Quite recently I have been thinking a lot about language. And to be more particular the written word. Basically, I have always maintained that you never read in order to learn something new. Books are simply a way to find other people that you agree with, or to see thoughts that you have in you and cannot really express. This is all nice and well if you're reading the latest Ligotti opus, but things begin to get a tad complicated when you turn to reading philosophy.
I think that more or less each nationality has it's own style of expressing itself, and this is when the problems begin. OK the Americans are my favourite, they cut straight to the point, I like them, they say it as they see it. The English are nice as well, direct plus they use cooler words. I like the English. But then we go to where my problems begin. The French!
For some reason I have been occupying myself with French writers and one thought keeps popping in my head...Why? Why do you do this to me?...Why do you do this to yourselves? Ok for example; I have been reading some Baudrillard and the guy wants to say something along the lines of: “our lives are played out on small computer screens/simulations", referring to the virtual/digital blah blah...Does he actually use the word small, tiny, minute, or even microscopic ...nooooo the word he chose to type is “infinitesimal”...What sort of word is this? If you go down the cafe and ask for some coffee with an infinitesimal amount of milk in it, I bet you'll get a croissant thrown at your face. Googling infinitesimal gives you that it is something so small that it cannot be measured, but it also gives you that it is strongly linked to mathematics and it roughly means that you get something to be so small that you cannot reduce it any more yet it still retains some rudimentary qualities of the starting object.
So now you start thinking that maybe dear Jean had his reasons to use infinitesimal and not good old small. You ponder a bit and yes there was a reason... so you end up writing a couple of paragraphs on what the implications that led Baudrillard to use infinitesimal are. So now it all makes sense....but still since Baudrillard thought about it, why didn't he write about it and just stuck the infinitesimal word in? Well and did he think about it or is it you just projecting? Or is it all a twisted joke by the translator? Who knows but all this active reading thing is maybe what draws me to the French...
It only gets annoying when you read someone like Bataille who I hands down think as a genius, but severely disturbed. I like Bataille You pick up one of his books and your faculties start giving up on you...yet you go on in what is obviously the work of a delirious man, who in the random scattered moments of clarity, really has grasped how the cosmos works...So there you are reading away and just as soon as it all makes sense you get a closing chapter that says: Ooops I was wrong, no nothing sorry … my reasoning was faulted, forgive me for wasting your time...bye bye...all is nothing, remember kids unlearning is the path...I forgive such things only because Bataille has a fixation with the word odious...every ten or twenty pages he keeps finding something as being odious. I like that word odious...it has a nice ring to it.
...I just squashed a mosquito against my monitor... Bataille would like that.