Haven't tried to watch any of them yet, but I will be staring at my computer screen for a while if this webpage does in fact contain full video lectures from EGS instead of the minute or so clips they used to put up. Aside from the usual suspects of Badiou and Zizek, there is even one on poetry and mathematics with Jacques Roubaud, one of my favorite poets.
Thursday, September 06, 2007 | Filed Under | 0 Comments
Blanchot, from "Rene Char and the Thought of the Neutral":
"How can we live without the unknown before us?" In the evidency of this question-affirmation there is something that summons us; a difficulty that, holding us in its sight, nonetheless steals away in a nearly reassuring form. It has to be sought. the unknown is neutral, a neuter. the unknown is neither object nor subject. This means that to think the unknown is in no way to propose it as "the not yet known," the object of a knowledge still to come, any more than it would be to go beyond it as "the absolutely unknowable," a subject of pure transcendence, refusing itself to all manner of knowledge and expression. On the contrary, let us (perhaps arbitrarily) propose that in research - where poetry and thought affirm themselves in the space that is proper to them, separate, inseparable - the unknown is at stake; on condition, however, that it be explicitly stated that this research relates to the unknown as unknown. A phrase all the same disconcerting, since it proposes to "relate" the unknown inasmuch as it is unknown. In other words, we are supposing a relation in which the unknown would be affirmed, made manifest, even exhibited: disclosed - and under what aspect? - precisely in that which keeps it unknown. In this relation, then, the unknown would be diclosed in that which leaves it under cover, Is this a contradiction? In effct. i Research - poetry, thought - relates to the unknown as unknown. this relation discloses the unknown, but by an uncovering that leaves it under cover; through this relation there is a "presence" of the unknown; in this "presence" the unknown is rendered present, but always as unknown. This relation must leave intact - untouched - what it conveys and not unveil what it discloses. This relation will not consist in an unveiling. The unknown will not be revealed, but indicated.
(In order to avoid any misunderstanding, we should make it clear that if this relation with the unknown sets itself apart from objective knowledge, it does so no less from a knowledge that would arise out of intuition or a mystical fusion. The unknown as neutral supposes a relation that is foreign to every exigency of identity, of unity, even of presence.)(The Infinite Conversation, p. 300)
Of course, if any of that seems boring, it is worth noting that boredom is
An unserious seriousness from which nothing can divert us, even when it is lived in the mode of diversion. as we discover through the experience of boredom when indeed boredom seems to be the sudden, the insensible apprehension of the quotidian into which we slide in the leveling out of a steady slack time, feeling ourselves forever sucked in, yet feeling at the same time that we have already lost it and are henceforth incapable of deciding whether there is a lack of the everyday or too much of it - thus held by boredom in boredom, which develops, says Friedrich Schlegel, just as carbon dioxide accumulates in a closed space where too many people find themselves together. (Blanchot, "Everyday Speech", ibid., p. 242)
I have been browsing Temporary Services' website for a while - a collaborative trio I discovered today by way of their Library Project (HT LeisureArts), which is subversively adding, without being solicited, 100 new books and artist's projects to a collection of books currently in excess of 6 million at The Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago. According to the essay by Marc Fischer, some of the projects include:
The subject of war presented in the form of a coloring book (crayons included)
A critical analysis of photographic representation of prisoners in the United States
A short commentary on the discomfort of being dressed by an adult when you are a young child
A collection of photos from a social event archive
Email messages forwarded by an artist’s mother to provide emotional and spiritual guidance
An alphabetical reordering of the complete contents of romance novels
A detailed resource guide that uncovers the involvement of white supremacist groups in the underground punk and metal music scenes
The accounts of an "Uncontrollable" member of the Iron Column during the Spanish Civil War
Two self-published books documenting hundreds of drawings of vernacular architecture that were placed inside bottles and scattered throughout public places in Los Angeles
A story book in the style of those published by American Girl that teaches young girls how to pee standing up so that they can write their names in the snow.
I also highly recommend the Public Phenomena Archive, that "looks at the ways in which people modify the shared spaces of their cities", and contains numerous photos which are not only amusing, but thrive on the inexhaustable matrix that is 'everydayness':
[Basketball hoops, parking space savers & piles of bikes (slideshow)]
Saturday, September 01, 2007 | Filed Under | 0 Comments
"All our writing - for everyone and if it were ever writing of everyone - would be this: the anxious search for what was never written in the present, but in a past to come." - Maurice Blanchot
