Concetta Pennuto, « Pulsations du corps en médecine », Histoire, médecine et santé, 11, été 2017, p. 55-76. Cet article propose une illustration de la manière dont la musique a fourni, par le biais de ses harmonies et son langage, un outil aux médecins pour comprendre et maîtriser les pulsations du coeur. Après une courte exploration de l'acte de prendre le pouls dans l'Antiquité et au Moyen Âge, l'étude présente des exemples de médecins modernes qui utilisent non seulement les moyens (...) de l'harmonie - Médecine – Nouvel article. (shrink)

This tribute to Jacques Derrida takes in the sweep of his orchestration of literature with philosophy, as two “counterposed moments” of his interrogation of the working of language and thought. Focusing especially on his reading of Mallarmé, which distills the philosophical resonance of discourse that identifies itself as literary, and on Specters of Marx, which displays the political resonance of deconstruction, Sussman also turns to Derrida's reading of Blanchot as a figure who resumes the tension between the literary and the (...) philosophical but who “inscribes life, in all its impossible conditions.”. (shrink)

Le mathématicien au travail sait faire un geste que l'on appelle la« pulsation mathématique», qui s'exprime en tennes de bougé créatif nécessaire dans les diagrammes de pensée et d'interprétation des écrits mathématiques. Dans cette perspective Je statut d'objet est définitivement en révision, sous condition du jeu des relations. Le but ici est de construire aujourd'hui cette pulsation à partir de ce que Bachelard proposait hier comme épistémologie, aussi bien de la mathématique que de la science dite physique mathématique. (...) Les liens entre la pensée bachelardienne et les propositions plus récentes de Gilles Châtelet, Charles Alunni, ou René Guitart, sont mis en relief ainsi que ceux d'autres auteurs comme Jacques Lacan, Arthur Koestler, Alfred N. Whitehead, Charles S. Peirce. Nous proposons que le travail mathématique soit pensable comme du mouvement dans l'espace des diagrammes, du bougé pulsatif en icelui, et que cette manière de voir soit éminemment compatible avec la vue bacheJardienne suivant laquelle la forme intellectuelle précède l'objet empirique, lequel provient in fine, comme d'une concrétion de la pulsation de la pensée. Nous terminons donc sur un schème catégoricien de la pulsation. (shrink)

This article traces the efforts of the National Council of Churches in Brazil to endorse the document ‘Christian witness in a multi-religious world’ and to implement its recommendations in the practice of churches in Brazil. The reception of the document is placed into the historical development of the ecumenical movement in Brazil since an important conference in 1962 in Recife, Brazil, and the impact the Second Vatican Council had in the Latin American country. The focus is then on how the (...) religious plurality in the country started to be perceived. Three examples follow showing how fundamentalist Christian groups oppose other religious expressions in the country and how the churches united in the council are challenged by the spirit of witnessing in respect to embrace pluralism. (shrink)

As we transition to the 21st century, it is useful to think about some of the most important challenges business and other organizations will face as the new millennium begins. What will constitute “business as usual” in the business ethics arena as we start and move into the new century? My overall thought is that we will pulsate into the future on our current trajectory and that the new century will not cause cataclysmic changes, at least not immediately. Rather, the (...) problems and challenges we face now we will face then. Undoubtedly, new issues will arise but they will more likely be extensions of the present than discontinuities with the past. (shrink)

The city of Johannesburg pulsates with rhythms that are driven by some of its most fundamental characteristics: pressured economic activity, the mingling and movement of bodies, commuting, and a history of race and class segregation. The collaborative Jozi Rhythmanalogues project attempts to make sense of these rhythms by employing sensory experience as a process of explorative thought. In the course of this project, public spaces are documented over long periods through time-lapse films, which are analysed to reveal patterns of movement. (...) The resulting graphs, representing a kind of ‘automatic writing’ of the city’s rhythms, are interpreted as a graphic score by musical ensembles, producing music, sound and noise. This article reflects on the explorations of spaces, methods and concerns that has led to the development of the Jozi Rhythmanalogues project’s different manifestations, and looks at the ways in which two very different ensembles have interpreted the graphic score. The key questions that emerge relate to the nature of the information that is captured or ‘written’ in the graphs, and what it means to attempt, over and over, to make sense of this information. The idea of ‘sensory thought’ is critical here, as the project in its entirety is concerned with the work of the senses as a thinking process. This phenomenological angle is complicated by the flirtation with abstract data in the measurements that comprise the production of the graphs, revealing a question of movement between poetic and analytical modes of apprehension. (shrink)

The article discusses the features of interaction and mutual influence of the art of woodcut of China and the USSR. Chinese woodcut and Soviet engraving reveal the greatest mutual influence and rich genre palette in the middle of the XX century. Chinese woodcut gave a creative impulse, enriched the visual possibilities, brought new ideas to the Soviet art of woodcut. It served as an impetus for the rise of graphics, which realized and asserted its specificity. In this regard, it seems (...) relevant to identify common features of Chinese woodcut and Soviet engraving of the mid-20th century, as well as to identify differences in the development of this art form in the two countries. The article analyzes the works of famous woodcuts of two countries: Chen Yanqiao, Yang Han, Qi Baishi, V. A. Favorsky, A. A. Ushin. As a result of the analysis, the common features of Chinese woodcut and Soviet engraving of the mid-20th century were revealed, for example, similar plots and themes, as well as a special dynamic, lively and pulsating rhythm of the works. In addition, differences in the development of this type of art in both countries have been established, largely due to the preservation of their own national style by graphic artists. It is claimed that Soviet graphics contributed to the variety of Chinese woodcuts. In turn, Soviet artists adopted the subtleties of filigree technique from Chinese woodcuts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Center Blossoms, Part 1:The Pneumatological Fruit of the Incarnate Word in Bonaventure's BreviloquiumBr. Thomas A. Piolata OFM Cap. (bio)This paper asks the following question: What is the fruit of Saint Bonaventure's theological focus on Christ as the center of all theology? While Bonaventure's christocentric vision has rightly received ample scholarly attention and recognition, a clear and robust explication of the fruit—i.e., the culmination or goal—of this vision yet (...) remains to be articulated.1 The above question has not received a full answer. There is thus a lacuna and a need within the secondary literature on the Seraphic Doctor's thought. This study addresses and begins to remedy this lacuna. It offers a preliminary answer to the above question.2 To this end, I will argue that Bonaventure's christocentrism yields a theology that accentuates the Spirit's role in salvation—a pneumatological soteriology.To argue this point, I focus principally on Bonaventure's systematic masterpiece, the Breviloquium. I have chosen this text for two principal reasons. The first reason: the Breviloquium makes manifest the Seraphic [End Page 195] Doctor's distinctive christocentrism.3 After all, in a work consisting of seven parts,4 it is precisely Part 4—De incarnatione Verbi—that constitutes the text's undeniable structural center. Bonaventure's treatment of the Incarnate Word constitutes, as Part 4 of the text, the centerpiece of the seven-part theological synthesis developed in the Breviloquium.The second reason: the Breviloquium makes explicit the inherent— and specifically pneumatological—fruitfulness of Bonaventure's christocentrism. Significantly, that is, the centrality of Christ in the text does not end in Christ. Already in Part 4, the text's structural center, the centrality of Christ culminates and finds its fullness in a pneumatological, pentecostal reflection: "Postremo, ut inflammaret ad caritatem, misit [Christus] ignem Spiritus sancti in die Pentecostes."5 These words reveal the pneumatological climax of Christ's mission. They are taken from the tenth and final chapter of Part 4, where Bonaventure makes explicit reference to the "Spiritus sanctus" nine times.6 This pentecostal conclusion and cluster of references to the Spirit imbues this final chapter of Part 4 De incarnatione Verbi with a pronounced pneumatological accent and culmination. The centrality of the Incarnate Word already—within its own structure—begins to blossom into the Spirit. Indeed, the centrality of Christ is a blossoming center.This pneumatological apogee of the centrality of Christ does not go unnoticed by Joshua Benson in his careful study of the Breviloquium's Christology. Benson utilizes as a structural hermeneutic Bonaventure's triadic division of ortus, progressus/modus, and status/fructus introduced in the prologue of the text,7 and arrives at the following synthesis: "This chapter [Chapter 10 of Part 4] is the ultimate fructus of Bonaventure's investigation of the incarnate Word and also establishes Christ further as the ortus of the life of grace that Bonaventure will examine in part 5 [De gratia Spiritus sancti]."8 Benson thus eventually concludes: "The paschal mystery is the foundation for the pneumatological mystery of the church."9 [End Page 196]Ultimately, then, Benson's comments bear witness to the inherent trajectory of the Breviloquium's distinctive christocentrism. Indeed, the center not only anticipates, but even reaches into the subsequent parts that follow: Part 4 does not stand alone as an isolated monad, but betrays directionality, a movement toward the Spirit. Put differently, the text's undeniable christic center is a vibrant center that bears fruit, a center that breathes forth the mystery of the Spirit. In a word, the center blossoms: pneumatological presence pulsates within and so blossoms forth from the reality of the Incarnate Word.This insight motivates the present study. After all, it is this basic insight that lies at the genesis of, formulates an initial answer to, and evinces the theological gravity within the very question that opened this essay: What is the fruit of Bonaventure's theological focus on Christ the center? Answering this question constitutes the goal of this study. To answer it, I will explicate the—pneumatological—fruit of Christ the center. In brief, the answer I propose lies in what I will... (shrink)

What intelligent person has never pondered the meaning of life? For Yuval Lurie, this is more than a puzzling philosophical question; it is a journey, and in this book he takes readers on a search that ranges from ancient quests for the purpose of life to the ruminations of postmodern thinkers on meaning. He shows that the question about the meaning of life expresses philosophical puzzlement regarding life in general as well as personal concern about one’s own life in particular. (...) Lurie traces the emergence of this question as a modern philosophical quandary, riddled with shifts and turns that have arisen over the years in response to it. _Tracking the Meaning of Life _is written as a critical philosophical investigation stretching over several traditions, such as analytic philosophy, phenomenology, and existentialism. It maps out a journey that explores pivotal responses to this question, drawing especially on the thought of Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, Sartre, and Camus and exploring in depth the insights these thinkers offer regarding their own difficulties concerning the meaning of life. In the book’s four sections, Lurie discusses Tolstoy’s challenge to experience the religious and transcendental meaning of life by choosing a simple, hardworking existence; Wittgenstein’s focus on ethics and discovering the sense of the world, his conclusion that the question of the meaning of life makes no sense, and his turning to experience the mystical aspect of the world; Sartre’s positing of freedom as the basis of human life, stipulating a personal answer to the question of the meaning of life; and Camus’ view of the absurdity of life, unalleviated by any personal meaning. Guided by these views, Lurie imparts new insight to ideas that underlie our concern with life’s meaning, such as the difference between attitudes toward life and beliefs and opinions about life, the meaning of words versus the meaning of events, shared meanings versus personal meanings, and the link between ethics and personal identity. _Tracking the Meaning of Life_ is no mere dry philosophical study but a journey that dramatically illustrates the poignancy of the quest for meaning, showing that along the way it gradually becomes more obvious how personal meaning may be found in the pulsations of everyday life. The book offers stimulating reading not only for scholars in philosophy but also for general readers who wish to see how their personal concerns are echoed in modern philosophical thought. More than a description of a journey, it is a map to anxieties and puzzlements we all face, pointing to ideas that can guide readers on their own search for meaning. (shrink)

