ABSTRACT
I begin with two modified or “fractured” quotations – quotations that presume upon a suppressed or at least unexpressed original that the present phrase undertakes to revise – quotations, that is, that take the form of a pun. “A Rome of one’s own”; “When in Rome, do as the Greeks.” Even without such punning superscription, however, the use of quotation is itself always already doubled, already belated, since it cites a voice or an opinion that gains force from being somehow absent, authority from the fact of being set apart. Used always “in quotation,” as there and not there, true and not true, the real thing and yet a copy, the quotation occupies the space of a memorial reconstruction in the present plane of discourse. Notice that we put “in quotation” in quotation marks. This is a pictogram of how the palimpsest of authority in discourse works. Quotation, then, is a use of history, since in a quotation tradition and authority are simultaneously instated and put in question. In the
same way, a quotation is a ghost: a revenant taken out of context, making an unexpected, often disconcerting appearance – the return of the expressed. Thus Walter Benjamin, perhaps the most assiduous modern collector of quotations, writes that “Quotations in my works are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions.”1
