1. Absence and Presence

2. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production - 1966 To know is not to listen to some pre-existing word, which would be a story or fable, and translate it: it is to invent a new word, give the word to that which essentially guards a silence, not that it is prevented from saying something, but rather because it is the guardian of a silence. To know, therefore, is not to rediscover or reconstitute a latent sense: hidden or forgotten. It is to constitute a new knowledge, i.e. a knowledge that is added to the reality from which it sets out and of which it says something else. Let us remember that the idea of a circle is not itself circular: it is not because there are circles that we have the idea of a circle. And let us bear in mind that the appearance of a knowledge institutes a certain distance, a certain difference or displacement (écart): in limiting by this difference the initial domain, it makes of it a measurable space, the object of a knowledge.

3. Barthes, “The Third Meaning” In short, what the obtuse meaning disturbs, sterilizes, is metalanguage (criticism).

4. For Aristotle, all potential to be or to do something is always also potential not to be or not to do. -Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities

5. Avicenna, three kinds of potentiality material potentiality – a child who may one day learn to write but does not know how yet possible potentiality – a child who has begun to write, form a few letters complete or perfect potentiality – a scribe who is in full powers of writing but chooses not to write.

6. The man of action is always without conscience; no one has a conscience except the observer. - Goethe Forgetfulness is a property of all action. - Nietzsche

7. History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]. Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class give the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution. - Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

8. Gillian Overing, Language, Sign and Gender in Beowulf The hysteric is one of society’s anomalies, one of the ‘abnormal ones’ (Her) essential quality is that of ambiguity: Is she a heroine or victim, does she dismantle or reinforce the structures that contain her?

9. Gillian Overing, Language, Sign and Gender in Beowulf The hero himself is one of the most unsettling forces in the poem and has long been recognized for the kinds of ambiguity he generates – about the value of pagan and Christian ideals or the value of treasure, for example. His power to disturb as a hysteric accrues throughout the poem; when Beowulf...finally chooses death fully understanding the terms of his choice, he calls attention to the illusion of choice and the illusion of the power of the subject to make it.

10. Beowulf Haste is best now, that we should go to look on the lord of the people, then bring our ring-bestower on his road, escort him to the pyre. More than one portion of wealth shall melt with the hero, for there’s a hoard of treasure and gold uncounted; a grim purchase, for in the end it was with his own life that he bought these rings: which the burning shall devour, the fire enfold. No fellow shall wear an arm-ring in his memory; no maiden’s neck shall be enchanced in the beauty by the bearing of these rings.

11. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammotology (1967) The instituted trace cannot be thought without thinking the retention of difference within a structure of reference where difference appears as such and thus permits a certain liberty of variations among the full terms. The absence of another here-and-now, of another transcendental present, of another origin of the world appearing as such, presenting itself as irreducible absence within the presence of the trace, is not a metaphysical formula substituted for a scientific concept of writing. This formula, beside the fact that it is the questioning of metaphysics itself, describes the structure implied by the “arbitrariness of the sign,” from the moment that one thinks of its possibility short of the derived opposition between nature and convention, symbol and sign, etc. These oppositions have meaning only after the possibility of the trace.

12. Derrida, Of Grammatology Even before being bound to incision, to engraving, to drawing or to letters, and to a signifier referring in general to a signifier signified by it the concept of graphy (graphie) implies, as the possibility common to all systems of signification, the instance of the instituted trace.

13. Derrida, Of Grammatology The “unmotivatedness” of the sign requires a synthesis in which the completely other is announced as such without any simplicity, any identity, any resemblance or continuity — within what is not it. Is announced as such: there we have all history, from what metaphysics has defined as “non-living” up to “consciousness,” passing through all levels of animal organisation. The trace, where the relationship with the other is marked, articulates its possibility, in the entire field of the entity [étant], which metaphysics has defined as the being- present starting from the occulted movement of the trace. The trace must be thought before the entity. But the movement of the trace is necessarily occulted, it produces itself as self-occultation. When the other announces itself as such, it presents itself in the dissimulation of itself. This formulation is not theological, as one might believe somewhat hastily. The “theological” is a determined moment in the total movement of the trace. The field of the entity, before being determined as the field of presence, is structured according to the diverse possibilities-genetic and structural — of the trace. The presentation of the other as such, that is to say the dissimulation of its “as such,” has always already begun and no structure of the entity escapes it.