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Marco V Morelli

| 29 Mar 2023

Microdoses Poetry AI, Barthes, Foucault, discourse, theory, writing

Memory is the real name of the relation to the self, or of the affect of oneself by oneself. According to Kant, time was the form in which the spirit affected itself, as the space was the form in which the spirit was affected by something else ; time was therefore "self-affection", constituting the essential structure of the subjectivity. But time as subject, or rather subjectification, is called Memory. Not that short memory that comes after, and opposed to oblivion, but "the absolute memory" which doubles the present, which redoubles the outside, and which is one with oblivion, as it is itself and continuously forgotten to be redone ; its fold merges with the unfold, because this one remains present in this other one, as what is folded. Only oblivion (unfolding) finds again what is folded into the memory (in the fold itself). (...) What is opposed to the memory is not the oblivion, but the oblivion of oblivion, which dissolves us outside, and which constitutes the death. (Gilles Deleuze - Foucault, Les Editions de Minuit, 1986 )

jef Safi, résiliAnce de la mémoire - anamnesis(4) / YSE#25 page 4 (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Now that #ai is colonizing
#writing, my mind goes back
to studying theory in the ’90s:
when Barthes’ Death of the Author
replaced the living subject
behind the speech act
with decentralized discourse,
the pleasure of the text,
and a critique of presence.
“What does it matter who
is speaking?” asked Foucault.
The author-function pervades.
Now all that we have left
are sliding signifier-chains
and disembodied hermeneutics.
And to the question:
Knock knock, who’s there?
—Who wants to know?

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