Roholt explains why grooves, which are forged in music’s rhythmic nuances, remain hidden to some listeners. He argues that grooves are not graspable through the intellect nor through mere listening; rather, grooves are disclosed through our bodily engagement with music. We grasp a groove bodily by moving with music’s pulsations. By invoking the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “motor intentionality,” Roholt shows that the “feel” of a groove, and the understanding of it, are two sides of a coin: to (...) “get” a groove just is to comprehend it bodily and to feel that embodied comprehension. (shrink)

Walter Benjamin is a seminal philosopher whose work makes us think about the concepts of experience, child, and childhood. A journey through his life experience and personal narratives brings us closer to the world of his own childhood. As such, it is a philosophical journey in the sense of taking us towards something that is unknown to us and that in the end can transform us. We will travel through the following texts by Benjamin: Children’s Hour Radio Narrative (2015), Berlin (...) Childhood: around 1900 (2013), Reflections on the child, the toy and education (2009), One-Way Street (2013) and The Storyteller:Reflections on the works of Nikolai Leskov (2018). To navigate these texts is to allow and encourage us to experiment with other ways of looking at and being in the world. His narrative allows us to experience the experiences of the child Benjamin, to traverse its unique and sparsely inhabited places, and thus to travel through any child’s world, feeling a child’s temporality and a child’s gaze. According to Jorge Larrosa (2003), childhood is an enigma. Benjamin’s narratives allow us to enter this enigma, to unveil images redolent with the experience of children and childhood, and thereby to approach this mystery that is both philosophical and pulsating with life, like the life of this philosopher himself. (shrink)

By applying a few of the concepts and transformative tools presenting in many of Deleuze’s texts, Barnett Newman’s paintings receive a much-needed re-interpretation. In many of Newman’s paintings, the fields of colors and the pulsating zips that sear through these vast landscapes can be seen as intensive sensations pushing away from philosophical and artistic domains that cling to images of thought rooted in recognition and binarism. The function of such a Deleuzian reading of Barnett Newman is to evoke the potentiality (...) for destabilization so that one is able to create new sensations, new ways of conceiving of painting and life that are never able to be captured by a single system of signification. Rather than the desire to imitate, represent, or capture, Newman is able to mark an intensive threshold of becoming. Beneath a representational regime is a plane of imperceptible forces that traverse the face of the painting and extend beyond the canvas infinitely in every direction. (shrink)

