I am not talking about the brevity of a recorded film that
one could see again (life will have been so short) but of the very
thing itself.
Beyond memory and time lost. I am not even speaking of
an ultimate unveiling, but of what will have remained alien, for
all time, to the veiled figure, to the very figure of the veil.
This desire and promise let all my specters loose. A desire
without a horizon, for that is its luck or its condition. And a
promise that no longer expects what it waits for: there where,
striving for what is given to come, I finally know how not to have
to distinguish any longer between promise and terror.
from Monolingualism of the Other, Or, The Prosthesis of Origin, Jacques Derrida
All through these pages I have suggested that literary studies must take the “figure” as its guide. The meaning of the figure is undecidable, and yet we must attempt to dis-figure it, read the logic of the metaphor. We know that the figure can and will be literalized in yet other ways. All around us is the clamor for the rational destruction of the figure, the demand for not clarity but immediate comprehensibility by the ideological average. This destroys the force of literature as a cultural good. Anyone who believes that a literary education should still be sponsored by universities must allow that one must learn to read. And to learn to read is to learn to dis-figure the undecidable figure into a responsible literality, again and again. It is my belief that initiation into cultural explanation is a species of such a training in reading. By abandoning our commitment to reading, we unmoor the connection between the humanities and cultural instruction.
from Death of a Discipline, Death of a Discipline, Gayatri C. Spivak
We must learn to do violence to the epistemic epistemological difference and remember that this is what education “is,” and thus keep up the work of displacing belief onto the terrain of the imagination, attempt to access the epistemic. The displacement of belief onto the terrain of the imagination can be a description of reading in its most robust sense.
[…]
Affirmative sabotage.
from An Aesthetic Education, Gayatri C. Spivak