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Kurt Tong, Gosling Lake

via 20 x 200

JK Photography, Underwater Silence 7x10

via etsy.com

richard long

A Line Made by Walking (1967)

"The consolation, the dignity, the joy of life are that discouragements and lapses, depressions and darknesses come to one only as one stands without--I mean without the luminous paradise of art. As soon as I really re-enter it--crossed the loved threshold--stand in the high chamber, and the gardens divine--the whole realm widens out again before me and around me--the air of life fills my lungs--the light of achievement flushes over all the place, and I believe, I see, I do."

The Notebooks of Henry James. October 22nd, 1891, 34 De Vere Gdns.

synapses

Kiki Smith, Nests and Trees (1997)

Sigmund Freud, "On the spinal ganglia and spinal cord of petromyzon" (c. 1900)

on convergence

Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London, 2005)

p. 16, n. 3:

"Once more my reflection dovetails with the work of William Connolly, who--in Identity/Difference (Ithaca, 1991) and The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis, 1995)--argues for a 'politics of paradox'. While we put the accent on different aspects, since Connolly is particularly interested in bringing to the fore what he calls the 'paradox of difference' and I am specially concerned with the paradox of liberal democracy, our approaches converge on many important points. We both consider that it is vital for a pluralist democratic politics to expose and acknowledge paradoxes instead of trying to conceal or transcend them through appeals to rationality or community."

c.f. Connolly's anti-rationalist stance in Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minnesota, 2000), and particularly the "visceral register," relevant here to Mouffe's agonistic pluralism.

spectral

Special thanks to the OED, always.

spectral, a.

Isaac Taylor (attr.), A Natural History of Enthusiasm (1830)

"A spectral resemblance of piety, unsubstantial and cold as the mists of night."

deleuze and delirium

Gilles Deleuze, "Literature and Life," Essays Critical and Clinical (1997).

on the minor (c.f. Melville's Pip, Father Mapple):

"This is the becoming of the writer. Kafka (for central Europe) and Melville (for America) present literature as the collective enunciation of a minor people, or of all minor peoples, who find their expression only in and through the writer." (4)

on delirium (c.f. Durkheim, the delirium of collective representation):

"Literature is delirium, but delirium is not a father-mother affair: there is no delirium that does not pass through peoples, races, and tribes, and that does not haunt universal history. All delirium is world-historical, a 'displacement of races and continents.' Literature is delirium, and as such its destiny is played out between the two poles of delirium. Delirium is a disease, the disease par excellence, whenever it erects a race it claims is pure and dominant." (4)

on syntax (c.f. William James):

"There are no straight lines, neither in things nor in language. Syntax is the set of necessary detours that are created in each case to reveal the life in things." (2)

Syntax, experience and revelation; bosh! and "finally, breath-words, the a-syntactical limit toward which all language tends." ..."suspended exclamations as the limit of language, as explosive visions and sonorities." (5)

the action of lightning

Bataille on the festival:

"The sacred is that prodigious effervescence of life that, for the sake of duration, the order of things holds in check, and this this holding changes into a breaking loose, that is, into violence.

[...]

The divine world is contagious and its contagion is dangerous. In theory, what is started in the operation of sacrifice is like the action of lightning: in theory there is no limit to the conflagration."

In relation to Durkheim on effervescence and the deification of society:

Deification of society (pursues ends beyond the individual), dominion over consciences: moral authority. Worked out in common, intensity of acceptance in individual mind: echoes reciprocally in all other minds. Psychic properties. Collective force not entirely external, integral to our being (made up in and by individual consciences).

“Invigorating influence” of society, especially at certain moments, e.g. August 4th, 1789: debate over feudal rights, “legal form given to the resolution of a principles made in a moment of collective enthusiasm,” later called night of the Dupes, St. Bartholomew’s night massacre of the estates (August Decree).

Refurbishing of common faith by manifesting it in common, *attitude particular to man addressing the crowd…form of grandiloquence absurd elsewhere, effective in context. “Even his ideas lose all sense of proportion and easily fall into every kind of excess.” “Abnormal plethora of forces,” oratorical inspiration: forces derive from the group, rebounded, amplified feeling, reverberation, the group “incarnate and personified.”

"[...] general effervescence characteristic of revolutionary or creative periods."

Forces: each form in our conscience two circles of mental states, two sorts of reality (sacred, profane things).

Early years of French Revolution, under influence of general enthusiasm, things secular transformed by public opinion (The Motherland, Liberty, Reason) become religion established with dogma, holy days, altars, symbols, etc. Patriotic enthusiasm. Collective action: sensation of the sacred.