Deployments

From Humanism and Democratic Criticism by Edward Said:

That deployment of an alternative identity is what we do when we read and when we connect parts of the text to other parts and when we go on to expand the area of attention to include widening circles of pertinence.

[Compare with Ricoeur's notion of reading as providing an expanded self.]

From Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight by Shoshana Felhman:

Reading is an access route to a discovery. But the significance of the discovery appears only in retrospect, because insight is never purely cognitive; it is to some extent always performative (incorporated in an act, a doing) and to that extent precisely it is not transparent to itself. Insight is always partially unconscious, partially partaking of a practice. and since there can never be a simultaneous, full coincidence between practice and awareness, what one understands in doing and through doing appears in retrospect: nachträglich, après coup.

[Pair with a view of Said's description of re-reading and parsing as deployment of an alter-native.]


And so for day 120
13.04.2007