Archive for the 'Philosophy/Psychology' Category

RIP – Philippe Sollers

Saturday, May 6th, 2023
  • Philippe Sollers passed away


  • (Philippe Sollers and Julia Kristeva)

    Derrida’s closest intellectual comrade in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the writer and editor Philippe Sollers, who published a number of Derrida’s early essays in Tel Quel. But the friendship soured. Sollers wanted Tel Quel to become the cultural journal of the French Communist Party (PCF) and enforced strict obedience to the Moscow line. At a dinner with the Derridas, one telquelian launched into a passionate defence of the Soviet invasion of Prague, where Marguerite’s relatives lived. It did not go down well. Sollers was also worried that Derrida’s reputation might eclipse his own, suspecting that Derrida’s essay in praise of his novel, Numbers, was a covert ‘attempt at appropriation’. In 1967 Sollers had secretly married the Bulgarian literary theorist Julia Kristeva, whose career he was also keen to promote over Derrida’s. Rebuffed in their efforts to capture the cultural apparatus of the PCF, in the early 1970s Sollers and Kristeva converted to Maoism. This led to a deepening estrangement from Derrida, whose friend Lucien Bianco, a distinguished Sinologist, had disabused him of any illusions about revolutionary China. When Derrida gave an interview to La Nouvelle Critique, a PCF literary journal, Sollers and Kristeva protested by ‘boycotting’ a dinner in his honour. Derrida’s Tel Quel years were over. Years later, in her novel The Samurai, Kristeva would mockingly depict Derrida as Saïda, founder of ‘condestruction theory’, a man who was so attractive to American feminists that they ‘all became “condestructivists”’.)(Via Not In the Mood – a review of Derrida’s bio..)
    In the Mood for Julia Kristeva – June 24, 2013

  • Wittgenstein Plays Chess with Marcel Duchamp

    Wednesday, April 6th, 2022
  • Marjorie Perloff -Marcel Duchamp & Wittgenstein (From Tablet)

    At 90, the poetry critic Marjorie Perloff doesn’t want to analyze verse. She wants to discuss Wittgenstein and Duchamp

  • 1aaageometric-and-topological-data-analysis

    Network of Stoppages

    (Marjolie Perloff on Wittgenstein and Marcel Duchamp)

    Marjorie: They did have a lot in common. They were almost exact contemporaries, you know—only two years apart. Duchamp was born in 1887, and Wittgenstein was born in 1889. And they both had training in engineering and mathematics. They made equations. There’s Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages. That is the key work. I really do think so.

  • Wittgenstein Archive

  • Marcel Duchamp Network of Stoppages – 2018

  • RIP Thich Nhat Hanh – Buddhist Monk & Peace Activist,

    Saturday, January 22nd, 2022
  • Thich Nhat Hanh (Plum Village)

  • Michael Andre

    I’m sad about Nhat Hanh’s death. I published a controversial dialogue between Dan Berrigan and Nhat Hanh. Both men hated the war in Vietnam so intensely, they understood the self-immolation of monks in Saigon. Not too many Unmuzzled OX readers understood.
    I never met Nhat Hanh. Everything went through Dan Berrigan. The chapter on Self Immolation was rejected by the publisher of a book of dialogues. I published it. Readers were not necessarily thrilled.

  • The Raft is Not a Shore
    A Dialogue between Thich Nhat Hahn and Daniel Berrigan

    Daniel Berrigan (Preivous Post).

  • Wiki

  • Émilie du Châtelet & Voltaire

    Friday, December 17th, 2021
  • Google celebrated Émilie du Châtelet (17 December 1706 – 10 September 1749)
    wiki

    <>

    (via wiki)

    Relationship with Voltaire
    In the frontispiece to Voltaire’s book on Newton’s philosophy, du Châtelet appears as Voltaire’s muse, reflecting Newton’s heavenly insights down to Voltaire.

    Du Châtelet may have met Voltaire in her childhood at one of her father’s salons; Voltaire himself dates their meeting to 1729, when he returned from his exile in London. However, their friendship developed from May 1733 when she re-entered society after the birth of her third child.[4]

    Du Châtelet invited Voltaire to live at her country house at Cirey in Haute-Marne, northeastern France, and he became her long-time companion. There she studied physics and mathematics and published scientific articles and translations. To judge from Voltaire’s letters to friends and their commentaries on each other’s work, they lived together with great mutual liking and respect. As a literary rather than scientific person, Voltaire implicitly acknowledged her contributions to his 1738 Elements of the Philosophy of Newton, where the chapters on optics show strong similarities with her own Essai sur l’optique. She was able to contribute further to the campaign by a laudatory review in the Journal des savants.[12]

    Sharing a passion for science, Voltaire and Du Châtelet collaborated scientifically. They set up a laboratory in Du Châtelet’s home. In a healthy competition, they both entered the 1738 Paris Academy prize contest on the nature of fire, since Du Châtelet disagreed with Voltaire’s essay. Although neither of them won, both essays received honourable mention and were published.[13] She thus became the first woman to have a scientific paper published by the Academy

    Hannah Arendt – Lesson from Life

    Monday, October 18th, 2021
  • How the facts of Hannah Arendt’s life read like fiction

    Lesson from Life – Hannah Arendt

    As her friend Mary McCarthy once said, Arendt was “a magnificent stage diva”. Focusing on only one episode in Arendt’s eventful existence, Margarethe von Trotta’s dull 2012 biopic Hannah Arendt didn’t show the half of it. Time, surely, for the 12-part HBO drama series. Having read Ann Heberlein’s lyrical yet lucid On Love and Tyranny, I suggest Episode One end with the young Arendt declaring, “I can either study philosophy or I can drown myself”.

  • Raul Hilberg, the first historian to document the banality of Nazi evil, nursed a lifelong grudge against Arendt. who borrowed from and popularized his work without crediting him.

    Hanna Arendt never did the research, she popularized the idea that Nazis were primarily bureaucrats. Here is a book about the man whose research Hanna used without attribution.

    Hilberg was not happy either. After toiling for thirteen years on his book, he was being eclipsed by someone who had worked for little more than two years on hers. “Who was I, after all?” Hilberg asked bitterly in his autobiography. “She, the thinker, and I, the laborer who wrote only a simple report, albeit one which was indispensable once she had exploited it.”

  • Hannah and Her Admirers by David Rieff (Susan Sontag’s son)

    Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic of Hannah Arendt is a film about ideas that remains intellectually detached from them.
    Arendt had relied, by her own admission, on Raul Hilberg’s magisterial history of the Shoah, The Destruction of the European Jews, published in 1961. Most valuable of all to her was Hilberg’s account of the role of the Judenräte during the Shoah, and to what degree the leaders of these councils had in effect collaborated in the Jews’ extermination. Her conclusion was that had the Jews been leaderless and unorganized, there would have been chaos and misery, but nowhere near as many as 6 million would have been murdered. It was this position, far more than her thinking about the banality of evil, that had set so much of the official Jewish world against her. And while Hilberg did not agree with her, as he makes clear in a few icy paragraphs of his memoir, The Politics of Memory, he nonetheless defended Arendt publicly during the controversy.

    It is a film about ideas that remains intellectually detached from them. Despite her immense talent as a director of actors, perhaps with Hannah Arendt von Trotta is not so far from those late Rossellini films after all, and is nowhere near being as diligent or trustworthy.

    The Passing of Janet Malcolm – The Author of the Journalist

    Saturday, June 19th, 2021
  • Janet Clara Malcolm was an American writer, journalist on staff at The New Yorker magazine, and collagist. She was the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, In the Freud Archives, and The Journalist and the Murderer, among other books.
    (Wikipedia)

    Janet Malcolm the author of the journalist and the murderer died (Guardian)

    “New Yorker writer, whose scepticism about her trade brought her both praise and blame, was also famed for studies of psychoanalysis and Sylvia Plath”

  • Her most consistent modus operandi was to obscure and complicate

    Janet Malcolm literary magician (Atlantic-obit-David Graham)

  • <> <>
    (Photo – Fung Lin Hall)
    In the Freud Archives (Granta)
    Janet Malcolm introduced this reader to Jeffrey Masson and Anna Freud.

    Who will inherit the secrets of Sigmund Freud? Who will protect his reputation? Who may destroy it? Janet Malcolm’s investigation into the personalities who clash over Freud’s legacy has become a celebrated story of seduction and betrayal, love and hatred, fantasy and reality. It is both a comedy and a tragedy. Malcolm’s cast of characters includes K. R. Eissler, a venerable psychoanalyst and keeper of the Freud flame; Jeffrey Mason, a flamboyant Sanskrit scholar and virulent anti-Freudian; and Peter Swales, a former assistant to the Rolling Stones and indefatigable researcher. Each of them thinks they know the truth about Freud, and each needs the help of the other. Malcolm endeavours to untangle the causes of their rivalry and soured friendships, while the flaws and mysteries of Freud’s early work tower in the background.

    Re: Masson vs Malcolm

    When it was published, Masson, the former project director of the archives, filed a $10m libel lawsuit, claiming that Malcolm had fabricated several quotes attributed to him. Though Malcolm was unable to provide proof of the quotes, after a decade of proceedings, a jury finally decided in Malcolm’s favour in 1994. Though Malcolm later claimed she had found a misplaced notebook containing some of the quotes, the case shadowed her for years, with journalists voicing scepticism at her methods.

    Jacques Barzun and Friends

    Tuesday, March 30th, 2021
  • Jacques Barzun and Friend (American Scholar)
    What did a distinguished historian, and possibly a great man, see in an unkempt young would-be writer?
    By Arthur Krystal | March 23, 2021

    More important, he had a soothing effect on me. I was calmer in his presence, as if the world wasn’t all about struggle, competition, and jockeying for position. Somehow he seemed detached from such things, and it was a detachment that subtly transferred to me. And when I think back on how little I knew then and how well I thought of myself (the two obviously went hand-in-hand), I see that he came along at a moment when I needed someone who represented what adulthood could be like, even if I sensed that my own would be very different. And so, for 40 years, whenever I heard his distinct but slightly throaty voice, the world made a little bit more sense, and it was a pleasure to make him laugh.


