Reply to comment

Calderon

Hanna I am glad you talk about Kate Thomas's blog and talkin class.

You write “This is sort of paradoxical in that what she (oranyone) writes on a blog is ephemeral only in that it gets buried under themultitude of what other people write, so it remains to be easily seen only fora short amount of time.” I think that this the reason I don’t consider her blog ablog she writes a column that feels very much like a dictatorship. She tells astory and her reader, her community is allow to alter, change contribute to. Ibelieve that one of the characteristics of blog is to allow the exchange ofthoughts. You also say that you think its hard to get rid of postings that are there,in this sense I think that a blog works very much like history, if you want toknow how it started then you go back to the first posting and find out, I likethe fact that there are many postings it seems like an evolution, an emergenceof thoughts within the blog. 

Second you talk about Jorge Luis Borges and how he “He feltas though the writing he did when he was 20 might as well have been written bya completely different person than the person he was at 70--but also thatnothing he wrote could express who he really was.” I think that in order tounderstand this we can draw on some Simon De Beauvoir theory on the “SecondSex”. She suggests on the “Second Sex” that fundamental assumptions dominatesocial, political, and cultural life and how humans internalized this ideology.She also recognizes that all human beings have within them the potential fortranscendence. So how does this relate to Jorge Luis Borges? Well, I think thatsince some of the fundamental assumptions that dominate the social, political,and cultural life change and so does the perspective that one has towards life.This idea of transcendence is also very useful, since she suggest that humansshould strive to always change into “others”. I think that sometimes withouttrying, we transcend without even realizing at times. But when you are a writer(like Borges) you tend to have a more vivid prove I guess of what your “innerself” was (if we have one) at 20. You are able to see that you change that youtranscend with time. That even if you stayed in the same place your setting haschange because new people have come into your life, or the surroundings, thatyour house no longer looks the same and that the city has emerged from an oldversion to a new one.

I like Derrida and how he believes that nothing is there,and everything is a social construct. I just wrote a paper on Judith Butler andher theory on “From Gender Trouble” and the truth is that I am really startingto believe that gender is a performance with an idea of reality that is false,a falseness that shows how people are socialized to behave based on thegenitals with which they were born. Perhaps this idea of performance helps understandBorges too. Perhaps Borges has been playing a performance all his lifeaccording to the genitals he was born with and he is tired of playing such socialrole and he needs a new one, but since society has embedded too much in hislife he can’t and that’s why he believes that the person who wrote at 20 is nolonger the one that writes at 70.