December 2011
1 post
3 tags
The Wind Shows Us How Close to the Edge We Are
Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
~Joan Didion
from...
June 2011
1 post
3 tags
An Emotion, like a Recipe, is Always Waiting to...
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INDEX
The realm of eros is always a bureaucracy. Bruce Pearson, a friend of mine who is a painter and a self-made gourmand, likes to buy books written by cooks whose restaurants he cannot afford to dine in. Over the past twenty-five years, he has bought dozens of books and perfectly repeated a number of dishes in them: Jean Georges Vongerichten’s Sweetbreads en...
February 2011
1 post
4 tags
This Body is Like that Dying Star
In the West I know that we are accustomed to thinking of the future as lying ahead of us and the past behind us. We leave the past behind as we walk forward into the future. And because I think we’re homo erectus, we see the horizon line. We have metaphors of life occurring to us at the rate of walking. We think we’re walking toward a horizon into the future.
In the East it’s...
January 2011
1 post
2 tags
The Sun is a Joke
New groups, whole families, kept arriving. He could see a change come over them as soon as they had become part of the crowd. Until they reached the line, they looked diffident, almost furtive, but the moment they had become a part of it, they turned arrogant and pugnacious. It was a mistake to think them harmless curiosity seekers. They were savage and bitter, especially the middle-aged and the...
December 2010
2 posts
4 tags
Its Enigmas, Its Glamour, and Its Illusions
Who is the “I” of the dream? Who is the person to whom one attributes this “I,” admitting that there is one? Between the one who sleeps and the one who is the subject of the dream’s plot, there is a fissure, the hint of an interval and a difference of structure; of course, it is not truly another, another person, but what is it? And if, upon awakening, we hastily and...
3 tags
The Dream is a Second Life
The Dream is a second life. Never can I pass without a shudder through those gates of ivory or horn which separate us from the invisible world. The first moments of sleep are the counterpart of death: a kind of nebulous sluggishness paralyzes our thinking, and at some instant which we cannot precisely determine, the self, in another form, continues the work of our existence. This is a kind of...
November 2010
7 posts
4 tags
Our Culture is Our Cuisine
No more news and soul-searching hard words, soft words, bad words on Chinese America for me. And she asks me during a video seizure of situation comedies what it feels like. She’s been locked up all her life and never saw anything like me before. From way down in comfort I tell her being a Chinaman’s okay if you love having been outlaw-born and raised to eat and run in your mother...
4 tags
We are All Only Temporary Curators of Our Present...
We are all only temporary curators of our present bodies, which will all decay, sooner or later. In a hundred years or so all the humans currently alive will have died. I take great comfort in knowing, with certainty, that thing that makes us special, able to enrich our own lives and those of others, will not cease when our bodies do but will be just starting a new {and hopefully even better}...
3 tags
Like Anyone Else I Make My Inner Journeys That I...
But what do you know about me, given that I believe in secrecy, that is, in the power of falsity, rather than in representing things in a way that manifests a lamentable faith in accuracy and truth? If I stick where I am, if I don’t travel around, like anyone else I make my inner journeys that I can only measure by my emotions, and express very obliquely and circuitously in what I write.
...
2 tags
Academics' Lives are Seldom Interesting
Academics’ lives are seldom interesting. They travel of course, but they travel by hot air, by taking part in things like conferences and discussions, by talking, endlessly talking. Intellectuals are wonderfully cultivated, they have views on everything. I’m not an intellectual, because I can’t supply views like that, I’ve got no stock of views to draw on. What I know, I...
1 tag
As You Begin to Lose Your Characteristics One by...
What was once before you - an exciting, mysterious future - is now behind you. Lived; understood; disappointing. You realize you are not special. You have struggled into existence, and are now slipping silently out of it. This is everyone’s experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone’s everyone. So you are Adele, Hazel, Claire, Olive. You are Ellen. All her...
3 tags
Dying is a Quality of the Air
Supermarkets this large and clean and modern are a revelation to me. I spent my life in small steamy delicatessens with slanted display cabinets full of trays that hold soft wet lumpy matter in pale colors. High enough cabinets so you had to stand on tiptoes to give your order. Shouts, accents. In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It’s everywhere and...
