I In Of Grammatology, Derrida rejects Lévi-Strauss’s account of his encounter with the Nambikwara as naif. Lévi-Strauss, says Derrida, is a victim of the typical Rousseauian nostalgia before an allegedly-egalitarian-and-transparent society in which any attempt on the part of one of its members to concentrate power and turn opaque its transparency is punished by the…
Category: Body
Cruelty and Tenderness among Extra-Modern Peoples
Extra-modern peoples are often viewed not only as materially underdeveloped, politically immature, and culturally uneducated, but also as being fundamentally cruel. We cannot discuss here all these accusations, which tell more about those who pronounce them than about anything else. But there is one we would like to examine here: the supposed cruelty of indigenous…
Those Who(se Bodies) Do Not Look Like Us
Early in the morning at the Pnyx, west of the Acropolis, Aristotle and Spinoza walk and chat on the eve of the Greater Eleusinian Mysteries… Aristotle: “But don’t we say that the body is defined in two ways: as a compound of form and matter, on the one hand, and, in physical terms, by its…
Phantasmagoria // Sofya
An aquatic space, A ghostly water… I (i?) dance butoh drowning. An aquatic space A porous body— Dissolving Into dark waters, Dreamy waters, An a-temporal space. An aquatic space. i dance butoh In ghostly waters.
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…
Humanity and Cannibalism as Problematic Notions // S&C
The crocodile-man from Papua New Guinea whom you see on the picture below is more similar to a crocodile than to any other “human” living in a nearby community. In turn, this cat-man from the Amazon rainforest is more similar to a jaguar than to any other “human” living in a nearby community. Finally, this…
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…
On Sade // Carlos
I. Which Sade? It is quite easy to ignore Sade(*). One just needs to place his writings on the shelf of psychosexual deviations. And yet it is only inexactly that Sade is called a pornographer. Pornologist might be a better term. But then again, this term, too, tells us very little – if it tells…