The 800-Word Book Review - Derek Neal’s Newsletter
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The sentence seems to want to continue, "I begin to despair"
1. In the preface to Male Fantasies, a 1977 psychoanalytic study of “the fascistic type” in Nazi Germany, author Klaus Theweleit interrupts himself mid-sentence with an ellipsis and writes: “...at this point, the sentence seems to want to continue, ‘I begin to despair’ (but this is the reality of a frozen semantics, not, in the end, of any feeling I might have).”1 Theweleit then begins a new paragraph, leaving the previous sentence unfinished. When I read this passage, I was stunned. Think about what Theweleit is suggesting here: that he is not the writer of this text, but that the text…
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