tim,
thanks for this piece...
in a strange (profound, moving) way, it answers some of the questions
that i was interested in along the "do we need to speak clearly?"
thread.... and also makes me regret all the more the antagonism of some
of that exchange.
dan h.
Tim Adams wrote:
>
> A looong time ago, someone here asked for anything on Deleuze's tragic end.
> As chance would have it, I soon come across a very beautiful and moving
> text by his close friend, Richard Pinhas, concerning Deleuze's last days
> <http://www.save-the-world.com/FORM/chimere/chim_4.htm>.
>
> I've been rather busy of late so the translation has taken me longer than
> expected. I hope it is still of use to who ever made the inquiry.
>
> Of particular interest (for me at least) is the planned book/music
> composition on Revel, the Belero and the Waltz, and the "new form of
> enunciation, an other enunciative-matter" it would employ. This strangely
> echoes Guattari's own interest in the concept (Bakhtin's) of
> utterance/ununciation in his last works.
>
> Tim Adams
> Department of Architecture
> University of Auckland
> New Zealand
>
> Richard Pinhas, "Paris Atmosphere, September 1995"
>
> Source: Chimeres: 31, (Summer, 1997)
>
> Gilles says: IÕm having a severe attack of asthma and hangs up inhaling.
> The telephone rings again. Gilles: I want to speak clearly, in a metallic
> but gentle voice. A buzzing is transmitted by the receiver as if an insect
> was vibrating around it: a reconstituting machine. GillesÕ voice, dry and
> colourless, wan, already faraway, withdrawn and frustrated by the rhythm of
> regurgitated air, to the beat of another surge of delightful oxygen. ItÕs
> September, he calls unexpectedly from Saint-L*onard-de-Noblat. HeÕs back in
> Paris: Gilles hangs up, mumbling the humble apology: Òsevere asthmaÓ. The
> phone rings again: is the new Philosophie out in Paris? Have you read it?
> What do you think? How is it? Does ÒImmanenceÓ disappoint you or not? How
> do you find it? A sublime and beautiful text, ÒImmanence: A Life...Ó(1),
> beyond its inheritance, it embodies both the absolute density of style and
> the fundamental necessity of thought. A last pneumatic breath. I am
> stunned, excited and floored by it. The pure narration of the
> Deleuze-clinamen. The actual and definitely eternal version of a singular
> and internal event.
>
> The voice is normal, pale perhaps, a little breathless. No, that number of
> Philosophie is not yet available, itÕs only just been advertised; but
> ClaireÕs given me his copy. The last two days spent with this text have
> passed extremely slowly. And again yesterday, on the embankment of the 5th
> arrondissement, reading beside the Tournelle, a few steps from the Tour
> dÕArgent. Harbour flotsam, a little tobacconistÕs shop with a terrace, an
> enervating north wind -- sweet, light breath on the deserted embankment at
> summerÕs end. Naturally I start reading the difficult and moving,
> ÒImmanence: A Life...Ó. It demonstrates that philosophy is perhaps, among
> other things, a quest that profoundly modulates the density of things and
> the multiple variations of surface. Such style. I cry a few tears,
> immediate forms of an inconsolable spontaneity. Then I rummage through the
> sometimes confused and often muddled comments of the apocalyptic
> post-agr*gatifs [students studying for high-level teacherÕs exam]. The
> thinking is clear because it expresses the power of becoming or else the
> incorporeal being of shit elements, theyÕre thinking about the agr*gation
> [high qualification for teachers], theyÕre playing an old tune. Above all,
> Gilles warned us not to worry about these paraphrases without great
> interest or use. The aesthetic of Kerenski in the minor. This is what
> Nietzsche says, ÒFrom the event, they have made an old tuneÓ. Well after
> all, that is to be expected, one being sometimes controversial. GillesÕ
> crafty smile. Returning to ÒImmanenceÓ, followed by sad and dark thoughts,
> taking so long on some pages, I am slow, so slow, so confused. The text
> consumes the afternoon, it captures me and initiates a metamorphic process.
>
> ÒImmanenceÓ penetrates me slowly, like a divine nectar, like a subtle
> poison. No doubt its strange beauty conceals like the ethereal veil of a
> last text. Perception from a final address, as if things will soon be less
> consistent, less luminous, less terrestrial perhaps? A world disembodied,
> the world without Gilles. A philosophical question: what is the world
> without Gilles? But we visit other regions, we live in other mornings,
> Òbathed in a serene brightnessÓ, of the most real possibilities still
> remaining. During this time he didnÕt have long to go, two months maybe. I
> had been sad without knowing why. No doubt the confused and vague
> perception of a veiled sorrow of a gap, at once the largest and the
> smallest, a kind of simultaneously minimal and maximal distance. Gilles and
> (is) our Òinterior simultanismÓ, a testing-clinamen, a block of contracted
> time. That is what makes me sad: a block of condensed time insidiously
> reveals that this immediate present soon becomes an immemorial past.
> Intuitive (sensory) power of the transcendental empiricism.
>
> I loiter through ÒImmanenceÓ like a delinquent adolescent, a heavenly child
> dazzled by a magic object, Rimbaud of Prisunic. Reading slow, very slow,
> making each word reverberate and return a scintillating echo, welcoming the
> recollection of infinite conversations, smiles, and points of view from
> certain years gone by. At this moment I see clearly the smile of the cat
> after the cat has gone, or Caesar crossing the Rubicon in LeibnizÕs
> commentary. Dazzling intuition of the Òcoalescence of the virtual and the
> actualÓ. I touch at the same material of the ineffectual and feeling event
> like an instantaneous cut in time. The grand scene of a ball with pale,
> white masks, blurred inscriptions, sublime exhalations of time regained.
> Gilles liked so much these classic pages that are so popular today. The
> text annoys me, it takes too long, the entire afternoon perhaps, the sun
> scraping and bathing Paris in a surreal light. Sweet light of the first
> days of September, only in Paris.
>
> I turn the page and a surprise awaits me: an article entitled ÒSuidasÓ. A
> short, brief, stocky essay, an ode of love for Gilles. Some brilliant and
> amusing lines that finally make me laugh out loud. Someone named Bernold
> has known a certain essence, one possible modality of ÒDeleuzismÓ. Suidas,
> or Soudas, late 8th-century AD philosophical collector or compiler. Did he
> really live? Apocryphal. Virtual reality of a philosophical being whose
> very existence is in doubt. Has he like Xenophon lived through the
> Anabasis? An image: Suidas giving a commentary on Democritus and Epicurus.
> Telescoping duration and the lysis of time, as if an active and powerful
> chronologist takes hold of this little number of the revue Philosophie. A
> rare moment of happiness and a small joy of the purist kind. The grand
> laughter of the double affirmation. I quickly reread ÒImmanenceÓ one last
> time for today, and remain astounded by my impression of sadness. Why this
> sadness when the text is so beautiful, so powerful, so perfect?. The
> quintessence of philosophy in action perhaps, and of a vital one-all that
> it harbours. Becoming imperceptible in my step by step journey up to
> Jussieu. I turn off on the left and lose myself once more in the Jardin des
> plantes. LetÕs go see my pal the tortoise. IÕve spoken to Gilles about this
> friendly tortoise whose life seems to be an enigma. It has certainly read
> Nietzsche (passim), this tortoise from the Jardin des plantes. We are well
> in agreement between a whisky and the translation of the Aion paidos of the
> Obscure fragment by Cl*mence Ramnoux. Entered into captivity in 1870,
> before the heroic Paris Commune, the tortoise is always there, immense and
> brave. How old was it when it was captured, during its long transit and its
> arrival in Paris in 1870? Of course the tortoise is not a conceptual
> animal, but it has the right to embody slowness and the improbable: Zeno of
> Elea, the famous paradox, the fast and slow movements.
