Archive for the 'Philosophy/Psychology' Category

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on Her life & on Her work with Derrida

Tuesday, April 30th, 2019
  • G.C. Spivak

    Interview Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

    Because of the unusualness of my parents…my mother was very active. When the refugees from the newly created state of East Pakistan came in the millions into Calcutta at Independence at 5:00am in the morning she was in the railway station helping with rehabilitation. She helped establish a nunnery particularly for educated middle-class women who really wanted to get out of their lives, etc. She ran the first working women’s hostel in Calcutta so well that even the state asked her, “Mrs. Chakravorty, how do you do it? We failed!”

    Photo via

    Spivak – Interview

    Has your understanding of Derrida’s book changed over the four decades since you first translated it?

    So I found. When I began, I didn’t notice how critical the book was of “Eurocentrism” because the word in 1967 was not so common. Derrida was an Algerian Jew, born before World War II, who was actually encountering Western philosophy from the inside. A brilliant man, he was looking at its Eurocentrism.

    He also said a very powerful thing about African orality: they could remember seven generations back; we’ve lost that capacity. There, “writing” takes place on the psychic material called “memory.” Derrida connects this to Freud. So he was saying, look at reality carefully. It’s coded so that other people, even if they’re not present, can understand what we are saying. He looked at how this was suppressed in philosophical traditions.

  • Ornette Coleman and Derrida

  • Derrida was from Algeria – Previous post, Far from Men Viggo’s film about Algeria

    Bride & Groom – Yves Klein & Rotrout, R. D.Laing & Jutta – Happy Valentine’s Day!

    Wednesday, February 13th, 2019

  • Yves Klein & Rotrout

    In 1962, Rotraut and Klein married in Paris. Klein died six months later, while Rotraut was pregnant with their son’

    Rotrout divides her time between Phoenix, Arizona, Paris and Sydney Australia.
    Brother of Rotrout Uecker is Gunter Uecker

  • My Paintings are only the ashes of my art – Yves Klein


  • Jutta and R. D.Laing.

    Mad to be Normal – reviewed by Psychology Today

    Gabriel Byrne played a mad patient in Mad to be Normal.

  • Happy Valentine’s day!

  • RIP Paul Virilio, An Aesthetic Philosopher of Bunker Archeology

    Wednesday, September 26th, 2018
  • Frieze

    How Philosopher Paul Virilio (1932–2018) Spoke to an Age of Acceleration and Total War


  • Claude Parent and Paul Virilio


    via


  • Paul Virilio (wiki) (French: [viʁiljo]; 4 January 1932 – 10 September 2018)[3] was a French cultural theorist, urbanist, and aesthetic philosopher. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military.
    According to two geographers, Virilio was a “historian of warfare, technology and photography, a philosopher of architecture, military strategy and cinema, and a politically engaged provocative commentator on history, terrorism, mass media and human-machine relations

  • Bunker Archeology

    Magdalene Jetelova
    – in which she laser-projected select quotations from, what else, Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology onto the half-submerged fortifications found scattered along Normandy’s beaches.

    Magdalene Jetalova (Czech artist)

  • Nusch Eluard, René Char & Cafe Society -2018

    Thursday, June 21st, 2018
  • Nusch Eluard
    The combustive Nusch Eluard Born: June 21, 1906

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    René Char – Lucidity is the Wound Closest to the Sun

    René Char with Picasso 1a_Char-Caws_Ess#DEF0A
    Protesting with Picasso on the heights of the Mont Ventoux against the nuclear installations.

    Resistance in Every way

    obéissez à vos cochons qui existent;
    j’obéis à mes dieux qui n’existent point.

    obey your pigs who exist;
    I obey my gods who do not.

  • Coffee & Cigarettes, Cafe Society

    <> <> <> 1aasartreBeauvoir
    Simone de Beauvoir – Paris with Sartre, Chicago with Nelson Algren.

  • 1aasartre-beauvoir-picasso-dog
    (Picasso, Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus and Picasso’s dog)

  • The Horror of Tulips, Zizek has the Answer + Peter Brook, The Remarkable Man is 93

    Wednesday, March 21st, 2018
  • Happy birthday S. Zizek March 21 1949

    See young Zizek here. 1aalacaZizek
    Lacanian Sympton

    Scroll down – Sophie Fiennes (sister of Ralph Fiennes directed Zizek.)

  • The Duty of Philosophy? Zizek has the answer.

  • Peter Brook is 93 –

    Peter Brook’s Filmography

    1953, The Beggar’s Opera
    1960, Moderato Cantabile (UK title Seven Days… Seven Nights)
    1963, Lord of the Flies
    1967, Ride of the Valkyrie
    1967, Marat/Sade
    1968, Tell Me Lies
    1971, King Lear
    1979, Meetings with Remarkable Men
    1979, Mesure pour mesure
    1982, La Cerisaie
    1983, La Tragédie de Carmen
    1989, The Mahabharata
    2002, The Tragedy of Hamlet (TV)

    L’avventura
    Moderate CantabileL'avventura and Moderate Cantabile
    Both film nominated at Cannes 60.

    Jeanne Moreau and Jean Paul Belmondo in Moderate Cantabile directed by Peter Brook, an adaptation of a story by Marguerite Duras.

    See “on the bench” from Moderate Cantabile (youtube)

    Alain Locke, The Harvard Professor/Philosopher & The Harlem Renaissance

    Tuesday, February 27th, 2018
  • 1alainLangston

  • The Harlem Renaissance produced three of America’s most beloved writers—the poets Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, and the Baha’i philosopher, Alain Locke. These three men, close friends throughout their lives, completely changed America’s–and the world’s–perceptions about what black people could accomplish as artists and intellectuals.

    Alain Locke( and Langston Hughes- via)

  • Art and Activism (Harvard) by Adam Kirsch

    Rediscovering Alain Locke and the project of black self-realization

  • Alain Locke Alain-Locke-793x1024

    Photo by Gordon Parks

    Alain Locke is widely acknowledged as the intellectual architect of the Harlem Renaissance (also known as the New Negro movement). Locke eloquently elaborated on the concept of the New Negro, an urbane individual who is knowledgeable and proud of his or her history and aware of his or her potential and power as a citizen in a democratic society. Locke graduated from Harvard College in 1907 and was the first black Rhodes Scholar. He received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard in 1918 and went on to be a professor of philosophy at Howard University.(via)

  • Alain Locke & Eleanor Alain-Locke-and-Eleanor-Roosevelt
    (photo via Black Plato on World Citizenship )

  • The New Negro – An Interpretation edited by Alain Locke

  • RIP William Gass (1924-2017), Rilke & Paul Valéry were His Guiding Lights

    Sunday, December 17th, 2017
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    William Gaddis and William Gass photo by Mary Gass
    New Yorker – the Radical Criticism of William Gass

    William Gass, who died this week, argued that the charge of a writer was not to relate a world but to create one—a world of sound, of the melody made when syllables collid

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    William Gass being painted by Philip Guston before a reading in 1969. Photograph: Digital Gateway Image Collections
    Guardian on Gass

  • Four interviews of William Gass
    William Gass’ interview from Believer Magazine.
    “But I do have a very conscious desire not to be academic. I’m antiacademic. I hate jargon. I hate that sort of pretension. I am a person who [commits] breaches of decorum—not in private life, but in my work. They are part of my mode of operation. That kind of playfulness is part of my nature in general. The paradox that, in a way, to take something very seriously, you can’t always be serious about it..” (via 3quarksdaily).
    On Teaching and writing, interviewed by Jan Garden Castro.
    “Gass: I’m interested in making a self-contained system of concepts, ideas that will then define a kind of consciousness. It’s a way of inventing a consciousness by supplying someone with the structure and content of an experience. So I make that up and create that consciousness. It’s not a consciousness of the world; it’s a consciousness of the work.”
    On Wittgenstein,
    “The intellectual integrity he displayed was awesome, absolutely. I was watching not just a really great mind in operation but also an absolutely honest and pure intellect. I don’t think he was an honest and pure person, but he had that intellect, and you saw it. It was like seeing a great artist in operation—absolute scruple. No second-rate stuff would be permitted. That was really impressive. Again, it was an exemplification. Socrates embodies that way; I’m sure Spinoza must have. And Wittgenstein was the complete embodiment of that quest in himself.”

