this is how i feel about a lot of people on the internet
“How different are the prudent and formidable words of the obsessive. He delights in his discourse, touches it up, polishes it. He is the man of one single utterance, and of one unique image. He’ll serve it to you over and over, prepared or presented differently. Don’t be offended. He doesn’t take you for deaf or stupid. He just ignores you. He talks to himself. You are merely a pretext, a spectator just barely admitted to the dialogue he carries on with himself, and which will go on in your absence. The less you show yourself the better he’ll feel, because he brooks no disagreement with his discourse or with his image. Only your silence, the suspension of your own desire, can one day interrupt the flux of redundant utterances, utterances of utterances, often, for the sake of prudence, empty. He inturrupts himself: “To whom was I speaking?” If you persevere, and resist the temptation to get a word in edgewise, scanning the silence when he finally speaks to you, his desire might be able to liberate itself from the capture of the gaze, from its too perfect appropriateness to the signifier, and open up a real dialogue.”
(Luce Iragaray, To Speak is Never Neutral)
February 7th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
did um….did something happen?
February 7th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Nothing specific! I just read this bit of Iragaray’s book today, and it reminded me of a certain type of knuckleheaded person who writes online; the one who is typing just to hear himself type. I almost titled the post, “this how I feel about 25% of people on metafilter.”