We have written elsewhere on schizophrenia, following Jean Oury, as a “rhythmic distortion.” We would now like to add that such distortion is neither what one presences when one witnesses a schizophrenic delirium nor what one enters when one enters one. For, as Freud stresses, it is at re-building their collapsed worlds that psychotics aim…
Category: Life
On Nietzsche’s Eternal Return
Nietzsche’s “most difficult thought,” as he himself calls it in a posthumously-edited fragment, is his thought on the “eternal return.” Heidegger interprets it as the eternal recurrence of the “same.” Deleuze, instead, as the eternal recurrence of “difference.” Who is right, Heidegger or Deleuze? We would like to venture that they are both right –…
Only We Die: on Immanence
We have never been humans – no human has ever stepped on the surface of the earth. However, since their first symbolic utterance mortals started to walk on the earth, naming (i.e. conferring being to) what lives and what dies. Possessed by symbolic language, humans are the only mortals, the only animals who experience in…
Dionysos and Apollo
I Dionysos and Apollo Dionysos and Apollo shared one sanctuary: Delphi, located on a ridge of the Parnassos mountains overlooking the Valley of Phokis and the surrounding hills, near the town of Krissa north of the Gulf of Corinth in today’s region of Sterea or Central Greece. Dionysos was worshiped there in the winter, whereas…
Is the Earth Round?
“The earth is round.” It would be possible to contest this commonplace affirmation and to claim that the earth is flat instead, like a disc. Yet today almost nobody would contest the fact that the earth is round. Still, if it may be true that the earth is round, it is not clear whether the…
Chaos, Rhythm, and Forms
Schizophrenics are like unstable points inside machinic circuits, thus their frequent drawings and narratives on the “influencing machines” they are, in their perception, connected to and controlled by. Generally, these “machines” reflect the technological status of the historical period in question: they can be immaterial (e.g. religious or theological) machines, mechanical machines with gears and…
Endemic Pandemic Pandemonium
SPANISH VERSION HERE A devastating plague dominates Thebes. Sophocles (Oedipus Rex, first intervention of the chorus, vv. 158-215) has its people call on the gods: First we call on Athena, deathless daughter of Zeus, / and Artemis, earth upholder, […] / and Phoebus [Apollo], the far shooter, / come to us now […] / Our…
Post-Nihilist Meanderings on the Shores of Mythology, Tragedy, Poetry, and Enigma
It wasn’t long. It only lasted four hundred years. But the beautiful thing is that we can assist to its birth and death. The beautiful thing and the sad thing. It first surfaces in Homer’s Iliad, and it dies with Aristotle, in Aristotle. Strangely, we can presence both events. Yet we can only understand the…
Oedipus Rex
Duplicity. “When Oedipus speaks he sometimes says something other than or even the opposite of what he thinks he is saying.” Yet “the ambiguity of what he says does not reflect a duplicity in his character, which is perfectly consistent, but, more profoundly, the duality of his being. He is double. He is himself a…
Walking in Beauty: Philosophy & Eros
In his Letters II and VII, Plato argues that the insights of philosophy “cannot be put into words like other subjects can be.” They are so simple that they appear to be laughable to those who do not take part in the philosophical life or way of living, as it is only through the latter…