explicadinho is a tumblelog.

A guerra entre o judeu-cristianismo e o paganismo ainda está sendo travada nas últimas ideologias das universidades.(…) as discussões dos franceses sobre as limitações racionalistas de sua própria cultura foram ilegitimamente transferidas para a Inglaterra e para os Estados Unidos, com resultados medíocres. A língua inglesa foi criada por poetas, um empreendimento de quinhentos anos de emoção e metáfora, o mais rico diálogo interior da literatura mundial. Os modelos retóricos franceses são demasiado estreitos para a tradição inglesa. A mais perniciosa das importações francesas é a ideia de que não há pessoa por trás de um texto. Haverá alguma coisa mais afetada, agressiva e inexoravelmente concreta do que um intelectual parisiense por trás de seu bombástico texto? O parisiense é um provinciano quando pretende falar para o universo.

Kierkegaard has written a fascinating little book called Repetition, in which he proposes to use this term to replace the most traditional Platonic term anamnesis or recollection. By it he apparently means, not the simple repeating of an experience, but the recreating of it which redeems or awakens it to life, the end of the process, he says, being the apocalyptic promise: “Behold, I make all things new.” The preoccupation of the humanities with the past is sometimes made a reproach against them by those who forget that we face the past: it may be shadowy, but it is all that is there. Plato draws a gloomy picture of man staring at the flickering shapes made on the wall of the objective world by a fire behind us like the sun. Bu the analogy breaks down when the shadows are those of the past, for the only light we can see them by is the Promethean fire within us. The substance of these shadows can only be in ourselves, and the goal of historical criticism, as our metaphors about it often indicate, is a ind of self-ressurection, the vision of a valley of dry bones that takes on the flesh and blood of our own vision. The culture of the past is not only the memory of mankind, but our own buried life, and study of it leads to a recognition scene, a discovery in which we see, not our past lives, but the total cultural form of our present life. It is not only the poet but his reader who is subject to the obligation to “make it new”.

frye, anatomy of criticism

:~

A green schoolboy’s copybook manufactured in some Austrian part of the empire, with Zeugnisbüchlein printed on its front cover, which he called The Book of The Masked. Whose pages were filled with encrypted field-notes and occult scientific passages of a dangerousness one could at least appreciate, though more perhaps for what it promised than for what it presented in such impenetrable code, its sketch of a mindscape whose layers emerged one on another as from a mist, a distant country of painful complexity, an all but unmappable flow of letters and numbers that passed into and out of the guise of the other, not to mention images, from faint and spidery sketches to a full spectrum of inks and pastels, of what Vlado had been visited by under the assaults of his home wind, of what could not be paraphrased even into the strange holiness of Old Slavonic wcript, visions of the unsuspected, breaches in the Creation where something else had had a chance to be luminously glimpsed. Ways in which God chose to hide within the light of day, not a full list, for the list was probably endless, but chance encounters with details of God’s unseen world. Its chapters headed “To Listen to the Voices of the Dead.” “To Pass Through the Impenetrable Earth.” “To Find the Invisible Gateways.” “To recognize the face of Those with the Knowledge.

As he worked on the room, and as it began slowly to take a shape, he realized that for many years, unknown to himself, he had had an image locked somewhere within him like a shamed secret, an image that was ostensibly of a place but which was actually of himself. So it was himself that he was attempting to define as he worked on his study. As he sanded the old boards for his bookcases, and saw the surface roughnesses disappear, the gray weathering flake away to the essential wood and finally to a rich purity of grain and texture—as he repaired his furniture and arranged it in the room, it was himself that he was slowly shaping, it was himself that he was putting into a kind of order, it was himself that he was making possible.
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Torturing oneself with the idea of family happiness while not actually having a family, he decided, might be a fairly new circumstance in social history. People had probably not been like this a hundred years ago. He imagined an exhibit at the society. He imagined the puppets.

I don’t particularly like people. Never have. Man to my mind is about the nastiest, most destructive of all the animals. I don’t see any reason, if he can evolve machines that can have more fun than he himself can, why they shouldn’t take over, enslave us, quite happily. They might have a lot more fun. Invent better games than we ever did” (Warren McCulloch, OOM, p. 226).
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We are our epistemology” is Gregory’s formulation. 52 Catherine’s phrasing is similar: “Each person is his own central metaphor”
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How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (N. Katherine Hayles)
- Highlight on Page 78 | Loc. 1763-65  | Added on Wednesday, November 30, 2011, 02:58 PM

(o gregory e a catherine aí no caso são os batesons)

The situation of modern humans is akin to that of Searle in the Chinese room, for every day we participate in systems whose total cognitive capacity exceeds our individual knowledge, including such devices as cars with electronic ignition systems, microwaves with computer chips that precisely adjust power levels, fax machines that warble to other fax machines, and electronic watches that communicate with a timing radio wave to set themselves and correct their date.

Sa personnalité, son nom, me semblaient comme des fictions menteuses que je n’avais plus le courage d’inculquer aux pierres. Les palais m’apparaissaient réduits à leurs simples parties, quantités de marbre pareilles à toutes les autres, et l’eau comme une combinaison d’hydrogène et d’oxygène, éternelle, aveugle, antérieure et extérieure à Venise, ignorante des Doges et de Turner.
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In short, what I had supposed sustances were thinned away into shadows, while every where shadows were deepened into substances:

“If substances might be call’d what shadows seem’d
For each seem’d either!” - Milton