As Bertram has shown in some splendid pages, we encounter the tradition of Socratic Eros and the educative daimon in Nietzsche. According to Bertram, the sayings sum up perfectly this erotic dimension of pedagogy. One is Nietzsche himself: “The deepest insights spring from love alone.” Another is by Goethe: “We learn only from those we love.” Finally, there is Hölderlin’s dictum: “Mortal man gives his best when he loves.” These three maxims go to show that it is only through reciprocal love that we can accede to genuine consciousness.
Pierre Hadot The Figure of Socrates Philosophy as a way of life
My reading orbits an accretion of preoccupations. So far, this year’s idées fixes are the influence of the East on Greco-Roman thought (and by extension, modern thought), Epicureanism, the neo-vitalist/transcendental materialist movement in contemporary philosophy, and asceticism. It may be that the interrelation between these themes are personal, but they appear deeply connected.
Following a question on Twitter I thought I’d compile a list of some of the texts that I’ve recently read and that I’ll be reading over the next few months. Please feel free to make further suggestions of titles that speak urgently to these concerns. These are all complementary to the Urtexts of Epicurus, Lucretius, and Diogenes Laertius, and to this superb companion.
@timesflow I’ve read some Marcus Aurelius, and Lucretius. Who else would you recommend for epicurean and/or materialist explorations?
By the time of the Platonic dialogues Socrates was called atopos, that is, “unclassifiable.” What makes him atopos is precisely the fact that he is a “philo-sopher” in the etymological sense of the word; that is, he is in love with wisdom. For wisdom, says Diotima in Plato’s Symposium, is not a human state, it is a state of perfection of being and knowledges that can only be divine. It is the love of wisdom, which is foreign to the world, that makes the philosopher a stranger in it.
Pierre Hadot Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse Philosophy as a way of life
Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988-9) – Cornelia Parker
Vital materiality better captures an “alien” quality of our own flesh, and in so doing reminds humans of the very radical character of the (fractious) kinship between the human and the nonhuman. My flesh is populated and constituted by different swarms of foreigners. The crook of my elbow, for example, is a “special ecosystem, a bountiful home to no fewer than six tribes of bacteria. . . .They are helping to moisturise the skin by processing the raw fats it produces. . . .The bacteria in the human microbiome collectively possess at least 100 times as many genes as the mere 20,000 or so in the human genome.” The its outnumber the mes. In a world of vibratory matter, it is thus not enough to say that we are “embodied.” We are, rather, an array of bodies, many different kinds of them nested in a set of microbiomes. If more people marked this fact more of the time, if we were more attentive to the indispensable foreignness that we are, would we continue to produce and consume in the same violently reckless ways.
Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) – Cornelia Parker
A second advantage hinges on the inflection of matter as vibrant, vital, energetic, lively, quivering, vibratory, evanescent, and efflorescent (to recall some modifiers I have used throughout the book). In a world of lively matter, we see that biochemical and biochemical-social systems can sometimes unexpectedly bifurcate or choose developmental paths that could not have been foreseen, for they are governed by an emergent rather than a linear or deterministic causality. And once we see this, we will need an alternative to the idea of nature as blind mechanism. A vital materialism interrupts both the teleological organisms of some ecologists and the machine image of nature governing many of their opponents.
Bourdieu’s judgement, and that of all those who denounce the aesthetic illusion, rests on a simple alternative: you know or you do not [on connaît ou on méconnaît]. If you do not know [méconnaît], it is because you do not know [sait] how to look or you cannot look. But to not be able to look is still a way of not knowing how to look. Whether philosopher or petit-bourgeois, those who deny this, those who believe in the disinterested character of aesthetic judgement do not want to see because they cannot see, because the place that they occupy in the determined system, for them as for everyone else, constitutes a mode of accommodation which determines a form of misrecognition [méconnaissance].
Rancière, Jacques and Jon Roffe (Translator). “Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge.” in: Parrhesia. Vol. 1, 2006. (English).
