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

impersonality. Weil uses a processes of de-creation, attentiveness to the feelings and
sensations conveyed to her personhood by nature, to allow what it is that is essential in
those sensations to register as objective and verifiable facts within the construction of her
personality. She searches, through active selection, for essential things that affect her
personhood and that are capable of being aesthetically represented and rendered subject
to an act of self-interpretation.
In her reading of Weil, Cameron shows the opposing yet possible truths by which
impersonality modifies and makes human identity uncertain:
One way of approaching impersonality is to say that it is not the
negation of the person, but rather a penetration through or a falling
outside of the boundary of the human particular. Impersonality
disrupts elementary categories that we suppose to be fundamental
to specifying human distinctiveness. Or rather, we don't know what
the im of impersonality means. (ix)
For Weil we learn that the impersonal was marked by all that is inanimate, non-
human, and outside while also being a call to pay ever closer attention to the particular
qualities of the bad mood that her headaches presented. Rather than seeking release, Weil
found ways to endorse their painful being. Through moving and thinking within the
duration of the pain that her headaches caused, Weil found a way to experience an aspect
of herself, unavailable to her in a state of health, as "dead wood" or "a chlorophyll
conferring the faculty of feeding on light."
Pound finds different resources to register this ambivalence. His technique,
though, unlike Weil‘s, leaves no discernible pattern through which to make such
determinations of self-overcoming. His textualism plums both history and the delirium
that a real archive of events – a veridical order of memory – exists: under, through, and
with which to register a foundational connection to the discovered tenements of the self.
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