clem, Macherey and intertextuality

In class, on Tuesday, we unpacked Macherey's text which was to my mind quite a complex read. But what I found the most interesting about the text was when he refers to intertextuality, which is the shaping of a text's meaning by the influence the writer has had from other texts while writing but also the influence the reader has had from other texts while reading, analyzing and interpreting it. Macherey says that everything that has ever been written comes from something else. When you stop and think about this for a second it is true! I tried to think of certain things such as the Bible that could potentially stand on its own but it does not as it comes previously from an oral tradition therefore it IS intertextual. Also thought a book such as Finigan's wake by the author James Joyce might seem like something that can stand on its own, but in reality it does not. It has references to other novels, places, people. Everything is intertextual because we cannot write something, make a movie, a piece of art anything really with out putting into account everything we know and have learned in our lives. We cannot forget what we know and it obviously has an influence on what me do. A French Physicist André Lavoisier once said "nothing disappears, nothing is created, everything is transformed" I really like this quote because I think it describes intertextuality well. We cannot lose what we know, or create something completely new with all we know but we can take something that exists and transform it, make some changes inspire ourselves from it in order to make it new. Intertextuality tells us that nothing is original and nothing is unique. It all comes from something else pre-existing that is hidden in our sub-conscience.