Art enthusiast Phyllis Tuchman in The New York Times yesterday —
"Ms. Rockburne's understated work plugged into
the prevailing Minimalist aesthetic of the day . . . ."
This was quoted here yesterday, followed by a visual flash drive
of sorts —
Another Parisian flash drive of sorts —
Two excerpts from today's Art & Design section of
The New York Times —
For the deplorables of France —
For further remarks on l'ordre , see
other posts tagged Galois's Space
(… tag=galoiss-space).
* The radical of the title is Évariste Galois (1811-1832).
. . . Con Figuras de Espantar
"He Who Searches is multifaceted in structure …"
— Publisher's description of a Helen Lane translation
of "Como en la Guerra ," by Luisa Valenzuela.
Also by Valenzuela —
Related material — An obituary from The Boston Globe today
on the April 5 death of Borinsky's translator, and . . .
"He Who Searches" may consult also posts tagged Date.
Remarks suggested by the previous post —
|
From Jeremy Biles, "Introduction: The Sacred Monster," in (Fordham University Press, 2007, page 3) — Bataille’s insistent conjunction of the monstrous and the sacred is the subject of this book. Regarded by many as one of the most important thinkers of our time, and acknowledged as an important influence by such intellectuals as Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida, Bataille produced a corpus of wide-ranging writings bearing the monstrous marks of the affective and intellectual contradictions he also sought to produce in his readers. In the following chapters, I will specify some of the ways in which Bataille evokes monstrosity to elicit in himself and his audience an experience of simultaneous anguish and joy—an experience that he calls sacred. In particular, Bataille is fascinated with the ‘‘left-hand’’ sacred. In contradistinction to its lucent and form-conferring ‘‘right-hand’’ counterpart, the left-hand sacred is obscure and formless—not transcendent, pure, and beneficent, but dangerous, filthy, and morbid. This sinister, deadly aspect of the sacred is at once embodied in, and communicated by, the monster. As we will see, it is in beholding the monster that one might experience the combination of ecstasy and horror that characterizes Bataille ’s notion of the sacred. The dual etymology of ‘‘monster’’ reveals that aspect of the sacred that enticed Bataille. According to one vein of etymological study, the Latin monstrum derives from monstrare (to show or display). The monster is that which appears before our eyes as a sign of sorts; it is a demonstration. But another tradition emphasizes a more ominous point. Deriving from monere (to warn), the monster is a divine omen, a portent; it heralds something that yet remains unexpected, unforeseeable—as a sudden reversal of fortune. In the writings of Bataille, the monster functions as a monstrance, putting on display the sinister aspect of the sacred that Bataille sees as the key to a ‘‘sovereign’’ existence. But in doing so the monster presents us with a portent of something that we cannot precisely foresee, but something that, Bataille claims, can be paradoxically experienced in moments of simultaneous anguish and ecstasy: death. |
See as well …
(Order of news items transposed for aesthetic effect.)
From "The Metaphysics of Entities," a post of Sept. 20, 2014 —
Anthony Lane in The New Yorker on a 2013 film —
"The hero of 'The Zero Theorem' is a computer genius
called Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz)…. He is the sole
resident of a derelict church, where, on a crucifix in front
of the altar, the head of Christ has been replaced by a
security camera. No prayers are ever said, and none are
answered."
Related dialogue from a 2008 film —
Another view of the Zero Theorem derelict church —
Translation by Barbara Johnson:
"The minimum number of rows— lines or columns—
that contain all the zeros in a matrix is equal to
the maximum number of zeros
located in any individual line or column ."
In the original:
"situés sur des lignes ou des colonnes distinctes "
Update of 11:30 PM ET May 29, 2014:
Derrida in 1972 was quoting Philippe Sollers, Nombres
(Paris: Éditions du Seuil , 1968). Sollers in turn was
perhaps quoting A. Kaufmann, Méthodes et Modèles
de la Recherche Opérationnelle , Paris, Dunod , 1964,
L'Économie d'Entreprise 10 , vol. 2, page 305:
"Le nombre minimal de rangées
(lignes et/ou colonnes) contenant
tous les zéros d'une matrice, est égal
au nombre maximal de zéros
situés sur des lignes et des colonnes distinctes."
May '68 Revisited
"At his final Paris campaign rally… Mr. Sarkozy declared himself the candidate of the 'silent majority,' tired of a 'moral crisis in France not seen since the time of Joan of Arc.'
'I want to turn the page on May 1968,' he said of the student protests cum social revolution that rocked France almost four decades ago.
'The heirs of May '68 have imposed the idea that everything has the same worth, that there is no difference between good and evil, no difference between the true and the false, between the beautiful and the ugly and that the victim counts for less than the delinquent.'
Denouncing the eradication of 'values and hierarchy,' Mr. Sarkozy accused the Left of being the true heirs and perpetuators of the ideology of 1968."
— Emma-Kate Symons, Paris, May 1, 2007, in The Australian
Related material:
From the translator's introduction to Dissemination, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Barbara Johnson, University of Chicago Press, 1981, page xxxi —
"Both Numbers and 'Dissemination' are attempts to enact rather than simply state the theoretical upheavals produced in the course of a radical reevaluation of the nature and function of writing undertaken by Derrida, Sollers, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva and other contributors to the journal Tel Quel in the late 1960s. Ideological and political as well as literary and critical, the Tel Quel program attempted to push to their utmost limits the theoretical revolutions wrought by Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Mallarme, Levi-Strauss, Saussure, and Heidegger."
This is the same Barbara Johnson who has served as the Frederic Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard.
Johnson has attacked "the very essence of Logic"–
"… the logic of binary opposition, the principle of non-contradiction, often thought of as the very essence of Logic as such….
Now, my understanding of what is most radical in deconstruction is precisely that it questions this basic logic of binary opposition….
Instead of a simple 'either/or' structure, deconstruction attempts to elaborate a discourse that says neither 'either/or', nor 'both/and' nor even 'neither/nor', while at the same time not totally abandoning these logics either."
— "Nothing Fails Like Success," SCE Reports 8, 1980
Such contempt for logic has resulted, for instance, in the following passage, quoted approvingly on page 342 of Johnson's translation of Dissemination, from Philippe Sollers's Nombres (1966):
"The minimum number of rows– lines or columns– that contain all the zeros in a matrix is equal to the maximum number of zeros located in any individual line or column."
For a correction of Sollers's Johnson's damned nonsense, click here.
Update of May 29, 2014:
The error, as noted above, was not Sollers's, but Johnson's.
See also the post of May 29, 2014 titled 'Lost in Translation.'
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