Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Original Figures . . .

“we do not even know if an original exists in an absolute sense, apart from the primordial God, and it is already something extraordinary when we encounter one.”

“Each original is a powerful, solitary Figure that exceeds any explicable form: it projects flamboyant traits of expression that mark the stubbornness of a thought without image, a question without response, an extreme and nonrational logic. Figures of life and knowledge, they know something inexpressible, live something unfathomable. They have nothing general about them, and are not particular – they escape knowledge, defy psychology. Even the words they utter surpass the general laws of language (presuppositions) as well as the simple particularities of speech, since they are like the vestiges or projections of a unique, original language [langue], and bring all of language [langage] to the limit of silence and music.”


(Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, The Formula.”)

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