Merci Via Elousia: The Torture House Of Langage Elfriede Jelinek “language should be tortured to tell the truth." As Elfriede Jelinek put it with extraordinary clarity: “language should be tortured to tell the truth.” It should be twisted, denaturalized, extended, condensed, cut and reunited, made to work against itself. Language as the “big Other” is not an agent of wisdom to whose message we should attune ourselves, but a place of cruel indifference and stupidity. [*]The most elementary form of torturing one’s language is called poetry[*] —imagine what a complex form like the sonnet does to language: it forces the free flow of speech into a Procrustean bed of a fixed shape of rhythm and rhyme. So what about Heidegger’s procedure of listening to the soundless word of language itself, of bringing out the truth that already dwells in it? No wonder late Heidegger’s thinking is poetic. Recall the means he uses to do this: can one imagine a torture more violent than what he does in, say, his famous reading of Parmenides’s proposition “thinking-speaking and being are the same”? e-flux/journal/hegel-versus-heidegger/
Posted on: Mon, 22 Jul 2013 14:11:42 +0000
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