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Metaphysical Displacement

Cioran in conversation with Fernando Savater (1977): I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person, a little like the stoics at the end of the Roman Empire who felt like citizens of the world which is to say they felt like citizens of no part. And later with [...]

Posted 07 November 2010 § ‡ Comments Off °

Discontinuous Thinking

Cioran in conversation with Leo Gillet (1982) about the aphorism: The aphorisms are momentary instantiations of something general. They are a discontinuous thinking. You have a thought which explains everything, that is what calls a momentary instantiation of thought. It is a thought that does not include much truth, but that contains enough for it [...]

Posted 30 October 2010 § ‡ Comments Off °

Visibility as an Ability

Visibility without visuality: the visual as the beam emanating from Beatrice’s eye in Dante’s Paradiso. It ‘shone more than a thousand miles’. The visual in this case is a reflection of divine light, bouncing of the soul through the eyes outwards to illuminate the gaze itself as it looks upon the world. The visual as [...]

Posted 29 October 2010 § ‡ Comments Off °

#homeless thoughts

The world is saturated with non-thinking, non-thoughts, unthoughts, homeless thoughts namely those that have lost their connection, have lost their extension or more precisely lack extension. Of course epistemologically speaking this implies and we confirm this, that any kind of knowledge which is uprooted by thought must originate in the body first. There isn’t a [...]

Posted 29 October 2010 § ‡ Comments Off °

#gap

Spurious reads Pessoa: My God, my God, who am I watching? How many am I? Who is I? What is this gap between me and me?

Posted 23 October 2010 § ‡ Comments Off °

Ex-centric Positionality and être-au-monde

Let’s take up Dylan’s bio-phenomenological theme earlier. The ‘unfolding of life within life’ as he so eloquently put it. A biological perspective, or rather a zoological one to be more precise, provided by Helmuth Plessner might be of great assistance here. All the more because Plessner in the introduction to Mit Anderen Augen, Aspekte eine [...]

Posted 21 October 2010 § ‡ Comments Off °

#revenge on my head

Spurious: Sometimes I want to pre-empt the destruction, I tell W. I want to lie my head beneath a caterpillar track. Want it to burst like a melon. Because my head aches, I tell W. My head throbs … And that’s what the machines want, I sometimes think: revenge on my head.

Posted 20 October 2010 § ‡ Comments Off °

The Low Perspective

Returning to the methodological ‘low’ point of view briefly now. According to Merleau-Ponty this judging of man from below has only become possible in modernity. In the translator’s note of my edition of his famous radio lectures (published as Causeries/The World of Perception) we read that during the radio broadcast of the fifth lecture, Man [...]

Posted 19 October 2010 § ‡ Comments Off °

Doing-Television-Watching

Ressentiment towards capitalism fuels a consumer slave-morality based on envied deprivation which favours consumption as passivity and unreflective receptivity. Consumption however, as De Certeau rightly stipulates, is not to be unproblematically equated with passivity or to be thought of, simply and naively, as the opposite of production. It is not. Instead he reasons, consumption is another [...]

Posted 18 October 2010 § ‡ Comments Off °

#humanity is another corporeity

Side Effects writes: Merleau-Ponty in Nature: “Before being reason, humanity is another corporeity” (208). Disquiet is the result of this thought. Why? Because human life sediments itself in the patina of arrogance, refusing to contend with its prepersonal materiality—my body, no longer me. As such, phenomenology must become bio-phenomenology as it maps this unfolding of life within [...]

Posted 17 October 2010 § ‡ Comments Off °