  • Jacques Barzun, 30 Nov 1907 – 25 Oct 2012
    Historian & Scholar dies at 104 (NYtimes)

    Jacques Barzun (on vimeo)

    The Achievement of Jacques Barzun (The First Things)

    Cynthia Ozick – “the last of the thoroughgoing generalists,”

  • My notion about any artist is that we honor him best by reading him, by playing his music, by seeing his plays or by looking at his pictures. We don’t need to fall all over ourselves with adjectives and epithets. Let’s play him more.
    — Jacques Barzun, in an interview with John C. Tibbetts

    Barzun 100 (a blog dedicted to Barzun)

  • Darwin Marx Wagner
    (Cover by Leonard Baskin, Typography by Edward Gorey)

    Update: Endless Rewriting (Another article from American Scholar).

    When a novice writer received a letter from Jacques Barzun, asking her to write a book, how could she have known what she was in for?
    By Helen Hazen

  • Dying Young, Pascale Ogier, Full Moon & Ghost Story

    Friday, February 19th, 2021
  • Pascale Ogier and Derrida from this amazing site.


    (Ghost Dance a Documentary film )

  • Pascale Ogier wiki

    For her performance in director Éric Rohmer’s film Full Moon in Paris, Ogier was nominated for a César Award for Best Actress at the 10th César Awards and won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the 41st Venice International Film Festival. Shortly afterwards, on the day before she was to celebrate her 26th birthday, Ogier died of a heart attack probably caused by a heart murmur condition she had since age 12, combined with drug use.
    Ogier is buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. The film Down by Law (1986) is dedicated to her.

  • “We are still in mourning. One month since Pascale Ogier died in her sleep. Still, nothing can soften the intolerable cruelty of that news. Around her lovely face, memory cannot yet set in. Pascale lives on.
    When death comes, the grace of the young woman still spreads throughout the city. Nothing can prevent it; nothing can contain it. A great 25-year-old actress was born, as sumptuous and simple as a Renaissance castle on the banks of the Loire River.”
    Marguerite Duras, 30 November 1984, Libération.


  • (Full Moon in Paris directed by Eric Rhomer)

    Richard Brody on Eric Rohmer and Pascale Ogier


    Mother and Daughter (Bull Ogier and Pascale Ogier)

  • (Repost – Jacques Rivette archive)
    Another photo of Pascale and Bull Ogier

    23 Photos of Pascale Ogier

    RIP Mary Catherine Bateson – Daughter of Mead & Bateson

    Friday, January 15th, 2021
  • Mary Catherine Bateson (wiki)

    Mary Catherine Bateson (December 8, 1939 – January 2, 2021) was an American writer and cultural anthropologist.

    MCBateson

    We Are Not What We Know but What We are Willing to Learn.

    Legacy Obit

  • Edge obit – Mary Catherine Bateson: Systems Thinker

  • Bateson & Mead

  • >

    Thank you Mary Catherine Bateson, this reader devoured her books, she was passionate.

    Decoding of Inca Knots by Manny Medrano

    Wednesday, July 15th, 2020

  • Manny Medrano ’19, right, explains the meaning of quipus knots while holding a model. Quipus are knots that Incas used to record censuses, etc., and there are only 1000 left in the world. Medrano is the first name on the paper he co-wrote with Professor Gary Urton, left, Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Pre-Columbian Studies, that is being published in EthnoJournal.
    Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer

    The College Student Decoded the data in Inca Knots

    Quipu

    Nature is Healing Covid Meme

    Why Greogory Bateson Matters

    Baba Ram Dass died peacefully at home in Maui on December 22, 2019

    Monday, December 23rd, 2019
  • Richard Alpert
    (Photo via Tell Truth Love Everybody )

  • Thank you for everything Baba Ram Dass (Richard Alpert).
    Attended his lecture and shook hands with him. I recommended his Grist for the Mill to a troubled teenager.. the book changed his life around..he got it.

  • Wiki

    Tricycle

    Roland Barthes – Notes on Mourning & Neil Young in the Desert

    Tuesday, November 12th, 2019

  • Notes on mourning. By Roland Barthes
    September 6, 2010

    Roland Barthes – A Cruel Country – The New Yorker

    Roland Barthes as an Actor

    Mythologies

    What I hide by my language, my body utters (See a Necktie Skirt)

    Camera Lucida

  • Jacques Derrida paid ironic homage to Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” in his essay “The Deaths of Roland Barthes”


  • (Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva in China, 1974)

    Writing Degree Zero

    Iconographie (more photos)

    When Barthes was Thackeray

  • !DennisNeil
    Neil Young in the desert, photo by Dennis Hopper

    Happy birthday Neil Young!