The Elegy of the Exilee

‘Totality and Infinity’ is a book. Destroy the book and it persists nonetheless. That happens to be the case with everything… d’oh…  ‘Totality and Infinity’ is not a book… about alterity or the Alter or the alterity of the Alter. If one capably destroyed the Alter and with it all alterity, the subject of ‘Totality…

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Just remember what it is you wish for

Both memory and the act of remembering originate in mindfulness. To be mindful is to have knowledge, but also to take care. A memory is a memory of and to remember is to remember because… Therefore, if memory is equated with knowledge, neigh, if memory is indistinguishable from knowledge, the contents of memory can be…

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Axel’s Island

A memory is no different from a representation. A memory can be indistinguishable from an artefact – a thing done with craft. When the fool looks at the pointing finger, when, that is, we question the very act of remembering, the punctum – the alterity – of the memory strikes. The pointing finger, remembering, points…

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I(:) met you

Picture yourself in an art gallery eyeing the mysterious beauty of some post-modern painterly disaster hanging on one of the gallery walls. Conceive now the world you are standing in, the very same world that holds in its bosom those atrocious paintings hanging on the gallery walls, as one unitary painterly mess. Yourself now, as Pantocrator,…

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The Investiture of that Name

Paintings are atemporal; a painting can be painted at any time. History is the history of the photograph. History, then, is the history of colour. Following Runge, white and black are to be treated as colours and not as transparencies. Colour is colourful but must still appear to appear as such. Following Heraclitus very loosely,…

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Speciously Valid

Science defines a photograph. All science does is define a photograph.  To dissect, to analyse, to investigate, to examine, to inspect, to study… actions all done in order to check whether reality is real, whether reality persists. What then, we should ask, is the difference between these actions and the act of remembering? Is there…

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Andromeda

The photographic is the illusion of depth. Depth conveys to any image the illusion of the real. Depth extends into motion, which are both ultimately conventions that retain their respective dynamics through the simple positioning of body (or image of body) within the more global image we call the world. If this triad, depth, motion,…

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A Proposition

Perception and semantics are way too obvious and boring; so we will skip those two levels and start our discussion straight from the level of memory. The etymological dictionary gives the following entry for the verb ‘remember’: “mid-14c., remembren, “keep (something or someone) in mind, retain in the memory,” from Old French remembrer “remember, recall,…

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