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: Otherness
Four Notes on Plato… Upstream
Hypercomplex: there is probably no better adjective to describe Plato’s thought; and this explains, too, why it is so very easy to lose sight of what it invites us to reflect on and ponder, which is nothing different from thought’s endless beginning, meandering itineraries, and inner paradoxes. But then, how can one speak of essentialism…
On Truth, neither Universal nor Particular, but Infinitesimal or Transversal
Let’s suppose four worlds (W1, W2, W3, W4). World 1 contains mothers (x), maternal aunts (r), and fathers (z), but not shamans (k): W1 = (x = x) ∧ (r = r) ∧ (z = z) ∧ ∄k World. 2 also contains mothers (x) and aunts (r), but (as it happens, e.g., among the Iroquois;…
Plato… minus Platonism (with a Note on Guattari and Deleuze)
It is with Heraclitus that the “thinkable” becomes the very object of thought – and I am tempted toassert that it is only then that philosophy properly begins. The apocryphal anecdote concerning the death of Homer contained in frag. DK B56 (to which I have already alluded here) hints at this in a lovely manner…
Of Human Thought as an Iridescent Interface
What does it mean to say that we are at once auto- and allo-poietic, endo- and exo-consistent, different and non-different from what is in one sense, but in another sense no longer remains, external to us? And, even more importantly perhaps, what does it mean to realize that we are unceasingly sliced and spliced between…
“To Cast the Fish and Keep the Net” – Philosophy’s Uncanny Task
Merleau-Ponty’s later writings witness to a thematic shift from the study of perception to that of meaning as its supplement, in the Derridean sense of the term “supplement” – a shift that Merleau-Ponty himself describes in La Prose du monde with an eloquent metaphorical expression: “to cast the fish and keep the net” (jete[r] les…
Images of Thought
Interestingly, and as I have written elsewhere, this letter remains for us, Europeans, a typically Greek one (in German it is called ypsilon, which is its original Greek name; in French, i grec (“Greek i”); in Spanish, i griega). This very Greek “Y” symbolizes (or rather, pictures graphically; Pierce would have said that it is…
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…
Butō & Philosophy
To “represent” (vorstellen) something and to “position” (stellen) it in its “place” (Stelle) is said in German after the same verbal root, which is also inherent in the word Gestell: “positioning,” “enframing.” With the latter term, Heidegger points at the generalized availability in which things stand before us – a trait which is peculiar to…
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…