The essentially arbitrary (and vice versa)

----We think that an artefact like the artistic text has this or that salient feature, as in the obsession with literariness, a version of essentialist thought. This idea is applied both on the production and reception paradigms which inform the governing reading contract at play in this classic hermeneutic position. Inherent property notion, as if it were residing within an object of reference. The whole point of art is always to foreground this habit, to make us see the arbitrariness of human meaning as it is expressed in various media, an arbitrariness founded on the the aporias of desire and myth than on essences and nature which are always posited to neutralize the arbitrary. This arbitrary, however, is not the opposite of law but the highest law, the highest form of necessity. The positing of inviolables, paradoxically, is also part of this arbitrary necessity. To posit the arbitrary fufills the arbitrary as its own negation and affirmation, whereas to posit the necessary is simply to assert the affirmation of its own necessity.


---Aren't we strangers to language and vice versa? What seems to be our most intimate possession is also the most mutable, the most traversed by the unknown. What we use to dispel the unknown, a guard, a solace, against it, the tool we depend on to understand, is also itself an unknown foreigner. What we think we possess always escapes, for it does not belong to us but to Time. What we felt to be our unique aid against the threat of the unknown each day is, in the final count, its ally. The more we use it, the more it becomes an other. It is not the foothold of identity, but of alterity. When spoken or written, its form transcends itself, and becomes a stranger right under our eyes. What we think we touch is not nearness but distance; what is left is nothing but a brief disturbance. Between the lips, a pure sound marks the meeting point of two strangers. When do I really speak you? When do you really speak me? Maybe only newborn children, whom we thought struggled with first vowels, had truly spoken.