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Help me make a list
of writers in whose work every image, every movement of thought, every recognition refers to death
By Carl | February 17, 2007 | Permalink
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Maurice Blanchot
Posted by: cameron | Feb 18, 2007 5:29:07 AM
FERBER, Edna
Posted by: 01001010 | Feb 18, 2007 10:01:40 AM
“Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.” -- Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler... 249
“Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.” -- Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” 7
“Only in the novel are meaning and life, and thus the essential and the temporal, separated; one can almost say that the whole inner action of the novel is nothing else but a struggle against the power of time.” -- Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel
Posted by: jane | Feb 18, 2007 10:46:48 AM
such a list is obscene, is it not? one suspects carl of URAJOKE(ing)...
nonetheless: gabriel josipovici, gillian rose, arthur rimbaud, susan sontag, paul celan, john berger
Posted by: Matt | Feb 18, 2007 12:03:45 PM
When I read Henry James I feel like I’m watching a horror movie: death that could be my own is prefigured everywhere.
Posted by: Carl | Feb 18, 2007 3:07:46 PM
Is that an introjective as opposed to projective sort of thing, carl?
Posted by: Matt | Feb 18, 2007 4:49:06 PM
Recognitions and movements refer?
Posted by: ben wolfson | Feb 18, 2007 5:38:54 PM
Marguerite Duras
Celine (?)
Posted by: David McDougall | Feb 18, 2007 6:58:22 PM
William Pierce?
Posted by: muhahaha | Feb 18, 2007 8:16:11 PM
BERLE,Milton
Posted by: 01001010 | Feb 18, 2007 8:22:45 PM
Kierkegaard, "Such is my situation in the realm of the spirit. I have disciplined myself and keep myself under discipline, in order that I may be able to execute a sort of nimble dancing in the service of Thought, so far as possible also to the honor of the God, and for my own satisfaction. For this reason I have had -to resign the domestic happiness, the civic respectability, the glad fellowship, the communio bonorum, which is implied in the possession of an opinion. -- Do I enjoy any reward? Have I permission, like the priest at the altar, to eat of the sacrifices? . . . That must remain my own affair. My master is good for it, as the bankers say, and good in quite a different sense from theirs. But if anyone were to be so polite as to assume that I have an opinion, and if he were to carry his gallantry to the extreme of adopting this opinion because he believed it to be mine, I should have to be sorry for his politeness, in that it was bestowed upon so unworthy an object, and for his opinion, if he has no other opinion than mine. I stand ready to risk my own life, to play the game of thought with it in all earnest; but another’s life I cannot jeopardize. This service is perhaps the only one I can render to Philosophy, I who have no learning to offer her, "scarcely enough for the course at one drachma, to say nothing of the great course at fifty drachmas" (Cratylus). I have only my life, and the instant a difficulty offers I put it in play. Then the dance goes merrily, for my partner is the thought of Death, and is indeed a nimble dancer; every human being, on the other hand, is too heavy for me. Therefore I pray, per deos obsecro: Let no one invite me, for I will not dance." -- Philosophical Fragments, Preface
also see Joel Peter Witkin
Posted by: cynic librarian | Feb 18, 2007 8:52:46 PM
Beckett, obviously.
Posted by: Jonathan Weed | Feb 19, 2007 1:19:24 AM
Bo...
Bo...
Bo...
Herr...
Herr..
Trafio...
Signorelli.
Posted by: jb | Feb 19, 2007 4:49:55 AM
""""""recognitions refer?""""""
Hold writers and wankers to a referential criteria, and blogland would soon be dismantled; but then so would most humanities, Lit. and philosophy departments, from Palo Alto to Pittsberg.
Posted by: 01001010 | Feb 19, 2007 9:10:20 AM
Patrick Modiano
Posted by: bram | Feb 19, 2007 9:48:41 AM
Freud, of course.
'Misremembering Signorelli'
"Herr, what is there to be said?"
"Herr, when that is gone, what is there left to live for?"
Posted by: jb | Feb 19, 2007 11:54:02 PM
Camus & Keats.
Posted by: VA | Feb 19, 2007 11:56:26 PM
Don Delillo. Pynchon?