    From Gadfly an interview on William Gass in 1998 – “The Tunnel may well be the greatest prose performance since Nabokov’s Pale Fire, but only the most stalwart readers will be able to last the full trip through Kohler’s anti‑Semitic, sexually-depraved and bathroom‑humor obsessed world. ”

    “For instance, I can show in what way a sentence by Henry James “is” a spiral staircase. It has the same thought. And my mind works that way. (From Center for book culture – W.G interviewed by Arthur M. Saltzman)

    1aallenGassMiller

    William H. Gass, Allan Ginsberg, and Arthur Miller outside the apartment house of Fyodor Dostoevsky in St. Petersburg, Russia, 1985

    William H Gass (The Soul inside the sentence)

    Item (“The Surface of the City” Slide Photographs)

    Gass as Photographer

    Navy

  • 1aPaulValeryRilke

    Rilke and Paul Valéry

    Paul Valery’s influence on William Gass

    In William H. Gass’s “Art of Fiction” interview, in 1976, he declared two writers to be his guiding lights—the “two horses” he was now “try[ing] to manage”: Ranier Maria Rilke and Paul Valéry. He added, “Intellectually, Valéry is still the person I admire most among artists I admire most; but when it comes to the fashioning of my own work now, I am aiming at a Rilkean kind of celebrational object, thing, Dinge”

    Nise” The Matter of Heart”, Brazilian film on Nise da Silveira a Jungian Therapist

    Tuesday, October 24th, 2017
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    via

    Wiki

    Nise da Silveira was a Brazilian psychiatrist, student of Carl Jung.
    She devoted her life to psychiatry and never was in agreement with the aggressive forms of treatment of her time such as commitment to psychiatric hospitals, electroshock, insulin therapy and lobotomy.

    In 1952 she founded the Museum of Images of the Unconscious, in Rio de Janeiro, a study and research center that collected the works produced in painting and modeling studios. Through her work, Nise da Silveira introduced Jungian psychology in Brazil.

    1aanise-the-heart-of-madness
    Nise “The Matter of Heart” trailer here.

    UCLA In’tl

    Gloria Pires was actually Berliner’s second choice for the lead, even though her performance turned out to be exactly what he wanted. Pires is one of the most famous actresses in Brazil and is the only big name in the film, because, said Berliner, the filmmaking team went to great lengths to cast actors who were mostly unknown.

    1aanise1-superJumbo

    NYtimes review

    The movie, full of characters behaving erratically, could easily have taken on the aura of a freak show, but the director, Roberto Berliner, somehow stays respectful of the subject matter even while depicting extreme psychiatric conditions. It’s a study of courageous innovation against an entrenched medical orthodoxy.

    “Our job is to cure patients, not comfort them,” one colleague chastises.

    “My instrument is a brush,” Dr. Silveira replies curtly. “Yours is an ice pick.”
    Nise: The Heart of Madness

    Gloria Pires played a Brazilian architect and a lover of Elizabeth Bishop in Reaching for the Moon. (Previous post – see the trailer)

    The Passing of Kate Millett – Artist, Author, a Pioneer Feminist at 82 -(Sept 14, 1934 – Sept 6, 2017)

    Thursday, September 7th, 2017
  • Kate Millet by Alice Neel – 1970

  • Remembering Kate Millett by Katharine Stimpson

  • Kate Millett an influential feminist writer is dead at 82 (NYtimes)

    .

    Katherine Murray Millett was born on Sept 14, 1934, in St. Paul.
    She attended Oxford University and was the first American woman to be awarded a postgraduate degree with first-class honors after studying at St Hilda’s College, Oxford.
    The feminist, human rights, peace, civil rights, and anti-psychiatry movements were some of Millett’s principal causes. Her books were motivated by her activism, such as woman’s rights and mental health reform, and several were autobiographical memoirs that explored her sexuality, mental health, and relationships. Mother Millett and The Loony Bin Trip, for instance, dealt with family issues and the times when she was involuntarily committed to a nursing home. (via her wiki

    1aadinnerkatemillet2
    Dinner for One – 1967 – Kate Millett

    See more art by Kate Millet here

  • “The Basement” was disturbing but I had to read it.
    Here is a review of the Basement by Duncan Mitchell

    Happy Kate katemillett by Hyder in 1994.

    Her homepage is here. – AN INVITATION TO THE WOMEN’S ART COLONY/FARM

    Of course she went to Iran.

