Melancholy, Struggle and Book Reading

Gregory Ulmer. Applied Grammatology.

The book is perhaps the most charged cathected object in Western civilization, representing, according to Freud's analysis of his own dream of the botanical monograph, the Mother. Derrida's frequent allusions to the need for mourning (a process associated with the child's defenses for dealing with the loss of or separation from the mother, an essential element of the entry into language), signaled by funeral knell in Glas, suggests that gramatological writing exemplifies the struggle to break the investiture of the book.

Reminds me of a line from Robin Blaser (Pell Mell): "our battle with the book is our Buddhist battle".

And so for day 614
18.08.2008