“Artworks are not being but a process of becoming” —Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory In the everyday use of the concept, saying that something is grotesque rarely implies anything other than saying that something is a bit outside of the normal structure of language or meaning – that something is a peculiarity. But in its historical use the concept has often had more far reaching connotations. In different phases of history the grotesque has manifested its forms as a means of (...) subversive resistance against society’s prevailing notions of form and power. What aids this impact and distinguishes two of its basic stylistic features is the grotesque’s dissolution of form and its hyperbole. Such grotesqueries, however, soon solidify into new forms, new structures of meaning, hierarchy and practice, and in this sense the history of the grotesque is, on one hand, a continual opposition and transgression of the prevailing notions of art as well as of God and humanity, while on the other hand it offers continual resistance to its own solidifying process. As such the grotesque will not and cannot be contained in form without it losing the very thing that makes it grotesque. Even though it is somewhat easy to point out certain stylistic features of the grotesque, the sum of those features tell us very little about what is at play within it. Definitions concerned with the grotesque’s content rather than its form faces similar difficulties. Throughout history, expressions relating to the grotesque have been used in defense of a whole host of different social and cultural discourse including, for instance, Catholicism (See Erhard Schön’s Der Teufel mit der Sackpfeife , 1536), Protestantism (See Lucas Cranach’s Der Papstesel , 1523), a material folk culture (see Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World , 1984) and an idealistic romantic structure of meaning (see Wolfgang Kayser’s The Grotesque in Art and Literature , 1957). Thus though the grotesque cannot be reduced to the expression of certain forms or meanings, in order to examine what the grotesque is about one has to try to see how it’s relationship to flow and process and how, by maintaining this relationship, it attempts to avoid solidifying into form and meaning. The process of the grotesque alluded to here revolves around a play between periphery and center, the marginalized and the dominant. Most often this is expressed as a direct negation of the center of power. In the medieval grotesque tradition of the carnival, for example, it is expressed by its emphasis on the nether regions of the body as the center of creation of meaning. Spirit does not come from above, but from the belly, buttocks and genitals, and there is, expressed in this manner, a mockery of the predominant Christian notion of truth and meaning. Such inversions of the sites of meaning most often explicitly express an increased interest in materiality instead of ideal content which comes to the fore through the play between periphery and center. Even in early grotesque Renaissance art (for example in the works of Raphael) the depiction of the mythological or ideal reveals an exploration of the possibilities of the material. The works of art thus explore their own boundaries rather than act as vessels of the divine and in this way the grotesque explores the limits of form and materiality. This in turn brings to the fore a metaphysical dimension in the workings of the grotesque: It is an immanent exploration of its own boundaries. Materiality and metaphysics are joined together, because it is through the awareness of itself as a structuring (dis)order that it places itself in opposition to the prevailing notions of form and power. This way the grotesque expresses an awareness of the division of sign and reality and a search for this reality. It implicitly expresses the awareness that meaning is not something God-given and static, but fluctuating and man-made. In modern explorations of the history of the grotesque it is commonly seen as a form of realism that manifests a shift from the ideal towards the material, freeing art from representing some hidden higher order and instead making the work of art the very site of creation and meaning. Going even further, the grotesque actively opposes the notions of the ideal by marking a shift from an ahistorical view of the world towards the historical. However, this also makes clear why the grotesque has a tendency to solidify into new static forms of meaning, for by establishing itself as a subversive counterforce there is an idea of transgression and emancipation. That is why the grotesque often historicizes and relativizes only to repeat the mistakes of that which it negates: putting itself in the king’s chair. The exploration of the material seems to create new forms and notions of the ideal. The representation of an otherness outside the prevailing notions of meaning and truth becomes a positive manifestation of this otherness as truth itself. Thus the historical “truths” of the grotesque are superseded by history itself. When the expressions of the grotesque solidify into static form and meaning, they become mere objects like anything else in the world. Instead of being this elusive thing of process and flow, it becomes tangible to the existing hierarchy of power as well as history itself. In this way the grotesque can be expunged, included or simply revealed as yet another false notion of truth, which is precisely what has happened with the grotesque throughout the course of history. If from the beginning the expression of the grotesque has not already been in the service of some structure of meaning and truth, it has quickly been included or has quickly included itself in such a structure. But by doing so it rejects its own basis: the tension between periphery and center is replaced by the attempt to create a new center, a new structure of meaning and truth. The doubleness, ambiguity and flow of the grotesque are then rejected by the grotesque itself. THE NON-FORM OF FORM In the critical thinking of Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69) the problem of art, caught between a reductive and prevalent notion of truth and meaning and a peripheral and alienated otherness, is reexamined and reformulated. For Adorno, the instrumental rationality of Enlightenment itself reverts into a new form of mythology which is every bit as static and exclusive as the hierarchies of religion it supersedes. All is excluded that is non-identical to the instrumental mastery of the objects of the world, "For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry." 1 As such the non-identical has been banished from the realm of thought and action, and banished specifically to the realm of art. But the realm of art is not able to provide a decent home for it because even modern art is not something entirely autonomous. While it is excluded from the notions of truth and meaning provided by instrumental rationality, it still originates from society. Just like instrumental rationality art is about mastery, structuring and exclusion. Therefore, the problem for art is that it cannot directly provide a space for the non-identical because its mode of operation is similar to that of instrumental rationality. Even worse, art has very few possibilities to free itself from this. If it becomes l’art pour l’art it is at the same time reduced to the very thing instrumental rationality claims it to be: a subjective judgment of taste.expressionism also stands as an example of this. Conversely, art cannot work within the framework of the identity-thinking of society, because any notion of freedom or emancipation would reproduce the exclusive practices of instrumental rationality. For example: Explicit socialist literature may establish itself in opposition to instrumental rationality while at the same time reproducing it. Its language may seem different, but in reality it merely provides a different set of reductive schematics for human life and experience. The problem for the art of the grotesque was, as I mentioned earlier, that far too often it was merely a symbolic manifestation of a notion of otherness—not otherness itself. Because of this the subversive character of the grotesque ends up shaping and containing otherness instead of providing a space for it. According to Adorno the only way to avoid this is to radicalize the grotesque. In order to avoid solidifying into form the work of art has to be an object which cannot be contained in thought or form—a non-form of form. The work of art has to work in a way that it strives for autonomy but without entirely leaving a discernible reality. In other words, it has to pull in two directions at once. Thus the work of art is a paradox. It is autonomous in the sense that it closes itself off from everything outside of the work of art, trying to shy away from the contaminating influence of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality. At the same time though the work of art is heteronomous in the sense that it originates from a specific historical context and is bound to be what society is not. Autonomy and heteronomy are inseparably intertwined. Unable to display otherness itself, but still trying to be a refuge for it, there is only one option for art: It has to turn against itself and destroy its own logic of form, thereby demonstrating how any representation of otherness is impossible. Art becomes a lamentation of the victims of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality and shows the traces of the otherness that is unable to appear. Adorno’s pessimistic theory of art and history stages art as a negative dialectical process where the work of art closes itself off and rejects everything outside, while the individual elements in the work of art destroys its very own logic of form from within: Artworks synthetize ununifiable, nonidentical elements that grind away at each other; they truly seek the identity of the identical and nonidentical processually because even their unity is only an element and not the magical formula of the whole […]. The resistance to them of otherness, on which they are nevertheless dependent compels them to articulate their own formal language, to leave not the smallest unformed particle as remnant. This reciprocity constitutes art’s dynamic; it is an irresolvable antithesis that is never brought to rest in the state of being. 2 Relative to a traditional understanding of the grotesque, Adorno radicalizes the tension between center and periphery, autonomy and heteronomy. In the traditional understanding of the grotesque, as we find it for example in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, the grotesque establishes the display of otherness as a new center of meaning and truth. However Adorno rejects such notions and argues instead for a modernism of the grotesque in which both center and periphery are included in a negative dialectical process and continually synthesizing and destabilizing each other’s positions. A modernism of the grotesque works on the inside of the sign or the artwork, continually outlining and questioning the boundaries between materiality and form. This moves the focus away from the relation between the sign or work of art as a conceptual manifestation on one side and the object it refers to on the other side. Instead it implicitly points to the amorphous mass from which the signs and thereby meaning have been carved, the remnants that have been left behind. Modernism of the grotesque does not imply that it is emancipatory or that it reconciles man with nature, and does not represent a new position or a new ideology. It merely remembers and insists on the double nature of man and art: to write or paint yourself or an artwork whole by inscribing meaning in life or by applying form on a canvas is at the same time both creation and destruction. The very signs we use to center meaning in our lives carry its own alienation in them. Meaning surfaces only when process and flow comes to a halt—solidifying, but at the same time excluding parts that do not fit into that particular structure of meaning. NOTHING DONE AND NOTHING UNDONE It has always been difficult for art historians to find a suitable category for the works of the Danish artist Leif Lage (b. 1933). In his paintings the sensitive figuration seems so fragile that it is on the verge of turning into abstraction. Or conversely: the figurative emerges cautiously and hesitantly out of abstraction. As an art critic once wrote, he can almost paint things away. 3 Working in some undefinable space between abstraction and figuration, the Lage’s works shy away from the realm of words, and as a result few critics have been able to write anything meaningful about his works. In fact even fewer have been able to write more than one or two pages. The Danish author and art critic Leif Hjernøe is one of those few, but even he starts off by saying how impossible it is to write about Lage, confessing that his works exist both as process and in a field of in-between which words cannot reach. He writes: Always you find yourself in a place where nothing is done and nothing left undone, and where the elements of the work of art rest in a continuous motion. Always there is the open wound, where infection rather than surgical intervention is considered as an opportunity. And the conflict between matter and antimatter makes all diagnoses uncertain and allows conditions of uncertainty to spread in a place of raw presence. 4 The art works against the diagnosis and the certainty. Words are being eaten up by what is outside the realm of words: tension, process and doubleness. An approach to an understanding of the work of Lage could be to follow his connection to Samuel Beckett (1906-89). One can note, therefore, that Lage has illustrated several of the Danish translations of Beckett’s works. Though one is an author and the other a painter both seek a place where figuration, where the word, erodes. For both this entails an attempt to question and examine and so move in behind the façade of the surface in an exploration of that something or nothing that may be behind representation. At the same time even in the vanishing point of figuration or words, the meaningless words or the disjointed lines still stand as signs of human activity—signs of movement in emptiness. With very few exceptions Lage’s artworks revolve around one motif: Man—most often “en face.” But unlike traditional portraitures Lage’s people are found within. The artworks do not sense the reality of appearances, but rather the existential dimensions within man. As a seismograph they are sensitive to the utmost subjectivity in order to display an objective, sensuous depiction of the very problem of subjectivity. Instead of a static façade of a man, Lage’s “en face” shows the process-character of man. The people in Lage’s paintings are always in process—in the midst of becoming or dissolving. I will take a closer look in the following at the ways in which Lage establishes this sense of being in constant process, of being in-between modes or categories. THE DOUBLENESS OF THE STROKE Lage’s etchings attract attention in particular for the tension conveyed there between the material and the form. The material physically opposes the violence of the needle. But instead of embracing the violence of the needle and the victory over matter—instead of making the artistic creation and figuration express a heroic mastery of the background it is made out of—Lage uses the stroke to express the very tension between stroke and material, figuration and background. In the drypoint etching Untitled from 1983, which illustrated the Danish translation of Beckett’s Ill Seen, Ill Said , the needle tears up the material in long rough lines: Together, the primarily horizontal and vertical lines form a face. Thus the force needed to etch a line in the metal-plate draws attention to itself: It is there in the absence of curves and nuances. Man emerges on the metal-plate after great exertion and in a very simplistic form. This way Lage enhances the nature of the material, as the material’s resistance is not something to overcome. On the contrary the figuration is smitten by its very resistance and as such expresses the violence of its own becoming. Even more pronounced is the fact that the lines do not just show the violence of creation—it actively erases figuration in the same process that creates it. For example the mouth consists of 8-10 horizontal strokes, of which some seem to be connected to each other as if the mouth has been quickly scratched out. The mouth speaks of the inability to speak. In the same way, the eyes are black holes due to a large amount of criss-cross cuts, which together form a dark middle. Those lines, at the same time, form the eyes of the figuration and scratch out the eyes of the figuration. The extroverted aspects of the face—connected to speech and sight—are portrayed as introverted as well. Just as the etchings down into the metal-plate makes something appear. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1983 (etching) The figuration of the etching is connected to creation. It expresses that something is wrought into existence out of nothing by sheer artistic force. However, this force is at the same time presented as a violence of creation, which makes it impossible for form to truly emerge. Herein lies one of the basic principles of Lage’s art, namely that art cannot be that nothing or something behind the realm of words or signs. Without form, art would lose its ability to express anything at all. Form is a necessity if art is to avoid becoming as devoid of expression as the reality is that we cannot reach behind the appearance of things. On the other hand, art cannot raise itself above its own material in joyous celebration of the beauty of form. This would use the material in the manner of an instrument and thus would suppress the otherness it attempts to rescue. When art becomes mere form, any traces of otherness will have dissolved. Then art would be a question of technique, in no way different from the instrumental rationality of society. Therefore art works in a particular space between form and non-form. As Hjernøe says of the works of Lage, it is in the center of the event, in the in-between where things neither are nor are not, "And everything takes place just before it changes character. As the blood just before it coagulates, as the milk just before it separates, as fried egg just before it turns white […]." 5 The precise emphasis on the in-between of Lage’s art points in particular to the work of art as both outside of and in time. The work of art is a singular point in time, but at the same time it is continually in process. In the borderland between form and non-form, between creation and destruction, it shimmers like a fata morgana . The work is done but at the same time undone. It is only there as a cry in response to the inability to come into being. Akin to the etching is the drawing, but while both, of course, use the stroke or line as their main instrument, the paper does not resist the line in the same sense as the metal-plate of the etching. As a result in Lage’s drawings the stroke frolics in a space with almost no tension at all. There is nothing there to keep the pencil stroke at bay, but at the same time this means that there is nothing there to keep it together. One of the more expressive examples of this is found in an untitled drawing from Tegninger og Text ( Drawings and Text ) from 1999. The drawing consists of one unbroken pencil stroke. It is as if the stroke is confused—it darts around on the paper making doodles on the way or gathers itself in more straight lines in the center of the paper. It is in this manner that the semblance of a body is established. A couple of small circles serve as eyes and are the reason that the rest can be read as both face and body instead of pure abstraction. In fact the unbroken stroke serves as both abstraction and figuration as on the one hand it is the stroke that seemingly outlines the shape of a figure, while on the other hand the unbroken stroke dissolves any truly recognizable figuration by continuously, without end or aim, overflowing the boundaries of the figure. Seen again here is a doubleness to the stroke and the act of creation. In the etching it was all about the tension between the resistance of the material which created the doubleness. Here it is the opposite. It is the lack of tension. The stroke is free to do anything, but has no aim: without some kind of resistance, there is nothing to hold figuration together. It threatens to dissolve into nothingness. Conversely, the drawing can also be seen as a process of becoming. Like a form of automatic writing, the pencil darts around until it finds a point of densification. But even in such an interpretation of the drawing, the figuration appears artificial—it points to itself as the result of the artistic act of creation. The stroke is primarily stroke and only secondarily figuration. With its wild movement it calls attention to itself as stroke. Thus the figuration never becomes something in its own right. It points to the basic principle of creation: Someone has drawn me, I am the result of artistic endeavors, and therefore I am not for myself but always overflowing the boundaries that contain me. It is the stroke that in the very same movement creates figuration and dissolves it. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1999 (drawing) THE LIGHTNESS OF COLOR, THE DENSITY OF PAPER Often the watercolor is used as a precursor for larger paintings, because it has an immediacy in which one can quickly paint the main lines of a composition. However, Lage’s watercolors are not temporary points in a process leading to another final painting. They are not sketches, later to be filled with details in another material. For him watercolor is an end in itself. This also implies that he doesn’t try to work against the paper’s absorption of the water color and its tendency to absorb detail. On the contrary, he examines the possibilities inherent in this blurring of the line and absorption of color. As in the previous examples, there are of course recognizable shapes in Lage’s water colors. But these shapes are rarely separable from color, line or even paper. In other words: the figurative and the abstract more or less become one. One of the reasons for this is that Lage often works on wetted paper which means that the paper hungrily absorbs color into its fabric instead of it being on top of the paper. The paper becomes line because it is the absorption of the color which, together with the brush stroke itself, separates the colors from each other. The line is also color and the color is also line, because there is no separation between the different colors other than the colors themselves. At times this results in almost complete abstraction. In such cases Lage add lines with a pencil as if he wants to hold some sort of figuration together. At other times it is the other way around: the strokes of the pencil are a being dissolved by the water color blurring out the figuration. Untitled 1 from 1999 displays various tones of green. The contour of the colors appears unusually rough. Most of all it is reminiscent of a shoreline which has found its form through the work of thousands of years between water and land. Pockets of resistance surface as islands not yet drowned in color—as paper or color not yet consumed by the dominant color. The shape of the colors does not seem created by the hand of the artist, but rather by the inner workings of the watercolor: color against color over time has resulted in this very image, as if it is all a part of a natural process of change and decay. Despite the fact that there are no strong differences in color there seems to be a struggle taking place in the watercolor. For example, inexplicable holes in the dark color, which cover most of the right side of the watercolor, appear as if the underlying color is eating away the dark color, or that the dark color is in the process of covering up the underlying color. The small pockets of resistance demonstrate a process and development that, almost as a happy accident, evokes a couple of small eyes and a large mouth. Behind the colors a few slanted lines can be discerned, but the hand of the artist has long ago disappeared behind the life of the colors. Thus the watercolor seems to be held at precisely the point in time where figuration randomly appears. The small eyes and wide mouth seemingly express the realization of the figuration’s temporality. It is just a moment in time, soon to be consumed again in the life of the colors. The nature, the background it stems from and is part of, moves on undeterred, continuing its everlasting process of creation and decay. In this sense, the watercolor provides an experience of how neither artist nor man is able to transcend the materiality they consist of. The colors of man, the materials man consists of are “becoming” and “progress” but also “decay” and “disappearance”. The artist’s pencil strokes have been eaten up long ago, and the figuration is living on borrowed time. Human or artistic activity is about creating form, transcending mere matter by shaping and applying meaning to it. But Untitled 1 shows the doubleness of such creation: the transience and fragility of human life. Should the figuration come into being, should it rise and transcend the material, which binds it to its temporal existence, it would become nothing because its very existence is conditioned by the life and work of the colors. In the same sense man cannot escape his own temporality. He too, for better or worse, must accept a life in the volatility of sensation. Leif Lage, Untitled 1 , 1999 (watercolor) In most of Lage’s watercolors there seem to be a stronger artistic control than in Untitled 1 . Most often both the arrangement of colors and the technique in which they are painted express the hand of the artist. An example of this is Untitled 2 from 1999. While figuration in Untitled 1 seemed to appear as a happy accident, the figuration is much more “created” in Untitled 2 . Here the most important parts of the figuration, the eyes, the mouth and part of the skull, are colored black and painted on top of the background’s play of colors. The background primarily consists of blue and yellow tones. Only parts of the paper are covered in color, however, which yet again stresses the act of painting: There is a surface which is being filled by color by an artist. The blue tones are concentrated in the figuration, while the yellow tones surround it. All this means that the figuration stands out more clearly in this watercolor. This is also underlined by the fact that the blue and dark tones cover part of the yellow tones as spots here and there. Thus it is not a background which is in the process of consuming figuration, but rather the emerging figuration which blots out the background. Such an understanding is even suggested by how the mouth and eyes are placed in the larger blue color field. The eyes and mouth are in the center of the watercolor, while the blue color field is placed from center out towards the left side. This gives the impression of a face turned slightly to the right and slightly upwards, which again makes the mouth appear to emerge from the paper. It also helps that the mouth cuts the center axis of the watercolor. In other words, the arrangement of the blue and black colors create some depth and perspective which gives the illusion of a figuration, seen partially in profile, emerging from the background. Seen in profile, the eyes and mouth seem extroverted—they almost seem as if they are put on top of the face. But at the same time they are painted as black holes, sucking in the gaze of the onlooker. The watercolor is even more challenging if one follows what may be the faint outline of the skull, which, on the right side of the watercolor, no longer works together with the blue color, but rather alone postulates the outline of the skull. If not the blue color field, but this line, is the outline of the skull, then all of a sudden the face is not in profile but “en face”—staring directly towards the onlooker. Outline and color seemingly work against each other and establish two different expressions. Without the slightly upward tilted expression of the profile, the eyes and mouth do not seem to emerge from the paper. On the contrary, seen “en face,” the eyes and mouth are really gaping pits of darkness. In this sense Untitled 2 is at the same time surface and depth of perspective. The line gives form but at the same time it dissolves the form created by the colors, and vice versa. Leif Lage, Untitled 2 , 1999 (watercolor) As the last example of Lage’s artistic method, I have chosen another untitled work (as indeed nearly all of Lage’s artworks are)—this time from 2000. This is perhaps one of the most figurative watercolors Lage has created, though that doesn’t tell us too much. The painting depicts a human face in blue and green tones on a yellow toned background. The colors create a clear demarcation between the figure and the background, which compensate for the watercolor’s lack of outline. Beneath the face darker tones imply the beginning of the torso, and nuances of color even hint at something which could be a collar. The hair is in even darker tones and its structure is emphasized using pencil strokes on top of the water color. One eye is marked by a brown spot with a darker spot in the middle, while the other eye is added by pencil. The mouth is a round, red dot. In Untitled from 2000 the work between abstraction and figuration is much less pronounced than in the previous examples cited here. Nonetheless the watercolor has a delicacy to it which almost makes the figuration disappear, even as it appears. This has something to do with the fact that all the individual brush strokes have dissolved. The only outlines are those created by the clash of colors. Even the red mouth seems to be more paint than mouth—unable to be formed truly as anything other than a speck of color with some small semblance to a mouth. In contrast to the other watercolors, there is no movement, no progress or decay, just a vibrating standstill. The figure is not emerging or disappearing but embedded in and as surface, and as such it makes the figure seem stuck in its condition rather than freed by the act of giving form: mouth open as a wound. Pencil strokes add detail and life to the hair as an attempt to help the figure emerge. But all this does is create two levels in the watercolor: The pencil strokes are put on top of the figuration rather than being part of it. Thus they end up highlighting the endless distance between the movement and form-giving of the pencil strokes and the static and stuck figure behind these strokes. Leif Lage, Untitled , 2000 (watercolor) MAN AND THE VIEW OF THE ONLOOKER Lage’s works seem at the same time to be an examination of tensions between form and material in art and a display of an image of man full of the same tensions. This is because the people who are emerging in Lage’s images are not just in his works, They are his works. This means that man is not something emerging from a background but is part of this background and vice versa. The art of Lage inscribes man in its surroundings and background. Man is not the ruler of nature. Man does not rise above matter; there is no truly transcendent position for man to occupy in the art of Lage. Instead man is a part of the very matter, it, at the same time, tries to distance itself from in order to distinguish itself from its surroundings. Man emerges in an attempt not to be line, stroke, color. In an attempt to free itself of matter. Should it succeed in this, however, it would turn into nothing. On the other hand, if man fully accepted itself as mere matter it would disappear in it—in instincts, urges and lack of reflection. The appearance of man is thus subject to a state of being in-between. Only in the tension between material and its negation can the outlines of man be traced. However this also means that in the art of Lage man is never something in itself but always in process—on the way to its freedom and its loss. However, Lage’s art is not just about showing the tensions inherent in man but also about showing such tension on the verge of breaking point. In the moment before everything is done, or when nothing yet has been done, the delicate tension between form and material has been stretched to its utmost in such a way that man’s character of process emerges and is contained on the paper or canvas. Therefore, Lage’s art contain traces of human life. Not only is it an autonomous unity of tensions where man is stretched out between its singularity and the surroundings it is a part of. It is also this pulsation between figuration and material which brings about the traces of human endeavor and activity. Even when man almost seems to have disappeared into the material, strokes and lines are still there as a reminder of human activity and potential creative power—as a reminder that hope is still possible and that man is still there. The view of the onlooker seeks out forms and meaning. It seeks outlines and edges. But first and foremost it is the eyes in Lage’s works of art that allow the onlooker to decode the figuration at play. This creates a distinctive relationship between the onlooker and the artwork. The onlooker tries to wrest the enigma from the artwork, tries to reduce it to solid, meaningful form. But the very same moment that hints at such a possibility sees the view of the onlooker confronted with a gaze of its own. The eyes of the figure in the work of art are most often dark pits, as if they were an illustration of the violence committed against the eyes of the onlookers and their search for meaning. Or as if they were a dark reflection of the onlooker’s failed attempts to delineate the traces of life in the artwork to a solid meaningful form. Therefore, the gaze of the figuration speaks not only of its own powerlessness but also of the powerlessness of the onlooker. When the view or sight has trouble finding solid meaningful forms, it has something to do with the fact that the precondition for sight, light, no longer stems from something transcendent. In Lage’s art there is nothing outside the works of art, nothing outside of human life, and as such nothing to shed light on the works of art or human life and reveal solid meaningful forms. All light comes from within. In a western context, light as a medium for sight is central to the understanding of meaning. People speak of the clarity of thought, while knowledge is tied together with enlightenment, and so forth. But the light no longer originates from a divine point of view. It originates from man, who has created himself in the image of God. The problem with this is that light always covers up its own base. Light illuminates something but at the same time it hides itself. 6 While it was previously God who was unknowable, now it is man. It is also problematic that sight and the medium of sight stem from the same place. Following this thought one can posit two final problems. Firstly, the immediacy and presence established by light by making forms and objects accessible to sight is fake. Light is not some independent entity which present things in a neutral manner for the onlooker. It is inextricably tied together with the gaze’s desire after meaning. In other words: Light perverts the appearance of things because it doesn’t originate from some objective entity which allows them to appear as they are. Instead light is based upon and originates from the subject and its conquering gaze, seeking out meaning and form constantly. Secondly, the joining of sight and light makes introspection within human life impossible. Everything can be illuminated by its use value for the subject but only as long as it is separated from the subject, as long as it is an object. But the subject itself cannot be illuminated. Lage’s art tears down such a dividing line between subject and matter, but it does so without reestablishing a divine position from where the light emanates. Therefore, the light in Lage’s art may not illuminate very well. It may not have the certainty presented by modern science or the religions of yesterday. But it does show what such light tries to hide, namely, the subject as it is in its material reality—inscribed in time and death, which are the basic conditions of materiality, but at the same time also full of life in its joy and will to create. For the onlooker the meeting of the gaze in Lage’s works of art is thus also a destruction of the view of the onlooker. The ability to see is challenged in a radical way. Those outlines will not solidify into static form, as if the light was too dim to see. Just as in Lage’s figurations, the view of the onlooker turns to black: turns towards the onlooker in recognition and becoming—or disappearance. NOTES Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment . (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002): 4-5. Theodor W. Adorno. Aesthetic Theory . (London & New York, 2002): 176. Carsten Bach-Nielsen. “Mere glæde end gru.” Kristeligt Dagblad . September 24, 2002. Leif Hjernøe. “Den yderliggående inderlighed.” LEIF LAGE—Retrospektiv udstilling 1983 . (Copenhagen: Brøndum, 1983): 18. Ibid. Maurice Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation . (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): 162-163. (shrink)

