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Showing posts from August 7, 2022

revery on transcendence

  Borachio, thou art read In nature and her large philosophy. Observ'st thou not the very self-same course Of revolution, both in man and beast? -          The Atheist’s Tragedy   What is the state of transcendence today? -          One of Derrida’s favorite gambits was to open an article with a totally queer or off kilter sentence: Que vais-je pouvoir inventer encore? For instance. This seems a phrase broken off from a first draft, or an interior monologue, or something eavesdropped upon. Some event to which one was not privy. It sets us, if we are not so irritated that we do not read further, on the path of estrangement, which means hopping, skipping and jumping to an unfamiliar rhythm. -          “They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept.” -          So: what is the state of transcendence today – as opposed to, say, on

variations on the pathetic fallacy

  Although we were going upriver to Blois, that day, we had a couple of hours to kill, so we decided to take the train downriver to Saumur and poke around. We got out at the station and headed up the hill to the bridge, which is mighty long. Its left flank crosses one branch of the Loire river, then it runs through an island, then it crosses the right bank of the river. Saumur is a physically capacious town, with an infrastructure, as a newspaper article in the Petit Temps, December 9, 1893, noted, that could easily support 100,000 people – but like the clothes of   a person who has some wasting disease, the infrastructure is much too large for its current size. What happened to Saumur was that Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had the effect of outlawj g or severely restricting Protestantism. Since half of Saumur at that time was Protestant,   most of the population left. It was the worst thing ever to happen to Saumur. Even the owners of the story-book castle above the t