Derrida and the hedgehog
I have been slow to blog about the death of Jacques Derrida. He wasn’t as formative an influence on me as he was on others, but his essay "Freud and the Scene of Writing," together with the text it comments on, Freud’s "A Note on the Mystic Writing Pad," helped shape key parts of my dissertation.
But the Derrida essay I want to mention is a lesser-known one, "Che cos’è la poesia?" ("What is Poetry?" or more literally "What kind of thing is poetry?"). My battered photocopy is buried in a box somewhere, and someone has checked out the UVA Library’s copy of the collection in which it appears, so I can’t quote at length. But I did find an excerpt at another blog:
Who dares to ask me that? Even though it remains inapparent, since disappearing is its law, the answer sees itself (as) dictated (dictation). I am a dictation, pronounces poetry, learn me by heart, copy me down, guard and keep me, look out for me, look at me, dictated dictation, right before your eyes: soundtrack, wake, trail of light, photograph of the feast in mourning.
It sees itself, the response, dictated to be poetic, by being poetic. And for that reason, it is obliged to address itself to someone, singularly to you but as if to the being lost in anonymity, between city and nature, an imparted secret, at once public and private, absolutely one and the other, absolved from within and from without, neither one nor the other, the animal thrown onto the road, absolute, solitary, rolled up in a ball, next to (it)self. And for that very reason, it may get itself run over, just so, the herisson, istrice in Italian, in English, hedgehog.
The image of the poem as hedgehog has stuck with me more vividly than a lot of what I read in graduate school. Looking at this passage again, I realize that I still think of poetry in many of the same ways: as a spiny thing, a fragile but stubborn thing, an "imparted secret" both anonymous and intimate, something that asks to be learned by heart, interiorized, dictated, carried away.
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