“We should take him quite literally when Godard says children are political prisoners. Language is a system of instructions rather than a means of conveying information… then there’s something like silence, or like stammering, or screaming, something slipping through underneath the redundancies and information… So how can we manage to speak without giving orders, without claiming to represent something or someone… how can we restore to sounds their part in the struggle against power? I suppose that’s what it means to be like a foreigner in one’s own language, to trace a sort of line of flight for words.”
Gilles Deleuze, Three Questions on Six Times Two
“Until then, I had written nothing, except for letters to friends, and the letters were very conventional, made up of ready-made phrases, heard and read. Never something felt. And then I sent a Christmas card to a German friend… I had bought it in the prison shop and the back of the card, the part that was meant to be written on, was a paper with a very rich grain. And the grain really touched me. And instead of writing to her about Christmas, I talked about the grain of the post card, and the snow that it evoked. That’s when I began to write. I think that was the trigger”
Jean Genet Dialogues avec Hubert Fichte (1975) et Bertrand Poirot-Delpech (1982), éditions cents Pages, 2000
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