Si(g)ns of Omission: The Books that Got Away

Abstract

For this piece, Ross Chambers proposes a reflection on the academic ‘discipline’ – on writing, literary theory, history and hauntings, and on the time spent, lost, and bound up both with writing books and falling in love with books long dreamt of and planned out, but which fall by the wayside in the course of a life spent thinking, reading, and writing (e.g., studies of Berlioz and Gautier, on the audience as an ex-timate included/excluded third-party in theatre, or a ‘Big Book on Baudelaire’). In this poignant, powerful piece on personal and intellectual œuvres that are, in some sense, always bound to remain incomplete (or désœuvrées), Chambers takes us through, as idle fellow flâneurs, a kind of auto-bio-bibliography: that is, a texturing/textualization of the self as thinker and writer who has dedicated the last fifty years to interrogating the radically disruptive potential of that strange institution he calls loiterature.