Class 7: Correction Berque & New Text by Echenoz

This week we got back to work but started branching out by studying an academic text by a contemporary author and researcher.

In fact, if you want to delve more into his texts, his theories and his world you can actually audit his seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales: http://crj.ehess.fr/document.php?id=581

For this text, it was imperative to analyse the overall meaning to find the juxtaposition between the living, WE, and the dead, THEM. From there, you needed to adapt the pronouns found in the text to correspond to the category you were talking about.

PART ONE: CORRECTION:

Opening Corpses

VIII. Yet no matter what they tell us, in the end corpses only say what we want to make them say. “We”, in other words, the living, with our monopoly on speech. We take advantage of this to be the only ones to talk about death, even if it’s the one thing in all the world we know the least about. Certainly, we see death with others, but no matter how much we autopsy ourselves, we’ll never see ourselves dead. There’s no hermeneutics of death: we’ll never know what it wants to say, other than transposed in terms of life. As someone who’s alive and thus capable of talking about death, I know that we, the living, are unable to put ourselves in the place of the dead. Even if we chant Requiem aeternam dona eis (“Grant them eternal rest” in Latin, a dead language but not the language of the dead), it’s mainly so the souls of the dead will leave us alone, we who are alive. Because souls that aren’t at rest come back; and we don’t really want that. What we want is for those we love not to die. But once they’re corpses, they’ve gone to another world, and we don’t really know what kind of ideas they might get over there. No doubt not the same ones they had while they were alive; because since they’ve been dead, they’ve seen worse (other things). They’ve seen other dead people who could very well have given them dead-people ideas.


HOMEWORK

For next week (22/23 March 2010) we will deal with ACTION. Again, it is important to know who did what, where and when and to whom. Here is the text:

Jean Echenoz, Cherokee 1983

Et maintenant qu’il avait un instant, le serveur parlait encore au jeune homme en désignant l’homme fort du regard. Il semblait parler à voix basse mais, malgré la musique, le jeune homme paraissait comprendre : il glissa de son tabouret, remonta calmement la ligne des buveurs pour s’approcher de l’homme fort, très près, et lui dire quelque chose que Georges Chave ne put entendre. L’homme fort sursauta, voulut reculer, se heurta au comptoir. Le jeune homme remua encore les lèvres et puis, subitement, caché entre eux parmi la foule obscure et le bruit, Georges Chave vit luire un rasoir dont la lame réfractait un faisceau fugitif de lueur jaune. Sous l’action d’on ne sait quoi, il y eut alors un mouvement de foule et Georges Chave heurta brusquement l’homme fort qui trébucha et que le jeune homme voulut retenir en se baissant à portée de Georges Chave, lequel alors balança sèchement sa jambe pour écraser son pied sur le nez du jeune homme qui se mit à crier quelque chose d’inaudible en portant ses deux mains vers son visage, le rasoir allant se perdre sous les semelles des danseurs. L’homme fort regarda brièvement l’homme grand, puis s’éloigna du bar en courant vers l’escalier, se frayant un brutal passage de sanglier à travers les femmes qui dansaient. Georges Chave courut après lui, le rejoignit dans le hall.