December 04, 2014
December 04, 2014
Georges Seurat
b. Dec. 2, 1859
Jorie Grahaminterviewed by Thomas Gardner _______________________ Round and roundThe Visible WorldJorie Graham
I dig my hands into the absolute. The surface breaks into shingled, grassed clusters; lifts. If I press, pick-in with fingers, pluck, I can unfold the loam. It is tender. It is a tender maneuver, hands making and unmaking promises. Diggers, forgetters. . . . A series of successive single instances . . . Frames of reference moving . . . The speed of light, down here, upthrown, in my hands: bacteria, milky roots, pilgrimages of spores, deranged and rippling mosses. What heat is this in me that would thaw time, making bits of instance overlap shovel by shovelful—my present a wind blowing through this culture slogged and clutched-firm with decisions, overridings, opportunities taken? . . . If I look carefully, there in my hand, if I break it apart without crumbling: husks, mossy beginnings and endings, ruffled airy loambits, and the greasy silks of clay crushing the pinerot in . . . Erasure. ... ...(more)
Olli Löytty
Translated by Hildi Hawkins
books from Finland
(....)_______________________
When you increase the speed of the movie, you realise that many people go in and out of the house’s doors. It looks as if a revolving door has gone made and is, by turns, sucking people in and chucking them out – them and their belongings. The changing seasons follow their even cycle, leaves changing from browny-red and –yellow to deep green and then pale buds, finally disappearing completely into the wrinkles of the bare branches. The colour of the house brightens and fades, and the birch trees that stand outside it atrophy to saplings that are then dug up and carried away.
I derive particular pleasure from seeing the pastel-coloured two-storey buildings that went up behind the house in the 1980s and 1980s demolished; in their place rise little wooden houses with vegetable gardens. At some point, too, potatoes grow in the garden of my house.
I have been told that gazing backwards is an activity that increases with age. People begin to seek explanations of themselves in the past, their family roots, the places they have visited. Perhaps, in every person’s life, there is a watershed; once one has passed it, one turns one’s gaze back in the direction from which one has come. I myself am still travelling with my gaze fixed firmly forward, but on the level of ideas I understand the wisdom that is hidden in history. It is clear that I would not be as I am if I had not lived the kind of life I have lived, if my parents’ backgrounds and choices had not been those they were. And I would not be myself if I had not lived where I have lived, moved from place to place and finally ended up in the family home, the same house where my grandmother brought up her family and where my parents celebrated their wedding. My family’s path is a circular one, and I have clearly been unable, or perhaps even unwilling, to stray from it.
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suburb
Georges Seurat
by Andrew Gallix
3:am
... on the one hand, many of the authors I have been obsessed with over the years have endeavoured to take a step outside philosophy, by which is usually meant the circle and circuit of Hegel’s system or Heidegger’s understanding of history as the history of being. I respect and love that gesture, that can be found in Bataille, Levinas, Blanchot and others. But, on the other hand, what I learned from Derrida very early on — my master’s thesis was on the question of whether we could overcome metaphysics — is that the step outside philosophy always falls back within the orbit of that which it tries to exceed. Not to philosophize is still to philosophize. Similarly, any text or philosophy that simply asserts the value of metaphysics is internally dislocated against itself, undermining its own founding gesture. This leave us writing on the margin between the inside and the ouside of philosophy, which is where I’d like to place Memory Theatre._______________________(....)
3:AM: Would you agree that the memory theatre and the “perfect work of art” envisioned at the end of the book correspond, respectively, to the two poles between which literature oscillates according to Maurice Blanchot? On the one hand, what you have called the “Hegelian-Sadistic” tradition, driven by the work of negation of human consciousness, and on the other, a striving after “that point of unconsciousness, where (literature) can somehow merge with the reality of things” (Very Little . . . Almost Nothing). Both poles, of course, are unattainable, but I suspect you have more sympathy for the latter, which is on the side of “The Plain Sense of Things” (Wallace Stevens) — “the near, the low, the common” (Thoreau) — and “lets us see particulars being various” (Memory Theatre) . . .
SC: That’s very interesting and I stole the “particulars being various” from Louis MacNiece, who is underrated and underread in my view. I remember reading Blanchot’s account of the two slopes of literature and it making a huge impact that continues to reverberate, particularly in relation to the INS (International Necronautical Society) work that I do with Tom McCarthy. On the one hand, literature is a conceptual machine that comprehends all that is, digests it and shits it out. That transforms matter into form. On the other hand, there is a kind of writing — poetry usually (Ponge, Stevens, late Hölderlin) — that attempts to let matter be matter witout contolling or comprehending it. I am more sympathetic to the second slope, but the attempt to let matter be matter without form is also an unachievable fantasy. We can say with Stevens, we don’t need ideas about the thing, but the thing itself. But we are still stuck with ideas about the thing itself, with the materiality of matter. Form, even the form of the formless, is irreducible.
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The Forest at Pontaubert
Georges Seurat
Volume 17, Issue 1 (2014)
The Summer 2014 issue of Between the Species addresses important theoretical issues that show how careful philosophical reflection about nonhuman animals can help clarify our notions of moral agency, equality, and the nature and scope of our obligations. In addition to these fine examples of philosophical argumentation, we include a work of fiction, “The King of the Meat Eaters,” by an anonymous author. All inquiries concerning this piece may be directed to me, [email protected]. Also, this issue includes the first interview in the history of the journal. One of our Associate Editors, Angus Taylor, had the opportunity to interview Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlikca, whose book Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights is perhaps the most important work in the field in many years. Finally, this issue contains a book review of Lisa Kemmerer’s Animals and World Religions.
Animal studies
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