Log24

The Last Enemy
(See April 30)

"I was also impressed… by the intensity of Continental modes of literary-critical thought….

On the Continent, studies of Hölderlin and Rousseau, of Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rilke, of Rabelais, Nietzsche, Kafka, and Joyce, challenged not only received ideas on the unity of the work of art but many aspects of western thought itself. Derrida, at the same time, who for nearly a decade found a home in Yale's Comparative Literature Department, expanded the concept of textuality to the point where nothing could be demarcated as 'hors d'œuvre' and escape the literary-critical eye. It was uncanny to feel hierarchic boundaries waver until the commentary entered the text—not literally, of course, but in the sense that the over-objectified work became a reflection on its own status, its stability as an object of cognition. The well-wrought urn contained mortal ashes."

— Geoffrey Hartman, A Life of Learning

In memory of
Jacques Derrida and James Chace,
both of whom died in Paris on
Friday, Oct. 8, 2004… continued…
(See previous three entries.)

Orson Welles

Mate in 2 V. Nabokov, 1919

"The last enemy
that shall be destroyed is death."
— Saul of Tarsus, 1 Cor. 15:26

Knight move,
courtesy of V. Nabokov:

Nfe5 mate

Knight:

Sir John Falstaff
(See Chimes at Midnight.)