Robert Walser by Walter Benjamin

on mood of 'convalescent' - p. 112-3 in 'Microscripts'

Robert Walser - Microscript p.49

So here was a book again, and again I was introduced to a woman. I've acquired quite a few female acquaintances by reading, a pleasant method for expanding one's sphere of knowledge, though one can certainly, I admit, become lazy in this way. On the other hand, characters in books stand out better, I mean, more silhouettishly from one another, than do living figures, who, as they are alive and move about, tend to lack delineation.

BRUNO BOSTEELS - In the Shadow of Mao: Ricardo Piglia’s ‘Homenaje a

p.244

Maoism’s first innovation in respect of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy consists in having recognized the existence of internal contradictions in a socialist country even after the initial revolutionary period, and in having responded to this unexpected fact by proposing original tactics and strategies, in particular the famous mass line, the self-critique of the party as form, and the idea of intellectual re-education.

Battles in the Desert and Other Stories - Jose Emilio Pacheco

pp.32-33

I don't understand myself. The other day, I felt great compassion while I watched the cook killing the animals, and today I had great fun stepping on crabs at the beach. Not the big ones that live in the rocks; the little grey sand crabs. They would run around madly looking for their holes and I would crush them furiously and just for the fun of it. Then I thought that in some ways was are all like crabs and when we least expect it, someone or something comes along and crushes us.

p. 69

Pedro parked the car in front of the walls of the convent hidden in the mountain's desolation. They asked if you wanted to get out, and the three of you walked through deserted corridors, hallways full of echoes without memory.

‎'Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long beards, and pretences to foretell events.' - J.Swift

Roland Barthes, 'The Image' in The Rustle of Language, p.356

'I Crave, I long for Abstinence from Images, for every Image is bad' - Roland Barthes, 'The Image' in The Rustle of Language, p.356

Roland Barthes Interview (bio) from The Tel Quel Reader

p.256 - Mythologies not political but ideological, targeting the petite-bourgeoisie

p.262-63 - position as tourist diminishes the emphasis on the Japanese petty bourgeoisie,

and 'on writing' in relation to Zero degree

p.267 - on the work as awaiting and a preparation for 'socialist practice'?

In your article on Julia Kristeva's Semeiotike ('The Stranger', 19070) you write that in a society deprived of socialist practice, thus condemned to "discourse", theoretical discourse is temporarily necessary'. Do you mean to say that your work is an awaiting and a preparation for 'socialist practice'

Your question runs the risk in my opinion of reducing the plural of the subject in representing is as tending towards something unique and full; your question denies the unconscious. I accept it, however, and I will answer this: if it is absolutely necessary, to live and to work, to have a representation of an end (which is sometimes curiously called a Cause), I would just remind you of the tasks that Brecht suggests for the intellectual in a non-revolutionary period: liquidate and theorize. These tasks are always coupled together by Brecht: our discourse can represent nothing, prefigure nothing; we only have a negative activity at our disposition (Brecht called it critical, or even epic, that is, interruptive [entre-coupee], interrupting [qui coupe] history), at the end of which shines only, like a distant glimmer, intermittent and uncertain (barbarism is always a possibility), the ultimate transparency of social relations.