From a Gauche:
"In Defense of These Deflated Meta-Narratives

The thing to avoid, I don't know why, is the spirit of the system. -Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

Beckett does not say: the thing to avoid is the system. The comic force of his work often derives from the realization that 'the system' is unavoidable. So what is the 'spirit' of the system? Is it the initial creative urge, the desire to systematize in the first place? Or is it a hardening that happens sometime later on? I believe the crucial moment is not when a thoery begins to take shape, when fuzzy lines are made straight and implications are drawn out upon the vast terrain of human experience: this is not the construction of tyranny but the only claim a human subject can ever make to uniqueness. The crucial moment is when a thought, having properly extended itself across the breadth of the world, chooses not to ossify but to continue."

a Gauche
- posted by liz @ 6/28/2004 03:49:00 PM