Thursday, April 8, 2021

"What is left? What remains? Ephemera remain."

8 April 2021: "I have been making a case for a hermeneutics of residue that looks to understand the wake of performance. What is left? What remains? Ephemera remain. They are absent and they are present, disrupting a predictable metaphysics of presence. The actual act is only a stage in the game; it is a moment, pure and simple. There is a deductive element to performance that has everything to do with its conditions of possibility, and there is much that follows....This command to write is a command to save the ephemeral thing by committing it to memory, to word, to language. The poet instructs us to retain the last thing through a documentation of our loss, a retelling of our relationship to it" (Muñoz 71).

Still working my way through and really enjoying Cruising Utopia. This analysis of Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art," one of my favorite poems, just knocked me out. 

Work Cited

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York UP, 2009. 

No comments: