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The Forest of No Return

ON THE AFTERMATH AND ITS PRECURSORS [NOTE: The following essay is cross-posted to https://formulae.substack.com. I will gradually be moving content to Substack from this site, which will eventually be discontinued.] These formulæ are intended to facilitate (for myself no less than for others) some purchase on reality, the one to which we now belong, the one that led us here, and the one(s)…

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Transcriptions ③ /// Nikolai Berdyaev on the Bourgeois

"The bourgeois lives in the finite, he is afraid of the expanse of the infinite." (Nikolai Berdyaev)

The next entry in our series of transcriptions is excerpted from Nikolai Berdyaev’s Slavery and Freedom, translated from the Russian by Reginald Michael (R. M.) French. Berdyaev’s philosophical work, largely descended from the Christian existentialism of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, is relatively unappreciated today but was influential on many of his contemporaries within and beyond his native…

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Jaime Semprun /// Newspeak in the 21st Century

"...the primary goal of the worldwide computer system is not to inform or entertain the cybercitizens of a programmed society, but rather to make machines communicate with other machines..." (Jaime Semprun)

About a third of the way into his Défense et illustration de la novlangue française, in the wake of a litany of examples demonstrating the proliferation of technology-driven (or, more precisely, technology-subservient) neologisms, Jaime Semprun artfully cuts himself short—he does not, he says, want to insult the reader’s intelligence. More importantly, from a rhetorical standpoint, he does not…

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Transcriptions ② /// GÜNTER EICH: SOME REMARKS ON "LITERATURE AND REALITY"

The second entry in our series of transcriptions, this one from German poet and dramatist Günter Eich. Some Remarks on “Literature and Reality” was originally published in the 1981 collection Valuable Nail from Oberlin College Press, translated by Stuart Friebert, David Walker, and David Young.   All the views that have been presented here assume that we know what reality is. I have to say for…

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Transcriptions ① /// Postscript to Ceronetti's THE SILENCE OF THE BODY

"The relationship science has forged w/ living & nonliving matter... is that of the psycho killer w/ his victims... It makes every dealing with doctors & their cures more agonizing." (Guido Ceronetti, Postscript to THE SILENCE OF THE BODY)

Transcription is often a sort of drudgery, but like other exercises in monotony it can also be a salutary and even sacred labor. Those who pray or meditate will, through repetition, transform their prayers or mantras into an internal ambience, not strictly divorced from meaning but separated enough from direct attention that the conscious mind can maintain a relationship to the words while…

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Ellul & Charbonneau ///Directives for a Personalist Manifesto ①

Ellul & Charbonneau /// Directives for a Personalist Manifesto ①: "We are revolutionaries in spite of ourselves."

In the early 1930’s, several somewhat interrelated revolutionary movements, all of which favored some form or other of political decentralization—and all of which deplored the dominant totalitarian ideologies of their time—adopted, as a mark of their more intimate but no less radical concerns, the rather fuzzy but allusive designation “personalism.” These movements seem to have dissolved rather…

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Denis de Rougemont /// Atomic Homeopathy

Denis de Rougemont /// Atomic Homeopathy: "...only the very smallest of things has come apart."

God says: “I am the One who is.” But the Devil, always eager to imitate God—even in reverse, since he sees everything from below—tells us as Ulysses told the Cyclops: “My name is No One, there is no one here. Who could you possibly be afraid of? What? You’re going to tremble before something that doesn’t exist?” Denis de Rougemont, La Part du diable[1.Denis de Rougemont, La Part du diable(New…

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Roman sun.

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#charlotterampling as though painted into this frame from #thenightporter by #lilianacavani

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Do you know @k__a__t__s__u ? You might be surprised because yes you do. #katsu http://katsu.today

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New York Skyline #Nosferatu

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Dominique de Roux, founder of les Cahiers de l'Herne #dominiquederoux #cahiersdelherne #immédiatement

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Buon compleanno, Guido Ceronetti! #guidoceronetti #novantanni

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New translation up at signals-noise.com, CONVERSATION WITH A BROWNSHIRT, from Denis de Rougemont's "Journal d'Allemagne" #denisderougemont #nazism #translation

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Denis de Rougemont /// Conversation with a Brownshirt

Between 1935 and 1936, the Francophone Swiss intellectual Denis de Rougemont (L’Amour et l’Occident) was a guest lecturer at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt where, in addition to his teaching, he kept a diary of observations—many in the form of dialogues—about life in Nazi Germany. The following is an excerpt from what would become his Journal d’Allemagne, first published by…

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The apartment of Jules Verne. #julesverne #writersdesk

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Degraw Street, Brooklyn.