Memento Mori: On Writing as Laying a Thought to Rest

Abstract

This article examines writing as a material-discursive practice that both produces and stills thought. Using a posthumanist phenomenological approach, temporally separated writing sessions, personal narrative, cultural texts, and a longitudinal collection of notes are placed in conversation with one another. The article enacts its central claim that writing lays a thought to rest even as it enables future meaning making to occur. This inquiry invites reflexivity and restraint in how writing is treated as the definitive site of knowledge production, situating writing as both a necessary technology for sharing inquiries and a practice that alters what it seeks to represent.

Keywords

writing posthuman phenomenology qualitative inquiry meaning making

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