doubt+ctrl

[relentlessspinozism-blog]

There is in understanding a blind spot: which is reminiscent of the structure of the eye… [T]he nature of understanding demands that the blind spot within it be more meaningful than understanding itself. To the extent that understanding is auxiliary to action, the spot within it is as negligible as it is within the eye. But to the extent that one views in understanding man himself, by that I mean an exploration of what is possible in being, the spot absorbs one’s attention: it is no longer the spot which loses itself in knowledge, but knowledge which loses itself in it.

Georges Bataille, Inner Experience

[blue-voids]

[doubtlr]

Grace Ahlbom

[manymanywolves]

Phenomenology hence shows how objects and others have already left their impressions on the skin surface. The tactile object is what is near me or what is within my reach. In being touched, the object does not stand apart; it is felt by the skin and even on the skin. In other words, we perceive the object as an object, as something that has integrity and is in space, only by haunting that very space, by coinhabiting space, such that the boundary between the coinhabitants does not hold.

Sara Ahmed, “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology”

[ninetythieves-blog]

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 2.

[outofthedarkness]

Having seen how lucidly and logically certain madmen justify their lunatic ideas to themselves and to others, I can never again be sure of the lucidness of my lucidity.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

[likeafieldmouse-deactivated2015]

[doubtlr]

Saul Steinberg - Fingerprint Man (1951)

[relentlessspinozism-blog]

I am in fact of the opinion that the antithesis of conscious and unconscious is not applicable to instincts. An instinct can never become an object of consciousness—only the idea that represents the instincts can. Even in the unconscious, moreover, an instinct cannot be represented otherwise than by an idea. If the instinct did not attach itself to an idea or manifest itself as an affective state, we could know nothing about it. When we nevertheless speak of an unconscious instinctual impulse or of a repressed instinctual impulse, the looseness of phraseology is a harmless one. We can only mean an instinctual impulse the ideational representatative of which is unconscious, for nothing else comes into consideration.

Sigmund Freud, The Unconscious

[doubtlr]

The being of consciousness qua consciousness is to exist at a distance from itself as a presence to itself, and this empty distance which being carries in its being is Nothingness. Thus in order for a self to exist, it is necessary that the unity of this being include into its own nothingness as the nihilation of identity. […] The for-itself is the being which determines itself to exist inasmuch as it can not coincide with itself.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

[reaktorplayer]

[doubtlr]

Man Ray, Mathematical Object, 1936

[relentlessspinozism-blog]

Schopenhauer often cited an analogy borrowed from Spinoza: if a stone thrown through the air were conscious, it would fancy that it moved itself through the air of its own will and of its own accord.

Eugene Thacker, Philosophical Doomcore

[greatestdegreeofuncertainty]

The world is already constituted, but also never completely constituted; in the first case we are acted upon, in the second we are open to an infinite number of possibilities…. There is, therefore, never determinism and never absolute choice, I am never a thing and never bare consciousness.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

[invisiblestories]

[doubtlr]

Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature

(Image: Gilbert Garcin)

[marxvx-deactivated20170329]

Whatever can be the meaning of life? If we divide mankind into two large classes, we can say that one works for a living, and the other has no need to. But working for one’s living can’t be the meaning of life; to suppose that constantly procuring the conditions of life should be the answer to the meaning of what they make possible is a contradiction. Usually the lives of the other class have no meaning either, beyond that of consuming said conditions. To say that the meaning of life is to die is seems again to be a contradiction.

Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

[mortodisonno-deactivated2013090]

I’m looking for the face I had before the world was made.

W. B. Yeats, The Winding Stair 

[ryandonato-deactivated20130922]

[doubtlr]

Guy Laramee delicately cuts caverns through the centers of books.  He carves the pages away to reveal caves that seem to be ready to be explored.  His work explores the insides of books in a very literal way.  Indeed, Laramee’s sculptures in way recall the plot of a classic: Journey to the Center of the Earth.  And, in fact, Laramee mentions this book in his statement on the series.  He says:

“Like in Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth”, we seem to be chained to this quest. We “have to” know what lies inside things. But in doing so, we bury ourselves in the “about-ness” of our productions – language, function, etc- all things “about” other things.”

[arasx]

Self-consciousness must do away with this otherness it has; this is the doing away with the first double-sense, and hence itself a second double-sense: first, it must set out to do away with the other independent being in order thereby to become certain of itself as the essential being; second, in so doing it sets out to do away with itself, for this other being is itself.

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

[silentreverence]

The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit—not a part of the world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus