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March 08, 2005
Fleshing out écriture
Some definitions from my commonplace book; these might illuminate Conley's use of the term in his introduction to The Writing of History, pp. xx-xxi:
- From Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: "It is in terms of saving the freely choosing subject whose concept insinuates itself into the most radical communalist politics of collectivity that Said uses écriture as a code word suggesting (I cannot be sure, since the word hangs unexplained on the borders of his essay) linguistic reductionism at a second remove. The thumbnail explanation of écriture as the excluded other that I have given above would have helped his general argument: 'A principle of silent exclusion operates within and at the boundaries of discourse; this has now become so internalized that fields, disciplines, and their discourses have taken on the status of immutable durability'" (123-124).
- From Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?": "The conception of écriture, as currently employed, is concerned with neither the act of writing nor the indications, as symptoms or signs within a text of an author's meaning; rather, it stands for a remarkably profound attempt to elaborate the conditions of any text, both the conditions of its spatial dispersion and its temporal deployment" (119).
- From Leon S. Roudiez, intro. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, by Julia Kristeva: The word writing "must unfortunately convey two distinct meanings as it corresponds both to écrit and to écriture (in the recent, stronger sense of the latter term). The situation is somewhat confusing in French, but worse in English. Écriture is what produces 'poetic language' or 'text'. . . . . One could possibly use the word 'scription' to convey the sense of contemporary écriture" (19).
- And from Conley's introduction to Certeau's The Writing of History: Certeau's title, L'Écriture de l'histoire, does not translate readily into English. Writing is an insufficient translation, because "écriture implies more than verbal discourse: it is a Scripture in secular garb, but it is also literature, 'writing,' in an imperiously intransitive form. Following in the steps of Freud's Moses, writing sets off in search of its own poetics. Écriture shares much with literary practice, a discipline without telos or object in sight" (xx).
- 3/29/05 addition: Certeau himself defines écriture as having "the broad meaning of the organization of signifiers" (86).
Posted by senioritis at March 8, 2005 10:22 PM