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TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

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that metalepsis is a useful heuristic. However, what we find after we take the material<br />

substrate of language acquisition seriously as it is tropologically refracted into theoretic<br />

discourses like Blasing's, may not be that it constitutes the ground for the subject's<br />

eventual metaleptic formation. Finding a world without an irrational-Symbolic that is<br />

different in kind from the rational-Real leaves metalepsis open to the possibility that what<br />

it breaks is only ever a question of degree and not the transumptive leap into the symbolic<br />

order Blasing argues that it is. Rather than being a "metonymy of a metonymy"<br />

metalepsis implies understanding that metonymy (replacement) is a species of the genus<br />

synecdoche (condensation). Implied by this understanding is the knowledge that poetic<br />

tropes are learned from the confrontation of the will to repeat and the natural law that<br />

abhors all repetition. For Deleuze, this confrontation produces the ground of scriptable/<br />

sayable Symbols that disguise Nature's profound independence from the mimetic<br />

principles of identity(genus), resemblance(perception), opposition(predication), and<br />

analogy(judgment). Metalepsis, on these terms, registers rather than represents the<br />

subject‘s disguise in Symbol. Blasing's concern to instantiate the ontological priority of<br />

the non-rational to lyrical language forces her to smooth over the foundational difference<br />

between Lacan and Deleuze. That Deleuze‘s linguistic theory closely recalls Benjamin‘s<br />

processual understanding of the relationship between names and titles is not, perhaps,<br />

surprising.<br />

In fact, poetic-subjectivities like that which belong to Ezra Pound, and obliquely<br />

acknowledged by Saunders, follow Deleuze‘s appraisal for the multiple more readily than<br />

Blasing‘s implicit favoring of the singular in the metaleptic break into the symbolic order.<br />

Pound's distinct impersonality, one in which he grants his narrator the power to construct<br />

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