The tuning of the Baroque or—at least until Weiss—French lute does not merely cipher its technical disposition to produce music in a certain way, but sets forth a peculiar ontology of music itself—one that slips away from the familiar grammars of linear melody and architectural harmony, opening instead onto a more unstable field where sound…
Category: Otherness
Style Brisé (I): Modernity’s Musical Ghost
“Searching (for) limits” beyond those previously assigned and “getting rid of the glue” that held everything together in organic fashion: these are the expressions Richard Taruskin employs to characterize two distinct, though broadly contemporaneous, aesthetic responses within post-Wagnerian European music. The first, associated with the German tradition of Mahler, Strauss, and ultimately Schoenberg, sought to…
Butō and Art’s Future
It is incredible that, after about 700 years of discussing on art’s essence and pushing its boundaries further and further – sometimes in extremely interesting ways, other times in less compelling fashion – we have ended up in turning art into either allegory or imitation.(*) For both are merely forms of re-presentation, and re-presentation has…
Aphrodite’s Wounded Hand
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…
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…