Ancient Greek pair of eyes made of bronze, marble, frit, quartz, and obsidian. 5th century BCE or Later. Metropolitan Museum, New York. Object 1991.11.3a, b I A fresh look at Greek mythology requires perhaps that we view its gods (θεοί) both as those who offer us a deeper “insight” into things – for with just…
Category: Animism
How Does an Animist Ontology Look Like?
Fig. 1. Animism viewed as a “flat ontology” through a still-convalescent counter-modern lens (after Anna Tsing’s notion of “piling”). Fig. 2 Any animist ontology viewed from its own standpoint: polyvocal but articulated, rather than flat.
AΓAΛMA
The Ancient-Greek word ἄγαλμα (agalma) did not merely designate a statue, which we wrongly take to be its most common meaning. In Homer, it is the precious object desired by everyone that embellishes, by making it shine, the harness of the horse of the best among the warriors – in short, it is the treasure…
Of Dreamscapes and Dancescapes
(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…
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,…