Words and the murder of the thing

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 28, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 99-113

  Schwenger, Peter ^a  

^a MOUNT SAINT VINCENT UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950615366     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/449034     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, vol. 11 of The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1941), p. 169
2. Swift critics cite a particular target: Thomas Sprat's desire for an Edenic time "when men deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal number of words" or rather the mechanistic equivalence between words and things that this wish implies (Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold W.Jones [St. Louis, 1958], p. 113)
3. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis, 1975), 1.1-3, p. 5
4. G. W. F. Hegel, System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit, trans. and ed. H. S. Harris and T. M. Knox (Albany, N.Y., 1979), p. 221
5. Maurice Blanchot, "Literature and the Right to Death," "The Gaze of Orpheus" and Other Literary Essays, trans. Lydia Davis, ed. P. Adams Sitney (Barrytown, N.Y., 1981), p. 42; hereafter abbreviated "L."
6. Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York, 1971), p. 73; hereafter abbreviated "O."
7. Heidegger, What Is a Thing? trans. W. B. Barton, Jr. and Vera Deutsch (Chicago, 1967), p. 140
8. See Heidegger, "The Thing," Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 117; hereafter abbreviated "T."
9. Heidegger, What Is a Thing? p. 128
10. John Hollander recovers the strangeness of naming in "Adam's Task," which begins: Thou, paw-paw-paw; thou, glurd; thou, spotted Glurd; thou, whitestap, lurching through The high-grown brush; thou, pliant-footed, Implex; thou, awagabu. (John Hollander, "Adam's Task," Selected Poetry [New York, 1993], p. 267)
11. Victor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique," in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln, Nebr., 1965), p. 12
12. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (Mineola, N.Y., 1997), p. 3, hereafter abbreviated T
13. Stein, "A Transatlantic Interview, 1946," A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles, 1971), p. 18
14. Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York, 1970), p. 127
15. For examples of nineteenth-century cut glass carafes, see Felice Mehlman, The Phaidon Guide to Glass (Oxford, 1982), pp. 126-27
16. See for example Allegra Stewart, Gertrude Stein and the Present (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 87-95
17. William H. Gass, "Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence," The World Within the Word, ed. Gass (New York, 1979), pp. 63-123, esp. pp. 82-84
18. and Lisa Ruddick, Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990), pp. 194-97
19. See Linda Mizejewski, "Gertrude Stein: The Pattern Moves, the Woman behind Shakes It," Women's Studies 13 (1986); 42
20. Stein, "Portraits and Repetition," Look at Me Mow and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures, 1909-1945, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (London, 1990), p. 115
21. Georges Braque, Illustrated Notebooks, 1917-1955, trans. Stanley Applebaum (New York, 1971), p. 35
22. Quoted in Sherwood Anderson, "The Work of Gertrude Stein," introduction to Stein, Geography and Plays (Boston, 1922), p. 5
23. Quoted in Serge Gavronsky's introduction to Francis Ponge, The Power of Language, trans. Gavronsky (Berkeley, 1979), p. 21
24. Ponge, "La Cruche," Pieces (Paris, 1962), p. 94; hereafter abbreviated "C."
25. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (London, 1966), p. 172
26. Ponge, "Tentative orale," Méίhodes (Paris, 1988), p. 202; hereafter abbreviated "TO."
27. Ponge, Tome Premier, trans. Richard Stamelman (Paris, 1965), p. 257
28. Ponge, Soap, trans. Lane Dunlop (Stanford, Calif., 1998), p. 10; hereafter abbreviated 5
29. W. H. Auden, "As I Walked out One Evening" Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York, 1976), p. 115
30. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1975), 18:40-41
31. Ponge, "Proem," Things, trans. Cid Corman (New York, 1971), p. 12
32. Ellie Ragland, "Lacan, the Death Drive, and the Dream of the Burning Child," in Death and Representation, ed. Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen (Baltimore, 1993), p. 84
33. Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, vol. 2 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York, 1991), p. 326
34. quot;From the mid-sixties on, Lacan equated the death drive with the jouissance effects produced by the objet a," Ragland tells us stressing, however, that jouissance can be either ecstacy or agony (Ragland, "Lacan, the Death Drive and the Dream of the Burning Child," p. 85)
35. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, vol. 7 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, trans. Dennis Porter, ed. Miller (New York, 1992), p. 120; hereafter abbreviated E
36. This is Lacan's (or rather his translator's) version of Freud's words in the Project for a Scientific Psychology. Strachey's translation is slightly different, but the substance is the same. See Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 1:330
37. Lacan, "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), p. 104