“a blunting of a too evident meaning, a too violent meaning”, “causes my reading to skid”, “opens onto the infinity of language”, “ultimately, the obtuse meaning can be seen as an accent, the very form of an emergence, of a fold (even a crease) marking the heavy layer of information and signification”

i started reading and copying from the book, and instead of emailing this, i put it here. oh and i just checked the definition of ‘obtuse’ and first thing that comes up is “annoyingly insensitive or slow to understand”  (slow slow delay delay)

“as for the other, the third meaning, the one which appears ‘in excess’, as a supplement my intellection cannot quite absorb, a meaning both persistent and fugitive, apparent and evasive, i propose calling it the ‘obtuse meaning’. this word readily comes to my mind, and miraculously, upon exploring its etymology, i find it already yields a theory of the supplementary meaning; obtusus means blunted, rounded. Now, the features I have indicated–makeup, whiteness, false hair, etc– are they not a kind of blunting of a too evident meaning, a too violent meaning? do they not give the obvious signified a kind of ineffable roundness, do they not cause my reading to skid? an obtuse angle is greater than a right angle: an obtuse angle of 100º, says the dictionary; the third meaning, too, seems to me greater than the pure perpendicular, the trenchant, legal upright of the narrative. it seems to me to open the field of meaning totally, i.e., infinitely. I even accept, for this obtuse meaning, the word’s pejorative connotation: the obtuse meaning seems to extend beyond culture, knowledge, information. analytically, there is something ridiculous about it; because it opens onto the infinity of language, it can seem limited in the eyes of analytic reason. it belongs to the family of puns, jokes, useless exertions; indifferent to moral or aesthetic categories (the trivial, the futile, the artificial, the parodic), it sides with the carnival aspect of things. obtuse therefore suits my purpose well.”

…

“the obtuse meaning is not in the language system (even that of symbols). remove it and communication and signification remain, circulate, pass. without it i can still speak and read, but it is not in speech either; it may be that there is a certain constant in the Eisensteinian obtuse meaning, but then this is already a thematic speech, an idiolect, and this idiolect is temporary; for there are obtuse meanings not everywhere (the signifier is a rare thing, a future figure) but somewhere: in other authors of films (maybe), in a certain way of reading “life” and hence “reality” (here understood in its simple opposition to the deliberately fictive).”

…

“the same uncertainty when it is a matter of describing the obtuse meaning (of giving some idea of where it is going, where going away); the obtuse meaning is a signifier without signified, whence the difficulty of naming it: my reading remains suspended between the image and its description, between definition and approximation. if we cannot describe the obtuse meaning, this is because, unlike the obvious meaning, it copies nothing: how describe what represents nothing? here the pictorial “rendering” of words is impossible. consequently, if we remain, you and I, on the level of articulated language in the presence of these images–that is, on the level of my own text–the obtuse meaning will not come into being, will not enter into the critic’s metalanguage. which means that the obtuse meaning is outside (articulated) language, but still within interlocution. for if you look at these images i am talking about, you will see the meaning: we can understand each other about it “over the shoulder” or “on the back” of articulated language: thanks to the image (frozen, it is true: I shall return to this), indeed thanks to what in the image is purely image (and which, to tell the truth, is very little indeed), we do without speech yet continue to understand each other.

in short, what the obtuse meaning disturbs, sterilizes, is metalanguage (criticism). we can offer several reasons for this. first of all, the obtuse meaning is discontinuous, indifferent to the story and to the obvious meaning (as signification of the story); this dissociation has a contra naturam or at least a distancing effect with regard to the referent (to “reality” as nature, a realist instance).”

…

“ultimately, the obtuse meaning can be seen as an accent, the very form of an emergence, of a fold (even a crease) marking the heavy layer of information and signification.”

…

“this accent (whose simultaneously elliptical and emphatic nature we have discussed) does not tend toward meaning (as in hysteria); it does not theatricalize (Eisenstein’s decorativeness belongs to another realm); it does not even indicate an elsewhere of meaning (another content, added to the obvious meaning), but baffles it –subverts not the content but the entire practice of meaning.”

…

“the obtuse meaning can proceed only by appearing and disappearing”

…

“the third meaning, which we can locate theoretically but not describe, then appears as the transition from language to signifying (signifiance) and as the founding act of the filmic itself.”

(roland barthes, the third meaning)