of Resonance

Now Granta, or more precisely the Commonwealth Prize ecosystem with which it is associated, appears to have been fooled by AI-generated prose. The issue is not whether detection software can "prove" machine authorship. The issue is aesthetic. Several readers and editors apparently encountered prose displaying classic LLM characteristics—semantic over-resolution at sentence level, lyrical excess without governing pressure, figurative autonomy detached from structural necessity—and accepted these peculiarities as "voice." Publishers still love literature to a degree, but increasingly in the manner that politicians once possessed "convictions": as vestigial accessories attached to managerial careers. from The Novel Is Dead. This Time It's for Real by Will Self

The reason why religions attach themselves to books is because of something about the book, not because of something about the religion. So that the book appears to contain ourselves and yet is not the same as ourselves, so it has a kind of mirror process around it, around what consciousness might be, what being might be. Which at the same time is not spelt out for us; it's a relationship that we sense without being able to understand completely, and I think in that sense every book contains a kind of mystery, both as you open it because you don't yet know what it's going to contain, but also as you read it because the process of understanding is itself in some way a mysterious process of transference. And again the book provides a sort of physical symbol and metaphor for all of that. But it's more than a question of language as communication, or language as meaning, or truth or what ever it might be. It's odd to say it's more than that but I think it is more than that. We sense that the truth might be there, within it, but we also sense that we don't know quite how we get from us to that truth. And there is always that sense of residue and mystery about that transaction or trajectory. Dr Brian Cummings on the Chasing Leviathan podcast.

It is important to observe that the order of Blanchot's narratives is not merely chronological. Each succeeding work is concerned exclusively with a moment lying outside of time, a moment that is essentially impossible, and which recurs like an obsession throughout all of Blanchot's work: the moment following my death, when I am dead yet able somehow to look back on my final moment, and which Blanchot sums up in the words, "we have forgotten to die." from Space and Beyond, an essay on L'attente l'oubli (Awaiting Oblivion) by Michael Holland

I envision a style: a style that would be beautiful, that someone will invent some day, ten years or ten centuries from now, one that would be rhythmic as verse, precise as the language of the sciences, undulant, deep-voiced as a cello, tipped with a flame: a style that would pierce your idea like a dagger, and on which your thought would sail easily ahead over a smooth surface, like a skiff before a good tail wind. Prose was born yesterday: you have to keep that in mind. Verse is the form par excellence of ancient literatures. All possible prosodic variations have been discovered; but that is far from being the case with prose. Flaubert to Louise Colet, quoted by Michael Fried in Flaubert's "Gueuloir".

The reading in Freiburg was an exceptional success: 1,200 people who listened to me with bated breath for an hour, then, having applauded me for a long time, they listened to me again for another fifteen minutes. Heidegger had come up to me—The day after my reading I was, with M. Neumann, Elmar's friend, in Heidegger's hut in the Black Forest. Then there was, in the car, a grave dialogue, with clear words from me. M. Neumann, who was the witness of it, told me afterward that, for him, this conversation had something epoch-making about it. Paul Celan, 2 August 1967, in Letters to Gisèle.

The traces of errancy are certainly prodding. They stir something up that cannot be integrated into the logical understanding of truth. Irrespective of the question as to whether Heidegger's judgment about modernity is right, to see the thinker fall appears to be a unique drama. Today, no thinker falls anymore. [89] Note 89: Could it be that Jürgen Habermas' corpus will be one of the first in which simply nothing at all prodding can be found anymore? Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Adorno, Sartre, Arendt, Derrida, Nancy, Badiou, even Gadamer, everywhere one stumbles upon dissonances. Normalization takes hold. The philosophy of the future – integration brought to completion. from Freedom to Fail: Heidegger's Anarchy by Peter Trawny.