113 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2024
  2. Mar 2024
    1. In Frankreich beginnt in dieser Woche eine öffentliche Debatte um ein großes lithium-bergbauprojekt im zentralmassiv. Der umfassende Artikel beleuchtet eine Vielzahl von Aspekten des lithium-Abbaus und der zunehmenden Opposition dagegen, die eng mit dem Kampf gegen die individuelle motorisierte Mobilität verbunden ist. https://www.liberation.fr/environnement/climat/course-au-lithium-made-in-france-une-opportunite-a-saisir-ou-un-mirage-ecologique-20240310_FQOVXTBNKJC5NJ7EZI2UQKOAIY/in

  3. Feb 2024
    1. As thehistorian Jean Leclercq, himself a Benedictine monk, puts it, ‘in theMiddle Ages, one generally read by speaking with one’s lips, at leastin a whisper, and consequently hearing the phrases that the eyessee’.6

      quoted section from:<br /> [au moyen âge, on lit généralement en pronançant avec les lèvres, au moins à voix basse, par conséquent en entendant les phrases que les yeux voient.] Jean Leclercq, Initiation aux auteurs monastiques du Moyen Âge, 2nd edn (Paris: Cerf, 1963), p. 72.

      What connection, if any, is there to the muscle memory of movement while speaking/reading along with sound/hearing to remembering what we read? Is there research on this? Implications for orality and memory?

  4. Jan 2024
  5. Dec 2023
    1. che giorno per giorno se la cavava

      This spot in the second edition of SQ (1958) is one of the few from which Levi actually removed words appearing in the 1947 edition (see Editions). He removed ‘Sua madre è finita a Birkenau’, a sentence implying that Jean’s mother did not survive her deportation. In fact, she did survive.

      JD

    1. Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800. Edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton. Translated by David Gerard. 1st ed. Foundations of History Library. 1958. Reprint, London: N.L.B., 1976.

  6. Nov 2023
    1. We're in the time of the French Revolution now, a time where revolutionaries break with superstitions from the past. They will only be guided by reason. You have this extremely decorated French historian and geographer that's on a mission. A mission to fight the church. 00:07:15 He published this book on the cosmographical opinions of the Church Fathers, and he really goes for it. He writes how until recently, all science has had to be based on the Bible, and geographers were forced to believe Earth was a flat surface. According to him, this was all because of three irresistible arguments persecution, prison and the stake. I
      • for Jean-Antoine Letronne, myth - flat earth, book - The Cosographical opinions of the Church Fathers
    2. there is this French scientist that introduced the idea that medieval people thought the earth was flat, and he believes religion was to blame. He was influenced by an age old movement that created the idea 00:04:30 of dark ages and the rule of the church and suppressing knowledge. If you go all the way back to the 1300s, we find one Italian poet that was quite sure of himself. Petrarch identified two times in history. The time of the Greeks and Romans that was an enlightened age. And basically everything after the fall of the Western Roman Empire was a dark age
      • for: Jean-Antoine Letronne, Petrarch, myth - flat earth, myth - dark ages

      • historical myth - flat earth

      • historical myth - dark ages
        • During the French Revolution, the French historian and geographer Jean-Antoine Letronne promoted the myth that the people of the middle ages believed in a flat earth.
        • He was influenced by the Italian Petrarch who promulgated the myth of the dark (in contrast to the light) ages
  7. Oct 2023
    1. They then spent a couple of pages on the history of elementary education, followed by a discussion of the stages of instruction, beginning with "reading readiness" and continuing through "sight words" and "context clues", to mature skills that allow the reader to compare the views of different writers.

      The broad idea of "reading readiness" stemmed from Jean Piaget's work, much of which was debunked by Peter Bryant during the 1970s. Yet we're still apparently discussing it and attempting to figure out how to do all this better: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/22/us/reading-teaching-curriculum-phonics.html

      They didn't tackle the lowest level very thoroughly, but I was a bit surprised that with their discussion of speed reading they didn't give at least a passing mention to phonics which had a big rise in the 1960s before declining in the 70s and 80s only to see another big uptick in the 90s.

