This begins without beginning: that is what one finds here are the raw edges of a greater tapestry. This is not a journal, it is though acts of interpretation. Do not seek what is outside the text, there is nothing outside the text. What is offered here are interpretations from a point in time in space and from a set of texts.
This blog is also an invitation to join in this act of interpretation, to weave your textile with these raw edges.
This invitation and these interpretations are offered out of a practice of contemplation in concert with action, withdrawal for the sake of connection.
Ultimately all that is written here is offered to God's glory and neighbor's good, in the traditions of Lutheran pietism and Christian monasticism.
Lord open my lips,
And my mouth shall proclaim your praise.
Excellent.
ReplyDeleteVery Nice
ReplyDeletecypherlord you sound alot like a friend of mine out in California. However, I am quite sure I purchased Gramatology myself. So perhaps you are thinking of someone else. ;-]
ReplyDeleteSeriously though, of course a particular text refers to what is in "the external world". I haven't read Derida in a while nor was I reading him at the time. However, I have always understood Derida's point or one of them in Of Gramatology, not that there was nothing outside particular texts, as if texts somehow appeared and were the only reality, but rather that textuality is emebeded in human experience of the world. Texts present problems of presence and absence and of identity.
Above, cypherlord do I know you are you the friend I think you are. From the text I might infer, but upon the first reading I had difficulty knowing who you were. Obviously there were clues, but the identity between cypherlord and the person I have concluded cypherlord to be is not clear from the rather short text above.
Derida's point as I have understood it and as other commentators I have consulted have understood Derida, is about the textuality of human experience, "Text" then above does not refer to any particular text or book, but rather that what we know as reading and writing and its problems of identity and presnece and absence are also in speach and other interactions with people and the world.
These problems seem to be hightened or highlighted in the realm of the virtual. So you have obscured your identity with cypherlord.
Since when I began this blog I didn't want to be writing about my life but as a forum of certain ideas the use of the paraphrase from Of Gramatology seemd approriate both to articulate how I concieved my own blogging but also to underscore the difficulties of knowing someone from a text, though it only hightens the difficulties of knowing that exist generally.
One can still of course object to this particular account of the relationship of texts to our general experience of the world and others, but the quote nor does Derrida in his works deny an external world, simply affirms the textuality of all human experience.