the single heading of mimesis; so too Socrates here compares a piece of writing to a portrait, the graphema to the zographema.

(Derrida 135)




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Inf(l)ections by Steve Cook