2 tags
As Though an Invisible Hand Managed to Teleonomize...
We should be amazed not that there is so much chaos and violence, but that there is so little and everything functions so well. Given the level of aggression of every car driver, the frailties of the equipment and the mad scrambles of the traffic, it’s a miracle thousands aren’t killed everyday, a miracle we only rarely slaughter each other and only a few of these disastrous...
October 2010
2 posts
3 tags
A Life of Pure Immanence, Neutral, Beyond Good and...
We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life. A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss.
…
The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and...
5 tags
The Energy of the Hindered Scream
… the exceptional status of his voice: the phantom of the opera is first of all a being of voice, in the novel he is regularly addressed as “the man’s voice,” as if the “normal” relationship of voice and its bearer (its source) were inverted: instead of the voice appertaining to the body as one of its properties, it is the body itself which, in its...
September 2010
4 posts
2 tags
Of the Epic Fragment or the Local Universe
Anatomists of the urban condition can be united by their awareness of the detail informing the whole: of the epic fragment or the local universe. A story can be told through its details and the partially true can be elevated to allegorical status by the intervention of a mere nuance.
~Michael Bracewell
{transcribed in a notebook; no citation available}
4 tags
The Inanimate May Sometimes Assume the Reflection...
Wherever the living pursue particularly ambiguous activities, the inanimate may sometimes assume the reflection of their most secret motives: and thus our cities are peopled with unrecognized sphinxes which will never stop the passing dreamer and ask him mortal questions unless he first projects his meditation, his absence of mind, toward them.
~Louis Aragon
Paris Peasant ~ {Trans. Simon Watson...
3 tags
What, in the End, Make Advertisements so Superior...
What, in the end, make advertisements so superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon says—but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt.
~Walter Benjamin
“One-Way Street” ~ Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913-1926 {Trans. Edmund Jephcott} ~ Cambridge, Mass : Belknap/Harvard UP, 1996 / pg 476
3 tags
An Ambience is Defined as an Atmosphere, or a...
The concept of music designed specifically as a background feature in the environment was pioneered by Muzak Inc. in the fifties, and has since come to be known generically by the term Muzak. The connotations that this term carries are those particularly associated with the kind of material that Muzak Inc. produces - familiar tunes arranged and orchestrated...
August 2010
4 posts
3 tags
Why Can't We Stay Closed Up Inside Ourselves?
Why can’t we stay closed up inside ourselves? Why do we chase after expression and form, trying to deliver ourselves of our precious contents or “meanings,” desperately attempting to organize what is after all a rebellious and chaotic process? Wouldn’t it be more creative simply to surrender to our inner fluidity without any intention of objectifying it, intimately and...
4 tags
He Was Listening to the Speech of the Everyday
He was listening to the speech of the everyday, grave, idle, saying everything, holding up to each one what he would have liked to say, a speech unique, distant and always close, everyone’s speech, always already expressed and yet infinitely sweet to say, infinitely precious to hear—the speech of temporal eternity saying: now, now, now.
~Maurice Blanchot
The Infinite...
3 tags
The Vulture
A vulture was hacking at my feet. It had already torn my boots and stockings to shreds, now it was hacking at the feet themselves. Again and again it struck at them, then circled several times restlessly round me, then returned to continue its work. A gentleman passed by, looked on for a while, then asked me why I suffered the vulture. “I’m helpless,” I said. “When it came...
2 tags
The Cares of a Family Man
Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try to account for it on that basis. Others again believe it to be of German origin, only influenced by Slavonic. The uncertainty of both interpretations allows one to assume with justice that neither is accurate, especially as neither of them provides an intelligent meaning of the word.
No one, of course, would occupy himself with such studies...
July 2010
3 posts
5 tags
It is This Surplus Dimension which Functions as...
