BERNEVAL

On your own but not alone…

Each of us, grown-ups and young people, often get so overwhelmed with our own problems that we often think we’re alone, that no one wants to help or even cares. It’s important to remember two things about that: that we all need to offer help when we think it’s wanted, and that none of us be afraid to ask when we need it. […] so we all know a little of each other’s problems. We are not alone.

Wallace Roberts, the American edition editor of The Little Red Schoolbook by Soren Hansen and Jesper Jensen with Wallace Roberts trans. from Danish by Berit Thronberry (New York: Pocket Books in association with Lawrence Handel Books, 1971).

And so for day 547
12.06.2008

M.A. Screech Ecstasy and the Praise of Folly

In the Annotations on the New Testament he [Erasmus] points out that the original Greek word, schema, may be translated by habitus (state, condition) or by figura (fashion, structure).

I find this conjunction of terms very suggestive. The annotation is to a verse concerning the world and what passes away.

I Corinthians 7: 31: praeterit enim figura hujus mundi: ‘For the fashion of this world passeth away.’ He himself preferred to render the Greek not by figura but habitus.

Apart from the theme of what passes away, I am intrigued by the relations between figura and habitus as they may pertain to descriptions of acts of perception.

And so for day 546
11.06.2008

A boy body (not subject to reproduction) runs through the blogmire attentive to the rustling ruptures:

She is now famous for the distinction between what she calls the “semiotic” and the “symbolic,” which she develops in her early work including Revolution in Poetic Language, “From One Identity to the Other” in Desire in Language, and Powers of Horror. Kristeva maintains that all signification is composed of these two elements. The semiotic element is the bodily drive as it is discharged in signification. The semiotic is associated with the rhythms, tones, and movement of signifying practices. As the discharge of drives, it is also associated with the maternal body, the first source of rhythms, tones, and movements for every human being since we all have resided in that body.
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/Kristeva.html
Center for Digital Discourse and Culture @Virginia Tech

Read carefully. Too quick a jump to the maternal association skips over the social & other associations with “rhythms, tones, and movement of signifying practices.” Marking a “first source” is like counting with natural numbers. The set of whole numbers brings to mind an origin beyond the source: the rain that feeds the spring. There is some laughter around the bend.

And so for day 541
06.06.2008