  8. Sep 2023
    1. The epoche is always performed and we don't know it. We don't realize it. 00:19:42 This was said, for instance, by Michel Henry. But maybe even more strikingly by Jean-Paul Sartre in his book, The Transcendence Of The Ego
      • for: epoche - Jean Paul Satre, epoche, question, question - epoche - symbolosphere, Jean-Paul Satre - Nausea
      • paraphrase
        • Jean-Paul Satre
          • The Transcendence of the Ego
          • Nausea (book)
        • both the subject and object are cocreated and emerge simultaneously
      • definition start
        • Bitbol calls this "symmetrical effort"
      • definition end
        • it takes symmetrical effort to
          • extract invariance from experience (objectification and object permanence)
          • stabilize an experiencing pole (construction of self)
        • when some event causes
      • example: epoche
        • reading a book on history
        • you suddenly realize there is no past, no medieval events, just black marks on paper (or on a screen)
      • question
        • Is realizing the epoche the same as realizing the symbolosphere?
  9. Aug 2023
  10. Jul 2023
    1. Der Chef des europäischen Wetterdienstes Copernicus, Jean-Noël Thépaut, bestätigt, dass es sich bei den derzeitigen Hitzewellen um außerordentliche Phänomene handelt. Dabei verstärken sich Effekte der globalen Erhitzung wechselseitig. Noch nicht verstanden, aber besorgniserregend seien die Erhitzung des Nordatlantik und die Abnahme des antarktischen Meereises. In den vergangenen Jahren hat vermutlich das La Niña-Phänomen das Ausmaß der globalen Erhitzung verdeckt. https://www.liberation.fr/environnement/climat/en-europe-le-puissant-dome-de-chaleur-va-durer-au-moins-jusquau-26-juillet-20230720_GRZXH5FIQ5EYLBZ4CB7U2L2VUY/

  11. Jun 2023
    1. Die Oberfläche des Nordatlantik ist 23,9°, die der Weltmeere insgesamt 20,9° warm. Diese Temperaturrekorde übertreffen auch die bisherigen wissenschaftlichen Prognosen deutlich. Sie werden dramatische Folgen für die Biodiversität, Extremwetter-Ereignisse und das Abschmelzen des Meereises haben. Ausführlicher Bericht der Libération zur Erwärmung der Ozeane und zu marinen Hitzewellen. https://www.liberation.fr/environnement/climat/pendant-que-locean-se-consume-20230623_M2PIQOI535BPRCGPITA6THMD44/

    1. We would nowadays probablycall the second group ‘constructivist’ or ‘cognitive’ or ‘sociocultural’psychologists, though the committee did not venture to name them as such. Thislatter school (or schools) they took to be associated with psychologists such asthe British Susan Isaacs, the Russian Alexander Luria, the American JeromeBruner, and the Swiss Jean Piaget.
    1. la carica di Pikolo, vale a dire di fattorino-scritturale, addetto alla pulizia della baracca, alle consegne degli attrezzi, alla lavatura delle gamelle, alla contabilità delle ore di lavoro del Kommando

      The character of Pikolo is introduced by listing his roles as part of the workforce and hierarchy in the camp.

      EB

    2. Jean

      'Jean' is Jean Samuel, a young Frenchman from Alsace, who survived the camps and the Death Marches and was in contact with Levi after the war. In his 1976 Appendix to SQ, Levi relates:

      ‘È vivo, e sta bene, Jean, il “Pikolo” del canto di Ulisse: la sua famiglia era stata distrutta, ma si è sposato dopo il ritorno, ed ora ha due figli, e conduce una vita molto tranquilla come farmacista in una cittadina della provincia francese. Ci incontriamo talvolta in Italia, dove viene per le vacanze; altre volte sono andato io a trovarlo. Stranamente, ha dimenticato molto del suo anno di Monowitz: in lui prevalgono i ricordi atroci del viaggio di evacuazione, nel corso del quale ha visto morire di estenuazione tutti i suoi amici (fra questi era Alberto)’ (OC I, 294).

      As noted here, Jean later wrote his own memoir, Il m’appelait Pikolo.

      Levi would return to Jean and to this chapter, ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, re-reading and commenting on it, in his 1986 book I sommersi e i salvati, in the chapter ‘L'intellettuale ad Auschwitz’:

      ‘Rileggo dopo quarant’anni in Se questo è un uomo il capitolo Il canto di Ulisse: è uno dei pochi episodi la cui autenticità ho potuto verificare (è un’operazione rassicurante: a distanza di tempo, come ho detto nel primo capitolo, della propria memoria si può dubitare)’ (OC II, 1234).

      RG

    3. la carica di Pikolo

      With the chapter ‘I sommersi e i salvati’, Levi introduces the theme of Prominenz into his reconstruction of life in the Lager. From here on, Levi highlights the web of political relations structuring the concentration camp, wherein power circulates despite and as a function of the persecutors’ will to domination (Forti 2014). A web of relations following the gregarious dynamics of the human--animal as ‘social animal’ (see the conviction ‘every stranger is an enemy’ in the Preface) tends to establish hierarchical forms of cohabitation.

      However, Levi also inspects such a ‘hierarchy of Prominenz’ from an ethical perspective: the ‘saved’ enter the circuit of Prominenz by assuming a certain ethical posture, that is, by calibrating their privilege either with solidarity towards their fellow inmates (such as Alberto or Lorenzo) or with a will to power and prestige that becomes blind towards his fellows’ oppression (such as Alfred L, Elias, Alex or Frenkel).

      Pikolo is no exception: like any other human figure of salvation in SQ, he is initially presented to readers for his ethical value. The first part of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ describes Pikolo’s story of salvation: he obtained his privilege shrewdly as he understood the voids of power that could be filled with his collaboration. However, he does not use his privilege to increase the oppression of those located in the lower ranks, such as Levi, but works instead to share the advantages his higher position affords him. It is not by chance that Pikolo’s decision to ask Levi to help him to carry out a convenient job that day also, and unconsciously, creates the condition for one of the most intense and memorable dialogues of our literary tradition. If Dante’s verses could resound in Auschwitz and, with them, a moment of hope and mental wellbeing (‘it is doing me good’), it is because of a simple and small act of solidarity that we can never take for granted wherever privilege rules.

      SG

    4. il Pikolo

      In this same paragraph, the ‘Pikolo’ is said to be a ‘fattorino-scritturale, addetto alla pulizia della baracca, alle consegne degli attrezzi, alla lavatura delle gamelle, alla contabilità delle ore di lavoro del Kommando’, and three paragraphs later Levi adds that ‘la carica di Pikolo costituisce un gradino già assai elevato nella gerarchia delle Prominenze’.

      Whereas the other titles mentioned in this chapter - Vorarbeiter; Kapo - identify recognised positions within the hierarchy of the Lager, Pikolo, according to the testimony of Jean Samuel, was the invention of Primo Levi: ‘Pikolo was not a camp job. The term was coined for me by Primo Levi. I was the only Pikolo. Of course, all the Kapos had helpers, often very young people, sometimes as young as twelve, who served as their assistants, doing everything they asked, including prostitution. The Kapos’ lovers, their sexual victims, were called “Pipel”. I escaped all that’ (Samuel, Dreyfus 2015, 37; my translation).

