I’m so glad someone found my blog through a search on Barthes and the sentence. Those are two of my favourite things. Sometimes I almost forget that I have a Master’s degree in English, because I rarely mention it, but I do, and my thesis was on the sentence as a unit of poetry in Gertrude Stein’s writing. I talked about Saussure, Jacobson, Barthes, Silliman, and a whole bunch of other linguists, theorists and poets. I still love thinking about sentences. Just the word is exciting. Not all my poetry is about sentences, but all my poetry is sentences. I know a lot of poets get down into words and their randomness or down into letters or even further down in specks and grunts, but I can’t get away from the sentence. I don’t think Barthes has the last word on sentences, but he does have a few things to say, mainly about the authority of the sentence. I think if the sentence is the system, I’d rather mess around inside it than turn away from it.

All of which is why I was so happy to get to write an essay about Saussure, Jacobson and Barthes for my philosophy of law class. I didn’t talk about sentences at all, only more abstractly about language, texts, thought, and law, but still it felt like a return to concerns I’d somewhat abandoned because of what? I don’t know. A sense of failure? Absurdity? Shame?