La dernière fois que j’ai vu mon père il m’a donné ce livre de Victor Hugo ”Choses vues” avec cette étrange couverture de Delacroix ou on ne voit qu’un sein.
J’avais pensé alors que j’en avais assez de ses classiques, je ne saurais dire combien de fois je les aies lus et relus et que ça ne pouvait rien m’apporter de nouveau.
Ce soir je me suis enfin décidé à y jeter un coup d’œil avec circonspection et la prudence d’un type en cavale…J’y retrouve cette merveilleuse manie qu’a mon père et qui nous a toujours rapproché au plus haut point intellectuel, de raturer des mots, des phrases, d’y bombarder de grosses goutes d’encre.
Une certaine émotion s’empare de moi lorsque je les reprends. De me poser la question du pourquoi telle ou telle phrase avait été soulignée. C’est ainsi que nous avons toujours dialogué dans la distance et la proximité.
Les livres les plus forts, on a beau se dire qu’à force de les fréquenter on les connait par cœur, chaque nouvelle lecture se révèle une bouleversante et excitante première fois.
C’est ainsi que je me dis que je devrais voyager comme Napoléon (Page 158 plus haut) avec deux redingotes et deux chapeaux.
I just started to read ”שיחות על תורת הנבואה” of Yeshayahu Leibowitz and I am already fascinated. Even if I see many similarities between Leibowitz, Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt regarding the notions of truth and reality ( Hannah Arendt cautioned that “the basic fallacy … is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.” ) I find in Leibowitz work a honest tentative to bridge the gap between meaning, which is the human interpretation of truth, and that naked truth itself and it’s perhaps the most abiding challenge in reconciling the human intellect with the human spirit.
Conclusions – I – about the concept of truth:
On page 1-25 :
Telling the truth will not help, unless the listener has the tools for understanding the truth. You can not tell the truth – the truth needs to be revealed.
On page 721 :
Mass rally ( at Mount Sinai) can not lead to knowledge of the truth, but rather the opposite – a mass rally leads to the liberation of passion, bolt, and frivolity.
On Page 783 :
He who is not a prophet, his imagination is busy with trivialities, even if mentally it’s the truth.
”Here I am developing an idea that Walter Benjamin addressed in his Arcades Project. He starts from the anthropological assumption that people in all epochs dedicate themselves to creating interiors, and at the same time he seeks to emancipate this motif from its apparent timelessness. He therefore asks the question: How does capitalist man in the 19th century express his need for an interior? The answer is: He uses the most cutting-edge technology in order to orchestrate the most archaic of all needs, the need to immunize exist-ence by constructing protective islands. In the case of the arcade, modern man opts for glass, wrought iron, and assembly of prefabricated parts in order to build the largest possible interior. For this reason, Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, erected in London in 1851, is the paradigmatic building. It forms the first hyper-interior that offers a perfect expression of the spatial idea of psychedelic capitalism. It is the prototype of all later theme-park interiors and event architectures. The arcade heralds the abolition of the outside world. It abolishes outdoor markets and brings them indoors, into a closed sphere. The antagonistic spatial types of salon and market meld here to form a hybrid. This is what Benjamin found so theoretically exciting: The 19th-century citizen seeks to expand his living room into a cosmos and at the same time to impress the dogmatic form of a room on the universe. This sparks a trend that is perfected in 20th-century apartment design as well as in shopping-mall and sports-stadium design—these are the three paradigms of modern construction, that is, the construction of micro-interiors and macro-interiors.” Peter Sloterdijk
Instead of this archaic state of protection I prefer the words of Cioran:
”The absence of an organic character of the contemporary culture, makes that man is no longer living in contents but in formulas that he can change as fast as he changes his shirt. So you understand why it is necessaryto purify oneself on the heights.” The full text below ( In French only).
Kazakh hunters in Altai Mountains in Western Mongolia :
”Here I am developing an idea that Walter Benjamin addressed in his Arcades Project. He starts from the anthropological assumption that people in all epochs dedicate themselves to creating interiors, and at the same time he seeks to emancipate this motif from its apparent timelessness. He therefore asks the question: How does capitalist man in the 19th century express his need for an interior? The answer is: He uses the most cutting-edge technology in order to orchestrate the most archaic of all needs, the need to immunize exist-ence by constructing protective islands. In the case of the arcade, modern man opts for glass, wrought iron, and assembly of prefabricated parts in order to build the largest possible interior. For this reason, Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, erected in London in 1851, is the paradigmatic building. It forms the first hyper-interior that offers a perfect expression of the spatial idea of psychedelic capitalism. It is the prototype of all later theme-park interiors and event architectures. The arcade heralds the abolition of the outside world. It abolishes outdoor markets and brings them indoors, into a closed sphere. The antagonistic spatial types of salon and market meld here to form a hybrid. This is what Benjamin found so theoretically exciting: The 19th-century citizen seeks to expand his living room into a cosmos and at the same time to impress the dogmatic form of a room on the universe. This sparks a trend that is perfected in 20th-century apartment design as well as in shopping-mall and sports-stadium design—these are the three paradigms of modern construction, that is, the construction of micro-interiors and macro-interiors.”
