Peter Szendy, Jan Plug (translator) · 2013 (À coups de points); Eng. 2018 · PDF · Calibre ID 2071
Resurfaced in Point, Pause, Chapter (2026-09-28).
Role in the triad
The point: punctuation as the blow that makes experience and exercises power; the long reading of Tristram’s cut.
Why this book
Contradicts Parkes while borrowing his history; its Sterne chapters are the center of the triad, and its claim that punctuation includes ‘chapter breaks’ hands the question to Dames. Lacan/Derrida on the point de capiton.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “For punctuation is never merely a matter of style or rhetoric in the common sense: It is force; it is power; it is political decision.” (p. 2)
- “The sensations, the events, that strike or dot me must be marked, punctuated, for me to have lived them.” (p. 2)
- “Punctuation as the doubling blow, as the singular flash or clap that, remarking what happens, allows us to have and to inscribe an experience of it.” (p. 4)
- “Besides the punctuation of sentences, there is what literary theorists call the punctuation of the page or work. The concept of punctuation thus overflows itself in all directions, since it ends up including blank spaces as well as chapter breaks” (p. 5)
- “Far from being able to anchor anything or anyone somewhere, the button point is unbuttoned.” (p. 22)
- “A subject that one can thus think, in the image of Perekladin, as at once punctuated and punctuating” (p. 31)
- “opinion itself is not a matter of opinion, far from it: It is a construction that is a matter of a technology of pointing and punctuation.” (p. 101)
Themes
blow · Derrida · experience · Lacan point de capiton · point · politics of punctuation · stigmatology · Tristram Shandy