Objects(*) are the product of multiple relations – or, rather, their crystalizations. They form at the intersection of relational nodes. Where things touch each other and get enmeshed, new objects appear. As Jeffrey Cohen writes, “medieval writers […] described thunderstones that drop with fire from the sky, rocks that emerge through the subterranean lovemaking of…
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…
Picturing Schumann’s Ghost Variations in Abstract Terms
For Luigi Attademo We have recently written on Schumann’s Morning Songs, Op. 133, for piano. Like these, the Theme and Variations in E-flat major for piano WoO 24, also know as Gesitervariationen (Ghost, or Spirit, Variations, due to Schumann’s self-declared source of inspiration as it is mentioned in Clara Schumann’s diary of February 17, 1854),…
On Schumann’s Songs of Dawn
Jankélévitch famously wrote that “only music can express things which are infinitely ambiguous, as, unlike logic, music must not opt between things which are incompossible or contradictory: it can bring forth and develop, with the help of polyphony, several independent lines of discourse.”(⦼) As a matter of fact, poetry can do it, as well. Consider,…
Ulysses’s Siren
For Pere Ros Suppose a series of musical notes forming a melody (the black circles are the notes, the arrow indicates their succession): Suppose, though, that instead of hearing the notes sounding cleanly one after another, some of them were shaken by a gusty wind; as a result, such notes would “look” more or less…
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…
Satyajit Ray’s Formal Beauty
Kurosawa famously said that “not to have seen the cinema of [Satyajit] Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.” Ray’s opera prima, পথের পাঁচালী Pather Panchali [Song of the Road] (1955), fits that description admirably.(*) Labelling it – as it is often done – a “neorealist” film misses, though,…
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…