I am a material configuration, the pigeons in the park are material compositions, the viruses, parasites, and heavy metals in my flesh and in pigeon flesh are materialities, as are neurochemicals, hurricane winds, E. coli, and the dust on the floor. Materiality is a rubric that tends to horizontalize the relations between humans, biota, and abiota. It draws human attention sideways, away from an ontologically ranked Great Chain of Being and toward a greater appreciation of the complex entanglements of humans and nonhumans. Here. the implicit moral imperative of Western thought -”Thou shall identify and defend what is special about Man”-loses some of its salience
Many of these links have been tweeted in the past, but here I can tag and categorise them for future reference. I hope you find some of them interesting too. Please feel free to discuss in comments or on Twitter. Some of the links to PDFs disappear quickly so download them promptly.
Jorge Luis Borges
The Signifying Corpse: Re-Reading Kristeva on Marguerite Duras by Karen Piper [PDF]: “Moderato cantabile, far from the sweet and melodious story the title suggests, is centred around the sound of a scream.”
A Dictionary of Borges[PDF] by Evelyn Fishburn and Psiche Hughes (Forewords by Mario Vargas Llosa and Anthony Burgess).
Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex [PDF] by Judith Butler. “In fact, we can see in The Second Sex an effort to radicalize the Sartrian program to establish an embodied notion of freedom.”
A Writer from Chicago [PDF] by Saul Bellow. “Neither in brash, and now demoralised, Chicago nor in New York, the capital of victorious mass culture (American culture is the culture of the TV networks), will any writer try to live like an artist. If he is a person of any degree of seriousness, why would he want to?”
Two by Friedrich Nietzsche: my favourite Ecce Homo (How One Becomes What One Is) and The Antichrist (A Curse on Christianity) [PDF]. A new translation by Thomas Wayne.
Many of these links have been tweeted in the past, but here I can tag and categorise them for future reference. I hope you find some of them interesting too. Please feel free to discuss in comments or on Twitter. Some of the links to PDFs disappear quickly so download them promptly.
Bridget Riley in her Studio, 1960′s
Dodie Bellamy’s passionate, polemical Barf Manifesto is one of the most intriguing texts I’ve read this year. Spew Forth [PDF] is a good taster of her aesthetic.
“Man is free; but he finds his law in his very freedom.” Any long time reader of this blog knows I’m very interested in the work, thought and person of Simone de Beauvoir. The Ethics of Ambiguity was, in part, her response to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.
Franz Kafka’s Complete Short Stories[PDF]: if I were allowed to keep only a single book it would be this one. I could read these stories alone for the rest of my life and never tire of them.
Franz Kafka’s The Trial [PDF]: a more modern translation of The Trial.
David Winter’s superb review of Christine Schutt’s Prosperous Friends, “proves Schutt to be of the finest stylists alive”.
“What can we say we really understand about our personal experience with colour?” Bridget Riley’s Introduction to Colour: Art and Science [PDF] addresses colour in art.
JG Ballard’s The Complete Short Stories [PDF]: though I agree with Germaine Greer’s comment that Ballard is “a great writer who hasn’t written a great novel,” I enjoy reading his short stories and longer pieces. It is his autobiographical books that get closest to greatness.
Yesterday I alluded to Foucault’s Self Writing [PDF: Technologies of the Self/Self Writing], one of a series of studies on “the arts of oneself” that draws heavily on Greco-Roman thought, particularly that of Seneca.
Woodcut illustration of the suicide of Seneca and the attempted suicide of his wife Pompeia Paulina
The illustration above depicts Seneca’s suicide (his wife was spared by Nero) who chose the traditional Roman suicide of cutting multiple veins to bleed to death. For some reason the illustration brings to mind the procedure enacted in Kafka’s In the Penal Colony. In Kafka’s story a device is constructed that very slowly, minutely inscribes a condemned man’s sentence on his flesh. It is Kafka’s most chilling and unforgettable short story. Judith Butler, in an early essay, draws an analogy between Kafka’s device and Foucault’s concept that the body is figured as a blank page available for inscription, awaiting the “imprint” of history and knowledge.
In Self Writing Foucault quotes Seneca’s phrase, “It is necessary to read, but also to write” as an exercise in self-inscription, what Plutarch termed ethopoietic, a procedure for transforming truth into essence. My own framework is not dissimilar to that described by Foucault, whereby I read, make notes reflecting on what I’ve read, spend time contemplating my notes, often reread, and converse about reading with others. This desire for conversation about literature is what drew me to blogging. As Foucault describes, “to collect what one has managed to hear or read, and for a purpose that is nothing less than the shaping of the self”.
