THE INFINITE BOOK

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L'amour en fuite (Love on the Run, 1979) by François Truffaut. Sep. 9th, 2020

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Decoloniality drives us to delink from the narrow history and praxis of Western knowledge and brings to the foreground the coexistence of stories, arguments, and doxa ignored by Eurocentered languages. The linear concept of time creates mirages in which colonial differences transform differential coexistences into being behind in time (e.g. China and Islam are behind and have to modernize according to the rhetoric of modernity). - Walter Mignolo, “Decoloniality and Phenomenology”

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How do we understand the ‘newness’ of early feminists (New Women) in a colonized country where the idea of feminism had not yet been introduced? Is feminism a product of Western modernity? If modernity is understood as a specific mode of existence in the West, one that’s normalized through colonization, the modernity of colonized world gets lost in translation. 

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Deleuze’s reading of the Proustian example, Combray:

For Deleuze, Combray plays the role of ‘object=x’ in Kant, a virtual object. It is the moment where we witness the virtual actualizing itself in time. On the actual, empirical level the form of the object in general =x enables recognition. In the Proustian experience, it brings the two moments - Madeleine 1 and Madeleine 2 - together. But there is something more than a recognition happening in the moment. Marcel does not just recognize M2 as Madeleine based on its identity with the former perception of M1, but is forced to relive the past, Combray. It is not a simple recollection of the past, but the past actualized as different than ever. Combray brings M2 and M1 together, but not as the same but as different, as two disparate series. What happens in the moment is not a recognition but resonance. (resonance as internal differentiation/ recognition as external relation) 

For Deleuze, this reveals the generative process of any recognition. (In terms of the relation of faculties, which he discusses in the Chapter 3, DR this is the moment where different faculties come to an accord, by transcendental exercise of the faculties.) Recognition is only a result of this resonance, but we do not notice that most of the time.        

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Lampert gives a reading of Deleuze’s passive synthesis focusing on how it explains the passage of time; “This three-levelled analysis explains, though not on its own terms, the problem of how the present becomes the past.” (Lampert 2012, 162)

“each time we go into the past and pull out an image, we return to the present differently. At the moment we make it present, it becomes determinate; but until then, the bag of stuff that we reach into is partly indeterminate, sine the flow of the event generates disjunctive multiplicity.” (Lampert 2012, 160)

Pure past functions like the future. 

Deleuze’s reading of Freud’s delayed action; it is not simply retroactive interpretation. Delayed reaction shows coexistence through difference. “Merely retroactively learning what a childhood event menat, or retroactively attributing adult motives to the child would not make a person obsessively try to avoid it bow, unless in addition one felt oneself a child again while going about one’s present business. […] Phenomena are synchronic in the sense that the same subjectivity struggles with them all at once, yet diachronic in that subjectivity is serially self-divided. […] for Deleuze, it might better be called reciprocal causality with reversible subjectivity. [...] There is one event occurring at two distant moments in time at once.” (Lampert 2012,168-9)   

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Moon & Jupiter 

Orion & Sirius

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A rainy day after the holidays 

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A pigeon sat on a branch reflecting on existence (2014; En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron), Roy Andersson. Thu. Aug 6. 8pm, Regent Square  

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Beth Lord, ‘Deleuze and Kant’ The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze. edited by Daniel W. Smith, Henry Somers-Hall, Cambridge University Press, 2012. 

- Account of determination in Kant

- Difference between being and thought

pure difference; internal to the relation of determination. 

The “I think” in the act of determining its existence, prevents the determination of its own activity -- determination of my existence is a movement of self-differing. (Time makes my indeterminate existence determinate by the “I think.”) determination is not a matter of subsuming some given being in general under an external concept that would determine it as my being. It is a matter of producing my being by internally differentiating it from my thinking. Time is the condition of determinability of the self and the hinge on which I generate my difference from myself. I cannot experience or know the spontaneity of my thought; I can only experience its effects in time. 

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auto-affection and time: Kant, CPR, B153-4

http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=66&groupe=Kant&langue=2

Introduction, Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and neuroscience by Adrian Johnston, Catherine Malabou

Lawlor, “Becoming and auto-affection” http://icnap.org/lawlor%20-%20paper.pdf

https://www.academia.edu/324310/_Desubjectivation_of_Time_and_Self-Affection_Kant_in_Heidegger._

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La Belle Verte (1996) by Coline Serreau, FEU tv room, 9pm, Mar. 15th

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The second formula that I want to develop truly belongs only to Kant and it is part of his last, most obscure texts. Kant, at the end of his life, compiles a book which will appear after his death. He begins a sketch of something which will be called the Opus Postumum. And the Opus Postumum is very strange because it's a mix of everything. There are laundry lists, there are little impressions of everyday life, and then there is a wonderful page. In these texts near the end the idea that time is like the form of auto-affection appears more and more. It's the form under which the subject affects itself. If anything is mysterious, that is. It would be clear for space, but he also says it of time. See how he divides things up: space is the form under which something exterior affects me and time is the form under which I affect myself. It's even more mysterious than "the time is out of joint". Cours de Deleuze sur Kant à Vincennes 14/03/1978

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Werner Herzog, La Soufrière (1977), The Dark Glow of the Mountains(1984), Le Grand Action, 6:30pm, Dec. 6th

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Ken Loach, Jimmy's Hall, at Cinéma du Panthéon at 11am, Nov. 30. 

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Christopher Nolan, Interstellar (2014), Nov. 29, 8pm, MK2 Bibliotheque. 

Too much drama to my taste. Epic scenes and interesting illustrations of 5th dimension. Personally liked that time spread out physically was shown with the bookshelves. Many wholes in the story. Might have been better fit to my taste if Jonathan Nolan's script was given to Kubrick as originally intended. 

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Woody Allen, Magic in the moonlight (2014), Nov. 27, 6:15pm at MK2 Bibliothque.

The british man's bitter and sarcastic humor was quite enjoyable. Despite the bad reviews, I could follow Colin Firth's reluctance & stubbornness with sympathy. Many factors in the movie seemed artificial, but with elegant costumes in the 20s and the unreal scenery went well with them. The weirdest part was when Stanley (Firth) was still so proud after being turned down by Sophie (Emma Stone) and complained about how much happier she could be if she chose him. As is always the case in Allen's movie, you see Allen's cranky and pessimistic ramblings about the world, this time with a little bit of Nietzsche. 

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Deleuze/ Kant, Somers-Hall

For Kant, the answer is that objects are given in intuition, and therefore that the '1 am' can only be determined provided it is given to us by the intuition of time. But clearly the 'I am' that Descartes introduces as a thinking thing is not an object which is given to us in intuition. As Kant notes, when we introspect, we don't find the self as a given object: 'No fixed and abiding self can present itself in this flux of inner appearances' (Kant 1929: A107). (...) we can only be given to ourselves in time, when we reflect, what we observe isn't the activity itself (which is transcendental), but merely the empirical after-effect of it (the '1 think' is merely an analytic result of an underlying process of synthesis): The spontaneity of which l am conscious in the '1 think' cannot be understood as the attribute of a substantial and spontaneous b~ing, but only as the affection of a passive self which experiences its own thought ... being exercised in it and upon it but not by it. (DR 86/108) When we introspect, therefore, what we encounter is not an active subject, but a subject intuited under the form of time, and subject to the sa me patterns of determination that any temporal object is subject to: a passive self. Somers-Hall; Deleuze's Difference and Repetition pp.76-77