square white world

Here

Antonio Damasio (Looking for Spinoza) shows, to simplify, the material neuronal causes of such feelings as empathy in the brain. Catherine Malabou goes further. She invents in The New Wounded, self-consciously, the philosophical concept of “cerebrality” to provide an aetiology for psychic events. She cites the argument of Bruno Bettelheim implying a shared causality of psychological symptoms in autists and mussulmen – the 1000 yard stare and – the indifference.

From Malabou’s preamble: “this book is a belated reaction to the ordeal of depersonalisation to which my grandmother was subjected as Alzheimer’s disease operated upon her. I say “operated” because it seemed to me that my grandmother, or, at least, the new and ultimate version of her, was the work of the disease, its opus, its own sculpture. Indeed, this was not a diminished person in front of me, the same woman weaker than she used to be, lessened, spoiled. No, this was a stranger who didn’t recognise me, who didn’t recognise herself because she had undoubtedly never met her before.”

And: “I was perfectly aware – along with everyone who must endure the same spectacle in their own lives – that this absence, this disaffection, this strangeness to oneself were, without any possible doubt, the paradoxical signs of profound pain. Later, I learned that Alzheimer’s disease is a cerebral pathology. Could it be that the brain suffers? Could it be that this suffering manifests itself in the form of indifference to suffering? In the form of the inability to experience suffering as one’s own? Could it be that there is a type of suffering that creates a new identity, the unknown identity of an unknown person who suffers? Could it be that cerebral suffering is precisely such suffering?”

I’d like to ask the opposite: if it could be that an as yet for us unknown person, an identity in the process of creation, can be equal to cerebral suffering, in the sense in which Deleuze issues the Stoic challenge of being equal to the wound which afflicts us? or in other words, acting?

Learning to kill
Is a matter of momentum
It starts small
And then it comes

Patrols every night
In the casbah of Nablus
Hey, what here is ours
And what is yours

At first just a drill
A rifle’s butt bangs on the door
Children in shock
A family terrified

Later – closure*
There’s danger already
Death is lurking
Behind every corner

Cocking the weapon
Arm shaking
Finger is firm
Against the trigger

The heart goes wild
Beats, terrified
It knows – next time
It will be easier

They are not a man, not a woman
They are just an object, just a shadow
Learning to kill
Is a matter of habit

Learning to fear
Is a matter of momentum
You start small
And then it comes

The news from above
Reaches the street
There’s no hope of living
The end is so near

Prophecies of terror
Like the crow of a raven
Close the shutters
Close up in the homes

We’re just a few
And they are so many
A tiny country
Devoured by enemies

They have only hate in their hearts
Evil, dark urges
Learning to fear
Is a matter of habit

Learning cruelty
Is a matter of momentum
It starts small
And then it comes

Every boy is a man
Craving victory
Hands behind the head
Legs spread

It’s a time of danger
It’s a time of destruction
Soldier, toughen up
There’s no good in compassion

The cousin like an animal
Used to blood
Doesn’t feel suffering
Is not human

Field uniform and chafing
Exhaustion and routine
From stupidity to evil
The route is short

All ours, all ours
Israel’s land
Learning cruely
Is a matter of habit

Son, son– stop
Son, son – come back
Come to me, sweetheart
Come to me, my baby

The sky is so gloomy
Outside, already dark
Tin soldiers still
Under the bed

Come home, son
Come home
Home
Home

Learning to love
Is a matter of tenderness
A careful step
In a cloud of gentleness

We will hesitate, we will come apart
We will soften, we will round out
Learning to love
Is a matter of habit

Being human
Is a matter of momentum
It grows like an unborn child
And then it comes

For just one minute
Just now, just today
To be on the other side
Of that same checkpoint

But our heart has hardened
And our skin is thick
Deaf and blind
In the bubble of the present

We will observe in amazement
The falling angel
Being human
Is a matter of habit

*”Closure” is a military term referring to a situation in which inhabitants of a village or town are prevented from traveling outside it.

– from here

– via Alan Sondheim, posted by Richard Silverstein here

relations are irreducible to their terms

pure relationality as the infinitely small (machine or combine) which tends to irreducibility – the infinite within the finite – where there is no same only difference

beauty as the pure transmissability of the beautiful presents the machinic workings of the schematism – the absolute is in actual things by virtue of their virtual or machinic part

-ing & -icipation

why parting? because occupying the empty form of time

why participation? because self-relational or engaging plasticity as phase, embryonic, inchoate, larval, participating in by difference from self

God is dead

Man is dead

the Other is dead

but they leave us with responsibilities

like faces withdrawing to the edge

of living

yet not quite disappearing

ever watchful

BEASTS………………………………………………….or pure bestiality

which is to say

machines

machines

participate in me.

his conclusion:

the tradeoffs we make on social networks is not the one that we’re told we’re making. We’re not giving our personal data in exchange for the ability to share links with friends. Massive numbers of people — a larger set than exists on any social network — already do that outside the social networks. Rather, we’re exchanging our personal data in exchange for the ability to publish and archive a record of our sharing. That may be a transaction you want to make, but it might not be the one you’ve been told you made.

– from here

Hiebert argues that the
postmodern self is technologized along a combination of three
vectors. The first of these are technologies of disappearance, which
Hiebert describes as “intellectual and psychological devices that one
can use to construct a plausible picture of not-being, progressively
writing out the residual elements of self and identity in such a way
as to re-open the questions of possibility.” [10] Included in this
category — this aesthetics of living — are the technologies of
reflection, perception, and autopoiesis, all of which are implicated
in subject-formation and each of which occasion engagement by Hiebert
with prominent theorists. [11] Crucially, Hiebert’s understanding of
disappearance in general recalls McLuhan’s notion of obsolescence:
just as an obsolesced technology doesn’t cease to exist but rather
persists in new forms — and hence obsolescence is “the beginning of
aesthetics, the cradle of taste, of art, of eloquence, and of slang”
[12] — the disappearance of knowledge is not an absence but a mode
of living, a “lived disappearance.” [13] Thus, “what remains when
knowledge disappears is an experience without knowledge [that]
nevertheless takes form, […] paradoxical though it might be” [14]

– from here