(A sequel to “Phantasmagoria“) There are two different theories of dreaming. One interprets dreams according to well-established a priori categories (such as complexes) and views dreams as symptoms of the dreamer’s personal expectations and frustrations, family and social roles, etc. Conversely, the other one approaches dreams in pragmatic and heuristic manner (as in a trial-and-error…
Category: Animism
Dreams as the Fugues of the Unconscious? On Musical Polyphony and Schizoanalytic Pragmatics
For Mahoro Murasawa and Kevin Swierkosz-Lenart I Like everything else, music is (to use a Guattarian concept) an “optional matter”; that is to say, there are many ways to organize any sound material. Take, for instance, the chromatic scale, which represents a way of classifying and gathering together a finite number of sounds, namely, twelve…
‘Aγχιβασίην…
In a Buddhist temple (with its elaborate architecture, the internal division of the enclosure into sections, etc.) the sacred is delimited by markedly human categories (Buddha of compassion, Buddha of wisdom, etc.), plus it is planned and organized. Conversely, a Shinto shrine (consisting of a small, red portico at the bend of a forest path,…
Other (Non-)Life(?)
Objects(*) are the product of multiple relations – or, rather, their crystalizations. They form at the intersection of relational nodes. Where things touch each other and get enmeshed, new objects appear. As Jeffrey Cohen writes, “medieval writers […] described thunderstones that drop with fire from the sky, rocks that emerge through the subterranean lovemaking of…
On Nishitani’s Notion of Nothingness (Sūnyatā) // S&C
Nishitani on Nothingness // Sofya What Keiji Nishitani intends to think in his famous essay Shūkyō to wa Nanika (What is Religion?), originally published in 1961 and translated into English in 1982 as Religion and Nothingness, is beautiful in a way. Firstly, he proposes that all life and non-life form oneself’s being. Nishitani quotes Miso Kokushi:…
A Pure Body – Artaud’s Dream // Carlos
Trees do not exist: nobody has ever seen one. We see something we identify and name as “a tree,” but what we call a tree is always something else than what we assume. Suppose we touch the tree instead of staring at it: free from its twofold visual enclosure – from its numeric and objectual…
Animism as a Question of Bodies and Logical Paradoxes // Carlos
There are two possible definitions of animism. The most widespread one turns around notions of projection and belief. Briefly, it states that we project onto animals, plants, rocks, and natural phenomena human qualities which these things lack like, for example, consciousness, intentionality, and agency. According to this definition, set forth by Hume and popularised by…