#pascal quinard

[minoracts]

"There are no bounds to physis made voice. There is no border between fusional-innate and passionate experience, between the writer’s gift and linguistic technique, between the biological given and the investigative function of paradoxes and images. The sublime does not lead the listener by persuasion (pistis) but by exaltation (ektasis). The great poet or the great prose writer searches for the ecstatic word. Language at its peak makes thauma (wonder, admiration) and ekstasis (ecstasy) oscillate, and procures for thought the sensation of light. “Art (technè) is complete when it seems to be nature, and nature, in turn, reaches its goal when it encloses (lanthanousan) art without anyone noticing. Art teaches, and here is the capital point (kyriôtaton), that there are certain peculiarities in the logos that have physis for their unique foundation.” The peak of language grants passage to the originary stock. All at once the raptor's area and the wild beast’s lair gather in it. A work of literature is situated in a time that is different from speech itself, devoted as it is to the present. Not writing in the present of its speech, literature writes in the past, writes in the future. It is a valiant writing, daring and threatening: it rivals dead writers, rivals eminent ones, rivals the future of speech both in the spell it casts as well as in the challenge it sets for writers yet to be born. It is a knot, a logos, a nexum, a spell, a defixio, a ligatura. Mimèsis or admiration, which both consist in letting oneself be possessed by the behavior of the other, of the beast, of the mountain, of its peak, of the vulture, is a predation more ancient than representation itself and gives birth to it. Normal words are like clothes that cover up: hence literary language is language naked to the point of fright."

Pascal Quignard, Speculative Rhetoric, trans. Timothy Lavenz