In the first place, difference presents itself in two ways: as difference in nature (a dolphin is different from a violin because their respective natures differ) and difference in degree or gradual difference (it is now warmer than it was earlier this morning). Yet difference can be also thought in terms of archetypes and their…
Category: Thought
Anthropology as Heterology
It was Herder (1744–1803) who coined the term Volkskunde (pl. Völkerskunde), which may be translated as the “knowledge” of the “popular traditions” and “cultural practices” of a given “nation” or “people.” But it was not until 1839 and 1843 that the first learned ethnological societies were established in Paris and London, respectively. The Ethnological Society…
On Leibniz
“Each singular substance expresses the whole universe in its own way, […] even if [somewhat] confusingly,” writes Leibniz in his Discourse on Metaphysics (§ 9). Let’s risk a gloss: There is no-one who has not received at least once, no matter how briefly, Athena’s or Eros’s or Ares’s visit (i.e. there is no-one who has…
The Other(s) – In Homage to Borges
I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me… – Borges We have already mentioned in a different context a passage in Jean Oury’s Création et schizophrénie in which, inquired by the therapist, a schizophrenic patient evinces her lack of self-recognition: upon looking at herself on a mirror, she sees no…
Turning Physics into Semantics: On Extra-Modern Magic
The real question is not whether the touch of a woodpecker’s beak does in fact cure toothache. It is rather whether there is a point of view from which a woodpecker’s beak and a man’s tooth can be seen as “going together” (the use of this congruity for therapeutic purposes being only one of its…
Что такое философия?
«Необдуманная жизнь не стоит того, чтобы быть прожитой» (Платон) Введение Философия это размышление о том, как мы видим вещи, когда видим их через те или иные идеи, и о том, какие идеи позволяют нам видеть вещи более богатым и сложным (на английском не «difficult», а «сomplex») образом. Также философия это создание новых идей, с помощью…
Metaphor and Meaning (II)
PREVIOUS PART HERE In Habu: The Innovation of Meaning in Daribi Religion, Roy Wagner writes: The words defined in a dictionary are all based on the principle of signification, and in most cases their signification is what is called lexical, that is, each word refers to one or more specific elements (which may be objects,…
Metaphor and Meaning (I)
The Yanomami myth of the “falling sky” – which resembles that of the Celts reported by Ptolemy to Alexander during his campaign in Thrace against the Illyrians – offers a perfect site to briefly explore the relationship between metaphor and meaning. Davi Kopenawa narrates the myth thus: At the beginning, the sky was still new…
Ars Variationis
Contemporary thought often suffers from a twofold delusion. There either needs to be a model for everything or else everything is taken to be a difference in itself. In this way, pure identity and pure difference move their pawns against each other in an endless and fruitless game. Translation, of course, is the first victim…
The False Sublime
In his First Critique, Kant calls “determinative judgements” those in which both the particular (“these two points and the distance between them”) and the universal (“the notion that the shorter distance between two points is a straight line”) are given, the former in the form of the sensible multiplicity we experience (“this something,” “that something,…