Editorial [Antae, Vol.7(2)]

Abstract

The three essays published in this issue consider, respectively, the three cornerstones of literary form: the poem, the novel, and the play. In this light, the issue’s cover image—a detail from Jackson Pollock’s Red Composition—stands in stark contrast, entirely dismissing the concept of form and embodying, in its drooling, carnivalesque splashes and unseemly drippings, what Georges Bataille describes as “formlessness” in a now notorious entry of the Critical Dictionary. A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. [excerpt]