Footnotes and finitude

Abstract

I stand before you on this occasion bearing some thoughts that somehow extend to all of us present, although under the guise of something slightly strange. To grant me your attention as I divulge these strange thoughts that I am honoured to impart on this day, is to grant me, in the words of Simone Weil, “the rarest and purest form of generosity.”1 My oration today is an ode to footnotes – the enumerated snippets of text we sometimes find at the bottom of a page. Let us compare these for a moment to endnotes, which are more uncompromising, forcing us, very confusingly, to endure some acrobatics to get to them at the back of a book, or at the end of each chapter. Footnotes, I believe, are a much more considerate form of organisation. Quite unfairly, they both produce the same result: the event of slipping in information that is relevant but not quite relevant enough to make it to the main body of text. [excerpt]