Roger Ebert seems to think this documentary is authentic. Others are speculating that it could be a big artistic hoax, something similar to Banksy’s Exit Through The Gift Shop documentary. But Casey Affleck says it’s all true (Time). Watch the trailers and visit the official website.
 | Un jeune collègue, bon spécialiste de Kant, étudiant la philosophie kantienne dans ses rapports avec la biologie et la médecine du 18e siècle, m’avait signalé un texte, de l’espèce de ceux qui engendre à la fois la satisfaction d’une belle rencontre et la confusion d’une ignorance à l’abri de laquelle on croyait pouvoir s’attribuer un brin d’originalité |
You’ll find a review of the English translation for The normal and the pathological here. And here’s Canguilhem’s obituary by David Macey.
| A vision had seized hold of me, like the demented fury of a hound that sunk its teeth into the leg of a deer carcass and is shaking and tugging at the downed game so frantically that the hunter gives up trying to calm him. It was a vision of a large steamship scaling a hill under its own steam, working its way up a steep slope in the jungle, while above this natural landscape, which shatters the weak and the strong with equal ferocity, soars the voice of Caruso, silencing all the pain and all the voices of the primeval forest and drowning out all birdsong. To be more precise: bird cries, for in this setting, left unfinished and abandoned by God in wrath, the birds do not sing; they shriek in pain, and confused trees tangle with one another like battling Titans, from horizon to horizon, in a steaming creation still being formed. Fog-panting and exhausted they stand in this unreal world, in unreal misery―and I, like a stanza in a poem written in an unknown foreign tongue, am shaken to the core. |
Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man) is one of the most revered and enigmatic filmmakers of our time, and Fitzcarraldo is one of his most honored and admired films. More than just Herzog’s journal of the making of the monumental, problematical motion picture, which involved, among other things, major cast changes and reshoots, and the hauling (without the use of special effects) of a 360-ton steamship over a mountain , Conquest of the Useless is a work of art unto itself, an Amazonian fever dream that emerged from the delirium of the jungle. With fascinating observations about crew and players—including Herzog’s lead, the somewhat demented internationally renowned star Klaus Kinski—and breathtaking insights into the filmmaking process that are uniquely Werner Herzog, Conquest of the Useless is an eye-opening look into the mind of a cinematic master. (Harper Collins Publisher)
A review of Herzog’s book over at The New York Times
| The ‘dark’ writer of the bourgeoisie, such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Mandeville, always had an appeal for Max Horkheimer, who was influenced by Schopenhauer early in his career. These writers still thought in a constructive way; and there were lines leading from their disharmonies to Marx’s social theory. The ‘black’ writer of the bourgeoisie, foremost among them the Marquis de Sade and Nietzsche, broke these ties. In their blackest book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno joined with these writers to conceptualize the Enlightenment’s process of self-destruction. On their analysis, it is no longer possible to place hope in the liberating force of enlightenment. Inspired by Benjamin’s now ironic hope of the hopeless, they still did not want to relinquish the now paradoxical labor of conceptualization. We no longer share this mood, this attitude. And yet under the sign of a Nietzsche revitalized by poststructuralism, moods and attitudes are spreading that are confusingly like those of Horkheimer and Adorno. I would like to forestall this confusion. |
Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Mandeville are “dark” writers (why?). Marquis de Sade and Nietzsche? Even darker : they are the “black” writers of the bourgeoisie. And Habermas? Habermas must be white.
| In June, Afghanistan officially outpaced Vietnam as the longest war in American history – and Obama has quietly begun to back away from the deadline he set for withdrawing U.S. troops in July of next year. The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it’s precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn’t want. |
“The horror….the horror”
A well-worth reading article by 30 years old journalist Michael Hastings. For me, it’s less about taking side (either for the Obama administration of for McChrystal strategy and ideas) than about the complex difficulties surrounding any large scale war operations. It’s somehow reminescent of McNamara’ account of what he called “The Fog of War” in Errol Morris’ documentary of the same name (2003). Anybody who ever saw Coppola’s Apocalypse Now will likely remember the extensive use of smoke and fog and the effect it has on the rendition of the story.
Newsweek as an short interview with Michael Hastings explaining how the Rolling Stone’s piece was written.
| An anosognosic patient who is paralyzed simply does not know that he is paralyzed. If you put a pencil in front of them and ask them to pick up the pencil in front of their left hand they won’t do it. And you ask them why, and they’ll say, “Well, I’m tired,” or “I don’t need a pencil.” They literally aren’t alerted to their own paralysis. There is some monitoring system on the right side of the brain that has been damaged, as well as the damage that’s related to the paralysis on the left side. There is also something similar called “hemispatial neglect.” It has to do with a kind of brain damage where people literally cannot see or they can’t pay attention to one side of their environment. If they’re men, they literally only shave one half of their face. And they’re not aware about the other half. If you put food in front of them, they’ll eat half of what’s on the plate and then complain that there’s too little food. You could think of the Dunning-Kruger Effect as a psychological version of this physiological problem. If you have, for lack of a better term, damage to your expertise or imperfection in your knowledge or skill, you’re left literally not knowing that you have that damage. It was an analogy for us |
Errol Morris’ essay on the Dunning-Kruger effect.