At what stage in its development does a foetus become a living human being? When is it proper to refer to a network of pulsating neurons as a.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.4 (2001) 41-53 [Access article in PDF] Bad Words Denise Riley Introduction The worst words revivify themselves within us, vampirically. Injurious speech echoes relentlessly, years after the occasion of its utterance, in the mind of the one at whom it was aimed: the bad word, splinterlike, pierces to lodge. In its violently emotional materiality, the word is indeed made flesh and dwells amongst us—often long outstaying its welcome. (...) Old word-scars embody a "knowing it by heart," as if phrases had been hurled like darts into that thickly pulsating organ, but their resonances are not amorous. Where amnesia would help us, we can't forget.This sonorousness of vindictive words might help to characterize how, say, racist speech works on and in its targets. But doesn't such speculation also risk becoming an advocacy for the cultivation of insensitivity on the part of those liable to get hurt—or worse, a criticism of their linguistic vulnerability: "They just shouldn't be so linguistically sensitive"? There's much to be said for studiously practicing indifference. But the old playground chant of "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me" was always notoriously untrue. The success of the tactics of indifference will also depend on the vicissitudes of the words' fate in the world, which is beyond my control. I change, too. As the terrain upon which malevolent accusation falls, I am malleable, while the harsh words themselves undergo their own alterations across time, and so their import for me weakens or intensifies accordingly. At times the impact of violent speech may even be recuperable through its own incantation; the repetition of abusive language may be occasionally "redemptive" through the irony of iteration, which may drain the venom out of the original insult and neutralize it by displaying its idiocy. 1 Yet angry interpellation's very failure to always work as intended (since at particular historical moments, I may be able to parody, to weaken by adopting, to corrode its aim), is also exactly what, at other times, works for it. In any event, interpellation operates with a deep indifference as to where the side of the good may lie, and we can't realistically build an optimistic theory of the eventual recuperability of harm. Here there's no guaranteed rationality, nor any inescapable irrationality. Repetition breeds its own confident mishearing, 2 but its volatile alterations lean towards neither automatic amelioration nor inevitable worsening.This observation, though, leaves us with the still largely uninvestigated forensics of spoken injury. Verbal attacks, in the moment they happen, resemble stoning. Isn't it making heavy weather, then, to ask how they do damage: isn't the answer plain, that they hurt just as stones hurt? At the instant of their impact, so they do. Yet the peculiarity of violent words, as distinct from lumps of rock, is their power to resonate within their target for decades after the occasion on which they were weapons. Perhaps an urge for privacy about being maliciously named may perpetuate the words' remorseless afterlife: [End Page 41] [Begin Page 42] I keep what I was told I was to myself, out of reserve, shame, a wish not to seem mawkish and other not-too-creditable reasons such as guarding the word so it can't slip away to be lost in the broad linguistic flood; yet even if I manage to relinquish this fatal stance of nursing my injury, it may well refuse to let go of me. Why, though, should even the most irrational verbal onslaught lodge in us, and why should it stubbornly resist ejection, and defy its own fading? For an accusation to inhere, must its human target already be burdened with her own prehistory of vulnerability, in the shape of some psychic susceptibility; must it even depend on her anticipating readiness to accept or even embrace the accusation that also horrifies? Maybe, then, there's some fatal attraction from the aggression uttered in the present toward earlier established reverberations within us, so that to grasp this phenomenon, we have to leave a linguistic account and turn instead to a prelinguistic... (shrink)

