I A poem may be made illegible not only by neglecting its language, but also by deciding in advance what its language is to conjure into the light of the world. The first form of blindness overlooks the word; the second sees only what it has already decided to find there. Between them lies the…
Category: Visual Arts
Delicacy and the Advent of the Sacred
Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’huiVa-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d’aile ivreCe lac dur oublié que hante sous le givreLe transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas fui ! – Mallarmé Beneath the frost but touched then, however faintly, by the swan’s wing: I What one manages to see in something depends upon the breadth…
The World in Three Gestures—Correggio, La Tour, Velázquez
Three images stand in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie in a kind of silent disproportion to one another, as though the museum had accidentally opened a breach and allowed three distinct ontological climates to coexist without mediation. One gets immediately caught in their differing ways of breathing—one swollen with movement, one suspended in inward gravity, one abruptly turned…
A Note on Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse
… But what is a Sleeping Muse? What is a slumbering Muse? A Muse—that is, she from whom inspiration flows: perhaps fitfully for us, yet without interruption when seen from her own side; she who therefore abides within herself in a state of perpetual wakefulness; who inhabits that realm as we shall never be able…
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…
Picturing Thought’s Self-Reflection
Thought’s minimal gesture amounts to establishing distinctions against the background of a night in which, otherwise, all cows would be black (and not even discernible from their own shadows): a primordial chaos or, what amounts to the same, the undifferentiated unity of all things in which nothing is yet outlined. (Example of basic distinctions: everything…
Moreau contra Impressionists
In a letter addressed in 1897 to Leopold Goldschmidt – who, having acquired a painting of his, Jupiter and Semele, asks its author for some comments on it – Gustave Moreau writes: “It would be deplorable if this admirable art, which can succeed in expressing so many things, so many noble, ingenious and profound and…
Beyond the Semiotic Prism
There is, on the one hand, the earth’s flesh, i.e. the multiplicity of movements, images, sounds, and sensations that compose it, by which all earthly beings enter in communication with one another emitting and receiving signs; that is to say, a dynamic multiplicity which is, furthermore, permanently accompanied by thought – a thought that is…
The Enigma of the Sensible
Commenting on Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes: What is important is not that Julien Sorel [i.e. the protagonist], after he has learned that he has been betrayed by Madame de Rénal, travels to Verrière and tries to kill her. It is that silence, that dreamlike journey, that thoughtless certainty, and that…
Two Types of Outside: Vermeer & Velázquez
Allow us to begin by quoting two Wittgensteinian propositions and an excerpt from Roy Wagner’s comments on them in his The Logic of Invention (2019). Wittgenstein: “A picture cannot […] depict its pictorial form: it displays it” (Tractatus, 2.172). “A picture cannot […] place itself outside its representational form” (ibid., 2.174) Wagner: “A picture does…