image nation



citizens and barbarians,

By chance I came across a new book by Pierre Hadot called the _The Veil of Isis_. It's completely absorbing to me being part of my habitual tracks, my customary watering holes where the weight of gravity tends to compound everything into a tight ball of tension. A brief saying then waits to be ignited and set off like lighting or an orgasmic spasm... This is the style, the ethos that Heinrich Wolfflin described as baroque. The baroque he understood as coming out of the renaissance and further back from the gothic. It's a style where the renaissance expires, abandons itself to it's highest expression at least if we don't take satire as the epiphany of tradition which is perhaps closest to the truth. By preference one always figures style to be the image of a plant so that if the blooming is the renaissance then it's wilting 'represents' a loss of form. This spasmic irregularity is the ambience of an atmosphere whose reference can hardly be given a better shape by propositional discourse which we call the Promethean attitude as opposed to the dyonisian-shiva-bacchus approach which is grounded in a thinking that caresses its object as if it were a question of admiring something that was rare and unique and especial like Persephone. The Promethean attitude does not honor Persephone because it wants to see her without the veil of language, without our house language. Like the worst kind of philosophy the Promethean approach wants to take a direct peek at Persephone. A peek which would be explicit not to mention pornographic. Real sensuality is always a manner of approaching by way of allusions, indirection, indicatives. In so far as man is a sign in this regard as we learn from Heidegger's reading of Holderlin then he indicates a speechlessness that is also a sweet agonizing death, a dissolution and fusion with the enigma of the things themselves. This is precisely what Persephone mediates like a socratic midwife. Death comes over us like a flash, like a blitzkrieg. First we exhaust all avenues that a propositional discourse might entail. We come to the end of the line and we no longer have anymore reasons to hold us back from just doing what we do which is work on the streets of Persephone. We no longer worry about looking for pictures inside of us somehow corresponding to something outside but in their dissolution a roughness of thinking becomes more fluid, more formless and as such becomes a sort of transparent veil, something that's see-through and indicates the intertwining of the inside and the outside, indicates an ecstatic temporalizing of temporality. So Pierre Hadot's book is full of insights on Heraclitu's famous saying that phusis loves to hide. In a way as he points out it's also an unfolding of Nietzsche's brief, economical, energy saving and low impact aphorism in the gay science where we discover that the will to truth of propositional discourse, "wants by all means to unveil, uncover and put into a bright light whatever is concealed. We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn; we have lived too much to believe this. Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and "know" everything" (from the preface section 4) This is why Nietzsche then says truth is a woman like Persephone and the Intertextual Knot is like a... lol... ok, use your imagination...


lol.. Oh man I'm loosing it. I fear I am digressing where Am I? I imagination, imagination, imagination..... that's the anthem ... not guilty...


tympan

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