>
> On the telephone I told Gilles that I liked ÒSuidasÓ. Ha! Bernold! He makes
> a little cry of delight, a expression-groan of joy. An amusing animal this
> unknown Bernold? Gilles seems to be happy with my description and
> enthusiastic with my praise. You like tarantulas, Bernold? No doubt, no
> doubt. Returning to ÒImmanenceÓ I passed on my profound admiration. Really?
> As if I had told a white lie just to make him happy, as if an undefined
> doubt remained, as if perhaps it had not reached his goal. No, I stood firm
> in my blissful admiration. I profoundly like this text that achieves a form
> of absolute perfection, I insist and describe to him the joy that it gives
> without however concealing this background of sadness and melancholy. Why
> is that? As if a page turns and then I donÕt know it any more. It will not
> take long for me to know why. I was probably, without knowing it then, very
> receptive to GillesÕ suffering. Each word-material transmits a joy (I
> repeat again) and produces a pain. From this text-event rises an
> unfathomable grief that I have come to understand and incorporate. Grief
> that instantaneously passed into my flesh like a machine engraving the
> words onto the bodyÕs surface. In the distance watches, a guarding shadow,
> the second essay of The Genealogy of Morals.
>
> For the next week the calls never stop. Gilles talks about Ravel and the
> book on music he would like to write. He would ÒovercomeÓ the book-form to
> harmonize with a new form of enunciation, an other enunciative-matter,
> possibly to compose. He suggests an electronic Bolero. I am speechless
> because it associates in the same beautiful phrase the famous Bolero and
> the little electronic refrain [ritournelle]. Reminiscing back to the late
> Õ70s, he joyously recalls some stirring episodes at Vincennes and our
> shared trajectory around music. He wished to stay longer with me (and of
> course me with him, that goes without saying), to reminisce: we shared
> these stellar moments with emotion, in a great surge of pleasure. Gilles
> was very sick, he wished to talk, to be transported by a transfer; I share
> fear but also happiness, a crowned idiot, this brief infinity. Certainly,
> prior to the bad news, I did not understand his grand nostalgia nor
> perceived his constant suffering. I did not want to, seeing him to be
> eternal. Not wanting to conceive it or imagine it. To breath again, not
> wanting to breath, to think to breath, machine to breath, machine that
> breathes for me -- for him -- machine of machine, a subtle and terrible
> connection. I am a son, says Fanny.
>
> Here we are. For the first time perhaps, he will go back to the circle of
> events at Vincennes, the music that we heard during that time. He described
> his passion for Ravel, the Bolero, the waltz. The waltz above all, the
> suspension of beings and time suspended. Pure aether. Have you come to
> grips with ÒImmanenceÓ? IsnÕt the text too difficult, too abstract? (Gilles
> detested ÒintellectualÓ abstraction).Will it be well received, will it be
> well understood? For the first time, I sense in Gilles a singular anxiety,
> as if it might be truly important that this text not be open to confusion,
> that it be read in only one sense, bearer of a will with a double
> imperative: the plane of life and the plane of composition.
>
> At this precise moment we compose, him and I, a sequence on the plane:
> symbiosis of the rhizosphere.
>
> Two or three weeks pass by. What is doing? I call Paris, Fanny does not
> want me to visit. Same story the next day. A great anxiety returns to my
> cyclical depression from the end of October. He calls me back: again the
> electric hissing seems to twirl around his voice. Is this the electric
> sheep that androids dream?
>
> Footnote
> 1. ÒLÕimmanence: une vie...Ó,Philosophie: 47, (September, 1995), pp. 3-7,
> translated by Nick Millett in Theory, Culture & Society: 14, n.2, (May,
> 1997), pp. 3-7.
--
http://www.fortunecity.com/roswell/chupacabras/48/
http://www.tw2.com/staff/daniel/
Ware ware Karate-do o shugyo surumonowa,
Tsuneni bushido seishin o wasurezu,
Wa to nin o motte nashi,
Soshite tsutomereba kanarazu tasu.
