Sunday, January 30, 2011

The Love Affair

with Nietzsche is not over. I think it might be life long. However, the Gaga fascination is fading. She's not so shiny anymore, so sparkly, so bizarre. It's all starting to look the same. But perhaps, Born This Way will sway me.
For now, my heart belongs to Nietzsche.

"This book [Human, All-Too-Human. A Book for Free Spirits] was begun in Sorrento during a winter when it was given to me to pause as a wanderer pauses and look back across the broad and dangerous country my spirit had traversed up to that time. this was in the winter of 1876-7; the ideas themselves are older. They were already in essentials, the same ideas that I take up again in the present treatises - let us hope the long interval has done them good, that they have become riper, clearer, stronger, more perfect! That I still cleave to them today, however, that they have become in the meantime more and more firmly attached to one another, indeed entwined and interlaced with one another, strengthens my joyful assurance that they might have arisen in me from the first not as isolated, capricious, or sporadic things but form a common root, from a fundamental will of knowledge, pointing imperiously into the depths, speaking more and more precisely, demanding greater and greater precision. For this alone is fitting for a philosopher. We have no right to isolated acts of any kind: we may not make isolated errors or hit upon isolated truths. Rather do our ideas, our values, our yeas and nays, our ifs and buts, grow out of us with the necessity with which a tree bears fruit - related and each with an affinity to each, and evidence of one will, one health, one soil, one sun. - Whether you like them, these fruits of ours? - But what is that to the trees! What is that to us, to us philosophers!"

(Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morals, Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, (New York: Random House, 1969), pg. 16)

Saturday, January 29, 2011

I follow rivers

Lykke Li's new single "I follow rivers" from her upcoming album "Wounded Rhymes" release date: 2nd March 2011 in Sweden.

Shades of Shirin Neshat's films, Gagaesque in ways, dark, the pursuit but this time woman of man, sinister, provocative.
bear feet in the snow.
Political turmoil.

discovery: carla lonzi

Carla Lonzi. 1931 - 1982.
Italian art critic, writer, theorist and feminist.
Founder of the review Rivolta Femminile.

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« Noi rimettiamo in discussione il socialismo e la dittatura del proletariato. La forza dell'uomo è nel suo identificarsi con la cultura, la nostra nel rifiutarla. Sputiamo su Hegel. Siamo contro il matrimonio. Accogliamo la libera sessualità in tutte le sue forme. Sono un diritto dei bambini e degli adolescenti la curiosità e i giochi sessuali. La donna è stufa di allevare un figlio che le diventerà un cattivo amante. Comunichiamo solo con donne. »
(from Manifesto di Rivolta Femminile.)

Monday, January 24, 2011

Dimanche...

...à montréal includes:

a) Passion Pit.
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b) Nietzsche.
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c) pancakes from the Joy of Cooking.
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For Tess

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Dionysiac

The Pre-God is Dead, Pre-Rupture with Wagnar, Pre-Nihilism aka the Romantic phase in Nietzsche's writing.

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Not only is the bond between man and man sealed by the Dionysiac magic: alienated, hostile or subjugated nature, too, celebrates her reconciliation with her lost son, man. The earth gladly offers up her gifts, and the ferocious creatures of the cliffs and the desert peacefully draw near. The chariot of Dionysus is piled high with flowers and garlands; under its yoke stride tigers and panthers. If we were to turn Beethoven’s Hymn of Joy into a painting, and not to restrain the imagination even as the multitude bowed awestruck into the dust: this would bring us close to the Dionysiac. Now the slave is a free man, now all the rigid and hostile boundaries that distress, despotism or ‘impudent fashion’ have erected between man and man break down. Now, with the gospel of world harmony, each man feels himself not only united, reconciled, and at one with his neighbour, but one with him, as if the veil of Maya had been rent and now hung in rags before the mysterious primal Oneness.

Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher community: he has forgotten how to walk and talk, and is about to fly dancing into the heavens. His gestures express enchantment. Just as the animals now speak, and the earth yields up milk and honey, he now gives voice to supernatural sounds: he feels like a god, he himself now walks about enraptured and elated as he saw the gods walk in dreams. Man is no longer an artists, he has become a work of art: the artistic power of the whole of nature reveals itself to the supreme gratification of the primal Oneness amidst the paroxysms of intoxication. The noblest clay, the most precious marble, man is kneaded and hewn here, and to the chisel-blows of the Dionysiac world-artist there echoes the cry of the Eleusinian mysteries, ‘Do you bow low, multitudes? Do you sense the Creator, world?’

(Nietazsche, Freidrich, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music trans. Shaun Whiteside, (London: Penguin, 1993) pgs 18-9)

Monday, January 17, 2011

le maître ignorant

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Rancière published Le maître ignorant or The Ignorant Schoolmaster in 1991. It is an interpretation of the story of Joseph Jacotot - the original ignorant schoolmaster - who went to Holland as an educator in the 18th century but didn't teach a thing to his students. He didn't teach a thing, not in the sense we disenchanted youth would use that phrase, but in a different sense. He gave his students an edition of Télemacque written in French, of which they did not know a single word, with an edition of the same text in Dutch. The students read the book with the help of the translation and at the end of this experiment were asked to write an essay, in French, a language that they apparently did not know, or rather had never been taught. They each wrote an essay, and succeeded, on the text they had read, in a language they did not speak.

Thus, the ignorant schoolmaster.

This is a text that every person involved in education should read: new educators, older educators, those about to become educators. A revolutionary look at education. Rancière argues here that intelligence is equal, that equality can be a starting point rather than a destination, that intelligence is virtually boundless.

You can download an English version of Rancière's text here: http://ranciere.blogspot.com/2008/03/ignorant-schoolmaster-free-download.html
as well as check out this blog entirely dedicated to Rancière's writings. Despite being a French philosopher (of Algerian decent) most of what Rancière has written has been translated into English, illustrating what an erudite writer he is in the 21st Century.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

For the Love of God

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Damien Hirst (2007)

currently on exhibition at Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy.

Sunday, January 9, 2011

i resoluti

no. 1 Yoga. a) for a healthier mind, body and spirit and b) to rock the limbo line at next year's party of the year

no. 2 Less internet. and by that I mean less of the wasteful kind of Internet, not the great kind of looking up books at the library, learning Icelandic, etc.

no. 3 Grow a spine.


new projects:
- knitting a sweater: the boat-necked easy c/o make it with Mademoiselle circa 1987.
- morning routine of tea, yoga and Bach.
- paper to write: Gaga + Neitzsche's Dionysiac + Adorno's Negative Aesthetic.
- creative project: pattern making leading to clothes making (thanks to one of my christmas presents: Little Green Dresses.)
- learning Icelandic online.
- frequent library trips (I <3 you Bibliothèque Nationale)
- wednesday evening ritual 5 à 7 à l'Hotel de la Montagne with my Concordia friends.