“Now listen! Can’t you see that when the language was new — as it was with Chaucer and Homer — the poet could use the name of a thing and the thing was really there? He could say “O moon,” “O sea,” “O love” and the moon and the sea and love were really there. And can’t you see that after hundreds of years had gone by and thousands of poems had been written, he could call on those words and find that they were just worn-out literary words? The excitingness of pure being had withdrawn from them; they were just rather stale literary words. Now the poet has to work in the excitingness of pure being; he has to get back that intensity into the language. We all know that it’s hard to write poetry in a late age; and we know that you have to put some strangeness, something unexpected, into the structure of the sentence in order to bring back vitality to the noun. Now it’s not enough to be bizarre; the strangeness in the sentence structure has to come from the poetic gift, too. That’s why it’s doubly hard to be a poet in a late age.”
Taken from a speech by Gertrude Stein at the University of Chicago. Recorded by Thornton Wilder in the introduction to Four in America (1947).

Destruktion and deconstruction

The theory of deconstruction developed by Jacques Derrida has been enormously influential. In brief, it calls for the subversion and dismantlement of philosophical and social structures, hierarchies and oppositions, in order to avoid “violence”. But the concept was not original to Derrida: its core was borrowed from Martin Heidegger’s idea of destruktion, the end result of that thinker’s large-scale critique of Western metaphysics. Derrida removed destruktion from its original context and expanded it beyond Heidegger’s intentions, which arguably weakened it. Deconstruction is fatally Eurocentric and self-contradictory. However, Heidegger’s less ambitious project of destruktion, while ultimately flawed, is not prone to these same failings.

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