Sunday, August 1, 2010

Silence and Wonder

Phenomenology begins in silence.

Herbert Spiegelberg (1982). The Phenomenological Moment


The best formulation of the reduction is probably that given by Eugen Fink, Husserl's assistant, when he spoke of 'wonder' in the face of the world. Reflection does not withdraw from the world towards the unity of consciousness as the world's basis; it steps back to watch the forms of trancendence fly up like sparks from a fire; it slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice; it alone is consciousness of the world because it reveals that world as strange and paradoxical.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962). Phenomenology of Perception

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Sans Image

... The sweeping devaluation and incapacitation of a human ability to generate one's own images (or imagination) is inseperable from the ascendancy of already manufactured external images, which increasingly become the impersonal raw material of psychic life and determine the formal conditions of all so-called mental images. The hegemony of the global image industries entails the cancellation of the visionary image....

Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, Meaghan Morris, Raymond Williams (2005) New keywords: a revised vocabulary of culture and society

Saturday, July 3, 2010

The Ineffable



Jannis Kounellis, Senza Titolo, 1969

Thursday, June 3, 2010

New Eyes


"The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."

Marcel Proust

Thursday, May 13, 2010