We who study Karate-do,
Should never forget the spirit of the samurai,
With peace, perseverance and hard work,
We will reach our goal without failure.
thanks for this piece...
in a strange (profound, moving) way, it answers some of the questions
that i was interested in along the "do we need to speak clearly?"
thread.... and also makes me regret all the more the antagonism of some
of that exchange.
dan h.
Tim Adams wrote:
>
> A looong time ago, someone here asked for anything on Deleuze's tragic end.
> As chance would have it, I soon come across a very beautiful and moving
> text by his close friend, Richard Pinhas, concerning Deleuze's last days
> <http://www.save-the-world.com/FORM/chimere/chim_4.htm>.
>
> I've been rather busy of late so the translation has taken me longer than
> expected. I hope it is still of use to who ever made the inquiry.
>
> Of particular interest (for me at least) is the planned book/music
> composition on Revel, the Belero and the Waltz, and the "new form of
> enunciation, an other enunciative-matter" it would employ. This strangely
> echoes Guattari's own interest in the concept (Bakhtin's) of
> utterance/ununciation in his last works.
>
> Tim Adams
> Department of Architecture
> University of Auckland
> New Zealand
>
> Richard Pinhas, "Paris Atmosphere, September 1995"
>
> Source: Chimeres: 31, (Summer, 1997)
>
> Gilles says: IÕm having a severe attack of asthma and hangs up inhaling.
> The telephone rings again. Gilles: I want to speak clearly, in a metallic
> but gentle voice. A buzzing is transmitted by the receiver as if an insect
> was vibrating around it: a reconstituting machine. GillesÕ voice, dry and
> colourless, wan, already faraway, withdrawn and frustrated by the rhythm of
> regurgitated air, to the beat of another surge of delightful oxygen. ItÕs
> September, he calls unexpectedly from Saint-L*onard-de-Noblat. HeÕs back in
> Paris: Gilles hangs up, mumbling the humble apology: Òsevere asthmaÓ. The
> phone rings again: is the new Philosophie out in Paris? Have you read it?
> What do you think? How is it? Does ÒImmanenceÓ disappoint you or not? How
> do you find it? A sublime and beautiful text, ÒImmanence: A Life...Ó(1),
> beyond its inheritance, it embodies both the absolute density of style and
> the fundamental necessity of thought. A last pneumatic breath. I am
> stunned, excited and floored by it. The pure narration of the
> Deleuze-clinamen. The actual and definitely eternal version of a singular
> and internal event.
>
> The voice is normal, pale perhaps, a little breathless. No, that number of
> Philosophie is not yet available, itÕs only just been advertised; but
> ClaireÕs given me his copy. The last two days spent with this text have
> passed extremely slowly. And again yesterday, on the embankment of the 5th
> arrondissement, reading beside the Tournelle, a few steps from the Tour
> dÕArgent. Harbour flotsam, a little tobacconistÕs shop with a terrace, an
> enervating north wind -- sweet, light breath on the deserted embankment at
> summerÕs end. Naturally I start reading the difficult and moving,
> ÒImmanence: A Life...Ó. It demonstrates that philosophy is perhaps, among
> other things, a quest that profoundly modulates the density of things and
> the multiple variations of surface. Such style. I cry a few tears,
> immediate forms of an inconsolable spontaneity. Then I rummage through the
> sometimes confused and often muddled comments of the apocalyptic
> post-agr*gatifs [students studying for high-level teacherÕs exam]. The
> thinking is clear because it expresses the power of becoming or else the
> incorporeal being of shit elements, theyÕre thinking about the agr*gation
> [high qualification for teachers], theyÕre playing an old tune. Above all,
> Gilles warned us not to worry about these paraphrases without great
> interest or use. The aesthetic of Kerenski in the minor. This is what
> Nietzsche says, ÒFrom the event, they have made an old tuneÓ. Well after
> all, that is to be expected, one being sometimes controversial. GillesÕ
> crafty smile. Returning to ÒImmanenceÓ, followed by sad and dark thoughts,
> taking so long on some pages, I am slow, so slow, so confused. The text
> consumes the afternoon, it captures me and initiates a metamorphic process.
>
> ÒImmanenceÓ penetrates me slowly, like a divine nectar, like a subtle
> poison. No doubt its strange beauty conceals like the ethereal veil of a
> last text. Perception from a final address, as if things will soon be less
> consistent, less luminous, less terrestrial perhaps? A world disembodied,
> the world without Gilles. A philosophical question: what is the world
> without Gilles? But we visit other regions, we live in other mornings,
> Òbathed in a serene brightnessÓ, of the most real possibilities still
> remaining. During this time he didnÕt have long to go, two months maybe. I
> had been sad without knowing why. No doubt the confused and vague
> perception of a veiled sorrow of a gap, at once the largest and the
> smallest, a kind of simultaneously minimal and maximal distance. Gilles and
> (is) our Òinterior simultanismÓ, a testing-clinamen, a block of contracted
> time. That is what makes me sad: a block of condensed time insidiously
> reveals that this immediate present soon becomes an immemorial past.
> Intuitive (sensory) power of the transcendental empiricism.
>
> I loiter through ÒImmanenceÓ like a delinquent adolescent, a heavenly child
> dazzled by a magic object, Rimbaud of Prisunic. Reading slow, very slow,
> making each word reverberate and return a scintillating echo, welcoming the
> recollection of infinite conversations, smiles, and points of view from
> certain years gone by. At this moment I see clearly the smile of the cat
> after the cat has gone, or Caesar crossing the Rubicon in LeibnizÕs
> commentary. Dazzling intuition of the Òcoalescence of the virtual and the
> actualÓ. I touch at the same material of the ineffectual and feeling event
> like an instantaneous cut in time. The grand scene of a ball with pale,
> white masks, blurred inscriptions, sublime exhalations of time regained.
> Gilles liked so much these classic pages that are so popular today. The
> text annoys me, it takes too long, the entire afternoon perhaps, the sun
> scraping and bathing Paris in a surreal light. Sweet light of the first
> days of September, only in Paris.
>
> I turn the page and a surprise awaits me: an article entitled ÒSuidasÓ. A
> short, brief, stocky essay, an ode of love for Gilles. Some brilliant and
> amusing lines that finally make me laugh out loud. Someone named Bernold
> has known a certain essence, one possible modality of ÒDeleuzismÓ. Suidas,
> or Soudas, late 8th-century AD philosophical collector or compiler. Did he
> really live? Apocryphal. Virtual reality of a philosophical being whose
> very existence is in doubt. Has he like Xenophon lived through the
> Anabasis? An image: Suidas giving a commentary on Democritus and Epicurus.
> Telescoping duration and the lysis of time, as if an active and powerful
> chronologist takes hold of this little number of the revue Philosophie. A
> rare moment of happiness and a small joy of the purist kind. The grand
> laughter of the double affirmation. I quickly reread ÒImmanenceÓ one last
> time for today, and remain astounded by my impression of sadness. Why this
> sadness when the text is so beautiful, so powerful, so perfect?. The
> quintessence of philosophy in action perhaps, and of a vital one-all that
> it harbours. Becoming imperceptible in my step by step journey up to
> Jussieu. I turn off on the left and lose myself once more in the Jardin des
> plantes. LetÕs go see my pal the tortoise. IÕve spoken to Gilles about this
> friendly tortoise whose life seems to be an enigma. It has certainly read
> Nietzsche (passim), this tortoise from the Jardin des plantes. We are well
> in agreement between a whisky and the translation of the Aion paidos of the
> Obscure fragment by Cl*mence Ramnoux. Entered into captivity in 1870,
> before the heroic Paris Commune, the tortoise is always there, immense and
> brave. How old was it when it was captured, during its long transit and its
> arrival in Paris in 1870? Of course the tortoise is not a conceptual
> animal, but it has the right to embody slowness and the improbable: Zeno of
> Elea, the famous paradox, the fast and slow movements.
>
> On the telephone I told Gilles that I liked ÒSuidasÓ. Ha! Bernold! He makes
> a little cry of delight, a expression-groan of joy. An amusing animal this
> unknown Bernold? Gilles seems to be happy with my description and
> enthusiastic with my praise. You like tarantulas, Bernold? No doubt, no
> doubt. Returning to ÒImmanenceÓ I passed on my profound admiration. Really?
> As if I had told a white lie just to make him happy, as if an undefined
> doubt remained, as if perhaps it had not reached his goal. No, I stood firm
> in my blissful admiration. I profoundly like this text that achieves a form
> of absolute perfection, I insist and describe to him the joy that it gives
> without however concealing this background of sadness and melancholy. Why
> is that? As if a page turns and then I donÕt know it any more. It will not
> take long for me to know why. I was probably, without knowing it then, very
> receptive to GillesÕ suffering. Each word-material transmits a joy (I
> repeat again) and produces a pain. From this text-event rises an
> unfathomable grief that I have come to understand and incorporate. Grief
> that instantaneously passed into my flesh like a machine engraving the
> words onto the bodyÕs surface. In the distance watches, a guarding shadow,
> the second essay of The Genealogy of Morals.
>
> For the next week the calls never stop. Gilles talks about Ravel and the
> book on music he would like to write. He would ÒovercomeÓ the book-form to
> harmonize with a new form of enunciation, an other enunciative-matter,
> possibly to compose. He suggests an electronic Bolero. I am speechless
> because it associates in the same beautiful phrase the famous Bolero and
> the little electronic refrain [ritournelle]. Reminiscing back to the late
> Õ70s, he joyously recalls some stirring episodes at Vincennes and our
> shared trajectory around music. He wished to stay longer with me (and of
> course me with him, that goes without saying), to reminisce: we shared
> these stellar moments with emotion, in a great surge of pleasure. Gilles
> was very sick, he wished to talk, to be transported by a transfer; I share
> fear but also happiness, a crowned idiot, this brief infinity. Certainly,
> prior to the bad news, I did not understand his grand nostalgia nor
> perceived his constant suffering. I did not want to, seeing him to be
> eternal. Not wanting to conceive it or imagine it. To breath again, not
> wanting to breath, to think to breath, machine to breath, machine that
> breathes for me -- for him -- machine of machine, a subtle and terrible
> connection. I am a son, says Fanny.
>
> Here we are. For the first time perhaps, he will go back to the circle of
> events at Vincennes, the music that we heard during that time. He described
> his passion for Ravel, the Bolero, the waltz. The waltz above all, the
> suspension of beings and time suspended. Pure aether. Have you come to
> grips with ÒImmanenceÓ? IsnÕt the text too difficult, too abstract? (Gilles
> detested ÒintellectualÓ abstraction).Will it be well received, will it be
> well understood? For the first time, I sense in Gilles a singular anxiety,
> as if it might be truly important that this text not be open to confusion,
> that it be read in only one sense, bearer of a will with a double
> imperative: the plane of life and the plane of composition.
>
> At this precise moment we compose, him and I, a sequence on the plane:
> symbiosis of the rhizosphere.
>
> Two or three weeks pass by. What is doing? I call Paris, Fanny does not
> want me to visit. Same story the next day. A great anxiety returns to my
> cyclical depression from the end of October. He calls me back: again the
> electric hissing seems to twirl around his voice. Is this the electric
> sheep that androids dream?
>
> Footnote
> 1. ÒLÕimmanence: une vie...Ó,Philosophie: 47, (September, 1995), pp. 3-7,
> translated by Nick Millett in Theory, Culture & Society: 14, n.2, (May,
> 1997), pp. 3-7.
--
http://www.fortunecity.com/roswell/chupacabras/48/
http://www.tw2.com/staff/daniel/
Ware ware Karate-do o shugyo surumonowa,
Tsuneni bushido seishin o wasurezu,
Wa to nin o motte nashi,
Soshite tsutomereba kanarazu tasu.
We who study Karate-do,
Should never forget the spirit of the samurai,
With peace, perseverance and hard work,
We will reach our goal without failure.