This essay examines the concept of "life" in synthetic biology and redirects th... more This essay examines the concept of "life" in synthetic biology and redirects the question toward a notion of livingness, pertinent to us in the Anthropocene. This notion emerges from a new genealogy of thinkers , one that passes across the work of Henri Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Gilbert SImondon.
This paper explores Bataille's writings on primitive art, specifically his essay on t... more This paper explores Bataille's writings on primitive art, specifically his essay on the Lascaux cave, in order to elaborate a notion not of the informe (as contemporary art critics have done), but of the fictive figural image. It reads this "useless image"——a term borrowed from Bataille——in the work of Magritte through Bergson's notion of resemblance and the operation of attentive recognition.
... discoveries of structuralism, which had begun to reverse the conventional understanding of re... more ... discoveries of structuralism, which had begun to reverse the conventional understanding of relations ... Sollers stages the relation between interdiction and transgression as conflict, it becomes ... Once a dialectic of war replaces Bataille's intimate dance (ronde), and transgression is ...
... 8. This is because, by the time recognition occurs, the slave has already been reduced to the... more ... 8. This is because, by the time recognition occurs, the slave has already been reduced to the status of mere thing. 9. See Bataille, "Hegel, La Mort et le sacrifice" in Deucalion 5 (1955): 21-43. Translation included in this issue; see "Hegel, Death and Sacrifice," 9-27. Page 6. ...
... Page 11. Acknowledgments Greatest thanks to Josue V. Harari, teacher, colleague, and friend, ... more ... Page 11. Acknowledgments Greatest thanks to Josue V. Harari, teacher, colleague, and friend, without whose guidance, support, extensive editorial assistance, and sense of humor this book would never have been possible. ... Alexis Lykiard. London: Allison and Busby, 1978. ...
In a short text entitled "Questions de Poesie," preface to the Anthologie des Poetes de... more In a short text entitled "Questions de Poesie," preface to the Anthologie des Poetes de la NRF and published in the review in 1935, Valery mocks those who waste their time on terms such as Classicism, Romanticism, and Symbolism. These are terms "faits pour ... donner pretexte a des dissentiments infinis," since no one can agree upon their meaning. They are classifications, Valery concludes, that "n'enseignent ni a lire, ni a ecrire ... detournent et dispensent l'esprit des problemes reels de l'art; cependant qu'elles permettent a bien des aveugles de discourir de la couleur." (1) It is hard not to feel like a blind person holding forth about color when it comes to the question of modernism in the context of the NRF. For the NRF discusses Classicism, Romanticism, and Symbolism at length over the years as it positions itself strategically with respect to the contemporary world of letters and the horizon of modern art. Its analyses clearly reveal that these apparently meaningless terms are freighted with political values, and that the valences that attach to them shift over time, taking on different colorations according to the ideological forces at play in their deployment. Valery, however, will have none of this. In "Questions de Poesie" he moves resolutely on to what he calls the real problems of art: questions of language, or, as he puts it, "variation[s] de la langue qui la rend [ent] insensiblement tout autre." (2) What sensations is the poeta designed to produce? What operations of language enable it to do so? In other words, one must direct one's attention to questions of form, "L'unite et la consistence de la forme," (3) where form is construed in terms of specific operations of language. (4) What is a sentence? What is verse? What is a consonant? These are the pertinent questions, not what is Classicism, or Romanticism, or Symbolism? For the only difference that really counts, the difference between poetry and prose, depends upon them. The irony, of course, is that this essay that mocks conventional literary historical and esthetic categories, establishes the conventions of yet another category: Modernism. Valery's poetics becomes explicitly and canonically modernist thanks, in part, to the commentary of that preeminently modernist poet, T.S. Eliot. In "From Poe to Valery" (5) Eliot presents a now familiar genealogy of French modernist poetry that places Valery at the culmination of this development. Eliot traces French modernism back to a latent force in the writing of E.A. Poe, one indiscernible to Anglo American readers, but progressively revealed to, and by, three generations of French poets represented by Baudelaire, Mallarme and, above all, Valery. He identifies French modernism with poesie pure, the conviction that a poeta "does not say something--it is something," (6) a formula that rephrases the fundamental discontinuity Valery insists on between poetry and prose. Prose says something, whereas poetry just is something. Eliot identifies two principal features of modernist poetics that refer us to issues of form: self-consciousness (or self-referentiality) and autonomy (or awareness and concern for language). Eliot affirms that both are championed by Valery, "the most self-conscious of ali poets." (7) For Eliot, Valery not only epitomizes the modernist poet, be represents the culmination of modernism. From Eliot's point of view Valery took modernist poetics as far as it could go. The death of Valery in 1945 marks the demise of modernism itself. "I do not believe that this esthetic can be any help to later poets," (8) be affirms. From his perspective this poetic self-consciousness, this extreme awareness of, and concern for, language "must ultimately break down." (9) There will inevitably be an "irresistible revulsion of humanity," he argues, unwilling to "carry any longer the burden of modern civilization." (10) Eliot's myth of modernism (and its drama) is compatible with other important modernist myths, most notably those of Adorno and Clement Greenberg, both of which define Modernism against Romanticism, on the one hand, and against Realism (or the project of representation) on the other. …
come the subject of theory, or enabled the constitution of theory as subject, to the extent that ... more come the subject of theory, or enabled the constitution of theory as subject, to the extent that text theory is itself construed as model for, and generative of, a revolutionary subject. I am talking specifically about the project of semanalyse introduced by Kristeva in the late sixties and early seventies. If we look at the description of that project given in the canonical Dictionnaire encyclopedique des sciences du langage published by Ducrot and Todorov in 1972, we find it presented in terms which echo a number of central features of the Kantian sublime. Signifiance is described as "cette infinite diff6renciee dont la combinatoire illimitee
« II y a toute une politique du pouvoir intellectuel, une politique inte rieure (tres interieure,... more « II y a toute une politique du pouvoir intellectuel, une politique inte rieure (tres interieure, s'entend) et une politique exterieure, celle-ci etant du ressort de l'Histoire litteraire dont elle devrait faire l'un des principaux objets »'. Valery considere le double aspect de la production d'une ceuvre d'art, la production de l'ceuvre proprement dite et la production de sa valeur. C'est alors que l'analogie politique se presente a son esprit dans sa premiere le^on du Cours de poetique, presente au College de France en 1937.
This essay analyzes the social and economic forces behind the push for online education (especial... more This essay analyzes the social and economic forces behind the push for online education (especially in public universities), the discourses that support it, and the sometimes surprising discursive alliances that form among critics of the university. It also considers the opportunities as well as the risks of digital humanities and calls for increasing digital literacy on the part of humanists.
... 282 Page 9. LONGINUS AND THE SUBJECT OF THE SUBLIME port the audience outside themselves,&... more ... 282 Page 9. LONGINUS AND THE SUBJECT OF THE SUBLIME port the audience outside themselves," this transport is figured by Sappho, "clearly beside herself with love." The citation which immediately follows Sappho's poem figures the act of sublime enunciation itself. ...
Through an engagement with the philosophies of Proust’s contemporaries, Félix Ravaisson, Henri Be... more Through an engagement with the philosophies of Proust’s contemporaries, Félix Ravaisson, Henri Bergson, and Georg Simmel, Suzanne Guerlac presents an original reading of Remembrance of Things Past (A la recherche du temps perdu). Challenging traditional interpretations, she argues that Proust’s magnum opus is not a melancholic text, but one that records the dynamic time of change and the complex vitality of the real. Situating Proust’s novel within a modernism of money, and broadening the exploration through references to cultural events and visual technologies (commercial photography, photojournalism, pornography, the regulation of prostitution, the Panama Scandal, and the Dreyfus Affair), this study reveals that Proust’s subject is not the esthetic recuperation of loss but rather the adventure of living in time, on both the individual and the social level, at a concrete historical moment.
This essay examines the concept of "life" in synthetic biology and redirects th... more This essay examines the concept of "life" in synthetic biology and redirects the question toward a notion of livingness, pertinent to us in the Anthropocene. This notion emerges from a new genealogy of thinkers , one that passes across the work of Henri Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Gilbert SImondon.
This paper explores Bataille's writings on primitive art, specifically his essay on t... more This paper explores Bataille's writings on primitive art, specifically his essay on the Lascaux cave, in order to elaborate a notion not of the informe (as contemporary art critics have done), but of the fictive figural image. It reads this "useless image"——a term borrowed from Bataille——in the work of Magritte through Bergson's notion of resemblance and the operation of attentive recognition.
... discoveries of structuralism, which had begun to reverse the conventional understanding of re... more ... discoveries of structuralism, which had begun to reverse the conventional understanding of relations ... Sollers stages the relation between interdiction and transgression as conflict, it becomes ... Once a dialectic of war replaces Bataille's intimate dance (ronde), and transgression is ...
... 8. This is because, by the time recognition occurs, the slave has already been reduced to the... more ... 8. This is because, by the time recognition occurs, the slave has already been reduced to the status of mere thing. 9. See Bataille, "Hegel, La Mort et le sacrifice" in Deucalion 5 (1955): 21-43. Translation included in this issue; see "Hegel, Death and Sacrifice," 9-27. Page 6. ...
... Page 11. Acknowledgments Greatest thanks to Josue V. Harari, teacher, colleague, and friend, ... more ... Page 11. Acknowledgments Greatest thanks to Josue V. Harari, teacher, colleague, and friend, without whose guidance, support, extensive editorial assistance, and sense of humor this book would never have been possible. ... Alexis Lykiard. London: Allison and Busby, 1978. ...
In a short text entitled "Questions de Poesie," preface to the Anthologie des Poetes de... more In a short text entitled "Questions de Poesie," preface to the Anthologie des Poetes de la NRF and published in the review in 1935, Valery mocks those who waste their time on terms such as Classicism, Romanticism, and Symbolism. These are terms "faits pour ... donner pretexte a des dissentiments infinis," since no one can agree upon their meaning. They are classifications, Valery concludes, that "n'enseignent ni a lire, ni a ecrire ... detournent et dispensent l'esprit des problemes reels de l'art; cependant qu'elles permettent a bien des aveugles de discourir de la couleur." (1) It is hard not to feel like a blind person holding forth about color when it comes to the question of modernism in the context of the NRF. For the NRF discusses Classicism, Romanticism, and Symbolism at length over the years as it positions itself strategically with respect to the contemporary world of letters and the horizon of modern art. Its analyses clearly reveal that these apparently meaningless terms are freighted with political values, and that the valences that attach to them shift over time, taking on different colorations according to the ideological forces at play in their deployment. Valery, however, will have none of this. In "Questions de Poesie" he moves resolutely on to what he calls the real problems of art: questions of language, or, as he puts it, "variation[s] de la langue qui la rend [ent] insensiblement tout autre." (2) What sensations is the poeta designed to produce? What operations of language enable it to do so? In other words, one must direct one's attention to questions of form, "L'unite et la consistence de la forme," (3) where form is construed in terms of specific operations of language. (4) What is a sentence? What is verse? What is a consonant? These are the pertinent questions, not what is Classicism, or Romanticism, or Symbolism? For the only difference that really counts, the difference between poetry and prose, depends upon them. The irony, of course, is that this essay that mocks conventional literary historical and esthetic categories, establishes the conventions of yet another category: Modernism. Valery's poetics becomes explicitly and canonically modernist thanks, in part, to the commentary of that preeminently modernist poet, T.S. Eliot. In "From Poe to Valery" (5) Eliot presents a now familiar genealogy of French modernist poetry that places Valery at the culmination of this development. Eliot traces French modernism back to a latent force in the writing of E.A. Poe, one indiscernible to Anglo American readers, but progressively revealed to, and by, three generations of French poets represented by Baudelaire, Mallarme and, above all, Valery. He identifies French modernism with poesie pure, the conviction that a poeta "does not say something--it is something," (6) a formula that rephrases the fundamental discontinuity Valery insists on between poetry and prose. Prose says something, whereas poetry just is something. Eliot identifies two principal features of modernist poetics that refer us to issues of form: self-consciousness (or self-referentiality) and autonomy (or awareness and concern for language). Eliot affirms that both are championed by Valery, "the most self-conscious of ali poets." (7) For Eliot, Valery not only epitomizes the modernist poet, be represents the culmination of modernism. From Eliot's point of view Valery took modernist poetics as far as it could go. The death of Valery in 1945 marks the demise of modernism itself. "I do not believe that this esthetic can be any help to later poets," (8) be affirms. From his perspective this poetic self-consciousness, this extreme awareness of, and concern for, language "must ultimately break down." (9) There will inevitably be an "irresistible revulsion of humanity," he argues, unwilling to "carry any longer the burden of modern civilization." (10) Eliot's myth of modernism (and its drama) is compatible with other important modernist myths, most notably those of Adorno and Clement Greenberg, both of which define Modernism against Romanticism, on the one hand, and against Realism (or the project of representation) on the other. …
