Abstract
Invisibly visible, an oxymoron drawn from the association of the sacred with the written; for in scripture is the holy at once, purportedly, hidden and revealed. Writing in its most distilled form is often, and across cultures, identified as a poetic discourse and the purest poetry runs the risk of being regarded as exclusively formal, as removed as possible from any material reality or even the representation of such.
… poetic intuition … alone provides the thread that can put us back on the road of Gnosis as knowledge of the suprasensible Reality, `invisibly visible in an eternal mystery’.
André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism
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Notes
Harold Bloom (1976), Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 1–26.
Guillaume Apollinaire (1920), ‘Zone’, in Alcools, Paris: Gallimard, p. 12.
St John of the Cross (1979), The Collected Works of St John of the Cross, trans. K. Kavanagh and O. Rodriguez, Washington: ICS, p. 676.
Susan Handelman (1987), ‘Jacques Derrida and the Heretic Hermeneutic’, in Mark Krupnik, ed., Displacement: Derrida and After, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 108–11.
Harold Bloom (1982), The Breaking of the Vessels, Chicago: Universtity of Chicago Press, pp. 63–4.
Jacques Derrida (1982), Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, p. 6.
Jacques Derrida (1978), Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 294–300.
Emmanuel Levinas (1969), Totality and Infinity, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, p. 27.
Bernard McGuirk (1997), ‘Post-postscript: space, self, other. Latin America and the “Third Term”’, in Latin American Literature: Symptoms, Risks and Strategies of Poststructuralist Criticism, London: Routledge, pp. 233–57.
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© 2000 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Mcguirk, B. (2000). On the Trajectory of Gnosis: Pierre Reverdy via (obscura) St John of the Cross. In: Leonard, P. (eds) Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature. Cross-Currents in Religion and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596597_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596597_3
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