Obsidian is occasionally useful

Opened the Obsidian vault after a long time away and unearthed a curious connection among the following L notes. I will give you one guess as to the through-line here!

Nous savons maintenant qu’un texte n’est pas fait d’une ligne de mots, dégageant un sens unique, en quelque sorte théologique… mais un espace à dimensions multiples, où se marient et se contestent des écritures variées, dont aucune n’est originelle : le texte est un tissu de citations, issues des mille foyers de la culture.

All writing, therefore, in order to be what it is, must be able to function in the radical absence of every empirically determined addressee in general… To write is to produce a mark that will constitute a kind of machine that is in turn productive, that my future disappearance in principle will not prevent from functioning and from yielding, and yielding itself to, reading and rewriting.

… [formal texts] are, when you come to think of it, an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid.

A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying…