Vitro Nasu

About a week ago I saw the film My Name is Sabina Spielrein.

Sabina Spielrein stands out, both for the role she played in the rift between Freud and Carl Jung and because—no mere victim—she became a devoted convert to psychoanalysis’s cause. Drawing upon letters found in a Swiss basement in 1977, Elisabeth Márton’s documentary vividly illuminates a complex woman whose achievements were long relegated to the footnotes of history. -Jung Love: Vivid Doc Untangles an Affair of Hearts and Minds (Villagevoice)

Then I found out that there was an Italian film adaptation of her life which was on (youtube,1 2)

Sabina Spielrein - Russia, 1885-1942 (World Peaple’s Blog)

Jung to Freud, 4 June 1909: ‘Spielrein is the person I wrote you about. … She was, of course, systematically planning my seduction, which I considered inopportune. Now she is seeking revenge.’
(There are several books written about Freud, Jung and Sabina Spielrein, here is an article to get an introduction of Sabina Spielrein life story.)

It is interesting to note Lou Andreas Salome and Sabine Spielrein the two Russian intellectual women who had affairs with famous thinkers both became Freudian psychoanalysts and authors.

Sabina was born two decades later than Lou Andreas Salome, she had to endure the rise of Nazism and she and her family were killed by the Nazis troops.

Lou Andreas Salome and Freud
Lou on the other hand died in the late 30’s, saw the birth of Psychoanalysis and the rise of Nazism but not the Holocaust.
She became first known for her affairs with Nietzsche and Rainer Maria Rilke, and later her work as Freudian analyst came to light with the publication of her correspondence with Freud.

This I did not know.

It was rumored that Ibsen had modeled her famous Hedda Gabler, who desired to live like a man, after her, but Andreas-Salomé expressed particular dislike of the character: “She resembles a ravenous wolf on which a sheep’s skin has been growing for a very long time and who has forfeited its predatory strength only to keep its predatory soul.” (via)

Before meeting the founder of psychoanalysis, Andreas-Salomé had published a study of sexual love, Die Erotik (1911). In 1912 she asked in a letter to Freud his permission to come to Vienna for psychoanalytical training. Andreas-Salomé was still in her fifties, and youthful in appearance and when Freud first encountered her. He warned one of his younger followers that she was “a woman of dangerous intelligence” but that “all the tracks around her go into the Lion’s den but none come out.”

Poet and Muse.(The Nation) (Photos of Andreas Salome and Rilke)

They became lovers and constant companions for the next few years in a typically counter cultural, proto-hippie, turn-of-the-century way, walking barefoot through the woods, eating fruit paps with yogurt, studying religion as an artistic experience and art as a form of religion. Tolstoy, whom they traveled to Russia to meet, was their patron saint.

One amusing episode that I read somewhere long ago was that Tolstoy who was courted by Lou and Rilke, was not too impressed with Rilke, when they went to see Tolstoy, the great thinker and novelist. Tolstoy was more interested in Lou’s husband, an orientalist and a philologist.

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Self Portrait of Stanley Kubrick (Drama and Shadows: Photographs 1945-1950. Phaidon Press. ISBN 0-7148-4438-1. 2005. Originally taken for Look Magazine.)

The Real Stanley Kubrick by Michael Herr (Vanity Fair)

He was thinking about making a war movie next, but he wasn’t sure which war, and in fact, now that he mentioned it, not even so sure he wanted to make a war movie at all.
He called me a couple of nights later to ask me if I’d read any Jung. I had. Was I familiar with the concept of the Shadow, our hidden dark side? I assured him that I was. We did half an hour on the Shadow, and how he really wanted to get it into his war picture.

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Carl Jung and Arthur Schnitzler

And then there was this other book he was fascinated by - he was fairly sure I’d never heard of it - Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Traumnovelle, which means Dream Novel, meaninglessly called Rhapsody in the only English edition available at that time. He’d read it more than 20 years before, and bought the rights to it in the early 70s (it’s the book that Eyes Wide Shut is based on), and the reason I’d probably never heard of it (he started to laugh) was that he’d bought up every single existing copy of it. Maybe he’d send me one. I could read it and tell him what I thought.

Related links
Eyes Wide Shut - Strange German Version (Youtube)

The Jungian Things - a Discussion

Stanley Kubrick shared a birthday with Jung and Huxley.

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Weegee

Much like Weegee, Stanley Kubrick started his career as a photographer on the streets of New York & contributed era defining shots to LIFE magazine. Kubrick admired Weegee’s photographs & during shooting of Doctor Strangelove employed him as a stills photographer. When Peter Sellers heard Weegee speak he apparently used Weegee’s peculiar voice as the basis for that of Dr Strangelove!

Another photo of Kubrick and Weegee (Lovely Water Parade)

Dr. Strangelove - (John Edward’s favorite film).

Let us celebrate September 11 birthday boys - D. H. Lawrence, Arvo Part and Adorno.

Helen Mirren plays Frieda Lawrence

Paasion and Heartbeat (previous post on Lawrence includes a photo of Frieda and Lorenzo and the list of adaptation of his novels to cinema.)

Arvo Pärt: Silouans Song / Vienna Philharmonic Women

Touch, Sunday and Solitude with Japanese subtitles on youtube.
Arvo Pärt : 24 Preludes for a Fugue (2, 3, 4 of 29)
(documentary film (2005) films by Dorian Supin about Arvo Pärt to be released on DVD. )

Arvo Pärt : 24 Preludes for a Fugue (5, 6, 7 of 29)

Tabla Rasa-Miguel Robles/Arvo Part (Dance on Youtube)

Solo dance Spiegel im Spiegel

The Jargon of Authenticity

In his book “The Jargon of Authenticity,” Theodor Adorno discusses what he considers to be a major fallacy with all of society: the way we talk. It is his opinion and observance that we speak in such a way as to bring others down while at the same time raising ourselves up. “The jargon — objectively speaking, a system — uses disorganization as its principle of organization, the breakdown of language into words in themselves.” The jargon is a tool used by society in order to distinguish the few from the many, to distinguish “my” class from “your” class.

Adorno

Minima Moralia

I would like to draw attention to this great collection of reflections on a damaged life, wherein Adorno writes like a tragic poet, occasionally far away from the hassles of Marxism and Commodity Fetishism. Dedicated to his friend Max Horkheimer, the book begins with an epigram, life does not live. The book is in three parts with small chapters, the first of which is called For Marcel Proust. The book was written in America, when Adorno was in exile, when he became known as Teddy. The book has numerous anecdotes, parables and aphorisms and mostly reflections on exile, on damaged lives.

Adorno’s Minima Moralia is a favorite of this poet -12 or 20 questions: with Joshua Marie Wilkinson

On this Day

Aug 6, 1945 or see Images from Mark Young

John, Richard, Robert, Andy and Howard, all were born on Aug 6.
Click on the links below to find out about them. Who is your favorite?
John married Katherine Mansfield, a great editor and a pacifist.
(Her love letter to John is here.)

Richard was the liberal at Columbia (1916)

This Silent Star with 2000 pimples was born on 1928.

Heaven Knows he is Dead Man, Robert played Philip Marlow when he was alive.

This master of colors and brushstrokes was born on 1932

And brother of Simone Weil and a great mathematician Andre Weil died on Aug 6, 1998.

Most mathematicians lead rather staid lives; Weil’s was anything but. He spent a couple of years in India in the 1930’s, and was imprisoned in Finland on suspicion of being a Russian spy during World War II.

He was a child prodigy who might have intimidated Simone Weil. Was he the reason why she became anorexic and was so hard on herself? She was extraordinary, a great thinker and a saint.
A blurry photo of Andre and Simone Weil

People used to say of Simone: “She’s Andre Weil’s sister.” But as time went by, towards the end of her life, people began saying of Andre: “He’s Simone Weil’s brother.” The impact of her posthumously published texts however soon surprised even her family.(Via)

a.. “God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it.”
b.. “Weil’s Law of Faculties: First rate people hire other first rate
people. Second rate people hire third rate people. Third rate people hire fifth rate people.”
Andre Weil

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Watch Episode One: Humans beings will always betray you.

