Usure

I turn no moneys in the public bank; Nor usure private.

Neither do we approve the policy of the other sections of the bill referred to us, which proposes to declare utterly void all interests by which any usurious or illegal rate of interest is usured or taken, and under which a party may, as has been elsewhere done, tempt a neighbor by an offer of a high rate of interest to loan him money, and then under the cover of this law, turn around and cheat him out of the whole of it.

Similarly, he must make restitution to those from whom he has stolen or robbed before those he has usured.

Before him lay the Groan debtor's prison, a stark gray block against the iron sky. Within its sheer walls were the mad, the indebted, those usured into servitude.

The maternal tongue is irrevocably supplanted by a usured tongue, the language of the truck driver and of the maid in Andalusia.

Now, however, preaching cannot help anymore. They have usured themselves deaf, blind, and senseless, and they hear, see, and feel nothing more.

This dialectic of "blindness and insight" (and if this insight of Paul de Man has been used up, usured too many times to have kept its luster, what other relation to blindness is concealed in the place of its cliché?) continues to structure our stories that unfold at the site / sight of blindness in the heart of the other's vision: Plato's sighting that of the cave-dwellers,' Derrida's exposing Plato's.

This movement involves a detour through metaphor: with the expropriation of the primitive meaning given to things, we fall into a metaphoric mode of understanding; in the course of human history and through the process of usure or wearing away of the figurative, and 'proper' meaning is restored; this new one is the old one effaced and carried to a higher conceptual power, now interiorized and spiritualized.