Rudimentary translation of a post on Daniel Link's blog:
Much harder than interpreting a pose is continuing a gesture, and it's surprising that, even today, 30 years removed from his lamentable disappearance, Walsh's sayings and writings continue to be interpreted as if they were frozen poses and not indications which we should try to follow for our own movement.
What about interpreting a gesture? Shouldn't there some way of interpreting gestures without trapping them in history? Or is the work of interpreting already given some direction, by the gesture itself? Link might be saying this, but he associates (links?) gestures with continuation rather than interpretation. This is a much more bodily image—quite proper to the gesture—but it also does not seem offer much direction itself.
I don't know very much about Walsh, so I can't say whether Link is mistaken to speak of this "even today," a phrase which, for me, implies that these gestures could have been continued from the day they were produced. (I'm not even sure that this could actually be false, for any gesture, but there you have it.) If there's any hope here, it's in this idea of following. But does that mean keeping the gesture at some distance, probably historical, and treating it as an indication, or a literal continuation, getting inside the gesture and using it "for our own movement"?
7 comments:
I like your Link link. What seems pressing about his comment on Walsh is that we not interpret, but follow. This is after all the good news brought by the now rather fashionable word "gesture." It neither is an interpretation nor does it lend itself to being interpreted. If it relates to interpreting at all it does so by coming before an interpretation or by being a fragment of one. As in dance, which underlies the metaphor of gesture, one responds to it by looking, imitating, and after imitating enough, following the movement where it seems to be leading, by varying, developing, completing, torturing, wasting, prolonging, and on and on. Link is a novelist, so this kind of artistic analogy is appropriate. Most critics don't think of themselves as following the gestures of the works they criticize, but rather as presenting the meaning of a text. The former seems much more interesting, and would be a good description of what Benjamin tried to do, not to mention Derrida.
pst, jakob,
(me parece que
este bloguista
no dialoga
con el comentarista).
che, que estará haciendo el pibe?
que duros eh! les agradezco igualmente por los comentarios... mi humilde blog tiene ya un toque de profesionalismo. (eso era la idea o no?)
ella lo hace para joderte me parece, yo para hacer un gesto no ambiguo de solidaridad.
es que a jakob le gusta hacerse el intelectual.
y a la cronista a veces le gusta hacerse la boba. pero no le creas. es muy inteligente.
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