BBC’s Adam Curtis presents an intellectual history of the right since WWII in a series of three parts. The left is largely silent in this period with intellectual leaders Hofstadter and John Kenneth Galbraith dying to be replaced by no one. During this time, the right has so dominated the field of ideas that even Labour’s Tony Blair and the Democrat’s Bill Clinton were largely co opted as they abandoned long standing left ideals, undermining economic theory, important government regulation, and social safety nets. Curtis notes the dangerous concentration of wealth and power by a new elite and the general decline in welfare for the masses in the West. Curtis also shows how players learn to “game” or beat any attempt at objective metricization such as mental health diagnosis, Vietnam body counts, modern corporate accounting, British National Health care. Featured “thinkers” are;

John Nash game theory, paranoia and the cold war, Rand Corp. prisoner’s dilemma

Friedrich von Hayek Austrian school, fear of institutions East or West

R.D. Laing, Rosenhan Thud experiment discrediting psychology leading to metricization of diagnostics and medication of deviance

James M. Buchanan fear of danger of zealots and need for self interest motivation

Alain Enthoven Rand Corp. metricize management influenced McNamara, Thatcher

Thomas Schelling Game theorist nuclear deterrent models

Isaiah Berlin. Russian Jew Defined negative liberty as the absence of constraints on, or interference possible action. Greater “negative freedom” meant fewer restrictions on possible action. Associated positive liberty with the idea of self-mastery, or the capacity to determine oneself, to be in control of one’s destiny. influenced Tony Blair

Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin dismantle social safety nets for short term economic gains influenced Clinton

Episode Two: You can only trust the numbers.

Episode Three: We will force you to be free.

Related links
Cry Freedom (Guardian)

In the cold war paranoia made sense, but a bold new documentary argues that the west has become trapped in a false idea of what it means to be human. By Oliver Burkeman

R.D Laing, Knots

I found this documentary at bicyclemark

Richard Rorty 1931-2007

Richard Rorty, the leading American philosopher and heir to the pragmatist tradition, passed away on Friday, June 8. (via Long-Sunday)

“He admired people deeply, loved literature passionately and took deep pleasure in his work. (Philosopher couldn’t be ignored, SF Chronicle)

Philosopher, poet and friend, obit from Jürgen Habermas

Requiem for a Heavyweight, obit from McLemee.

The man had chutzpah.

A collection of links and a video on Rorty

A Queasy Agnosticism - Richard Rorty reviews Saturday by Ian McEwan

The tragedy of the modern West is that it exhausted its strength before being able to achieve its ideals. The spiritual life of secularist Westerners centered on hope for the realization of those ideals. As that hope diminishes, their life becomes smaller and meaner. Hope is restricted to little, private things—and is increasingly being replaced by fear.

But his novel helps bring us up-to-date about ourselves. It makes vivid both our uneasiness about the future and our queasy, debilitating agnosticism about matters of justice and redistributed wealth.

Richard Rorty did not get Freud and Lacan.
Interview of Richard Rorty by Josefina Ayerza

Via Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The centerpiece of Rorty’s critique is the provocative account offered in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979, hereafter PMN). In this book, and in the closely related essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982, hereafter CP), Rorty’s principal target is the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mental mirroring of a mind-external world. Providing a contrasting image of philosophy, Rorty has sought to integrate and apply the milestone achievements of Dewey, Hegel and Darwin in a pragmatist synthesis of historicism and naturalism.

Rorty on Derrida via Pas audela

I feel greatly indebted to Heidegger and Derrida for enabling me to read the canonical works of Western philosophy with fresh eyes. Unlike the mean-spirited Nazi Heidegger, though, Derrida was not only a good social democrat, but a generous and tolerant man. Like Kierkegaard, he had a bubbling wit and the ability to make fun of himself.

Obit from Todd Gitlin

I felt drawn to Rorty’s essays again and again—not least because they ranged far and wide (he ended up as a professor of comparative literature), and were, whatever his subject, elegant and approachable, closely argued and audacious at once; but also because he put his fingers squarely on the central thought dilemmas (or multilemmas) of our time, and because he didn’t use philosophy as a dodge from politics—sensible liberal social-democratic politics at that.

Happy Birthday
Edward T Hall

From 1933 to 1937, famed anthropologist Edward T. Hall lived and worked on the Navajo and Hopi reservations in Arizona. West of the Thirties is the story of Edward as a young man discovering his way in what might have been another century and another world, a frontier where four cultures - Navajo, Hopi, Hispanic and Anglo - clashed.

We play out our own paradigms until we learn another. But this was not something that I learned in class. When I was on the reservation, figuring out how to work with the Hopis and the Navajos, this is where I found out they were entirely different. And that imposing my paradigm on others would not work
Gifts of Wisdom: An Interview with Dr. Edward T. Hall | The Edge

Beyond Culture

More words of wisdom from Edward T Hall.