      Jean’s testimony also raises questions about the spelling of this term. In a letter he sent to Levi on 13 March 1946, Jean signed his name with his title and identification number from Auschwitz, ‘Picolo ex 176.397’, amending the spelling to ‘Piccolo’ in subsequent correspondence (Franceschini 2017, 268). Moreover, Levi replied to Jean’s letter with a note dated 24 May 1946, attached to which was an early draft of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, which differs in some ways from what would become the published version, including identifying Levi’s conversation partner as ‘Jean detto Piccolo', a spelling that corresponds to that adopted in the draft of the chapter that Levi sent to Anna Foa on 14 February 1946 (269). Beginning with the first edition of SQ, however, the spelling of Jean’s title was changed to ‘Pikolo’. Fabrizio Franceschini argues that Levi adopted this term, with its new spelling, from its common usage in northern Italian (and possibly also in Vienna in German usage) to refer to shop boys and other minor functionaries (272-79).

      CLL

    5. Pikolo ha viaggiato per mare

      In his Il m’appelait Pikolo, published 20 years after Levi’s death, Samuel’s recollection of his encounter and conversation with Levi differs conspicuously. Samuel reports, for instance, how he saw the sea for the first time only after the war. Samuel’s book also features correspondence between the two fellow inmates in which they hint at their different memories.

      FB

    6. amici

      As noted earlier, Jean Samuel’s memories of this episode are described in Il m’appelait Pikolo, pp. 39-40. Consider, for example, this sentence: ‘Encore maintenant je m’interroge sur ce mystère de la mémoire: nous avons eu tous deux le sentiment d’une rencontre cruciale, inoubliable, mais elle ne se fondait pas sur les mêmes gestes, les mêmes paroles, les mêmes sensations’ (Samuel, Dreyfus 2007, 40).

      MJ

    7. Pikolo

      In Il m’appelait Pikolo, Jean Samuel and Jean-Marc Dreyfus write: ‘Pikolo […] Primo Levi m’a donné ce nom, mon nouveau nom’; ‘[l]e terme de Pikolo ne fait pas partie du vocabulaire ordinaire du camp; c’est une invention de Primo Levi’ (Samuel, Dreyfus 2007, 15, 16) (see also here). Recent research, though (Franceschini 2022) has qualified this claim, pointing to a possible earlier origin.

      Tellingly, Samuel’s book was published on the twentieth anniversary of Primo Levi’s death.

      MJ

    8. Jean

      Jean Samuel, the actual person behind the character Jean, il Pikolo, in SQ, survived the camp and would write his own memoir – but only after Levi’s death. The book, written with Jean-Marc Dreyfus, is entitled Il m’appelait Pikolo (2007).

      FB

    1. la carica di Pikolo

      With the chapter ‘I sommersi e i salvati’, Levi introduces the theme of Prominenz into his reconstruction of life in the Lager. From here on, Levi highlights the web of political relations structuring the concentration camp, wherein power circulates despite and as a function of the persecutors’ will to domination (Forti 2014). A web of relations following the gregarious dynamics of the human--animal as ‘social animal’ (see the conviction ‘every stranger is an enemy’ in the Preface) tends to establish hierarchical forms of cohabitation.

      However, Levi also inspects such a ‘hierarchy of Prominenz’ from an ethical perspective: the ‘saved’ enter the circuit of Prominenz by assuming a certain ethical posture, that is, by calibrating their privilege either with solidarity towards their fellow inmates (such as Alberto or Lorenzo) or with a will to power and prestige that becomes blind towards his fellows’ oppression (such as Alfred L, Elias, Alex or Frenkel).

      Pikolo is no exception: like any other human figure of salvation in SQ, he is initially presented to readers for his ethical value. The first part of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ describes Pikolo’s story of salvation: he obtained his privilege shrewdly as he understood the voids of power that could be filled with his collaboration. However, he does not use his privilege to increase the oppression of those located in the lower ranks, such as Levi, but works instead to share the advantages his higher position affords him. It is not by chance that Pikolo’s decision to ask Levi to help him to carry out a convenient job that day also, and unconsciously, creates the condition for one of the most intense and memorable dialogues of our literary tradition. If Dante’s verses could resound in Auschwitz and, with them, a moment of hope and mental wellbeing (‘it is doing me good’), it is because of a simple and small act of solidarity that we can never take for granted wherever privilege rules.

