What do such men as Jeff and Jack mean when they speak of irony? It is possible that they mean irony in the sense of Derrida's former colleague Paul de Man. And in his glossing of the concept of irony, De Man pledges an allegiance to Schlegel and to Kierkegaard; Kierkegaard swears fealty to Socrates.…

I want, here, to return to Ankersmit's synesthetic example, the fierce redness of trumpets, because I think it is both more and less ingenious than his analysis gives it credit. The Dutch word translated as "fierce," fel, has a connotation of a sharp, acute sense. So we might then think of a painful sound which…

Previously, I have tried to explain the simultaneity of presence/absence in desire, and have tried to demonstrate how both Benjamin's understanding of aura and his definition of translation relate to that understanding of desire. Here, I will try to explore that interrelation of aura and translation even further, to explain why the search for an…

"We are lived by powers we pretend to understand: They arrange our loves;...but existing is believing We know for whom we mourn and who is grieving." -W.H. Auden, In Memory of Ernst Toller We are reaching, by means of this inquiry on desire, the limits of our capacity as human beings to explain the forces…

Defined as both presence and absence, desire is a peculiar entity. Presence: a firm pressure on one's gut, begging for release; a wind pressing one's sails forward. Absence: a ghost, a mirage, a memory no longer here, a future of unknown location. The everyday mentality with which one resolves this presence/absence dilemma is as follows:…