In lowland South America, breath animates human and non-human bodies, pulsating through the materialities of organisms. Humans, however, should manage their bodies to recast and reconfigure breath in its most life-enhancing manifestations: singing and smoking. These are the specialized domains of those able to manage their vitalities in such a way as to produce potent effects in themselves and in the world around them, including influencing atmospheric conditions, the lives of animals and plants and the harming and healing of others. (...) In these relational onto-epistemologies, intersubjectivity, intercorporality and states of non-cognitive interaffection find new depths. Breath, properly managed, can make and unmake worldly forms, including bodies and the societies they come together in. Focusing on two Amerindian communities, the Warekena of northwestern Rio Negro, Brazil and the Shipibo-Konibo of the Ucayali valley in Eastern Peru, this article examines the interface between human and non-human subjectivities, and how resonant interaffective atmospheric conditions are induced to promote health. (shrink)

This article argues that the mid-1960s saw a dramatic shift in how ‘brainwashing’ was popularly imagined, reflecting Anglo-American developments in the sciences of mind as well as shifts in mass media culture. The 1965 British film The Ipcress File provides a rich case for exploring these interconnections between mind control, mind science and media, as it exemplifies the era’s innovations for depicting ‘brainwashing’ on screen: the film’s protagonist is subjected to flashing lights and electronic music, pulsating to the ‘rhythm of (...) brainwaves’. This article describes the making of The Ipcress File’s brainwashing sequence and shows how its quest for cinematic spectacle drew on developments in cybernetic science, multimedia design and modernist architecture. I argue that often interposed between the disparate endeavours of 1960s mind control, psychological science and media was a vision of the human mind as a ‘cybernetic spectator’: a subject who scrutinizes how media and other demands on her sensory perception can affect consciousness, and seeks to consciously participate in this mental conditioning and guide its effects. (shrink)

La proposition de cet article est de se saisir du « temps de l’expérience » des parcs éoliens citoyens en Frise du Nord (Allemagne) en le confrontant à la fois aux pulsations politiques des expérimentations techniques et à la fois aux rythmes des vents, comme ce qui permettrait d’en prendre soin, pour penser la continuité des épreuves de transition dans le temps mais aussi dans l’espace, dans une perspective démocratique de multiplication des expériences de transition.

Le mathématicien au travail sait faire un geste que l'on appelle la« pulsation mathématique», qui s'exprime en tennes de bougé créatif nécessaire dans les diagrammes de pensée et d'interprétation des écrits mathématiques. Dans cette perspective Je statut d'objet est définitivement en révision, sous condition du jeu des relations. Le but ici est de construire aujourd'hui cette pulsation à partir de ce que Bachelard proposait hier comme épistémologie, aussi bien de la mathématique que de la science dite physique mathématique. (...) Les liens entre la pensée bachelardienne et les propositions plus récentes de Gilles Châtelet, Charles Alunni, ou René Guitart, sont mis en relief ainsi que ceux d'autres auteurs comme Jacques Lacan, Arthur Koestler, Alfred N. Whitehead, Charles S. Peirce. Nous proposons que le travail mathématique soit pensable comme du mouvement dans l'espace des diagrammes, du bougé pulsatif en icelui, et que cette manière de voir soit éminemment compatible avec la vue bacheJardienne suivant laquelle la forme intellectuelle précède l'objet empirique, lequel provient in fine, comme d'une concrétion de la pulsation de la pensée. Nous terminons donc sur un schème catégoricien de la pulsation. (shrink)

Processuality as refusal to “freeze,” “eternize,” and fragment reality is an attempt to deconstruct the I’s main mechanism, which is, as it was named in psychoanalysis, the compulsion of repetition. Through this deceit and illusion fabrication mechanism, the knowing I tries to “freeze”, to “fixate” and to fragment reality, through “catching” it in different images, formulae, dogmas, theories, ideologies, symbols and systems which become just as many “icons” or graven images of reality. This attempt of deconstruction is made from the (...) perspective of a philosophy/vision of process, quite sporadic in the Western space, bringing arguments from the perspective of Henri Bergson and Emil Cioran’s intuitionist philosophy, as well as from that of the new scientific paradigm of quantum mechanics. All these philosophies could be seen as philosophies of process, demanding as it were an understanding of reality in terms of process, and not of result. This understanding of process takes place with the help of intuition, the only one which can grasp, beyond the static, rigid and artificial concepts or categories of the intellect, the movement, “verb” or interior pulsation of things within the framework of an integration process which reveals the unity, non-separability, intercorrelation and mutual interconnectivity of things. (shrink)

Five Heads (1929–1930) and Actors in the Square (1969). An attempt was made to trace the external plan of the image in all its elements (form construction, figure composition, the characteristics of faces, the color landscape) and to reveal the internal plan, the figurative structure, which manifests itself in the play of the color surface, which performs a dual role: to be both an object shell and a screen, where associations that arose in the mind and imagination of the artist (...) in the process of work are visualized. The attempt to see and analyze how the interweaving of the two image planes (symbiosis, synthesis), their flowing into each other create a pulsating image of the work that touches the feelings of the viewer. (shrink)

We want real relations of the mind and the heart; we want friendship; we want knowledge; we want virtue; a more inward existence to read the history of each other. Ralph Waldo Emerson fiercely championed life as a living, pulsating experiment perpetually engaged and situated in relations. Beginning with Emerson’s first publication, Nature, when he claims that “a ray of relations passes from every other being” and that the human being cannot be understood without other beings and other beings cannot (...) be understood without the human being, Emerson argued that an interconnectedness of being and energy makes life a project of making sense of self, other, and society, with each playing indispensable... (shrink)

Yoga et spiritualité est le témoignage émerveillé mais lucide d'un voyageur en quête des valeurs essentielles. Bien avant que ne déferle sur l'Occident désorienté la mode de la route et du périple oriental, Arnaud Desjardins a voulu délaisser les voies touristiques afin d'écouter battre le coeur de l'Inde. C'est cette pulsation qu'il tente ici de nous livrer, la face cachée d'une Inde encore fervente, enracinée dans les millénaires de tradition. L'auteur procède du même coup à une mise au point (...) et aide ses lecteurs à se frayer un chemin à travers le fatras d'idées reçues, de contresens et de présupposés à propos du "Yoga" et des "mystiques orientales". Carnet de bord essentiel pour comprendre le cheminement intérieur d'Arnaud Desjardins, cet ouvrage donne quelques clefs fondamentales et constitue un document limpide sur une société bien mal connue de nous, et aujourd'hui plus que jamais menacée. (shrink)

Nature's simplest atom and mother of all matter, hydrogen feeds the stars as well as interlaces the molecules of their biological descendants – to whom it ultimately whispers the secrets of quantum reality. Hydrogen’s most prevalent earthly guise lies within the composition of water. A slight electrical disturbance can split water into hydrogen and oxygen gas, resulting in diaphanous bubble clouds slowly rising towards the liquid’s surface. Though the founding fathers of electrochemistry posited that the mass of liberated bubbles is (...) directly proportional to the input voltage, certain modes of electrolysis release more energy than is spent. One such mode involves water’s Janus-faced capacity to react as either an acid or a base. Emanating from an array of electrodes at the bottom of a water-filled chamber, strings and strata of hydrogen bubbles meticulously trace their emergent surroundings. In addition to eddy formations incited by a bubble's rapid growth and subsequent detachment from the electrode surface, acoustic vibrations permeate the two-phase fluid. As the sonic frequency and amplitude rises, the hydrogen bubbles start to coalesce with one another. When the sound field reaches maximum intensity, it can trap bubbles within its antinodes. The vibrations are generated both by transducers and by the bubbles themselves, which emit frequencies ranging from the audible spectrum to as high as 800 kHz. A white laser sheet scans and illuminates the hydrogen bubble trajectories. Each quivering bubble-lens divides the white light into its constituent spectrum of colors. While scanning, the laser sheet also swiftly pulsates and thereby extends the perceivable resolution of micro-momentary bubble dynamics. Before it even begins to map out its vibratory environment, a bubble goes through various stages of spatio-temporal evolution. During the first phase of growth, a bubble nucleus inflates linearly with time. At the second stage, bubble growth is limited by the diffusion of gas within the liquid, causing its size to increase as the square root of time. The final phase before detachment is limited by the kinetics of dissolved gas production, causing the bubble to grow as the cube root of time.1 Beyond macroscopically observable bubbles, an expanse of nanobubbles hides within the water’s internal architecture. Some researchers presume that these nanobubbles of dissolved gas are the carriers of water’s magnetic ‘memory’, enabling electromagnetic fields to saturate its innards for hours and even days after their initial appearance. In the seas and oceans, the lingering presence of electromagnetic fields photonically imparted by sunlight, triggers the electrolysis responsible for most of the Earth’s hydrogen. An essential form of photosynthesis, solar water splitting is the cleanest and most efficient means imaginable for generating and storing energy. —Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand *** Animals and plants are formed in earth and in water because there is water in earth, and there is pneuma in water, and there is soul heat in all pneuma ; so that in a way all things are full of soul. Hence plants and animals quickly form once this gets enclosed; and when this enclosing happens, when the corporeal liquids get heated, a sort of frothy bubble is formed. Now the difference between the various creatures which are produced in this way are due to the stuff which makes up the envelope around the soul-source.2 Throwing light into this pneumatic spray of perdurances, which would otherwise swarm below the threshold of human visibility, Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand’s Hydrogeny saturates the viewer’s sensorial space with the nano-architectures of froth. Straddling the cell wall between scientific enquiry and artistic praxis, Hydrogeny , beckons a recasting of Lucretius' clinamen in tune with the technologies of the modern observer. For Lucretius it was the indeterminate swerving of an atomistic layer of reality which accounted for the unpredictability of change and the existence of free will. Taken up by Harold Bloom to describe the swerving of cultural production from that which has already been made, the idea has since been textually redressed by Lacan, Derrida, Serres, Deleuze, Nancy, and Badiou. Here we have been given a kaleidoscopic technique for refining and expanding awareness of our enmeshment with so many nested, atomistic layers of object-bubbles—of things—as Aristotle might say,“full of soul.” The gravitational pull of Hydrogeny ushers a de-centered human spectatorship to the ever more intimate recesses of what media philosopher N. Katherine Hayles calls our capacity for “deep attention.”3 Vaporous attention suspended and re-oriented. Microscopic as these diaphanous waves are, the calling they produce is anything but inconsequential. Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand are two-thirds of the Amsterdam-based Art–Science Labratory, Optofonica , an atelier initiated by the Italian interdisciplinary artist TeZ in 2006. Follow more of their work at www.portablepalace.com —Isaac Linder NOTES (1) cf. Brandon, Kelsall, Levine, & Smith. “Interfacial Electrical Properties of Electrogenerated Bubbles.” Journal of Applied Electrochemistry 15 (1985):485-493. (2)Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, 762a18, tr. A. L. Peck (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1942). (3)“ My article on hyper and deep attention ,” N. Katherine Hayles, accessed on September 14, 2011. (shrink)

