Murdering language
“Language is one area of culture that Nicolas Sarkozy can’t dominate,” complains Hélène Cixous in the Guardian, “so he mangles it with a calculated barbarity… You’ve got to see what he does to language. He mauls it, he beats it, he pummels it, he dismembers it. Pushing syncope to the limit, he swallows half the syllables and he spits the rest in his opponent’s face.”
I hate to put Global Dashboard in the embarrassing position of defending the vertically-challenged French President, but seriously? This from Hélène Cixous? Author of some of the worst linguistic atrocities ever perpetuated?
Pure I, identical to I-self, does not exist. I is always in difference. I is the open set of the trances of an I by definition changing, mobile, because living-speaking-thinking-dreaming. This truth should moreover make us prudent and modest in our judgements and our definitions. The difference is in us, in me, difference plays me (my play). And it is numerous: since it plays with me in me between me and me or I and myself. A “myself” which is the most intimate first name of You. I will never say often enough that the difference is not one, that there is never without the other, and that the charm of difference (beginning with sexual difference) is that it passes… [continues ad nauseam]
Really, really, really: not fair.