Previously on this blog

Dear void,

Last Monday I began this blog project which has been on my mind since starting my Doctor of Arts degree in July 2019. This blog is to be at once a focusing instrument and a way to reach out into the digital void with something like epistolary correspondence.

In this, I’m following the advice of Seneca (by way of Foucault in 'Self Writing'), that writing practice (to create text for yourself and for others) is active and actioning and is relevant to the training of the self. Before it became Christianised as a tool for disclosing ‘all the drives of the soul’ or as a form of confession and engineer of shame, writing was emphasised in self training along with ‘abstinences, memorisations, self-examinations, meditations, silence and listening to others’*.

If writing it out through a blog allows the textual report to embody a witnessing, to stand in for our fellows, then our ‘blushing’ at the utterance on the page equals having actually been seen. Even though I’m not saying anything particularly personal (except you know now I’m also a harried parent) I did blush while writing the blog as I would have standing before an audience giving a speech.

McElhone. Shredded manuscript, 2019.

Last week I focused on a (super) close reading of J L Austin’s lecture/essay in How to Do Things with Words as well as the Pleasure of Research and the kind of high I get from scrutinising text via a method of radical rewording and rewriting (although Seneca would that I abandon the pleasure of the body and of the mind; they only soften and weaken you. So, I’m conflicted); rambled a bit about JL Austin, The Godfather, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s commonplace book; the ‘possibilities of the statement,’ the bodily thesis; and here, the sincerity of ‘I promise,’ Latin, some Latin inscriptions from the commonplace and some advice on planning your academic schedule for a more holistic education that could just as well come from Seneca himself:

I would have my mind of such quality as this; it should be equipped with many arts, many precepts, and patterns of conduct taken from many epochs of history; but all should blend harmoniously into one

— ‘On the gathering of ideas,’ Seneca, Moral Letter to Lucilius, Letter 84.

Thanks for reading, void.

J.

*Foucault, Michel. “Self Writing.” Translated from Corps écrit no 5 (Feb. 1983): 3-23