Balthus’s “pictures—like dreams—are journeys unto themselves,” writes Lance Esplung in The Art of Looking. “Balthus does not capture on canvas a scene already lived. He cultivates life within the breathing skin of the canvas, allowing his forms to play out their lives, independently and unpredictably, in relationship to and through the viewer’s experience. . ….
Author: polymorph
Tenderness, Intimacy, and Care
We are working lately with three Heideggerian concepts: “tenderness” (Zärtlichkeit), “intimacy” (Innigkeit), and “care” (Sorge), which we find important to rethink dwelling in capitalist ruins. Moreover, we take dwelling to be the only possible alternative to today’s fulfilled nihilism; and, more generally, to nihilism in any of its possible forms: those that want to accelerate…
How Does an Indigenous Concept Look Like?
In what follows, we render all indigenous terms in curly brackets to remind the reader that indigenous languages were, originally, non-written languages. This does not mean they were simpler, though. The fact that many indigenous languages are polysynthetic, for instance, makes them complex to an extreme which is hard for us to even fancy; thus…
We, Platonists (III) – or, the Untimely
PREVIOUS PART HERE From Plato to Foucault The late Foucault – the Foucault of The Care of the Self, published only a few days before his death in 1984 – goes back to a notion which is not very different from Plato’s notion of σωφροσύνη (sophrosyne, “soundness of mind”), about which we wrote in our…
We, Platonists (II) – or, Nietzsche Upside Down
FIRST PART HERE On Apollonian Temperance Γνῶθι σεαυτόν (gnothi seauton): “Know yourself.” These words connected to the Delphian Apollo are, above anything else, a recommendation about the assumption of one’s mortal condition, hence about the awareness of one’s limits against any ὕβρις (hybris, “excess”); thus too the Delphic lemma: Mηδὲν ἄγαν (meden agan), “Nothing in…
We, Platonists (I)
We want to talk about Plato. Of Plato as a modern taboo. Hence also about ourselves. About Plato and us. But first we are going to talk about horses. About apparitions and sculptures. Otherwise – we fear – we would only be able to repeat commonplace views on Plato. And we have had enough of…
What Is Language?
Certainly not primarily a communication tool. Nor a particular subset of learned behaviour. Nor a cognitive outcome of human evolution. Nor a set of sentences whose truth value could be quantified. Nor a socially-agreed-upon system of sounds and written phonemic symbols or ideograms to which meaning would be conventionally attached too. Nor a disciplinary apparatus…
Is the Earth Round?
“The earth is round.” It would be possible to contest this commonplace affirmation and to claim that the earth is flat instead, like a disc. Yet today almost nobody would contest the fact that the earth is round. Still, if it may be true that the earth is round, it is not clear whether the…
On Conceptual Noise and De-territorialisation
Due to human inactivity during the lockdown, in late March mountain goats were seen roaming the streets of a Welsh town. Events like this have provoked four different types of reaction in the social media. Some (A) celebrate such events (too naively?) as a return of nature to places from where it had been exiled….
Chaos, Rhythm, and Forms
Schizophrenics are like unstable points inside machinic circuits, thus their frequent drawings and narratives on the “influencing machines” they are, in their perception, connected to and controlled by. Generally, these “machines” reflect the technological status of the historical period in question: they can be immaterial (e.g. religious or theological) machines, mechanical machines with gears and…