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: Life
After Nietzsche
I Nietzsche claims that the way in which we picture the world affirms or denies what we are ready to put in it, in short, that our representations rely on a pre-representational basis, inasmuch as we see what we see depending on how we are inclined to value it. In other words, he underscores the…
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…
What Dies, and What Lasts: On Rosenzweig’s Indictment against Anaximander
I Franz Rosenzweig, in The Star of Redemption — which is a very interesting book, partly written in the trenches of the Balkan front during World War I —, accuses philosophy — he says: from Ionia to Jena, that is to say, all the history of philosophy, from its inception with the Ionian philosophers (Thales,…
Seeds of Singing – or, What Else Can a Soul Be and Do
Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) ends with one of the characters, “Paolo,” a bourgeois middle-aged man, running naked through the wilderness out of shame, a profound anti-bourgeois shame. For, while Paolo is able to break off with the bourgeois order that he himself incarnates as both a bourgeois father and businessman, he proves incapable of replacing it…
“We Fight Because We Die” (III): Extra-Modern War and Its Moral Supplement
(N.B. This entry follows from the previous one, titled: “An Existentialist Approach to Extra-Modern War”) Pierre Clastres states that “primitive societies […] invest themselves totally in their religious and ritual life, which unfolds as a continuously repeated affirmation of the communal Self,” and hence that “[e]ach ceremony is a new opportunity to remember that if…
“We Fight Because We Die” (II): An Existentialist Approach to Extra-Modern War
(N.B. This entry complements the previous one, titled “We Fight Because We Die” (I): On Extra-Modern War as a Question of Social Logic.”) We die. It can hardly be minimised. Thus the common ancient-Greek terms for men: θνητοί, “mortals.” During the opening seconds of Robert Gardner’s beautiful ethnographic film, Dead Birds (1964), the camera follows…
“We Fight Because We Die” (I): On Extra-Modern War as a Question of Social Logic
In Chapter 11 of Archeology of Violence, subtitled “War in Primitive Societies” – the term “primitive” has different connotations in French than it has in English: it means something like “original” or “primordial” in the Rousseauian sense, which is overtly non-evolutionist – Pierre Clastres begins by tracing a sharp contrast between two phenomena, namely, the…
Cannibalism as a Total Social Fact
1 “The power to change form – power over the image – can be seen as the ultimate realisable power in a society dominated by consensual (visual) image,” writes Roy Wagner.(⊛) By “consensual (visual) image” Wagner means what is commonly (and poorly) known as “tradition.” Take, for example, any extra-modern ritual: on the day in…
Bodies, Ghosts, Ancestors
It is tempting to view Plato’s tripartite division of the soul in Phaedrus 245c–253e as an instantiation – whose conceptual complexity is easily overlooked when the image it conveys is turned into a myth in the modern sense of the term, i.e. into an object of belief – of what we have called a semiotic…