Peter Sloterdijk
Instead of this archaic state of protection I prefer the words of Cioran:
”The absence of an organic character of the contemporary culture, makes that man is no longer living in contents but in formulas that he can change as fast as he changes his shirt. So you understand why it is necessaryto purify oneself on the heights.” The full text below ( In French only).
”Si l’on veut comprendre la vanité des ambitions et des aspirations cultivées par l’homme dans les grandes villes, si l’on veut dépasser les illusions engendrées par l’assimilation au rythme fou de la vie moderne, il est plus que nécessaire, il est indispensable de faire provisoirement retraite. ”( …) ”L’absence de caractère organique de la culture contemporaine fait que l’homme ne vit plus dans des contenus mais dans des formules dont il peut changer comme il changerait de chemise. vous comprenez donc pourquoi il est nécessaire de se purifier sur les hauteurs. ” Emil Cioran
Kazakh hunters in Altai Mountains in Western Mongolia :
Kara Walker is one of the most complex artist of this generation. She can make work that so effectively get the complexity of Human nature and critically address race, gender, sexuality and power. She investigates the darker aspects of American culture and human psyche.
Her last exhibition is currently held at The MOMA, and it consist on annotation of the original edition of Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War, published in 1866 by Alfred H.Guernsey. The goal of that edition was to narrate events just as they occured and Kara Walker challenges the truth Guensey claimed to recount and unjects a discourse about rightness and wrongness the author professed to omit. Walker’s silhouetttes of distorted fragments and flailing balck bodies are silkscreened over enlargement and she incoporates new understading of suffering, loss and horror from the nineteenth century illustrations.
”These prints,” Walker explains, ” are the landscapes that I imagine exist in the back of my somewhat more austere wall pieces”
Her use of silhouettes may depit figures as racially stereotyped, and illustrate the emergence of racial anthropology in the late eighteenth century, particulary the concept of physiognomy.
“Je crois que j’ai trop de “métier”, et que j’étrangle l’élan, par une sorte de mécanisme d’auto-punition. Il faut que cela ait l’air d’un jeu, et d’un jeu vraiment futile et banal. Au point qu’il faille vraiment prêter l’oreille pour réussir à entendre une mince musique désuète, que l’on est en droit de récuser l’existence même de la partition. Sans doute cela tient à ce que je suis bourré de “littérature”… Je me consume en vase clos, tellement loin de la vie (mais qu’est-ce que c’est ?) que le pastiche me paraît encore la meilleure manière de dénoncer cette infirmité. Il y a cependant autre chose, une illusion folle : je crois à la rengaine, aux mots les plus éculés, parce qu’ils me semblent receler plus d’inattendu” que les vocables à la mode…”
“Le “peuple” : son ignorance crasse ! C’est pour ça qu’on le roule si facilement. Chaque fois que j’entends un discours du Fürher, je ne peux m’empècher de penser à Agamemnon, Périclès, Alexandre, Kikero, Kaëzar, sans parler de Cromwell, Napoléon, et des héros de nos guerres de libération. Toujours la même rengaine : “Je suis au-dessus des partis !” Tous les mêmes ! En soi, ces retentissantes charlataneries m’amuseraient plutôt. Mais le “peuple” croit dur comme fer qu’on n’a encore jamais vu ça sous le soleil. Pas la moindre idée des conséquences prévisibles : au lieu de songer aux millions de pauvres types qui ont été couillonnés au cours des siècles et de botter le derrière à ces batteurs d’estrade ! Au fond chacun est responsable de sa propre ignorance et il n’y a pas lieu de s’apitoyer.” Arno Schmidt
L’homme en récession vers soi-même constitue une forme de subjectivité des enclaves dans lesquelles il a prioritairement et en permanence affaire à soi-même et à ses états intérieurs.
Il se transforme en un état à superficie réduite pour les habitants duquel il faut trouver la constitution adéquate. Personne n’a exprimé aussi clairement que Marc Aurèle le commandement qui invite les vivants à gérer eux-mêmes leur vie :
‘’Il reste donc à te souvenir de la retraite tu peux trouver dans ce petit champ de ton âme. Et avant tout, ne te dissipe pas…’’
Selbstwehr 
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