Yeniden Yazma Pratiklerinde Yücenin İnşası

This paper investigates the possibility of the literary presence of 'sublime' in the practices of re-writing. Even though, as Lyotard puts it, re-writing is considered a constitutive notion in the reception of the postmodern literature, one might claim that the practice of re-writing is as old as writing itself. The transition from 'trace' to 'sign' is only possible through a mechanism of repetition. The transition from 'image' to 'symbol', as what makes writing possible, also guarantees the transition from 'image' to 'thought'. As such, both the painter who retraces and thus keeps alive the drawings on the same cave walls for tens of thousands of years and the poet who writes her sonnets with iambic pentameter engage with the practice of re-writing. This essay treats the construction of the sublime as the infinity created by the encounters of the writer who is anonymized through the mediation of writing and the writer who is the bearer of the perceptions of 'here' and 'now' (and who is therefore materially restricted to herself). The practice of re-writing creates a possibility for this encounter. This is a literary possibility created by the transition from what is real to what is dreamy. The transition, in an ontological sense, is a transfer of that which is material to that which is ideal, i.e. related to thought. Such a transfer is what makes the transitivity of the writers of re-writing possible. The paper points at this literary phenomenon by describing it through the works of Borges and Hawthorne.