Why lift aphorisms from a novel at all? [Geoffrey] Bennington speculates that one’s chief motivation for taking such a course, at least in the domain of the eighteenth-century novel,… has been (and he quotes Derrida) to “monumentalize inscriptions now made lapidary: ‘the rest’ in peace.” In other words, the anthologizer sets out to rescue the essence, the “surplus” of a novelistic text and to create a monument to it. In this connection Bennington appropriates a notion from Freudian psychoanalysis to make his point. He sees the drive to anthologize as a “manifestation of repressed anality; the precious metal of the maxim is easily enough identified with the faeces, a ‘reste’ detached from the body. The ‘orderliness’ of the anthology can also be linked to Freud’s description of anal eroticism.Bennington alludes here to the kind of anthology that seeks to extract sententious propositions from a novel and then to reclassify them into “eternal” rubrics: “Man,” “Love,” “Life,” and the like. ~Mark Bell, Aphorism in the Francophone Novel of the Twentieth Century, 1997TPVgb, QE2