Now, you can’t tell me, we have the only God in the whole world. You can’t tell me that nobody else has God.

The future for us is the foreseeable future. The South Asian, however, feels that it is perfectly realistic to think of a ‘long time’ in terms of thousands of years.

The information is in the people, not in your head.

The reason man does not experience his true cultural self is that until he experiences another self as valid he has little basis for validating his own self.

Two points that are very important points to remember and ask: Is it real and does it work?

We should never denigrate any other culture but rather help people to understand the relationship between their own culture and the dominant culture. When you understand another culture or language, it does not mean that you have to lose your own culture.

We tend to do a lot of top down, micro-managing. In other words, we use the reptilian model.

You are the instrument of research.

About Context, Space, and Time, …… Hall’s Model here.

There is a misunderstanding of course, that is the reason why I previously hesitated to talk about The Matrix…. ( via greencinedaily.)

Jean Beaudrillard
(via)

The pataphysical spirit is the nail in the tire — the world, a wolf’s mouth (lupo vesce). La gidouille is also a hot-air balloon, a nebulous or even a perfect sphere of knowledge — the intestinal sphere of the sun. There is nothing to take away from death. Does a tire die? It renders its tire soul. Flatulence is at the origin of the breath.
1ooo days of theory - Pataphysics by J. Baudrillard via Ctheory.

Pataphysics is the absurdist pseudo-philosophy/ideology devised by Alfred Jarry.

By way of the understanding Artaud’s impact on the young Baudrillard, it may be valuable to recall Artaud’s proposal in Le Théâtre et Son Double (The Theatre and its Double) that art (in his case drama) must be a means of influencing the human organism and directly altering consciousness by engaging the audience in a ritualistic-like trance.
-Reviewed by Joseph Nechvatal

The Spirit of Jean Baudrillard - an obit from Arthur Kroker of Ctheory

In his thought there was always something simultaneously futuristic and ancient: futuristic because his theorization of the culture of simulation ran parallel to the great scientific discoveries of our time, specifically the radical transformation of culture and society under the impact of the speed of light-time and light-space; and ancient because Baudrillard was haunted by the enigma of pataphysics, namely the magical ascent of the reality-principle itself into the language of artifice, seduction and terror.

‘My death is everywhere, my death dreams’ - K-Punk

Antigram

In any case, what eventually transpired was the monstrous birth of a New York “Simulationist” school, principally composed of the artists Peter Halley, Jeff Koons, Ross Bleckner, Sherrie Levine, and far more principally marketed and masterminded by freelance curators Collins & Milazzo.

Jean Sees Dead People by Scott McLemee (Jan, 2001)

Remember Baurillard by Scott McLemee (March 14, 2007)

…And death made him laugh.

Continental Drift (via Cyrano)

(Question to J.B) - France chose not to send soldiers to Iraq, which has real meaning for countless individual soldiers, for their families and for the state.
J.B. Ah, yes. We are “against” the war because it is not our war. But in Algeria, it was the same. America didn’t send soldiers when we fought the Algerian war. France and America are on the same side. There is only one side.

Sainte Beuve

Then, on one of my trips to Japan, I was given a camera, and I began to try it out a bit, taking photographs from the plane on the return journey.
I like photography as something completely empty, ‘irreal’, as something that preserves the idea of a silent apparition.
Baudrillard’s Photography: A Hyperreal Disappearance Into The Object?

Artwork: happy famous Artists
tractatus logos philosophicus - baudrillard/disneyland
embroidery on canvas

Happy Birthday, Gabo! He turns 80 today. (BBC)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (El amor en los tiempos del colera)
Gabo on youtube here
For non-Spanish speaking people one of the commenters on youtube helped translate Gabo’s words.

he says, the men have three sort of lives: the public live, the personal live and the secret live; the women are present in three of them.
En general the people think in their relationships: the comunication is the solution of all troubles,but Gavo thinks when the couples have a talk they end fighting; is better to forget and to continuo.
After he understood that, he never had discussion with any woman!!

The mysteries of Bill Clinton by Gabo from Salon

During his first campaign, Clinton had mentioned that his favorite book was “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” I said at the time — and I was quoted in print — that I thought he had said it simply to pull in the Latin vote. He had not forgotten — after greeting me on Martha’s Vineyard, he at once assured me that what he said had been quite sincere.

