jbml thln 21 edmond jabès asserts:


"You
are silent,
I was; you
speak, I am."

I (JB) had always thought of this in terms of the possibility of a living relationship with the dead.

(In anthropological terms, there is nothing magical or superstitious about such a possibility; it would be, rather, almost a truism in nearly all human life worlds save the post-Enlightenment. If language, symbolmaking, culture, created as they arose the problem of acute consciousness of individual mortality, their evolution was in turn also driven as the solution to that problem.)

Taken as a statement about the politics of memory, this would be consonant with Benjamin's injunction to us to rescue our dead from that enemy "who has not ceased to be victorious." I had always thought, that is, of Jabès' "I" here in the guise of one dead, of Jabès in fact as a speaker for the dead.

Speaking of the dead, then, in a way that rescues them "from a conformity that is about to overpower them" would be a way of pre-serving life, would address and limit in some way the death of the dead. In this attempt to translate between Jabès' injunction and Benjamin's, pastness (having been, "I was "knipoog would be analogous to death, as presence (being, "I am"knipoog would be analogous to life!
04 mrt 2013 - bewerkt op 05 mrt 2013 - meld ongepast verhaal
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