But the Lacanian perspective is precisely the opposite. Against the usual prohibition that symbolic fiction should not be confused with, or mistaken for, reality, the central insight of Lacan is that the Real should not be mistaken for symbolic fiction. That is to say, the true philosophical art is not to recognize fiction behind reality - i.e. you experience something as reality and through the...
3 tags
An Idiom They Share With No Other
And such is the fate of lovers who touch each other with words, whose contact with each other is made of words, and who can thus repeat themselves without end, marveling at the utterly banal, because their speech is not a language, but an idiom they share with no other, and because each gazes at themselves in the other’s gaze in a redoubling which goes from mirage to admiration.
~Maurice...
5 tags
The Caress Consists in Seizing upon Nothing, in...
The caress, like contact, is sensibility. But the caress transcends the sensible. It is not that it would feel beyond the felt, further than the senses, that it would seize upon a sublime food while maintaining, within its relation with this ultimate felt, an intention of hunger that goes unto the food promised, and given to, and deepening this hunger, as though the caress would be fed by its own...
June 2010
6 posts
3 tags
A Desire for What We are Not in Want of
Here is another approach to it: the thought that thinks more than it thinks is Desire. Such a desire is not the sublimated form of need, any more than the prelude to love. Need is a lack that awaits fulfillment; need is satisfied. Love wants union. The desire that one might call metaphysical is a desire for what we are not in want of, a desire that cannot be satisfied and that does not desire...
A Degree of Heat Can Combine with an Intensity of...
There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it. A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and...
4 tags
An Hour, a Season, an Atmosphere, an Air, a Life
For you will yield nothing to haecceities unless you realize that that is what you are, and that you are nothing but that… . You are longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles, a set of nonsubjectified affects. You have the individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life (regardless of its duration)—a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack (regardless...
Because We Don't Know When We Will Die, We Get to...
Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five...
4 tags
Regretter la présence de quelqu'un
How can one regret the absence of the other while at the same time feeling a sense of deliverance from their presence? But language itself tells us how: Regretter la présence de quelqu’un means both to feel regret that they are there and to be sorry they are not. Regretter son absence means to feel regret that he is not there and for the time when he was not there. The melancholy of parting...
2 tags
Just Fine White Sand Swirling Up Into the Sky like...
Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you....
November 2009
1 post
To Write of Oneself is to Cease to Be
To write one’s autobiography, in order either to confess or to engage in self-analysis, or in order to expose oneself, like a work of art, to the gaze of all, is perhaps to seek to survive, but through a perpetual suicide~a death which is total inasmuch as it is fragmentary. To write of oneself is to cease to be, in order to confide in a guest~the other, the reader~entrusting yourself to him...
September 2009
3 posts
One Must Just Write, in Uncertainty and in...
Not to write~what a long way there is to go before arriving at that point, and it is never sure; it is never either a recompense or a punishment. One must just write, in uncertainty and in necessity. Not writing is among the effects of writing; it is something like a sign of passivity, a means of expression at grief’s disposal. How many efforts are required in order not to write~in order...
10 tags
The Capacity to Signal is Everywhere in the...
I say “I”; the living organism puts forth a sign for itself. This sign is not simply an effect it produces and puts forth; it is that with which it puts itself forth. It does not only make a sign, it makes itself a sign. The sign is a sound uttered with the throat, or a visual mark made by the hand. A contraction in the throat, a diagram of muscular enervation in the fingers and wrist...
August 2009
3 posts
Making Audible Forces That Are Not Audible in...
It is not a question of using works taken as musical examples to reach an abstract concept of time where one could say: “This is musical time.” It is a question of taking limited, determined cycles under certain conditions to extract particular profiles of time, and then potentially superposing these profiles to make a veritable cartography of variables. This method concerns music but...
One Stands to Lose Everything
There are games in which what one loses, if one loses, is completely disproportionate to what one wins, if one wins. One stands to lose everything. Is it not the intrinsic glory of bravado that accounts for the fact that we feel a kind of indifference and even disdain for someone who has never lied, never cheated on a lover, never duped or taken advantage of a friend, never got drunk, never thrown...
3 tags
No, No, I'm Not Where You Are Lying in Wait for...