      SG

    2. la carica di Pikolo

      With the chapter ‘I sommersi e i salvati’, Levi introduces the theme of Prominenz into his reconstruction of life in the Lager. From here on, Levi highlights the web of political relations structuring the concentration camp, wherein power circulates despite and as a function of the persecutors’ will to domination (Forti 2014). A web of relations following the gregarious dynamics of the human--animal as ‘social animal’ (see the conviction ‘every stranger is an enemy’ in the Preface) tends to establish hierarchical forms of cohabitation.

      However, Levi also inspects such a ‘hierarchy of Prominenz’ from an ethical perspective: the ‘saved’ enter the circuit of Prominenz by assuming a certain ethical posture, that is, by calibrating their privilege either with solidarity towards their fellow inmates (such as Alberto or Lorenzo) or with a will to power and prestige that becomes blind towards his fellows’ oppression (such as Alfred L, Elias, Alex or Frenkel).

      Pikolo is no exception: like any other human figure of salvation in SQ, he is initially presented to readers for his ethical value. The first part of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ describes Pikolo’s story of salvation: he obtained his privilege shrewdly as he understood the voids of power that could be filled with his collaboration. However, he does not use his privilege to increase the oppression of those located in the lower ranks, such as Levi, but works instead to share the advantages his higher position affords him. It is not by chance that Pikolo’s decision to ask Levi to help him to carry out a convenient job that day also, and unconsciously, creates the condition for one of the most intense and memorable dialogues of our literary tradition. If Dante’s verses could resound in Auschwitz and, with them, a moment of hope and mental wellbeing (‘it is doing me good’), it is because of a simple and small act of solidarity that we can never take for granted wherever privilege rules.

      SG

    3. Pikolo

      In Il m’appelait Pikolo, Jean Samuel and Jean-Marc Dreyfus write: ‘Pikolo […] Primo Levi m’a donné ce nom, mon nouveau nom’; ‘[l]e terme de Pikolo ne fait pas partie du vocabulaire ordinaire du camp; c’est une invention de Primo Levi’ (Samuel, Dreyfus 2007, 15, 16). (Although recent research by Franceschini 2022 has qualified this claim, pointing to a possible earlier origin.) Tellingly, Samuel’s book was published on the twentieth anniversary of Primo Levi’s death.

      MJ

    4. Pikolo

      In Il m’appelait Pikolo, Jean Samuel and Jean-Marc Dreyfus write: ‘Pikolo […] Primo Levi m’a donné ce nom, mon nouveau nom’; ‘[l]e terme de Pikolo ne fait pas partie du vocabulaire ordinaire du camp; c’est une invention de Primo Levi’ (Samuel, Dreyfus 2007, 15, 16). (Recent research, though, by Franceschini 2022 has qualified this claim, pointing to a possible earlier origin.) Tellingly, Samuel’s book was published on the twentieth anniversary of Primo Levi’s death.

      MJ

    5. il Pikolo

      In this same paragraph, the ‘Pikolo’ is said to be a ‘fattorino-scritturale, addetto alla pulizia della baracca, alle consegne degli attrezzi, alla lavatura delle gamelle, alla contabilità delle ore di lavoro del Kommando’, and three paragraphs later Levi adds that ‘la carica di Pikolo costituisce un gradino già assai elevato nella gerarchia delle Prominenze’.

      Whereas the other titles mentioned in this chapter - Vorarbeiter; Kapo - identify recognised positions within the hierarchy of the Lager, Pikolo, according to the testimony of Jean Samuel, was the invention of Primo Levi: ‘Pikolo was not a camp job. The term was coined for me by Primo Levi. I was the only Pikolo. Of course, all the Kapos had helpers, often very young people, sometimes as young as twelve, who served as their assistants, doing everything they asked, including prostitution. The Kapos’ lovers, their sexual victims, were called “Pipel”. I escaped all that’ (Samuel, Dreyfus 2015, 37; my translation).

      Jean’s testimony also raises questions about the spelling of this term. In a letter he sent to Levi on 13 March 1946, Jean signed his name with his title and identification number from Auschwitz, ‘Picolo ex 176.397’, amending the spelling to ‘Piccolo’ in subsequent correspondence (Franceschini 2017, 268). Moreover, Levi replied to Jean’s letter with a note dated 24 May 1946, attached to which was an early draft of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, which differs in some ways from what would become the published version, including identifying Levi’s conversation partner as ‘Jean detto Piccolo', a spelling that corresponds to that adopted in the draft of the chapter that Levi sent to Anna Foa on 14 February 1946 (269). Beginning with the first edition of SQ, however, the spelling of Jean’s title was changed to ‘Pikolo’. Fabrizio Franceschini argues that Levi adopted this term, with its new spelling, from its common usage in northern Italian (and possibly also in Vienna in German usage) to refer to shop boys and other minor functionaries (272-79).

      CLL

    6. il Pikolo

      In this same paragraph, the ‘Pikolo’ is said to be a ‘fattorino-scritturale, addetto alla pulizia della baracca, alle consegne degli attrezzi, alla lavatura delle gamelle, alla contabilità delle ore di lavoro del Kommando’, and three paragraphs later Levi adds that ‘la carica di Pikolo costituisce un gradino già assai elevato nella gerarchia delle Prominenze’.

      Whereas the other titles mentioned in this chapter - Vorarbeiter; Kapo - identify recognised positions within the hierarchy of the Lager, Pikolo, according to the testimony of Jean Samuel, was the invention of Primo Levi: ‘Pikolo was not a camp job. The term was coined for me by Primo Levi. I was the only Pikolo. Of course, all the Kapos had helpers, often very young people, sometimes as young as twelve, who served as their assistants, doing everything they asked, including prostitution. The Kapos’ lovers, their sexual victims, were called “Pipel”. I escaped all that’ (Samuel, Dreyfus 2015, 37; my translation).

      Jean’s testimony also raises questions about the spelling of this term. In a letter he sent to Levi on 13 March 1946, Jean signed his name with his title and identification number from Auschwitz, ‘Picolo ex 176.397’, amending the spelling to ‘Piccolo’ in subsequent correspondence (Franceschini 2017, 268). Moreover, Levi replied to Jean’s letter with a note dated 24 May 1946, attached to which was an early draft of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, which differs in some ways from what would become the published version, including identifying Levi’s conversation partner as ‘Jean detto Piccolo', a spelling that corresponds to that adopted in the draft of the chapter that Levi sent to Anna Foa on 14 February 1946 (269). Beginning with the first edition of SQ, however, the spelling of Jean’s title was changed to ‘Pikolo’. Fabrizio Franceschini argues that Levi adopted this term, with its new spelling, from its common usage in northern Italian (and possibly also in Vienna in German usage) to refer to shop boys and other minor functionaries (272-79).

      CLL

    7. Jean

      Jean Samuel, the actual person behind the character Jean, il Pikolo, in SQ, survived the camp and would write his own memoir – but only after Levi’s death. The book, written with Jean-Marc Dreyfus, is entitled Il m’appelait Pikolo (2007).

      FB

    8. Jean

      Jean Samuel, the actual person behind the character Jean, il Pikolo, in SQ, survived the camp and would write his own memoir – but only after Levi’s death. The book, written with Jean-Marc Dreyfus, is entitled Il m’appelait Pikolo (2007).

