I woke up this morning around three. Played my guitar (new song) for a while; then picked up my bedside copy of Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge. This is about the third time I’ve tried to read it. I finally have got his rhythm and actually like his writing—and his thinking, the origin of deconstruction: the absence beneath words, really, the indeterminacy of words—I wrote undeconstructively about this in one of my early articles, “The Yin and Yang of Genres” (cute title, huh?).
Went back to sleep thinking about the indeterminacy of life.
Two of his great lines: the occulation of discourse (I worked on that for about a half hour.)
“I am trying to define the blank space from which I speak.” (I got that right away.)
Published by ipeckham
Irvin, now retired, has been teaching writing at the high school and college level for forty years– in Morgan Hill, CA; the University of Nebraska, Omaha; Louisiana State University; and Drexel University. He specializes in and writes about social-class relationships, personal writing, and writing assessment.
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