Category: Reflections
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The word understand means position. In Old English, understandan is composed of under and standan. Yet under did not simply mean beneath. It could also mean among, between, in the presence of, or in proximity to something. To understand was therefore not to grasp an idea, but to stand within it. The image is spatial before it is conceptual. One stands among things, takes…
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If you haven’t painted grey, Cézanne said, you are not a painter. Perhaps the same could be said of thinking itself. Why should a single colour be a criterion? This statement is not a proposition but a provocation. Yet thought repeatedly returns to grey. Think of the colour of the shadows in Plato’s cave. Hegel writes:…
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“My reading has left impressions upon me as much as I have left impressions upon the books. A tattered copy of E. Starkie’s B. and a heavily marginalia-laden copy of B.’s Reflections have accompanied me for years, shaping me much as prolonged sitting shapes an armchair. The cushion bears the imprint of the body only briefly, but the chair…
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by Justin Loke I took the book from the shelf and left it on the table for a few days. It is Los papeles de Herralde. It is the photo on the cover, not the content, the two chairs that contain a punctum for me in the picture. My family had these chairs before as…
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Un Viejo Amigo por Justin Loke Empecé la mañana leyendo el capítulo 9 de Tomás Nevinson de Javier Marías y me llamó la atención su descripción de María Viana: los hoyuelos apenas perceptibles y la manera en que su mirada camina por la línea fina entre el asomo de un hombre libidinoso y el retrato…
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Inaction: Reading Hadot on Plotinus in the First Hours of the Year By Justin Loke “When people are too weak for contemplation, they switch to action, which is a mere shadow of contemplation and of reason. Since, owing to the weakness of their souls, their faculty of contemplation is insufficient, they cannot grasp the object…
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The Retreat of Reality: On Agamben’s What is Real? (2018) by Justin Loke For much of Western thought, reality was understood as something necessary, of necessity: things happened for reasons, and even if humans did not yet know those reasons, they were assumed to exist. This view goes back to Aristotle, who described reality in…
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“ […] A medieval glossary explains the meaning of the neologism dementicare, which was beginning to substitute the more literary oblivisci in common usage, as follows: dementicatis: oblivioni traditdistis. The forgotten is not simply cancelled or left aside: it is handed over to oblivion. The pattern of this unformulable tradition was set out by Hölderlin…
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“These bonds are shackle freeWrapped in lust and lunacyTiny touch of jealousyThese bonds are shackle free” – Placebo Luna, lunes, Monday, and lunacy all trace back to the Latin lūna, “moon,” an old word that shaped both calendars and metaphors. Spanish lunes descends directly from diēs Lūnae, “the day of the Moon,” while English Monday…
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“It is not because life and death are the most sacred things that sacrifice contains killing; on the contrary, life and death became the most sacred things because sacrifices contained killing. (In this sense, nothing explains the difference between anitquity and the modern world better than the fact that for the first, the destruction of…
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