| I have become an enigma to myself. So said Saint-Augustine. And herein lies my sickness. |
The reference is Saint-Augustine’s Confessions, book X, chap. 33 (§50) :
“But do you hear me, O Lord, my God: look upon me and see, have mercy and heal me, for in your eyes I have become an enigma to myself, and herein lies my sickness.” (google books preview)
Previously on Skandalon: Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo
| Then the men of the Empire, who had been through so much, who had lived in such carnage, kissed their emaciated wives and spoke of their first love; they looked into the fountains of their natal prairies and found themselves so old, so mutilated, that they bethought themselves of their sons, in order that they might close their eyes in peace. They asked where they were; the children came from the schools, and seeing neither sabers, nor cuirasses, neither infantry nor cavalry, they asked in turn where were their fathers. They were told that the war was ended, that Cesar was dead, and that the portraits of Wellington and of Blucher were suspended in the antechambers of the consulates and the embassies, with these two words beneath: Salvatoribus mundi. Then there seated itself on a world in ruins an anxious youth. |
Here’s the original French version:
“Alors ces hommes de l’Empire, qui avaient tant couru et tant égorgé, embrassèrent leurs femmes amaigries et parlèrent de leurs premières amours ; ils se regardèrent dans les fontaines de leurs prairies natales, et ils s’y virent si vieux, si mutilés, qu’ils se souvinrent de leurs fils, afin qu’on leur fermât les yeux. Ils demandèrent où ils étaient ; les enfants sortirent des collèges, et ne voyant plus ni sabres, ni cuirasses, ni fantassins, ni cavaliers, ils demandèrent à leur tour où étaient leurs pères. Mais on leur répondit que la guerre était finie, que César était mort, et que les portraits de Wellington et de Blücher étaient suspendus dans les antichambres des consultats et des ambassades, avec ces deux mots au bas : Salvatoribus mundi.
Alors s’assit sur un monde en ruines une jeunesse soucieuse.” (WikiSource)
| To take a dose of LSD is all right, and you will have the experience of being more or less crazy, but this will make quite good sense because you know you took the dose of LSD. If, on the other hand, you took the LSD by accident, and then find yourself going crazy, not knowing how you got there, this is a terrifying and horrible experience. This is a much more serious and terrible experience, very different from the trip which you can enjoy if you know you took the LSD. Now consider the difference between my generation and you who are under twenty-five. We all live in the same crazy universe whose hate, distrust, and hypocrisy relates back (especially at the international level)’ to the Fourteen Points and the Treaty of Versailles. We older ones know how we got here. I can remember my father reading the Fourteen Points at the breakfast table and saying, “By golly, they’re going to give them a decent armistice, a decent peace,” or something of the kind. And I can remember, but I will not attempt to verbalize, the sort of thing he said when the Treaty of Versailles came out. It wasn’t printable. So I know more or less how we got here. But from your point of view, we are absolutely crazy, and you don’t know what sort of historic event led to this craziness. “The fathers have eaten bitter fruit and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” It’s all very well for the fathers, they know what they ate. The children don’t know what was eaten. |
Think midle eastern wars, energy crisis, Europe financial crisis, unexplainable killing sprees and so forth.
About Stephen Collins: “I am 29. I am male. And I am a freelance illustrator / cartoonist. I live in London, from whence I hail. Well, actually I’m from Penge, which is to London what Nelson Mandella’s appendix is to Nelson Mandella, by which I mean a hidden, ugly and rather inconsequential part of a much greater whole. But still. I have a regular caricature in The Times, and do bits and bobs all about the place: Guardian, Independent, NME, GQ, FHM, Independent On Sunday, Q, Wall Street Journal and lots more.” Check his blog, website and MySpace page.
Artist’s statement: “Early-twentieth century Modernism greatly transformed our lives, liberating the human spirit from untold decoration. No longer needing to draw attention from God, all aristocratic attempts at ostentation have fallen away. At last we avail ourselves of mechanical aids far beyond our human powers, attaining the freedom to shape things at will.
I decided to trace the beginnings of our age via architecture. Pushing my old large-format camera’s focal length out to twice-infinity―with no stops on the bellows rail, the view through the lens was an utter blur―I discovered that superlative architecture survives, however dissolved, the onslaught of blurred photography. Thus I began erosion-testing architecture for durability, completely melting away many of the buildings in the process.” (Sugimoto’s official web site).
About Hiroshi Sugimoto: “Hiroshi Sugimoto (杉本博司, Sugimoto Hiroshi), born on February 23, 1948, is a Japanese photographer currently dividing his time between Tokyo, Japan and New York City, USA. His catalog is made up of a number of series, each having a distinct theme and similar attributes.” (Wikipedia).
