To communicate one’s desires to someone without images is brutal. To communicate one’s images without one’s desires is tedious (like recounting one’s dreams or one’s travels). But both of these are easy to do. To communicate the imagined desires and the desired images, on the other hand, is a more difficult task.
– Georgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (2007: 53)
Aren’t we all searching for a way to unravel ourselves?
– Anita Solak, in Rabbit 29 (2019: 157)
Almost all great works are destroyed by a complication of natures, that which is beneficial in one respect being hurtful in another; so that herein there is need of an accurate judg-ment and a discreet practice. And this I have done, as far as the matter allows and I can at present devise, by separating kindly heats from hurtful, and the things which tend to both.
– Francis Bacon, History of Life and Death (1638)
The problem, and the reason I say I am not sure of what to make of the fact, is that the terms are lacking to describe it; nothing is less adequate than the terms I have made up to this point, with references to life and literature, words and barbiturates, writing and traveling, and so on.
– David Wills, Prosthesis (1995: 268)
infinity, axiom of an axiom in set theory which lays down a condition that ensures that the domain of the theory contains a set with infinitely many members.
– Thomas Mautner, Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy (London: Penguin, 2005)
“To the extent that the body is a wound, the sign is also nothing but a wound. Are we still capable, are we already capable of confronting the wound of the sign, this flaying where sense gets lost? Sense is lost in this pure sense that is also the wound. The wound closes the body. It multiplies its sense, and sense gets lost in it.”
Jean Luc Nancy, (1994)
‘Corpus’ trans Claudette Sartiliot in Thinking Bodies ed. MacCannell & Zakarin. Stanford: Stanford UP.
“To know that one does not write for the other, to know these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not – this is the beginning of writing.”
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse
1978:100 (trans. Richard Howard, Penguin)
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