Posted by: VA | Feb 19, 2007 11:58:55 PM
You know I'm glad someone mentioned Margeurite Duras (as she's been staring at that broken pier in the image overlooking, all this time).
Posted by: Matt | Feb 20, 2007 1:17:38 AM
""""The concept of dog does not bark.""""
Posted by: 01001010 | Feb 20, 2007 9:03:37 AM
""""Delillo. Pynchon""""
Gaze at Capn' Tom's cartoons for a long enough time (the entropy cartoon, trajectory cartoon, bomb cartoons, thanatopis cartoons, the femme cartoons, etc. ) and one might be impelled to sign up for the Lit. book burning...and ah wager a few WWII historians, and physicists may have already signed it............
Posted by: nominalist | Feb 20, 2007 10:31:57 AM
Nominalist (if zat iz your real nëm), you vill not embarass or intimidate ze literature people vis your fascistic insistence on ze Truth!
Other death writer: Emily Dickenson.
Posted by: VA | Feb 20, 2007 12:35:05 PM
Will Oldham, of course.
Posted by: Craig | Feb 21, 2007 9:20:03 AM
Rosenzweig, but it's as an an enemy:
1st line of The Star of Redemption - "All cognition of the All begins in death" and the last two words - "Into Life."
Posted by: old | Feb 21, 2007 10:10:34 AM
""""Celine (?)"""""
Given the present state of Ho-wood and NY oligarchies, and Oprahocracy in general,
CelineTime may be soon approaching, or at least some review of the cliffsnotes to Mort a Credit.
Posted by: nominalist | Feb 21, 2007 2:41:04 PM
Heidegger's being-towards-death.
Posted by: LP | Feb 21, 2007 3:31:25 PM
Artaud, Rilke, Whitman (yes, Whitman; see "Specimen Days," not to mention "Cradle Endlessly Rocking," etc.)...
Posted by: cynic librarian | Feb 22, 2007 1:50:12 AM
HLMencken's translation of Nietzsche's AntiChrist
Posted by: nominalist | Feb 22, 2007 8:55:22 AM
Thank you all. In this post I review a remark of Benjamin's about the centrality of death in Proust.
Posted by: Carl | Feb 22, 2007 11:32:29 AM
""""To think that no one has thought of Kant's categorical imperative as dangerous to life!...The theological instinct alone took it under protection !--An action prompted by the life-instinct proves that it is a right action by the amount of pleasure that goes with it: and yet that Nihilist, with his bowels of Christian dogmatism, regarded pleasure as an objection . . . What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure--as a mere automaton of duty? That is the recipe for decadence, and no less for idiocy. . . Kant became an idiot.--"""""
Ja f-n wohl. We are not worthy.
Another rather cool Totenkopfchen: EAPoe
Posted by: nominalist | Feb 22, 2007 12:22:56 PM
"Artaud"
Questionable. It seems to me that Artaud refers his material mainly back to images of jouissance, rather than death per se. Lorenzo Chiesa, for one, has argued this...
Posted by: daniel | Feb 22, 2007 1:59:14 PM
"Arthur Rimbaud"
Equally, somewhat debatable. Is not Rimbaud really more concerned, in Bateau Ivre, and Paris Orgy, for instance, with surging vitality? Even A Season in Hell, I'm not sure, is really about death...
Posted by: daniel | Feb 22, 2007 2:01:46 PM
Ah've always been somewhat partial to Artie R's
Conneries. Yet would agree, tentatively, that they be more pagan, libertine, surreal, etc. than mort-like. EA Poe is a poet of death and didn't even some of the parisian peeps agree? Baudelaire, etc. Yankees, tho' perhaps not quite Dante, paint Thanatopsis fairly well; Steven Crane also in the camp, and not quite as gothic-sappy as EAP, or Lovecraft. Or Ambrose Bierce: tombmeister, most likely licked blood off of his bayonet. Better Bierce than another Proustian decorator.
Posted by: nominalist | Feb 22, 2007 10:40:36 PM
Soazig Aaron
Posted by: raphael | Feb 24, 2007 12:05:25 PM
Thomas Mann
Posted by: Swifty | Feb 26, 2007 9:03:52 AM
Mao: The Unknown Story-- Halliday and Chang.
Posted by: nominalist | Feb 26, 2007 3:19:05 PM
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