Sensation of Immobility — Dailey
By Patricia Dailey | Published on January 25, 2022
I want to cross over to the other track, for a moment to think about the language of law and margins so as to provide a few “crossovers” for our topics. Dr. Velasco looks closely at the cognitive and institutional factors that constitute and drive the development and mapping of manuscript space. He looks at how the formation of one text, of the law, of the “canon” of the discursive community produces its doubling in the margin. He examines how gloss is not exactly a parallel text, but provides a different register of the “life” of the text. The gloss can translate the primary text in relation to “civil life”; the gloss is, in some ways, a tenor for the text’s translation or extraction into different dimensions. In his article he notes that the “glosses protect the central text, placing it within a complex hermeneutic framework.” He describes the margin as an “eye” which illuminates the text and also transforms it. This perception provided by the gloss is “panoptic”: “it watches both the text and those who read and interpret it,” functioning like a kind of dropped pin that provides a fiction of immobility and centrality for the text itself.
This said, if we take as a given the “sensation of being immobile” in the center of the page that the marginal text produces, we also exposed to the space of contingency that underlies both the space of the text and especially the space of negotiation provided by the margin. So, thinking about the fixity that the “eye” produces, if we were to assume that the centrality of the text produces a “once” (that is, a decisive textual event) then the margin would presumably produce and affirmation of that “once” in a second register. How each of these relate to one another, and what this has to do with literature and the space of the poetic is what I hope to open the class up to today.
To begin, this class started for several of you, on the heels of the lecture of mysticism from last semester. Some of you who have already read Derrida’s “Number of Yes” — his reading of Michel de Certeau, a Jesuit scholar whose work The Mystic Fable became a way to think about the practice of mysticism (mostly in relation to his concept of the organization of the “everyday” and its recessive epistemology – not of the known, but of the secret, and spaces that are in themselves constituted by the “cutting across” of boundaries). Derrida understands the “mystic fable” to be part of the fable of ontology – the fable of “being” – which only articles itself as though it were a “first” in a so called “second” iteration. The second affirms and confirms the first, but also simultaneously produces the first iteration of the “yes.” If we think of this in the context of mysticism, we might note the ways in which, for example, any transmission of a text, is also the “confirmation” (and production) of its origin. A received text (especially the visionary text) is never articulated as the “pure” voice of god, but rather, the voice of affirmation of its reception. Think for example, of Hildegard’s Scivias: these are the true reflections received from God.” For all the visionary texts that are “dictated” and memorized – not in the sense of rote memorialization, but in the sense of being imprinted, as if they granted an ontological possibility. As if the “being” of the poem or of the poetic text were possible. The consequences for this are significant, as we will see in the essay by Derrida” Che cos’e la poesia.”
First, to speak of poetry of the literary, is always a question of division: a poem never “is”, for Derrida. Its “is” both an effect of writing and an effect of address. How do I mean this?
For Derrida, something of “traversals” of crossings occurs in the poem. Where do we find these traversals and how are they called? What names do crossings go by?