Once upon a time, the universe was much simpler: before our modern understanding of an infinite formless space scattered with pulsating stars, revolving planets, and mysterious black holes, the universe was seen as a rigid hierarchical system with the earth and the human race at its center. Medieval Views of the Cosmos investigates this worldview shared by medieval societies, revealing how their modes of thought affect us even today. In the medieval world system--inherited by Christians and Muslims from the Greeks (...) and Romans, and modified by their own religious tenets--spheres bearing the planets and stars wheeled around the earth, and at every level there was a moral lesson for humanity and a satisfying metaphor for the nature of God. The authors of this volume explain how the medieval view of the universe was harmonious on theological and practical levels, providing answers to the most puzzling of questions. Medieval Views of the Cosmos is an engaging and beautifully illustrated introduction to a world where every moment was a theater of human drama directed by the hand of God. (shrink)

Previous chapter The period spanning between 1750 and 1900 has been marked, first of all, by a tremendous expansion of the Platonic metric paradigm. Poetry, dance and music continued their ancient numerical tradition, into which they tended to introduce, at least until the 1840s, strict regularity and pulsation. Life science witnessed the generalization by Wolff and his followers of the division of phenomena duration into time-sequences which had been initiated in Antiquity by the - Sur le concept de rythme (...) – Nouvel article. (shrink)

In the structure of a modern literature erotic text we see two main tendencies: metaphoric (or metonymic) imagination, (for example Bataille) and combined imagination (de Sad). A bright example of the first tendency is A story of an eye by Bataille (1928). In it we see an antithetic metaphor, striking two sexes together. De Sad, using combined imagination, proceeds from the fact, that there is a limited amount of erotism places. But from them he leads all figures, which act in (...) these places. He transfers them and combines erotica and aggression, forming endless combinations. Кarel by Jahn Jene (1947) is an example of the second tendency. Endlessness of erotic desire in the novel appears as darkness. This darkness – is a sign of bottomless depths of desire–has a stream of light as reverse side, as its antithetic metaphor. The metaphor, created by a non-synthetic combination aims at causing shock, conveying obscenity, unquotability of desire. It has a double nature: to come into touch with Eros one must taste death. Unquotable discourse speaks of a unified pulsation of Eros-Thanatos. (shrink)

Neopoetics is a matrix for dynamic perceptual convergences between material and immaterial systems. The deep foundational ground for Neopoetics is the Poetics of Aristotle and its relation to the ancient Greek theatre as a practical systemic ideology for the mythic Greek drama. As Aristotle’s Poetics posits six basic components for the construction of drama (plot, character, thought, diction, song and spectacle) the neopoetic system has six constituent aspects: expanded embodiment, experiential metaphor, matrix architecture, perceptual resonance, the rheomode and neopoetic mythos. (...) Expanded embodiment describes an expansion of the corporeal body into fluid, dematerialized dimensions of experience, expression and exchange. Experiential metaphor is a sensate interface between the expanded body and the dematerialized field that contextualizes it in a neopoetic framework. It is what Roy Ascott terms an interspace: ‘found between the virtual and actual, where reality is renegotiated and the new consciousness is embodied’. The next three neopoetic aspects describe the language structures through which a new mythos is articulated. Matrix architecture is a framework for activation and alignment of the senses. It is a multisensory perceptual membrane that ignites the prism of the expanded body’s sensorium within the fluid interface of experiential metaphor. Matrix architecture articulates both a new sensorium and its interface with an integrated material/immaterial perceptual field. Perceptual resonance is the cathartic awakening of ‘the space between the senses’, evoked by the alignment of perceptual dimensions through matrix architecture. From this prismatic aperture emerges the mythic, transformative rheomode – the experiential language of the quantum wave. The rheomode is an expression of language. The term was coined by the quantum physicist David Bohm as an experiment in pursuit of a linguistic dimension of the wave. Yet in a neopoetic context, the rheomode becomes an evolutionary system. As Roy Ascott states,Language is not merely a device for communicating ideas about the world but rather a tool for bringing the world into existence. Art is a form of world building, of mind construction, of self-creation, whether through digital programming, genetic code, articulation of the body, imaging, simulation, or visual construction. Art is the search for new language, new metaphors, new ways of constructing reality, and for the means of redefining ourselves.Neopoetics mythos unfurls through the rheomode. It is an expression of an emerging ecology, an experiential awakening of the wave within the particle. Neopoetic myths are fluid evolutionary pulsations. They are transformation in the liquid convergences between material and immaterial dimensions. They are streams of lava birthing bedrock for an emerging paradigm. (shrink)

This paper explores Kierkegaard’s method of irony and his distinct conception of temporality through the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. It suggests that Kierkegaard makes an ironic use of the term ‘sacrifice.’ Rather than asking us to abandon all human preferential relationships in favor of an abstract (religious) love to an anonymous neighbor, it advances the view that Kierkegaard’s prime objective is therapeutic. Kierkegaard seeks to disabuse us of the idea that we can fully possess faith, or indeed, anything meaningful whatsoever, (...) such as the love that pulsates in our hearts for a family member, romantic partner, friend, or even to ourselves. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to map out the perspective of ecstatic naturalism and its corollary theology of deep pantheism. Ecstatic naturalism begins and ends with the fissuring between nature naturing (nature perennially creating itself out of itself alone) and nature natured (the innumerable orders of the world). Nature naturing and its pulsating potencies could also be named: der Wille (Schopenhauer), firstness (Peirce), the transcendental psychoid (Jung), and creativity (Whitehead). Deep Pantheism rejects theism, with a fully transcendent deity, and (...) panentheism, with its deity both in and beyond nature. The “deep” in my form of pantheism refers to the otherness of the unfathomable depths of the unconscious of nature. The theism entailed is that of gods and goddesses, finitely located, that are archetypal images. The symbol of the Great Mother is a premier locus for grounding and enveloping the human psyche. The travail of mind involves the fitful and precarious transitions between finite and embedded mind within nature natured and the emergence of an awareness of the depths of the human, cultural, collective, and natural modes of the unconscious via nature naturing. (shrink)

This article proposes that the propagation of vibrations could serve as a better model for understanding the transmission of affect than the flow, circulation or movement of bodies by which it is most often theorized. The vibrations (or idiomatically ‘vibes’) among the sound system audience (or ‘crowd’) on a night out on the dancehall scene in Kingston, Jamaica, provide an example. Counting the repeating frequencies of these vibrations in a methodology inspired by Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis results in a Frequency Spectrogram. This (...) ranges from the sociocultural frequencies of nightly, weekly and seasonal cycles and circulations of musical style and fashion, to the material frequencies of the amplitudes and timbres of sound itself, with reggae’s signature low-pitched bass-line, to the corporeal frequencies of the flesh and blood of the dancehall ‘crowd’, pulsating with heartbeats and kinetic dance rhythms. The vibration model then addresses the intensities of affect in terms of auditory amplitudes, as with sonic dominance; feelings as frequencies; and the distinctive meaning of affect as timbre. This aims to encourage the radical impulse of the idea of affect to abandon the traditional envelope of the autonomous, self-consistent, rational individual. The meaning of affect is thus located in the ratio, proportions and patterning of vibrations, that is, outside the discourse of emotions or representation of feelings. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Acts of Askēsis, Scenes of PoiēsisThe Dramatic Phenomenology of Another Violence in a Muslim Painter-PoetNauman Naqvi (bio)[End Page 50]The Divinity is beautiful and loves beauty. Cultivate the ethos of the Divinity. Askēsis is my glory, and all askēsis is from me.— Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad, Sahih al-Bukhari>> Introduction: Presenting the Drama of the Gnostic Ontology of Violence in IslamIn current discourse on violence in Islam, the fundamental importance (...) of the Prophetic distinction—a distinction iterated in a number of hadith, or speech-events of the Prophet Muhammad—between the greater, inner jihad, against the ego (al-jihad al-akbar), and the lesser, outward jihad, against oppression and animosity (al-jihad al-asghar), has often been cited. Even so, an originary measure of the significance of this exemplary distinction—abyssal in its simplicity, disclosing as it does the divinity proper to the divinely ordained imperative of jihad (such disclosure of divinity being the very task and telos of the Prophetic speech-event, its very eventfulness (hadatha)—has hardly been taken or heeded.It has not, to begin with, been explored that both forms strikingly share the violent word, jihad: in Arabic, forceful effort or struggle. It is as if the reality and intensity of these two radically different forms of force are adequated a priori in the Prophetic speech-event—if anything, it is the former, the inner jihad, that has the greater reality, the more violent, imperative intensity. With their difference a matter of degree and quality, the two are at once intimately related and violently real, linguistically leaving us little space for the distinction between the metaphoric and the literal in this demanding economy, language, and ontology of violence.1The line that has been drawn between the two forms of violence in the Prophetic speech-event is not ontological per se—it is the axis of the stage of their dramatic encounter, the battle line of their distinction. This axis, this vertical battle line of distinction, is the strait, but upwardly infinite, dramaturgical space wherein is enacted the gnostic ontology of violence in Islam. It is the axial line of force emanating from Islam’s extraordinary emphasis on the radical purification of one’s intention, one’s very intentionality (i.e., the purification not just of the springing ground of one’s comportment, but of the anterior ground where one receives and apprehends the real as such), in a quest for the demanding Divinity that would hurl the Islamic subject both inside and outside itself in its own endless search and infinite encounter. It is the battle line of distinction that races through the world stage of Islam’s arts, knowledges, and practices—the auratic line of force pulsating through the fields of its charismatic inheritance of generous visions, discourses, and gestures. Indeed, it is the piercing erotic arrow of divine love and mercy that is the subtle motus animi continuus of Islam’s graceful works of poiēsis.For the violent task of askēsis assigned by the great imperative of inner jihad is closely related both to the imperative of beauty in Islam—where the effects of askēsis: virtue and virtuosity, are densely, passionately cathected and imbricated with the beautiful2 by [End Page 51] virtue of the latter’s manifestation of divinity—as well as to the imperative of knowledge, wherein theory and praxis are united in askēsis.3Beauty and its creation—the act of poiēsis —are also, then, violently real, as are knowledge and its effects, since together they all have a kenotically violent askēsis as the condition and telos of their possibility, as the very ground(s) of their emergence and potentiality. Thus, the significance of the greater jihad is (again) to be read potentially, in the entire range of the arts, gestures, habits, and letters of Islam, its artifacts and bodies, where generous, kenotic, sacrificial logics are on display, not just in the lesser archive of jihad (in acts of greater jihad on far bygone battlefields), but in the epic world-panorama of the acts and scenes of askēsis and poiēsis that are... (shrink)

