The Technique of Bewilderment
by: Benjamin Shapere
"So the poet declares, “Love is a thing of twoness.” Some people, viewing the ponds from a distance, perceive only a superficial blueness, without the full immersion in immanence that is necessary for one to unify oneself with its branching multiplicities. This immersion requires one to leave off, in any case, the preconceived notions of observation, carried like dusty and begrimèd lenses preventing vision from dividing itself into further truths (greens blues browns held at once from the same viewpoint!). Bewilder, and the colors will proliferate like roots through water."
Meaning-making to Question Social Reality | A Reading of Citizen: An American Lyric
by: L. D.
"Rankine writes against the social reality by an imagination of another order. This kind of imagination is not given material, tangible tenets, but serves instead as a lingering possibility that echoes where uncertainty of signification is [...] In the unspecified possibilities of imagination, utopia ontologically exists: it stands existentially beyond the social order, and the general imagination of other orders will draw into play utopia. Subverting the social order by critique of race, language, and deviance, Rankine allows imagination to simply be a lingering presence that opens a possibility of un-reality, of utopia."
The Machine of "Desire"
by: Raymond Wu
"Each series of chambers —created through the multiplication of indexes, animated by the topography of desire, and operated by territorialized women — reproduces a modular pattern, through which they tune with one another to generate and capture the subject. Joseph K. 's movement — whether he tries to escape into the superego, the id, or into the stationary flight of daydreaming — never deterritorializes him from the topography that grounds him. Through the functions of the machine, they reterritorialize every attempt of his escape into another segment and thus diminish his possibility of breaking away."
Being at Threshold: Reading
The Vegetarian Before Power
and Beyond Human
by: Tina Qian
"Within this dream-space, where violence is omnipresent, the body endangered, and the self-permeable, Yeong-hye has already begun a pre-conscious, pre-symbolic turn toward vegetarianism as a way back to the Kristevan purity as a necessary reaction to abjection and away from the violence in flesh. The vegetal impulse—the desire for transformation, transcendence, and an inverted mode of perception—constitutes Yeong-hye’s metamorphic identity. Her arboreal fantasy signals a withdrawal from the Symbolic Order: not a full departure but a liminal positioning in which she has “ceased to be circumscribed, reasoned with, thrust aside” (Kristeva 15)."