    In 1981 Millett published Going to Iran, which was a new journalistic account of a trip she made to Iran in March 1979 to address Iranian feminists on International Women’s Day. The Shah of Iran had just abdicated, and the Ayatollah Khomeini had not yet fully consolidated his power. Nevertheless, Millett was soon expelled by the fundamentalist government for her feminist views. The chronicle is recorded in the rigorously honest style of her earlier works. (via)

  • Kate Millet

    The Return of the Troublemaker (June 2001)

    Society has lost its patience. So why isn’t she more downhearted? She smiles and says it’s because she is having too much fun. “I love making trouble. It’s a wonderful job. You don’t get paid but you have a lot of adventures.”

  • Flying with Kate Millet (previous post)
    Sexual Politics was circulated before the publication of her thesis.

  • Immersive Exhibit “Arcades” Brings Walter Benjamin Back to Life -2017

    Thursday, May 11th, 2017
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    Benjamin’s passport photograph from 1928 – courtesy of the Walter Benjamin Archiv, Berlin.
    Photo via

  • New Yorker(Walter Benjamin’s Unfinished Magnum Opus Revisited)

    Take a Stroll Through Philosopher Walter Benjamin’s Brain at New NY Exhibit

    ‘It’s like the Talmud, there is commentary and sub-commentary’
    Take a stroll through philosopher Walter Benjamin’s brain at new NY exhibit
    His tragic death in the Holocaust cut short the Jewish thinker’s 1,000 page opus.
    Through August 6, the Jewish Museum in New York’s immersive exhibit ‘Arcades’ brings it to life

  • Berlin Benjamin1 Childhood
    Name these children (arcade on FB)

  • Walter Benjamin (W.B for dummies on youtube)

  • Port Bou benjaminportpu
    Border crossing resting place

    On Truth
    Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help. Walter Benjamin

  • The Story Teller by Walter Benjamin (Guardian Review)

  • R I P Robert Pirsig – Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenace + Lila

    Monday, April 24th, 2017
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    Robert M. Pirsig

    “His well known book ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ was rejected by 121 publishers.”

  • Persig 1abob20

    Early photos

    Lila (wiki)

    NYtimes obit

    One of Mr. Pirsig’s central ideas is that so-called ordinary experience and so-called transcendent experience are actually one and the same — and that Westerners only imagine them as separate realms because Plato, Aristotle and other early philosophers came to believe that they were.

    But Plato and Aristotle were wrong, Mr. Pirsig said. Worse, the mind-body dualism, soldered into Western consciousness by the Greeks, fomented a kind of civil war of the mind — stripping rationality of its spiritual underpinnings and spirituality of its reason, and casting each into false conflict with the other.

    In his part gnomic, part mechanic’s style, Mr. Pirsig’s narrator declares that the real world is a seamless continuum of the material and metaphysical.

    “The Buddha, the Godhead,” he writes, “resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.”

    Gramsci & Cultural Hegemony, Portraits by Francis Picabia, Portrait of Strindberg by Munch

    Saturday, January 21st, 2017
  • antonioGLeopoldM

    Portrait of Gramsci by Leopold Mendez

    Antonio Gramsci (Italian Ales (Sardinia), 22 January 1891 – Rome, 27 April 1937) was an Italian writer, politician, political theorist, philosopher, sociologist, and linguist. He was a founding member and onetime leader of the Communist Party of Italy and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime.
    Gramsci was one of the most important Marxist thinkers in the 20th century. He is a notable figure within modern European thought and his writings analyze culture and political leadership. He is known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how states use cultural institutions to maintain power in capitalist societies. (wiki)

    Cultural Hegemony

  • Francis_Picabia,_1919,_Danse_de_Saint-Guy,_The_Little_Review

    Francis Picabia – 22 January 1879 – November 30

    See more Picabia Perpetual Movement (previous post)

  • Gertrude gertrude-stein Stein by Francis Picabia

  • <> <> <> Picabia_Self-portrait_with_hands__1932

  • August Strindberg / Gem. v. Munch
    Portrait of August Strindberg by Edward Munch

  • Ingmar Bergman on August Strindberg (see a video)

    Ingmar and Lena Olin Fršken Julie av Agust Strindberg
    Miss Julie – Ingmar directing Lena Olin

    August Strindberg was born on Jan 22 1849.

  • August Strindberg by Schonberg