come the subject of theory, or enabled the constitution of theory as subject, to the extent that ... more come the subject of theory, or enabled the constitution of theory as subject, to the extent that text theory is itself construed as model for, and generative of, a revolutionary subject. I am talking specifically about the project of semanalyse introduced by Kristeva in the late sixties and early seventies. If we look at the description of that project given in the canonical Dictionnaire encyclopedique des sciences du langage published by Ducrot and Todorov in 1972, we find it presented in terms which echo a number of central features of the Kantian sublime. Signifiance is described as "cette infinite diff6renciee dont la combinatoire illimitee
« II y a toute une politique du pouvoir intellectuel, une politique inte rieure (tres interieure,... more « II y a toute une politique du pouvoir intellectuel, une politique inte rieure (tres interieure, s'entend) et une politique exterieure, celle-ci etant du ressort de l'Histoire litteraire dont elle devrait faire l'un des principaux objets »'. Valery considere le double aspect de la production d'une ceuvre d'art, la production de l'ceuvre proprement dite et la production de sa valeur. C'est alors que l'analogie politique se presente a son esprit dans sa premiere le^on du Cours de poetique, presente au College de France en 1937.
This essay analyzes the social and economic forces behind the push for online education (especial... more This essay analyzes the social and economic forces behind the push for online education (especially in public universities), the discourses that support it, and the sometimes surprising discursive alliances that form among critics of the university. It also considers the opportunities as well as the risks of digital humanities and calls for increasing digital literacy on the part of humanists.
... 282 Page 9. LONGINUS AND THE SUBJECT OF THE SUBLIME port the audience outside themselves,&... more ... 282 Page 9. LONGINUS AND THE SUBJECT OF THE SUBLIME port the audience outside themselves," this transport is figured by Sappho, "clearly beside herself with love." The citation which immediately follows Sappho's poem figures the act of sublime enunciation itself. ...
Through an engagement with the philosophies of Proust’s contemporaries, Félix Ravaisson, Henri Be... more Through an engagement with the philosophies of Proust’s contemporaries, Félix Ravaisson, Henri Bergson, and Georg Simmel, Suzanne Guerlac presents an original reading of Remembrance of Things Past (A la recherche du temps perdu). Challenging traditional interpretations, she argues that Proust’s magnum opus is not a melancholic text, but one that records the dynamic time of change and the complex vitality of the real. Situating Proust’s novel within a modernism of money, and broadening the exploration through references to cultural events and visual technologies (commercial photography, photojournalism, pornography, the regulation of prostitution, the Panama Scandal, and the Dreyfus Affair), this study reveals that Proust’s subject is not the esthetic recuperation of loss but rather the adventure of living in time, on both the individual and the social level, at a concrete historical moment.
Thinking in Time, and introduction to Henri Bergson, presents guided readings of two of his work... more Thinking in Time, and introduction to Henri Bergson, presents guided readings of two of his works, Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory. i've posted here the conclusion to this book which simply gives some citations from Bergson that make you want to read him
... Page 11. Acknowledgments Greatest thanks to Josue V. Harari, teacher, colleague, and friend, ... more ... Page 11. Acknowledgments Greatest thanks to Josue V. Harari, teacher, colleague, and friend, without whose guidance, support, extensive editorial assistance, and sense of humor this book would never have been possible. ... Alexis Lykiard. London: Allison and Busby, 1978. ...
... Since the figure of Bergson is so deeply (and broadly) embedded in the French cul-tural conte... more ... Since the figure of Bergson is so deeply (and broadly) embedded in the French cul-tural context, the effacement of this discourse poses interesting ... It also returns to Bataille to recontextualize the figure I take primarily as a theorist in the opening chapter, and to situate him in ...
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i've posted here the conclusion to this book which simply gives some citations from Bergson that make you want to read him