      FB

    9. Jean

      Jean is Jean Samuel, a young Frenchman from Alsace, who survived the camps and the Death Marches and was in contact with Levi after the war. In his 1976 Appendix to SQ, Levi relates:

      ‘È vivo, e sta bene, Jean, il “Pikolo” del canto di Ulisse: la sua famiglia era stata distrutta, ma si è sposato dopo il ritorno, ed ora ha due figli, e conduce una vita molto tranquilla come farmacista in una cittadina della provincia francese. Ci incontriamo talvolta in Italia, dove viene per le vacanze; altre volte sono andato io a trovarlo. Stranamente, ha dimenticato molto del suo anno di Monowitz: in lui prevalgono i ricordi atroci del viaggio di evacuazione, nel corso del quale ha visto morire di estenuazione tutti i suoi amici (fra questi era Alberto)’ (OC I, 294).

      As other annotations note, Jean later wrote his own memoir, Il m’appelait Pikolo.

      Levi would return to Jean and to this chapter, ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, re-reading and commenting on it, in his 1986 book I sommersi e i salvati, in the chapter ‘L'intellettuale ad Auschwitz’:

      ‘Rileggo dopo quarant’anni in Se questo è un uomo il capitolo Il canto di Ulisse: è uno dei pochi episodi la cui autenticità ho potuto verificare (è un’operazione rassicurante: a distanza di tempo, come ho detto nel primo capitolo, della propria memoria si può dubitare)’ (OC II, 1234).

      RG

    10. Jean

      Jean is Jean Samuel, a young Frenchman from Alsace, who survived the camps and the Death Marches and was in contact with Levi after the war. In his 1976 Appendix to SQ, Levi relates:

      ‘È vivo, e sta bene, Jean, il “Pikolo” del canto di Ulisse: la sua famiglia era stata distrutta, ma si è sposato dopo il ritorno, ed ora ha due figli, e conduce una vita molto tranquilla come farmacista in una cittadina della provincia francese. Ci incontriamo talvolta in Italia, dove viene per le vacanze; altre volte sono andato io a trovarlo. Stranamente, ha dimenticato molto del suo anno di Monowitz: in lui prevalgono i ricordi atroci del viaggio di evacuazione, nel corso del quale ha visto morire di estenuazione tutti i suoi amici (fra questi era Alberto)’ (OC I, 294).

      As other annotations recall, Jean later wrote his own memoir, Il m’appelait Pikolo.

      Levi would return to Jean and to this chapter, ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, re-reading and commenting on it, in his 1986 book I sommersi e i salvati, in the chapter ‘L'intellettuale ad Auschwitz’:

      ‘Rileggo dopo quarant’anni in Se questo è un uomo il capitolo Il canto di Ulisse: è uno dei pochi episodi la cui autenticità ho potuto verificare (è un’operazione rassicurante: a distanza di tempo, come ho detto nel primo capitolo, della propria memoria si può dubitare)’ (OC II, 1234).

      RG

    11. Pikolo ha viaggiato per mare

      In his Il m’appelait Pikolo, published 20 years after Levi’s death, Samuel’s recollection of his encounter and conversation with Levi differs conspicuously. Samuel reports, for instance, how he saw the sea for the first time only after the war. Samuel’s book also features correspondence between the two fellow inmates in which they hint at their different memories.

      FB

    12. che giorno per giorno se la cavava

      This spot in the second edition of SQ (1958) is one of the few from which Levi actually removed words appearing in the 1947 edition. He removed ‘Sua madre è finita a Birkenau’, a sentence implying that Jean’s mother did not survive her deportation. In fact, she did survive.

      JD

    13. amici

      Jean Samuel’s memories of this episode are described in Il m’appelait Pikolo, pp. 39-40. Consider, for example, this sentence: ‘Encore maintenant je m’interroge sur ce mystère de la mémoire: nous avons eu tous deux le sentiment d’une rencontre cruciale, inoubliable, mais elle ne se fondait pas sur les mêmes gestes, les mêmes paroles, les mêmes sensations’ (Samuel, Dreyfus 2007, 40).

