I should like to briefly suggest an inverse parallel here. In Malraux, the proximity of death makes the world present itself anew with a strange intensity: a world that is not merely a biographical backdrop, but an irreducible exteriority that moves and exceeds the subject who experiences it. In Blanchot, by contrast, death calls into question the very possibility…
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In Defence of Góngora
I A poem may be made illegible not only by neglecting its language, but also by deciding in advance what its language is to conjure into the light of the world. The first form of blindness overlooks the word; the second sees only what it has already decided to find there. Between them lies the…
Delicacy and the Advent of the Sacred
Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’huiVa-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d’aile ivreCe lac dur oublié que hante sous le givreLe transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas fui ! – Mallarmé Beneath the frost but touched then, however faintly, by the swan’s wing: I What one manages to see in something depends upon the breadth…
From Musical Forms to Transcendental Affective Fields: The French Suite
Despite its many virtues, Aristotle’s hylomorphism, when it becomes a shortcut, can obscure the depths and complexity of things. We are accustomed to treating music, for instance, as a combination of matter and form: as the structuring of those specific types of sounds we call musical notes under a more or less regular formal pattern—Fantasia,…
The World in Three Gestures—Correggio, La Tour, Velázquez
Three images stand in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie in a kind of silent disproportion to one another, as though the museum had accidentally opened a breach and allowed three distinct ontological climates to coexist without mediation. One gets immediately caught in their differing ways of breathing—one swollen with movement, one suspended in inward gravity, one abruptly turned…
Style Brisé (II): Style Luthé—After Derrida’s “Cinders”
The tuning of the Baroque or—at least until Weiss—French lute does not merely cipher its technical disposition to produce music in a certain way, but sets forth a peculiar ontology of music itself—one that slips away from the familiar grammars of linear melody and architectural harmony, opening instead onto a more unstable field where sound…
Style Brisé (I): Modernity’s Musical Ghost
“Searching (for) limits” beyond those previously assigned and “getting rid of the glue” that held everything together in organic fashion: these are the expressions Richard Taruskin employs to characterize two distinct, though broadly contemporaneous, aesthetic responses within post-Wagnerian European music. The first, associated with the German tradition of Mahler, Strauss, and ultimately Schoenberg, sought to…
A Note on Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse
… But what is a Sleeping Muse? What is a slumbering Muse? A Muse—that is, she from whom inspiration flows: perhaps fitfully for us, yet without interruption when seen from her own side; she who therefore abides within herself in a state of perpetual wakefulness; who inhabits that realm as we shall never be able…
Ontologies of the Fragmentary
The greatness and the misery of an era—each of them probably containing both in similar proportion—can certainly be measured in different ways. One such way consists in examining the richness or poverty of its ideas not only with regard to their number, but also to their complexity; and this, in turn, depends, at least in…
Butō and Art’s Future
It is incredible that, after about 700 years of discussing on art’s essence and pushing its boundaries further and further – sometimes in extremely interesting ways, other times in less compelling fashion – we have ended up in turning art into either allegory or imitation.(*) For both are merely forms of re-presentation, and re-presentation has…