The first published paper on pulsars was entitled, by its five co-authors, “Observation of a Rapidly Pulsating Radio Source”. (Hewish, et al. 1968). The publication of this paper preceded by some months the coining of the word ‘pulsar’ to refer to such pulsating radio sources. Does it seem odd to talk of observing pulsars? It might seem so since much effort has subsequently gone into identifying pulsars with optically visible stars using conventional light, not radio, telescopes. We can say that (...) the moons of Jupiter are observable since either we can see them through a telescope or, at some future date, astronauts will be able to travel close enough to Jupiter to see its moons without visual aids. (shrink)

This paper is a full version of the author’s talk at “Procedural Logic and Philosophy of Consciousness”, a discussion dedicated to A.V. Smirnov’s book “The Logic of Mean­ing as a Philosophy of Consciousness: An Invitation to Reflection” (2021). The proposed content can be viewed as a co-reflection on the key concepts of the logical-semantic con­cept of consciousness: coherence, integrity, constriction, extension as the foundations and methods of conceptualization in their existential perspective. It is stressed that the logi­cal-semantic approach of A.V. (...) Smirnov reveals new facets in the understanding of philo­sophical rationality, personal and cultural subjectivity, experience, consciousness and their formation. To demonstrate the general philosophical, methodological status of the system of concepts introduced by the author, analogies are drawn with the understanding of exis­tential experience as a constriction of meaning-forming experiences that are unfolded by the subject in communication, creativity, self-understanding. The concepts that have re­ceived a conceptual justification in the works of A.V. Smirnov bring the origins of experi­ence to another level of comprehension, in accordance with which the spectrum of under­standing of human reflexive capabilities also changes. If we “start with integrity”, as the author advises us, then the idea of recursiveness of experience as a pulsating process of comprehension and self-reflection in the process of human interaction with the world or his “flickering” being-in-the-world is strengthened and acquires new angles. Of partic­ular importance here is the very style of author’s reflection, which is associated with the revision of established philosophical categories and their interpretations, the departure from the usual interpretations to discover one’s own philosophical language: one’s own – both in terms of the individual author’s approach and in aspects of the formation of the modern domestic philosophical tradition. (shrink)

This paper explores the meaning and being of the absolute spirit in Hegelrsquo;s thought by reflecting through the idea that spirit is the activity and being of gathering through dispersal. In Hegelrsquo;s thought gathering and dispersing are the primary movements through which spirit engages in the processes of its absolute self-cognition, the processes, that is, that underpin the eternal becoming of communal being. Gathering and dispersing thus define the pulsating movement of the absolute spirit in all its facets.

While philosophers have, for centuries, pondered upon the relation between mind and brain, neuroscientists have only recently been able to explore the connection analytically — to peer inside the black box. This ability stems from recent advances in technology and emerging neuroimaging modalities. It is now possible not only to produce remarkably detailed images of the brain’s structure (i.e. anatomical imaging) but also to capture images of the physiology associated with mental processes (i.e. functional imaging). We are able to see (...) how specific regions of the brain ‘light up’ when activities such as reading this book are performed, and how our neurons and their elaborate cast of supporting cells organize and coordinate their tasks. As demonstrated in the other chapters of this book, the mapping of the human mind (mostly by measuring regional changes in blood flow, initially by positron emission tomography (PET) and recently by functional magnetic resonance imaging or (fMRI)) has provided insight into the functional neuroanatomy of neuropsychiatric diseases. Amazingly, the idea that regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) is related intimately to brain function goes back more than a century. As is often the case in science, this idea was initially the result of unexpected observations. The Italian physiologist Angelo Mosso first expressed the idea while studying pulsations of the living human brain that keep pace with the heartbeat (Mosso, 1881). These brain pulsations can be observed on the surface of the fontanelles in newborn children. Mosso believed that they reflected blood flow to the brain. He observed similar pulsations in an adult with a post-traumatic skull defect over the frontal lobes. While studying this subject, a peasant named Bertino, Mosso observed a sudden increase in the magnitude of the ‘brain’s heart-beats’ when the church bells signalled 12 o’clock, the time for a required prayer. The changes in brain pulsations occurred independently of any change in pulsations in the forearm.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ease of CareTravis CearleyRoughly nine years ago, I was deer hunting on a friend's property just outside of Canaan, Missouri, where he had graciously provided me access to one of his premier tree stands. It was early in bow season and even though the calendar had suggested it was Autumn, the weather mirrored a classic Missouri August morning, muggy and thick. Dressed in my lightest hunting gear, I had (...) just gotten settled—bow in lap, arrow knocked, binoculars ready—when I felt a stinging sensation in my calf. Slowly hiking up my pant leg so as not to make too many sudden movements, I saw a familiar yet harrowing sight: Seed ticks had invaded my socks, and I was covered from the mid-calf down with black pulsating parasites. I knew instantly (as many outdoorsmen know) that my hunt had come to an end. Somewhere on the hike down the hillside or the climb into the tree, I had stepped on a nest of ticks, and the rest of my morning was shot (no pun intended). I quickly clambered out of the stand, made my way back to my friend's house and proceeded to strip down in his front yard. Left with only one option, I placed all "infected" articles of clothing in a burn pile, took my naked self to the nearest hose, rinsed feverishly in his yard, and checked every inch of my body for burrowed residents. You see, removal—complete and thorough—is the only way to keep the tick from becoming an unwelcome guest, causing itching and burning, or even spreading disease.The seed tick is an especially menacing foe. He can be invisible to the naked eye. He is faster than you would expect. He travels in herds. However, all ticks, regardless of size, are capable of causing weeks of discomfort. This discomfort and concern multiplies based on where the tick chooses to lodge itself. You see, there is a spot on the base of a man's penis where the penis itself meets the scrotum—a private, quiet, warm and damp location—that is particularly enticing to the tick. As an avid outdoorsman and lover of nature, I have had my fair share of uninvited guests attempt to call this place home. Multiple times in my life, I have taken caution in the painstaking removal of ticks in all sorts of locations, and I will tell you, few tasks are more galling or difficult than removing one burrowed next to the crease of the scrotum just under the penis itself. It seems they are keenly aware of the small bit of extra skin that exists on this part of the male anatomy, and part of me believes that they are also aware of the difficulty it presents. [End Page 79]At the time of the Canaan seed tick attack, my wife was pregnant with our first son who was due to be born that coming December. I am now the father of three sons. As a family, being outside is our favorite pastime. We run, we play, we chore; and whenever we can, we spend time in the woods. Whether we are exploring the various state parks of Missouri or rambling through the treelines of the family farm, some of the happiest times we spend as a family include nature. Nature means bugs; and even as a veteran tick assassin, I wasn't really prepared for the painstaking process of removing one from my son's nether regions. A few shivers, a few gasps and more than a few tears—juggling the "Get it off me, dad" with the "Don't worry, Daddy does this all the time"—nothing builds trust like tweezing a parasite from another person's scrotum. It is these moments that also remind me of how thankful I am for the absence of foreskin.I am a circumcised father of three circumcised boys. My wife and I chose to have our sons "clipped" after their births and by a medical professional. When my wife and I discussed whether or not to have them circumcised, I consistently came back to the same thought: "What benefit could foreskin... (shrink)

In the discourse of African philosophy, what may still seem unresolved is the question of the content and methodological approach appropriate for its study. Two apparently opposing camps are isolable here, namely, traditionalist or ethnophilosophical school and the Universalist or analytic school. The latter is criticized and rejected in this essay because it adopts a methodological approach characteristic of Western analytic philosophy which itself has come under severe criticism by the post empiricist philosophers and postmodernist thinkers. We argue that the (...) position of the ethnophilosophical group is more attractive since it pulsates with African cultural environment. (shrink)

El ensayo pretende mostrar como la obra de García Lorca traspasa la barrera de lo puramente estético, para prefigurarse como un emblema de los problemas sociales que aquejaban a la España de su época, es decir lo social llevado al plano estético de una manera singular; así, el poeta granadino logra trascender a la muerte, tema recurrente en toda su obra, forjando un estilo y modelo de vida que se convertirán en paradigmas dentro del escenario literario hispanoamericano.