No, no, I’m not where you are lying in wait for me, but over here, laughing at you.
What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing~with a rather shaky hand~a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to...
July 2009
15 posts
7 tags
Now and Then an Extraordinary Vision Rises Up...
Yes, now and then an extraordinary vision rises up before my eyes, sudden and clear; something terrible embraces my soul, and steals into my blood, my marrow, my nerves and my muscles. I remain, rooted in a vertiginous immobility, prey to an atrocious intoxication, fuddled with anguish. Then, just as a spark will sputter out, it disappears. The memory comes back, only much later, uncertain, as if...
The Only Issue Worth Fighting For
Imagine the amazing good fortune of the generation that gets to see the end of the world. This is as marvellous as being there in the beginning. How could one not wish for that with all one’s heart? How could one not lend one’s feeble resources to bringing it about?
To have been there at the beginning would have been fantastic. But we arrived too late. Only the end remains. Let us...
Get Away From Your Life. Get Away From Your Shadow...
Why does the period before birth barely interest us, whereas the period after death excites us enormously? Most people anticipate it by arranging to live as though they are already dead. They anticipate their own disappearance by making themselves increasingly transparent, by making an inventory of the objects which will survive them. Not one of these must move. Everything must be in place for the...
The Heightened Intensity Which the Processes of...
A new philosophical concept, say an alternative view of subjectivity, or a new system of representation, a new sound or an alternative image produces a break-through in old mental habits. What is produced is a concept and affect that break through the established frame, illuminating a territory by providing orientation co-ordinates; made visible/thinkable/sayable/hearable are forces, passions and...
Make Us Hear Sounds That Have Never Before Been...
I also think that [Deleuze’s project of philosophy] is an aesthetic mode of absolute immersion of one’s sensibility into the field of forces~music, colour, light, speed, temperature, intensity~which one is attempting to capture. Deleuze argues that painters make visible forces that previously were not, much as composers make us hear sounds that have never before been heard. Similarly,...
In Order to Live in the Flux of Desires
We can no longer sit idly by as others steal our mouths, our anuses, our genitals, our nerves, our guts, our arteries, in order to fashion parts and works in an ignoble mechanism of production which links capital, exploitation, and the family.
We can no longer allow others to turn our mucous membranes, our skin, all our sensitive areas into occupied territory~territory controlled and regimented...
6 tags
With the Idea That People's Lives are Arbitrary...
A strange pride obliges us not only to possess the other, but also to force out his secret, not only to be precious to him, but to be fatal. The voluptuousness of the gray imminence: the art of making the other disappear. A whole ceremony is required for this.
First follow people you meet in the street, at random, for an hour, two hours, brief sequences, disorganized ~ with the idea that...
With Cities, It is As With Dreams
It has neither name nor place. I shall repeat the reason I was describing it to you: from the number of imaginable cities we must exclude those whose elements are assembled without a connecting thread, an inner rule, a perspective, a discourse. With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its...
Sometimes It is Their Painful Beauty, or...
For the monster pleasures as well as polices, although we rarely talk about the pleasure. The monster-face is a mask placed on someone whose offence is obliquely desirable to us, however much we disguise that knowing from ourselves or call it something else~ for instance, news, or interest in the moral tone of the community, or whatever. Monsters have, or seem to have, freedoms we lack. They...
6 tags
Becoming Extinct in Full View of the Multitudes
In the beginning, you were afraid of forgetting. Afraid that you yourself would forget, afraid that others would forget you. And so, every morning you would speak, write, perform the rituals at your desk. You used your own voice to pursue your memories, trying to fill the growing emptiness inside. You seek a face, many faces, an utterance, a lot of talk that once lingered in your ears. Following...
5 tags
A Further Vigilance at the Heart of the Gathered...
The dream is a temptation for writing perhaps because writing also has to do with this neutral vigilance that the night of sleep tries to extinguish, but that the night of dream awakens and ceaselessly maintains, while it perpetuates being in a semblance of existence. One must therefore specify that in borrowing from night the neutrality and uncertainty that belong to it, in imitating this power...