Abstract
Shade is a rarity of light. The amorphous qualities of shade are not to be confused with the definable contours of shadow. Not only is shade a subversion of what Maurice Blanchot has called “the optical imperative” of the western tradition, it is also a suspension of the Platonic binaries that define knowledge and ignorance. In the arc between these polarities, shade transforms to tone, and knowledge fades to intimation. If we can know rarity, we know it as we know shade.
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Notes
Roy Sorensen, Seeing Dark Things: The Philosophy of Shadows ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 ), 118.
Andrew Marvell, The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976 ), 101.
Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007 ), 207.
Yves Bonnefoy, The Curved Planks, trans. Hoyt Rogers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006 ), 58–59.
Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1981 ), 67.
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989 ), 168.
Simon Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (New York: Routledge, 1997), 35.
Henri Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity in Henri Bergson: Key Writings, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey (London: Continuum, 2002), 216.
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© 2016 Harold Schweizer
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Schweizer, H. (2016). The Rarity of Shade. In: Rarity and the Poetic: The Gesture of Small Flowers. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-58929-3_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-58929-3_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-88778-1
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