JD14 Circonfession Circumfession

Description

"Gone sometime, home to stay"

Marilynne Robinson’s 2004 novel Gilead begins with the words “I told you last night that I might be gone sometime” (3). Her 2008 novel Home begins with “Home to stay, Glory! Yes!” (3). These two beginnings seem to call out or to respond to each other and might be read as a signature and its countersignature because, of course, my every signature tells that I will be gone sometime, while the return home, the countersignature, tells that I have for the moment escaped death, which, as Geoff Bennington puts it, “we shall here describe as the interruption of an ability to sign” (157). But it is this ability to sign, this writing which attests to living on in the face of death, which gives Gilead so much of its force.

Period	2014
Event type	Seminar
Location	Lille, FranceShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International