[Byron Society home page] [Event]
by Charlotte "Margarita Cogni" Stoudt
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
And pretend the concept of a unified subject can still get by.
Let us go, through uncertain half-deferred texts,
The muttering dialectics
Of rhetorically unstable language;
Texts that no longer read like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent.
Oh, do not ask, ‘What is intention?’
For with that naive humanist concept we know what Derrida has done.
In the room French feminists come and come
Claiming that Lacan is done.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
And yet avoid the totalising monological structure of imperialist discourse?
I should have been a member of the Frankfurt School,
Exposing the reified hegemony of commodity fetishism.
No! I am not Paul de Man, nor was meant to be.
I am no Stanley Fish — and here’s no great destabilising textual reading.
I have seen the abyssal nature of my discourse
And, in short, the radical attempt to negate art has ended up ironically
by giving due exactly to these categories through which Enlightenment aesthetics
has circumscribed its object domain.
In the room ...
I grow hegemonic, I grow hegemonic,
I shall put the bottoms of my trousers under an erasure.
I have heard the post-Hegelians deconstructing, none to none;
I do not think that they will equate aesthetic judgment with the expression
of subjective experiences:
We have lingered in the spaces of phallic signifiers,
By marginalised subjects wreathed with the tyranny of patriarchal representation,
Till post-modernist resistance wakes us, and we embrace the difference
of the other.