Quote of the Afternoon

So I just finished my first article for Books in Canada, titled Newfoundland in Letters, and I have been asked to take up another on short fiction in Atlantic Canada. I'm glad to do this. It keeps me abreast of the new writing in the region, while helping me to fill out my CV and become a better writer.

But now that the article is off, I can focus on my comp reading again. Here is the quote that hit me this afternoon, Pickstock, After Writing again:

In contrast to the "urge" of Derridian differance, liturgical language is neither autonomously in command of itself, nor an instrument controlled invisibly by a lurking and manipulative power. Rather, its language is in several ways "impossible". For liturgy is at once a gift from God and a sacrifice to God, a reciprocal exchange which shatters all ordinary positions of agency and reception, especially as these have been conceived in the west since Scotus. Moreover, liturgical expression is made "impossible" by the breach which occurred at the Fall. This breach is the site of an apparent aporia, for it renders the human subject incapable of doxology, and yet, as I have suggested above in my analysis of the Phaedrus, the human subject is constituted (or fully central to itself) only in the dispossessing act of praise. However, the aproria is resolved in the person of Christ, whose resurrection ensures that our difficult liturgy is not hopeless, and enables us to rejoin the angelic liturgy taking place in an ambiguous and shifting space beyond our own. (176-7)

I heard "impossible" used as it is above, in a presentation by Alison Milbank, who was a reader of After Writing before it was published. She was speaking about Huysmans' decadent and satanic images of Christ which, she implied, were "impossible", yet which led him into the Church. I was trying to get at what impossible meant in that context and if she was playing on Pickstock's usage of it, then I think I know what she is about. Pickstock's very theory of the subject is constructed on an impossibility, that of opening to God, which is already transcended by God for us. Not too shaby: she takes Paul and makes him relevant to contemporary theoretical gobily-gook. I like it.