diachrony

“It was a violence, a terrible intrusion in the succession of moments, a clot in diachrony.” China Mièville; Iron Council; Del Rey; 2004. “I also like to stand in the philosophy aisle, a thicket of the world’s most impenetrable prose.

I don’t know why, but reading a few lines of Bakhtin, Bataille, Heidegger, or Derrida makes me hungry. I love to pull out a book and read a sentence that, try as I might, I simply cannot understand. For example: ‘[Heidegger] has initiated a vocabulary which deconstruction can appropriate and revise for the sake of disarticulating a notion of eventhood whose temporality has been eschatologically hypostasized and thereby fixed in an Aristotelian diachrony of self-contained moments.’”* Michelle Huneven; Food for Starving Artists, Writers; Los Angeles Times; Aug 2, 1991. *Please do not email us for the meaning of that sentence.

Few are worthy of such esoteric knowledge. OK, we said that because we don’t understand it ourselves. But in good conscience we can’t leave you stranded and uninformed. So we recruited AI to explain it (see the image on the right). Enjoy.