Category Archives: Uncategorized

Robert Macfarlane, author of The Lost Words, musing about different ways of approaching nature. This, it seems to me, is what nature must best be to children: something “alive, powerful and sentient”, rather than something that can be, in Richard … Continue reading →

In an editorial (“The Geopolitics of Signs”, The Semiotic Review of Books Vol. 2.3 September 1991) Milena Doleželová-Velingerová opens with the following observation: Every culture, in order to become a culturally distinctive entity, must start by staking out the frontier … Continue reading →

E-motion: don’t quite know how the rhetoric of neither/nor moves me. Affect is a different kind of intelligence about the world, but it is intelligence none-the-less, and previous attempts which have either relegated affect to the irrational or raised it … Continue reading →

I first encountered this striking serigraph reproduced in black and white in the Graphex 4 catalogue of the 1976 juried exhibition at the Art Gallery of Brant (in Brantford, Ontario). I immediately recognized the parody of Matisse’s Dance. The image … Continue reading →

Jean Petitot-Cocorda Les Catastrophes de la parole. De Roman Jakobson à René Thom Paris: Maloine, 1985. En général, l’explication concerne de mécanismes sous-jacents, supposés êtres explicatifs, dérivables des lois générales et susceptibles d’être mathématisés. C’est-à-dire exprimés dans un formalisme génératif. … Continue reading →

John Berger from About Looking Duchamp was not an iconoclast: he was a new type of curator. Berger’s 1974 observation shapes an approach to art that is useful for understanding those assemblages that are in essence collections of objects with … Continue reading →

Someday perhaps English will adapt the term “vulgarization” to denote “popularization”. *smile* La répétition didactique, sous sa forme proprement pédagogique, ou même sous une forme plus vague de vulgarisation, est indispensable au fonctionnement de l’espace intellectuel, même si elle ne … Continue reading →

With apologies to Leonard Cohen (Let Us Compare Mythologies) Body and mind — words and things. Les extases de Nane Yelle, dans l’histoire de sa passion pour un chamane de l’enchâssement vertigineux du réel, ces extases mentales ne sont rien … Continue reading →

If there were not language there would only be music. And, just as certain creatures are the last surviving testimony to a form of life which nature has discarded, I asked myself if music were not the unique example of … Continue reading →