Reading Day 8
FragmentXK #academic, #fragments, #fragmentarythinking, #writing, #birthofmeaning
The spaces and gaps in between There’s always something in between. Something in between books, chapters, paragraphs, sentences, and words. There’s also an ‘in between’ letters (the little space in between the a and the b). Spaces and gaps are sometimes misunderstood as no-thing… but they’re an important something, or at least a constitutive nothingness. When we write, we write with words and letters. But not only. We (foremost) write with spaces and gaps – with the in betweens. There is always separation and difference. The interesting aspect to this is that it entails, more or less, that everything is fragmentary. The all (mind the italics) is a state of fragmentation. Empty space and equality What we perceive as fragmentary is shifts in the equality of the spaces in between the bodies of texts (or rather the body parts of a text). The ‘inequality’ of the spaces creates the sensation that something is missing, that something has existed (and is no longer there), or that something could possibly exist [that there is a potentiality for something to fill the space]. When reading the Bible, you sometimes come across paragraphs such as Mathew 23:14, which say ––––––– (nothing). A lost fragment. An omitted fragment. This hole in the text creates an own narrative through the questions it invokes. [In me: Why is this gone? Censorship by the church for potential unliked meanings? Or a mistake by an earlier owner? Did someone spill coffee whilst reading?] In other words: The space creates its own narrative, it forces creation, it makes us question. Barthes says only death is creative. And, as we see, out of the killed paragraphs (the spaces of the lost fragments) the reader creates.
Openings The fragments (and the importance of spaces and in betweens) opens up for wider interpretations as well as for total misunderstandings. For me this is an ethical aspect… an ethical potentiality. I believe these openings, the unsureness inherent in the fragmentary form, make room for the readers themselves (not necessarily for their ego – the space as a mirror in which they narcissistically could specter themselves. But for their presence as thinkers – the text speaks to them, and waits for their answer. This direction (speaking to) creates action or at least activity). In the womb I think about écriture féminine, I think about Hélène Cixous. She defines écriture féminine as fragmentary. The fragmentary as a resistance to linearity and to patriarchal (rationality). The fragmentary text is a text which does not force meaning. Through its own perforated being it gives room for the other in itself. [This can be tied to Irigaray’s thought on the placental… the mammalian possibility of carrying the other (alterity) within and that this has an ethical actuality for humans]. Inherent fragmentation Understanding is a desire of difference and otherness, of that which is not the same. This desire can come as a will to possess (making the other the same – which is the case for many kinds of understanding). The desire can, sadly only at times, take the form of an acknowledgement of the alterity of the other. The co-existing (with the other) needs negotiation and sometimes (most of the times) a repositioning of that which is understood as the same. The constitution of meaning (how mean-
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