The master of tricks
Posted on February 26, 2002 @ 12:04 in Research
Stephen Tyler writes:
The coincidentia oppositorum of putrefaction/congellation symbolizes the antonomasia of feelings as sensation and sense sensibility. Derrida seeks to escape the subjectivity and incommunicability of feelings by endowing them with the properties of the transcendental signifier which has no need of referents but has yet an inner structure of chance that is neither the product of a subject nor of the objects that make the subject's experience. (Tyler, 1987: 56)
This may look like gobbledygook, but in the end I made sense of it in the context of the book and argument it is in. For sure, it took me a long time to make sense of it (I had to read loads of books and had to reread Tyler's book many times) but all the while I had a gut feeling that it made sense and for a long while I knew I would understand it, but that understanding remained just beyond my grasp.
Sense it made in the end, however, just a page before the quote above, Tyler writes:
The master of tricks is the one who plays tricks best, whose technique and style produce illusions so brilliant and captivating that they are valued above the reality they both obscure and reveal, not because they are understood but because they seem to be just beyond the limit of understanding at the same time as they are within it. (Tyler, 1987: 55)
Sweet irony, isn't it? Thick is the plot of the evocative text.
(Tyler, Stephen A. (1987) The Unspeakable. Discourse, Dialogue, and Rhetoric in the Postmodern World. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.)
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