Travis Kim

“As I rode back in the lonely night, the wind going by me like a restless memory, I thought of this, and feared she was not happy. I was not happy; but, thus far, I had faithfully set the seal upon the past, and, thinking of her, pointing upward, thought of her as pointing to that sky above me, where, in the mystery to come, I might yet love her with a love unknown on earth, and tell her what the strife had been within me when I loved her here.”
― Dickens Charles, David Copperfield

“In the apparent periphery of a footnote, Gender Trouble cites from the second paragraph of this passage Freud's assertion, "the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego" (GT 163, n. 43). But then, in a substitution crucially significant to her conceptualization of the body as the psychic projection of a surface, Butler replaces the referent "it" in the subsequent part of the cited sentence, which in Freud clearly refers back to the ego as bodily ego ("The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it . . . ) , with the word (square bracketed, demoted-in my citation of Butler's note-to parenthetical) "body." Butler's recitation of the passage reads: "Freud continues the above sentence: '(the body) is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface' " (GT 163 n. 43; my emphasis). Butler's reading of Freud's assertion thus figures the body as interchangeable with the ego. That is, the body appears not only as a surface entity but as itself the psychic projection of a surface. Yet that it is precisely Freud's concern at this point in his essay to articulate the bodily origins of the ego, the conception of the ego as product of the body not the body as product of the ego, is underscored by the explanatory footnote added by his editor James Strachey that appeared first in the 1927 English translation of this text immediately following the above passage-a note authorized by Freud. The note reads: "I.e. the ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body."30 Butler's reading therefore inverts the note's representation of the body as productive of the psyche ("the ego is derived from bodily sensations") and, through that square-bracketed substitution, conversely images the body as a psychic effect. The body itself becomes commensurable with the psychic projection of the body. Whereas Freud's original assertion maintains a distinction between the body's real surface and the body image as a mental projection of this surface (a distinction between corporeal referent and psychic signified), Butler's recitation collapses bodily surface into the psychic projection of the body, conflates corporeal materiality with imaginary projection. In so doing, it lets slip any notion of the body as a discernible referential category.”
― Jay Prosser, Second Skins

“So long as conversation is viewed as solely a matter of what is displayed and openly reacted to by conversants, and of background understandings they share, and of what is inferable from their external behaviors, it remains accessible to the researcher. As a working assumption, most conversation studies take the shared world to be somehow independent of what occurs privately in the minds of the conversants. This methodological tack is not only convenient but has a powerful logic to recommend it--after all, individual conversants, in choosing what they will do and say next, attend to what they and their co-conversants have said and done. Examination of discourse particles, such as well, like and y'know, however, points up the fact that each Individual participant in a conversation is aware that some thoughts are not disclosed and of the fact that conversants enter material selectively in the shared world. Although the private and other worlds are essentially inaccessible to the nonparticipant observer, their existence cannot be ignored--particularly since speakers themselves often acknowledge to each other, in a number of ways, the existence and importance of their own unexpressed thinking.”
― Lawrence C. Schourup, Common Discourse Particles in English Conversation

“Like a vile trichina, like a germ of the plague infecting whole kingdoms, so I contaminated all this earth, so happy and sinless before my coming. They learnt to lie, grew fond of lying, and discovered the charm of falsehood. Oh, at first perhaps it began innocently, with a jest, coquetry, with amorous play, perhaps indeed with a germ, but that germ of falsity made its way into their hearts and pleased them. Then sensuality was soon begotten, sensuality begot jealousy, jealousy--cruelty . . . Oh, I don't know, I don't remember; but soon, very soon the first blood was shed. They marvelled and were horrified, and began to be split up and divided. They formed into unions, but it was against one another. Reproaches, upbraidings followed. They came to know shame, and shame brought them to virtue. The conception of honour sprang up, and every union began waving its flags. They began torturing animals, and the animals withdrew from them into the forests and became hostile to them. They began to struggle for separation, for isolation, for individuality, for mine and thine. They began to talk in different languages. They became acquainted with sorrow and loved sorrow; they thirsted for suffering, and said that truth could only be attained through suffering. Then science appeared. As they became wicked they began talking of brotherhood and humanitarianism, and understood those ideas. As they became criminal, they invented justice and drew up whole legal codes in order to observe it, and to ensure their being kept, set up a guillotine. They hardly remembered what they had lost, in fact refused to believe that they had ever been happy and innocent. They even laughed at the possibility o this happiness in the past, and called it a dream. They could not even imagine it in definite form and shape, but, strange and wonderful to relate, though they lost all faith in their past happiness and called it a legend, they so longed to be happy and innocent once more that they succumbed to this desire like children, made an idol of it, set up temples and worshipped their own idea, their own desire; though at the same time they fully believed that it was unattainable and could not be realised, yet they bowed down to it and adored it with tears! Nevertheless, if it could have happened that they had returned to the innocent and happy condition which they had lost, and if someone had shown it to them again and had asked them whether they wanted to go back to it, they would certainly have refused.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky