ABSTRACT
We did not do very much today. Down by the river, lying flat on our faces on the smoothly polished boulders, we watched the currents. I can do this for a long time. Wild water smashing against the rocks, currents whirling, swirling around a stone, white, green, blue, not one colour really, flowing, rushing water, released force, endlessly beating against its banks…‘Down at the end of the valley’, K. said, ‘it is dammed.’ Damned! Why do they have to catch it in a dam, take away all its life, the splashing, the currents…all smoothened to slack water. Tamed water. Water caught in concrete pipes. Taken. Funnelled into a network of wires. Reliable conduct. Standardized units. Energy, accessible for everyone. How would our society work without it? But this river here. Its wild flow…the way it changes with the light, with the weather, the way how its sound rises in the night…
subject vs. object…1 can man’s destruction of the environment be reduced as long as we define ourselves as the Other of nature…is there a more humane society possible as long as we see ourselves as that which the Others are not… dominating forms of human self-understanding…written down in the grammar of our language the idea of our sciences the logic of our laws the relations between men and women the functioning of the economy… dominating form of thinking that defines the subject by its difference from the other which in the course of this becomes the object…breathless object…the one lying below…or at the edges…in the periphery…and then…fucking morality of helpfulness…subject looking after…down at the object…charitably avoiding its own emptiness…subject I…Iye…
what a woman is…am I that name…why ask me…how could I know what I am…how could I say it…clearly…you are asking for a good purpose you say…fighting for equal rights…‘we women’…‘women are’ …not like the others…definitely…no…sorry …I cannot…I cannot think therefore I am…
topo-logical visual objectifying thinking if this is ‘thinking’ how can we think without degrading it isolating it binding it domesticating it strai(gh)tening it canalizing it normalizing it…it…the world wild life chora Id human being… prior to all bad intentions…out of the laws of form…the upright form of the ‘I’…the transcendental signifier if you like…
how did it come about…this idea of identifying the human being…identifying it in general and in particular…as the I…as a subject…as a person…how did it come about
this idea that what a human being is could be thought, defined, understood…I remember one day my father told me a fairy-tale about this…
The Story of how the human being was turned into an ‘I’
Once upon a time there was a rebel.3 He happened to ask a question which provoked a powerful answer: the peculiar bond between epistemology and ontology. It holds that there exists what can be known, and that ‘knowing somethig’ is…yes, is what only some people can claim to do. And these people said: ‘Knowing something is seeing the truth. And truth is not something that
and the eye you cannot see…panopticon of absolute control…absolution …visual logic abstracting aspects towards the general…towards the trinitary generality of authormediumreader…or producercommodityconsumer or origintraditiondestiny or scienceknowledgepolltics…to guarantee unbroken view…penetrating line…way of truth… topo-logic of clear and distinctive thinking…identifying…
is simply there or comes to you all by itself. What do you think? You have to see it. Naturally not everybody can see it. It takes some distance, because truth is something very peculiar, it is “an idea”. But don’t worry, if you study carefully, you can learn how to see it. We can teach you, just come and have dinner with us.’ And so it happened. Once upon a time in Greece.
