On critical composition in Hejinian and Scalapino's 'Sight' and 'Hearing'
As a writing teacher, I am relentlessly bugged by the question of how to move students toward an organic practice of critical inquiry, to help them feel pulled by it at the most basic, creaturely level. In my search for a pedagogy that feels right and real, I look toward the texts that have become my own exemplars of compelling argumentation and analytic integrity, only to realize that my favorite works of critical writing are, in fact, poetry.
Pleroma
Pt. 12
In The Radicality of Love, Srećko Horvat calls the practice of revolution an expression of love — at least, he claims, “if it wants to be worthy of its name” — and this denomination grounds a crucial amendment: “The worst thing that can happen to love is habit,” what with that worn patina of resignation — becoming-pedestrian, -routine. Rather than make love de novo, we endure it, suffer it, so that, to recognize oneself as numerous, to sublimate one’s solitude through the richness of shared experience means folding the Other into an abstraction (“the-Other-for-me”) — a “vision-in-one,” to borrow François Laruelle’s nomenclature, that cedes love-making for love-draining.
[L]ove must be reinvented, that’s obvious. — Arthur Rimbaud[1]
The reinvention of the world without the reinvention of love is not a reinvention at all.
— Srećko Horvat[2]
A dialogue about love is utterly crucial to the remaking of the modern world in writing.
— Leslie Scalapino[3]