Sharing my pain

"That is what would be at stake. Supposing that we might reach it (touch it, see it, comprehend it?), this tropic and prehistorical resource could not have the archeological simplicity of a proper origin, the virginity of a history of beginnings. And we know already that it could derive neither from a rhetoric of philosophy nor from a metaphilosophy analogous to what Bachelard, in his psychoanalysis of material imagination, called meta-poetics. We know this, already, on the basis of the law of supplementarity (betwen the concept and the field) viewed in its formal necessity. Provisionally, let us take this law for a hypothesis. In attempting to verify it in several "examples," perhaps we might, at the same time, fill the concept of metaphor, following its entire tradition, a tradition which is as much philosophical as rhetorical, and might also recognize, at the same time as the rule of its transformations, the limit of its plasticity."

-Derrida, White Mythology

I think I get this, but I'm not so sure. We'll see come my final saturday morning. Literary theory = (no) fun. I'm becoming further and further convinced that the majority of this stuff is often useless classification and intellectual and linguistic masturbation that excuses itself by simply collapsing back upon itself and re-erasing the very distinctions it seeks to demonstrate. Frustrating indeed. I miss reading real literature instead of discourse on discourse on discourse. Mmm ontological hierarchies of being and epistemic violence. Sigh...