Tendo como contexto as mudanças paradigmáticas da Atualidade, o objetivo deste artigo é refletir sobre os fundamentos filosóficos de uma educação com as diferenças a partir do conceito de duração desenvolvido por Henri Bergson. A teoria bergsoniana da duração instaura uma visão radical das diferenças humanas, baseada nos seguintes aspectos: a dimensão viva e pulsante das temporalidades dos diversos sujeitos; a irredutibilidade das diferentes temporalidades humanas a signos matemáticos; a totalização da temporalidade no âmbito da memória; e, enfim, seu potencial (...) de liberdade e criação. Partindo dos referidos fundamentos filosóficos, o artigo defende que uma educação com as diferenças precisa repensar a noção de sujeito ideal, as práticas de ensino e avaliação baseadas em quantificações e classificações, as lógicas fragmentadas e impessoais de produção de conhecimento e, finalmente, a ideia de formação para a liberdade e a responsabilidade ética. Palavras-chave: Duração; Henri Bergson; Educação; Diferenças. The duration in Henri Bergson: foundation of education with the differences Abstract: Taking the current paradigmatic changes as a context, the aim of this article is to reflect on the philosophical foundations of an education with the differences based on the concept of duration developed by Henri Bergson. The bergsonian theory of duration establishes a radical view of human differences, based on the following aspects: the living and pulsating dimension of the temporalities of the different subjects; the irreducibility of different human temporalities to mathematical signs; the totalization of temporality within the scope of memory; and, finally, its potential for freedom and creation. Based on these philosophical foundations, the article argues that education with the differences needs to rethink the notion of ideal subject, teaching and evaluation practices based on quantifications and classifications, fragmented and impersonal logics of knowledge production and, finally, the idea of formation for freedom and ethical responsibility. Key-words: Duration; Henri Bergson; Education; Differences. La duración en Henri Bergson: fundamento de la educación con las diferencias Resumen: Tomando como contexto los cambios paradigmáticos actuales, el objetivo de este artículo es reflexionar sobre los fundamentos filosóficos de una educación con las diferencias basada en el concepto de duración desarrollado por Henri Bergson. La teoría bergsoniana de la duración establece una visión radical de las diferencias humanas, basada en los siguientes aspectos: la dimensión viva y pulsante de las temporalidades de los diferentes sujetos; la irreductibilidad de diferentes temporalidades humanas a signos matemáticos; la totalización de la temporalidad en el ámbito de la memoria; y, finalmente, su potencial de libertad y creación. Con base en estos fundamentos filosóficos, el artículo sostiene que la educación con las diferencias necesita repensar la noción de sujeto ideal, prácticas de enseñanza y evaluación basadas en cuantificaciones y clasificaciones, lógicas fragmentadas e impersonales de producción de conocimiento y, finalmente, la idea de formación para la libertad y la responsabilidad ética. Palabras clave: Duración; Henri Bergson; Educación; Diferencias. Data de registro: 27/10/2021 Data de aceite: 19/01/2022. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Is Beauty an Archaic Spirit in Education?Howard Cannatella (bio)O! Father and mother, if buds are nip'd and blossoms blown away, and if the tender plants are strip'd of their joy in the spring day, by sorrow and care's dismay, how shall the summer arise in joy, or the summer fruit appear?William Blake, "The School Boy"1This article discusses the unfashionable and taboo idea that beauty matters. A sign of the (...) esteem in which beauty is held can be gauged by the fact that so few articles significantly address any conception of beauty in education. Yet outside a purely educational regime, matters are treated somewhat differently albeit confusedly. In contrast to a virtual silence on this issue, a defense of beauty is modestly made in this article—one that claims that education is considerably ineffective without beauty and would be a poorer and unjust system of practice if beauty were merely seen as an irrelevance, a distraction from the serious stuff of management practice. What is broadly pursued is an attempt to portray an educational praxis that involves the suggestion that an active being in the world is someone who shows themselves to be in some exhortation of its beauty. An attempt is made to map out a few of the reasons why the sense of beauty is an important condition of being, a position few educationalists, so the arguments go in this article, can choose to take lightly. In what can be seen at times as a rather tasteless, aggressive, and doctrinaire educational climate, an education that is culturally alive and buzzing with the sounds, smells, images, rhythms, freedoms, play, knowledge, and rationalities that accompany and are inseparable from social and individual existence at intimate levels of being can revitalize teaching practice in more sensitive and magical ways. By exploring some of the reasons why we should not desensitize ourselves to beauty in education, it is possible to counter-argue for a greater retention and conviction of this experience. My supposition is that beauty as a poetic force should be regarded [End Page 94] as one of the defining characteristics central to pedagogic practice. In making this claim I draw upon a few of Charles Dickens's and William Wordsworth's ideas in support of the importance of beauty in education.IEnjoyment is not a psychological state among others, the affective tonality of empiricist psychology, but the very pulsation of the I.Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity2If it is the case that beauty is nothing other than the proper releasing of the human spirit, the grasping of delights, something fundamental to the capacity of our minds and body—"the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world"3 —then, we may wonder, why is current educational practice preoccupied with things of arguably less importance? The thought that "beauty is the basic impulse underlying education"4 —or as Carritt5 puts it, beauty instigates that which is morally worth cultivating, a recognition of something universally valid for humanity—strikes a certain agreement between Emerson, Scarry, and Carritt: namely, that beauty matters educationally. Indeed, Freud6 surmised that civilization could not survive without it, and Plato remarked that education "ought to end in the love of the fine and beautiful."7 Although these remarks may seem platitudinous, they may still nevertheless arouse within us a feeling that beauty is something quite immense, faithful, and necessary. With these ideas in mind, the aim here is to explain how certain aspects of beauty can be important for transcending some of the dystopia affecting educational practices together with some of the reasons why the intimacy of beauty is good for us. When the delicateness of beauty appears to be losing its appeal, it is perhaps no coincidence that a major reason why some students are disenchanted with education is because they fail to see the beauty in it. If beauty in society is losing its grip, what harshness or sadness will result?Let us begin with the obvious observation that a pluralist conception of beauty is a fact of life. If there are different perspectives of beauty, then, as Wittgenstein8 remarked, we... (shrink)

Antoine Cantin-Brault | : Après avoir établi le bien-fondé de la constitution onto-proto-logique de la métaphysique, trouvée dans les travaux de B. Mabille, cette constitution qui montre que la métaphysique est assurément onto-théo-logique mais aussi mé-onto-logique, l’article veut montrer que cette métaphysique est tout entière déjà présente dans la pensée d’Héraclite. Si les métaphysiciens comme Hegel et Heidegger ont plutôt eu tendance à s’installer dans une de ces deux pulsations métaphysiques en récusant l’autre, Héraclite est peut-être le seul à les (...) scander toutes les deux. L’article cherche donc, à partir d’un élargissement de la constitution heideggérienne de la métaphysique, à montrer quels sont les fragments de l’Obscur qui permettent d’y voir précisément cette métaphysique nouvellement constituée comme onto-proto-logie, et suggérer l’importance d’un contact avec Héraclite pour comprendre la métaphysique en son ensemble et son histoire. | : After having established the merits of the onto-proto-logical constitution of metaphysics as presented in the works of B. Mabille — a conception which demonstrates that metaphysics is at once onto-theo-logical as well as me-onto-logical — the following article will seek to demonstrate that this understanding of metaphysics is already present in its entirety in the thought of Heraclitus. If metaphysicians such as, for example, Hegel and Heidegger have tended to place their thought in one of the two metaphysical pulsations while rejecting the other, Heraclitus was perhaps the first to chant both of them. By means of a broadening of the Heideggerian constitution of metaphysics, this article thus seeks to examine those fragments of the Obscure which reveal precisely this understanding of a metaphysics newly constituted as onto-proto-logy and, furthermore, to suggest the importance of consideration of Heraclitean thought for a fuller understanding of metaphysics in its entirety and history. (shrink)

Isolated neutron stars undergoing non-radial oscillations are expected to emit gravitational waves in the kilohertz frequency range. To date, radio astronomers have located about 1,300 pulsars, and can estimate that there are about 2×108 neutron stars in the galaxy. Many of these are surely old and cold enough that their interiors will contain matter in the superfluid or superconducting state. In fact, the so-called glitch phenomenon in pulsars (a sudden spin-up of the pulsar's crust) is best described by assuming the (...) presence of superfluid neutrons and superconducting protons in the inner crusts and cores of the pulsars. Recently there has been much progress on modelling the dynamics of superfluid neutron stars in both the Newtonian and general relativistic regimes. We will discuss some of the main results of this recent work, perhaps the most important being that superfluidity should affect the gravitational waves from neutron stars (emitted, for instance, during a glitch) by modifying both the rotational properties of the background star and the modes of oscillation of the perturbed configuration. Finally, we present an analysis of the so-called zero-frequency subspace (i.e., the space of time-independent perturbations) and determine that it is spanned by two sets of polar (or spheroidal) and two sets of axial (or toroidal) degenerate perturbations for the general relativistic system. As in the Newtonian case, the polar perturbations are the g-modes which are missing from the pulsation spectrum of a non-rotating configuration, and the axial perturbations should lead to two sets of r-modes when the degeneracy of the frequencies is broken by having the background rotate. (shrink)

Article is devoted to the social legitimation of knowledge. We study the contexts of implantation of knowledge products into the body of culture. The author proceeds from the need to study the process of objectification symbolic of object by applying the category of ‘facies‘, the introduction and justification of which on content and formal level were realized by the author in previous works. Such issues as the following are discussed in the article: the main stages of objectification, cognitions, different worlds (...) in science in the trend of unfolding cognitions, the basic principles of object-symbolic interpretation of the nature of knowledge. The author explores these questions by analyzing the basic epistemological trends that can be seen in the works of the greatest philosophers of both modern and recent times, globalizing the principle of a system approach on the basis of its synthesis with the elements of synergetics and semiotics. The author devotes a great place to criticism of Kant’s transcendental apriorism, revealing, however, its positive potential and determining its promising vector beating literally in the essence of contemporary cognitive science. Author takes on orbit of its original methodology conclusions of not only natural sciences and mathematics, but also poetic insights that allows creating of pulsating and at the same time quite certain interdisciplinary context. The main conclusions regarding the content of prerequisites of cognitive synthesis included in the final paragraph of article and are accompanied by convincing examples of modern physics. (shrink)

The work of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark occupies a singular position in the movement of institutional critique that began in the 1960s and 70s. The center of her research consists in a mobilization of the two capacities of perception and sensation that alllow us to grasp the otherness of the world, respectively as a map of forms on which we project representations or as a diagram of forces that affect the senses in their capacity for resonance. In 1976, with (...) the Structuring of the Self, she abandoned the field of art and opted for therapy. The forms of critique that she brought into play over the following decade only found a resonance among the generation that began to assert itself in the mid-1990s. Noting this resonance, Suely Rolnik decided to develop a project for the reactivation of memory around the work of Lygia Clark. The idea was to use filmed interviews to produce a living recording of the effects of the body constituted by Lygia during her exile from art, in her cultural and political environment in Brazil and in France. With the exhibition, the pulsation of this body had a chance of contaminating the territory of art. (shrink)

The first part of this paper examines conditions in accord with Einstein's criterion of regularity on the field solutions everywhere that would correspond to the existence of a black hole star, following from solutions of his (nonvacuum) field equations. ‘Black hole’ is defined here as a star whose matter is so condensed as to correspond to a complete family of spatially closed geodesics. The condition imposed is that the angular momentum of a test body in each of the closed geodesics (...) is a constant of the motion. The second part of the paper examines the implications in the problem of the condensed star of a generalized (factorized) version of the metrical field equations, discovered earlier by the author. It is found that in general relativity stars should naturally pulsate, and in its succeeding cycles the gravitational radius of the star is attenuated by a factor exp(−0.349T), where T is the pulsation period. Conditions are discussed for the possibility that the (relatively) regular emissions of radiation from a pulsar may be dynamically rooted in a (smaller) part of the pulsation cycle when the star is out of the black hole state (less dense → open geodesics)—when radiation would be emitted to the outside world—and the (greater) part of the cycle when it is in the black hole state (more dense → closed geodesics)—when radiation would not be emitted. (shrink)

While recent studies have shed some light on the significance of the electrical activity of the nervous system, there has been no adequate explanation for the wave formation or synchronization of this electrical activity. Adrian sums up the problem. “The origin of the 10-a-second rhythm is still uncertain, though the evidence points to some widespread organization, probably involving the central masses as well as the cortex. There are abundant nervous connexions for coordinating the beat, and when the rhythm is well (...) developed it is possible to record impulse discharges in phase with it passing to and fro in the nerve fibers of the white matter below the cortex. But in some areas no impulse could be detected entering or leaving the cell layers, though the potential waves keep more or less in step with those elsewhere. There is no proof that the waves are kept in phase by some means which does not involve nervous signalling, for impulses in axons of small diameter might well be missed, but it is not altogether unlikely that the synchronization is due in part to a direct electrical influence of one group of nerve cells on another. Gerard and Libet have shown that synchronization can occur between the two halves of a frog's brain cut in two and then placed in contact, and more recently Arvanitaki has shown that individual nerve cells may influence one another if they are brought close together in a conducting medium. At all events there are many examples of synchronized rhythmic activity in large collections of nerve-or-muscle cells. In the optic ganglion of the water beetle, for instance, there may be both a slow rhythm when the eye is in darkness and a rapid one when the eye is exposed to a bright light. The change from a slow to a fast rhythm is curiously reminiscent of that in the cerebral cortex when a sensory stimulus abolishes the 10-a-second rhythm and substitutes one at 40–60 a second. Such resemblances in preparations of quite different structures may be quite fortuitous, but they make it difficult to resist the suggestion that the rhythms of the brain may be dependent on the general properties of cell masses rather than on any special anatomical arrangement of them. Whatever its origin, the 10-a-second rhythm of the cortex corresponds to the resting, drowsy, or inattentive state and there is no such uniform pulsation when the brain is alert.”. (shrink)