一座演化中的島嶼

A limitless memory would in any event be not memory but infinite self-oresence. Memory always therefore already needs signs in order to recall the non-present, with which it is necessarily in relation.
-- Jacques Derrida

We cannot not try to open up, from the inside, the colonialism of European national language-based Comparative Literature and the Cold War format of Area Studies, and infect history and anthropology with the "other" as producer of knowledge. From the inside, acknowledging complicity. No accusations. No excuses. Rather, learning the protocol of those disciplines, turning them around, laboriously, not only by building institutional bridges but also by persistent curricular interventions. The most difficult thing here is to resist mere appropriation by the dominant.
-- Gayatri Spivak

Textuality being constituted by differences and by differences from differences, it is by nature absolutely heterogeneous and is constantly composing with forces that tend to annihilate it.
-- Jacques Derrida

When a word inscribes itself as the citation of another sense of the same word, when the textual center-stage of the word pharmakon, even while it means remedy , cites, recites, and makes legible that which in the same word signifies, in another spot and on a different level of the stage, poison (for example, since that is not the only thing pharmakon means), the choice of only one of these renditions by the translator has as its first effect the neutralization of the citation play, of the "anagram," and, in the end, quite simply of very textuality of the translated text.
-- Jacques Derrida

To lexicalize is to separate a linguistic term from its supposedly appropriate initial grammatical system into the conventions of another grammar. A new lexicalization involves a delexicalization as well. This is a constant and ongoing process and we cannot necessarily fix a positive or a negative value to it. In the emergence of the new postcolonial subject we witnessed a relexicalizing of India and Palestine.
-- Gayatri Spivak

Genealogical deconstruction is what sustains anti-ethnic regionalism and shifts gears from the management of enthinicity to the equitable management of capital and the sources of capital.
-- Gayatri Spivak

A poem by Nadia Anjoman
Translated by Mahnaz Badihian


No desire to open my mouth
What should I sing of...?
I, who am hated by life.
No difference to sing or not to sing.
Why should I talk of sweetness,
When I feel bitterness?
Oh, the oppressor's feast
Knocked my mouth.
I have no companion in life
Who can I be sweet for?
No difference to speak, to laugh,
To die, to be.
Me and my strained solitude.
With sorrow and sadness.
I was borne for nothingness.
My mouth should be sealed.
Oh my heart, you know it is spring
And time to celebrate.
What should I do with a trapped wing,
Which does not let me fly?
I have been silent too long,
But I never forget the melody,
Since every moment I whisper
The songs from my heart,
Reminding myself of
The day I will break this cage,
Fly from this solitude
And sing like a melancholic.
I am not a weak poplar tree
To be shaken by any wind.
I am an Afghan woman,
It only makes sense to moan

As for the fetishism of the consumer, I mean to indicate here that the consumer has been transformed through commodity flows (and the mediascape, especially of advertising, that accompany them) into a sign, both in Baudrillard's sense of a simulacrum that only asymptotically approaches the form of a real social agent, and in the sense of a mask for the real seat of agency, which is not the consumer but the producer and the many forces that constitute production.
-- Arjun Appadurai

The image, the imagined, the imaginary -- there are all terms that direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice.
-- Arjun Appadurai

How to conceive what is outside a text? That which is more or less than a text's own, proper margin? -- Jacques Derrida