Let's say that one were to read these comments while being an anti-natalist who still believes firmly in the importance of child welfare. Such a reader might want to look at how the affiliative dimensions of human cultural production--which is to say nurture, the care for the young and the establishment of linguistic, cultural artifacts--have…

"Moreover, the persistence of the poetics of entanglement in these discourses suggests the possibility of an anthropological position, a position which attempts to identify how metaphors gain semantic valence according to worldly relationships, a position which may remain meaningful so long as these worldly relationships are shared among human bodies--even as those bodies become stretched…

"Indeed, Derrida closes his Truth in Painting with a series of associations that evoke fidelity, lacing, commitment, binding, and restriction--so maybe it's all tied together." Maybe. But part of what I am attempting to do is resist the temptation of those literary, "maybe" moments, those moments when an authorial voice dissolves into something called polysemy…

Why is it that one must know, and why is it that knowledge must come from prolonged study rather than direct, instantaneous experience? In his Songs of Experience, Martin Jay attempts to engage with the figures that we have already seen--Benjamin, Foucault, Barthes, Scott, Derrida, etc.--as a way of understanding precisely what that term "experience"…

Have I succeeded in making it any clearer--what is the trace, what is the aura? Well, perhaps going back, once more, to Derrida might help us to finish up. Going back to Grammatology, Derrida tells us: “the word trace must refer itself to a number of contemporary discourses whose force we intend to take into…