Kurosawa famously said that “not to have seen the cinema of [Satyajit] Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.” Ray’s opera prima, পথের পাঁচালী Pather Panchali [Song of the Road] (1955), fits that description admirably.(*) Labelling it – as it is often done – a “neorealist” film misses, though,…
Author: polymorph
The Other(s) – In Homage to Borges
I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me… – Borges We have already mentioned in a different context a passage in Jean Oury’s Création et schizophrénie in which, inquired by the therapist, a schizophrenic patient evinces her lack of self-recognition: upon looking at herself on a mirror, she sees no…
Turning Physics into Semantics: On Extra-Modern Magic
The real question is not whether the touch of a woodpecker’s beak does in fact cure toothache. It is rather whether there is a point of view from which a woodpecker’s beak and a man’s tooth can be seen as “going together” (the use of this congruity for therapeutic purposes being only one of its…
Что такое философия?
«Необдуманная жизнь не стоит того, чтобы быть прожитой» (Платон) Введение Философия это размышление о том, как мы видим вещи, когда видим их через те или иные идеи, и о том, какие идеи позволяют нам видеть вещи более богатым и сложным (на английском не «difficult», а «сomplex») образом. Также философия это создание новых идей, с помощью…
Metaphor and Meaning (II)
PREVIOUS PART HERE In Habu: The Innovation of Meaning in Daribi Religion, Roy Wagner writes: The words defined in a dictionary are all based on the principle of signification, and in most cases their signification is what is called lexical, that is, each word refers to one or more specific elements (which may be objects,…
Metaphor and Meaning (I)
The Yanomami myth of the “falling sky” – which resembles that of the Celts reported by Ptolemy to Alexander during his campaign in Thrace against the Illyrians – offers a perfect site to briefly explore the relationship between metaphor and meaning. Davi Kopenawa narrates the myth thus: At the beginning, the sky was still new…
Beyond the Semiotic Prism
There is, on the one hand, the earth’s flesh, i.e. the multiplicity of movements, images, sounds, and sensations that compose it, by which all earthly beings enter in communication with one another emitting and receiving signs; that is to say, a dynamic multiplicity which is, furthermore, permanently accompanied by thought – a thought that is…
Ars Variationis
Contemporary thought often suffers from a twofold delusion. There either needs to be a model for everything or else everything is taken to be a difference in itself. In this way, pure identity and pure difference move their pawns against each other in an endless and fruitless game. Translation, of course, is the first victim…
Capitalism as Acculturation – or, the Revolutionary Force of the Past
December 9, 1973. In an article published in the Corriere della Sera Pasolini laments the acculturation brought about by capitalism. In particular, he deplores the loss of the “peripheral cultures which, until a few years ago had their own life assured – essentially a free life, even if within the poorest, or even miserable, peripheral…
The False Sublime
In his First Critique, Kant calls “determinative judgements” those in which both the particular (“these two points and the distance between them”) and the universal (“the notion that the shorter distance between two points is a straight line”) are given, the former in the form of the sensible multiplicity we experience (“this something,” “that something,…