dig

Category: language

  • AG2023_1044814a and its magnetic draw

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    Looking intensely at one image, then doing so again and again, is more or less the premise of the writer and critic Brian Dillon’s latest book, Affinities (2023), a text that endeavours to analyse attraction. […] For Dillon, affinity is an unreasoned impulse; the magnetic draw of an image, the way it imprints on our psyches, the way it holds time still cannot be academically delineated. But the more one surrenders to affinity, the more one can see – and the more one can learn. One can learn how to tease out a narrative, absent of language. Grace Linden, Psyche, 051723.

  • had this penalty

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    “Beauty had this penalty—it came too readily, came too completely.” (VW)

  • AG2023_1120828a or through the valley-depths of shade and dark obscurity

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    “like being pleasant to touch and smell,
    like converting sunlight
    into food, like making it easier
    for us to breathe.”

    “Say maiden wilt thou go with me
    Through the valley-depths of shade,
    Of night and dark obscurity

    […]

    To live in death and be the same
    Without this life

    […]

    The present mixed with reasons gone
    And past, and present all as one.”

  • AG2023_1120885b or scenes of assemblage

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    “What constitutes infrastructure, in contrast, are the patterns, habits, norms, and scenes of assemblage and use.

    This is what it means to invent alter-life from within life,

    heterotopian impulse” (LB)

  • AG2023_1120885a or madness illuminates his heart

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    “This sudden access to terrestrial madness illuminates his heart: he begins to think about the other Caribbean islands, their volcanoes, their earthquakes, their hurricanes.” (SC)

    “engender dissociation and prefer the inconclusiveness of life in ellipsis.

    […]

    heterotopian, which attends to living in the copresence of many forms of life.” (LB)

  • Suzanne Césaire

    “Spinelessness takes hold of this divided heart. And, with it, the usual trickery, the taste for “schemes”; thus blossoms in the Antilles this flower of human baseness, the colored bourgeoisie.

    And when, abruptly, in the Caribbean night, all decked out in love and quiet, there bursts forth the call of drums, the Blacks ready themselves to respond to the desire of the earth and of the dance,

    It is thus that the Caribbean conflagration blows its silent fumes, blinding for the only eyes that know how to see,”

    “The Great Camouflage”, trans. Keith L. Walker, in Césaire, The Great Camouflage, 2012, pp 39-46. monoskop.org

  • Diane Enns on Thinking Through Loneliness

    Q: Thinking Through Loneliness also draws on artistic and literary works. How did working with these texts help you in thinking through loneliness?

    I wouldn’t know how to discuss any intense experience of suffering without reference to artistic and literary works. To be moved by a work is as essential, in my view, as to be inspired or provoked intellectually. I was struck by the longing for intimacy conveyed in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved decades ago on my first of many reads, which has stayed with me. And who can read Franz Kafka’s story ‘The Metamorphosis’ without shuddering over the terrifying alienation and loneliness of Gregor Samsa, understanding our own alienation through an encounter with his?

    It would be difficult to analyse loneliness by referring exclusively to philosophical texts that engage with the subject, since there are so few. And in general, aside from Fromm-Reichmann’s 1959 essay, ‘Loneliness’, and a handful of other works, I found the social science literature to be rather too scholarly for understanding such a complex experience. Many of the categorisations of this or that type of loneliness landed too far from the original experience and as a result glossed over the vicissitudes of loneliness.

    The most poignant descriptions of human experience always come from artists and writers. Given their intent is not to settle the rich complexity of an experience into something more systematised and palatable, we really must look to them for understanding.

    Q and A with Professor Diane Enns on Thinking Through Loneliness (2022)

  • A suspended moment of living hope

    “[Anne] Carson suggests that to catch beauty is not the point; it is the yearning after it, the running after the spinning top, that gives us pleasure. “Beauty spins and the mind moves,” she explains. “To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.” […] In Carson’s reading of Kafka’s story, eros expands, understood in a broader sense than sexual love. This is eros as a force or magnetic pull that draws us outside of ourselves to converge not only with other individuals–with varying degrees of intimacy–but also with ideas and with the worlds we create and inhabit. We rise above the boundaries of our selves, our bodies, our circumstances and immediately collide with other being and things. ” – Diane Enns, Love in the dark, Philosophy by another name. 2016.


    *Anne Carson, Eros the bittersweet, referencing Kafka’s “The Top”