Gabo vs Mario Vargas Llosa - Two giants of literature, one black eye and 30 years of silence

Gabo shares a birthday with Wes Montgomery, the great Jazz innovator. Wes (John Leslie “Wes” Montgomery born 6 March 1923 in Indianapolis, Indiana; died 15 June 1968, also in Indianapolis)

In Your Own Sweet Way

More Wes - Four on Six with Wynton Kelly(piano)

William James On the Character of Artists

To artist Sarah Wyman Whitman, William James said; “Looked at from one point of view, the artist was like any other man, except for the greater rapidity of his intuitions; what he saw at once others saw more slowly.”

Agog has a new post:
William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, Robert D. Richardson, 2006

164 years ago from today, my favorite thinker William James was born. He primarily was interested in the inner lives of others.

Henry James and William James

Birthday: January 11, 1842 William James
Wife: Alice James
Brother: Henry James (Colm Toibin’s Novel on Henry is here).
Sister: Alice James (Sontag wrote a play Alice in Bed)

“A famously open mind: The education of the protean William James is the focus of a new biography” says the Boston Globe on this new biography by Robert Richardson (youtubed below).

William james at Harvard

Carl Jung’s letter

Previous post on James with varieties of links.

Two Artauds
(Marat played by Artaud from Abel Gance’s Napoleon.)

It’s the birthday (Sept 4, 1896-1948) of Antonin Artuad,
Actor, director, writer, artist, founder of the “theatre of cruelty”.

Patti Smith and Artaud page.

A visionary and a mystic. He saw the theatre as a ritual able to give rise to a numinous experience within the spectator.

To Have Done with the Judgement of God, a radio play by Antonin Artaud

And war is wonderful, isn’t it?
For it’s war, isn’t it, that the Americans have been preparing for
and are preparing for this way step by step.
In order to defend this senseless manufacture from all competition
that could not fail to arise on all sides,
one must have soldiers, armies, airplanes, battleships,
hence this sperm
which it seems the governments of America have had the effrontery
to think of.

In Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Artaud acted as the monk Jean Massieu.

Godard perfectly uses “The Passion of Jeanne D’Arc in Vivre Sa Vie.

Two last drawings by Artaud.

Derrida and Artaud

Derrida emphasized the
performative aspect of the work, stating
that “All of Artaud’s works participate in
an urge to DO something not just EXPRESS
something.” They “produce an event in the
act of writing and drawing … they are
events directed at an addressee.” Instead
of projecting a “French” sensibility
they, evoke an “immediately universal glosso-
poetics.” Thus countering the reductive
view that Artaud’s works are signs of
pathology, Derrida asserted that they are
“not only lucid–they illuminate us on what
it means to be dispossessed.”

2001 - Derrida’s discussion on Artaud

The Minotaur 1946 graphite and wax crayon by Antonin Artaud

A New Scène Seen Anew:Representation and Cruelty in Derrida’s Artaud
by Colin Russell

Glossopoeia, which is neither an imitative language nor a creation of names, takes us back to the borderline of the moment when the word has not yet been born, when articulation is no longer a shout but not yet discourse, when repetition is almost impossible, and along with it, language in general: the separation of concept and sound, of signified and signifier, of the pneumatical and the grammatical, the freedom of translation and tradition, the movement of interpretation, the difference between the soul and the body, the master and the slave, God and man, author and actor. This is the eve of the origin of languages, and of the dialogue between theology and humanism whose inextinguishable reoccurence has never not been maintained by the metaphysics of Western theater. (Derrida 240)

Who am I? Where do I come from? I am Antonin Artaud(The page includes three great drawings.)

French site dedicated to Artaud - with many interesting photos.

West Virginia University performance text (excerpted) / July 27 2006

So one can move in ways that she cannot move, and remain in air outside of gravity. EVERY HUMAN BEING IS THE RESULT OF INTERMINABLE SADNESS. These
images can be taken apart just like Al Capone.

World War II was very beautiful… bombers going from England to
Germany… I imagine Iraq is very beautiful too…

In another minute this will look like a dance… a modern dance.. with
mysterious black figures and electronic music…

more dance and more dance… someting about Krishna here but I don’t want
to go there -

Read the whole thing here.

The sad text