      MJ

  12. May 2023
  13. Apr 2023
    1. Not only does Locke providean intellectual foundation for Rousseau’s view of the child as an experimenter,we can also see the seeds of Rousseau’s notions of the plasticity of the child’smind

      John Locke provides some intellectual foundation in his Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) for Rousseau's Émile (1762) progressive and empiricist perspectives of teaching and learning.

  14. Mar 2023
    1. Jean François Champollion's "Lettre à M. Dacier ... relative à l'alphabet des hiéroglyphes ..." (1822) is therefore rightly celebrated as the "birth certificate" of Egyptology, in which the decisive breakthrough in the decipherment of hieroglyphic writing was achieved.
  15. Feb 2023
    1. Prof. Joseph Novak (Cornell) developed conceptual maps based on David Ausubel's subsumption (aka meaningful learning) theory and Piaget's concept of conceptual schemes. Conceptual maps have been proven successful across all levels of education worldwide (check Google Scholar).
  16. Jan 2023
    1. Like many people, I’d always been baffled by the occasional, undeniably ‘Lamarckian’ passages in On the Origin of Species, bearing in mind Darwin is generally credited with having discredited such thinking.

      Despite Darwin being thought of as having discredited Lamarckian inheritance, there are Lamarckian passages in portions of his work.

    1. Lobsters have a very bad reputation among philosophers, who frequently hold them out as examples of purely unthinking, unfeeling creatures. Presumably, this is because lobsters are the only animal most philosophers have killed with their own two hands before eating. It’s unpleasant to throw a struggling creature in a pot of boiling water; one needs to be able to tell oneself that the lobster isn’t really feeling it. (The only exception to this pattern appears to be, for some reason, France, where Gérard de Nerval used to walk a pet lobster on a leash and where Jean-Paul Sartre at one point became erotically obsessed with lobsters after taking too much mescaline.)
  17. Dec 2022
  18. Nov 2022
    1. Although Rousseau had an influence on a handful of European educators, itwould be misleading to imply that the impact on education of these new ideasabout learning through discovery was, at the time, profound.

      Did Rousseau have an influence on Maria Montessori? Where was the origin of her philosophy?

  19. Oct 2022
    1. Rousseau’sheretical view was that anything which was outside children’s experience wouldbe meaningless to them, much as Plato, Comenius, and others had warned. Hisinsights had condensed principally out of the prevailing intellectual atmosphereat the time—empiricism, explicated by philosophers such as John Locke. We’lllook at Locke and Rousseau in more detail in Chapter 2.

      Just as the ideas of liberty and freedom were gifted to us by Indigenous North Americans as is shown by Graeber and Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything, is it possible that the same sorts of ideas but within the educational sphere were being transmitted by Indigenous intellectuals to Europe in the same way? Is Rousseau's 18th century book Emile, or On Education of this sort?

      What other sorts of philosophies invaded Western thought at this time?

    2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who shockedthe world with Émile: or On Education ([1762] 1993).

      Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Émile, or On Education. Translated by Alan Bloom. 1762. Reprint, Basic Books, 1979. https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/jean-jacques-rousseau/emile/9780465019311/

    1. "In the event of a fire, the black-bound excerpts are to be saved first," instructed the poet Jean Paul to his wife before setting off on a trip in 1812.

      Writer Jean Paul on the importance of his Zettelkasten.

    1. »Bei Feuer sind die schwarzeingebundnen Exzerpten zuerst zu retten«, wies der Dichter Jean Paul seine Frau vor Antritt einer Reise im Jahr 1812 an.

      "In the event of a fire, the black-bound excerpts are to be saved first," the poet Jean Paul instructed his wife before setting out on a journey in 1812.

      link to: https://hyp.is/BLL9TvZ9EeuSIrsiWKCB9w/ryanholiday.net/the-notecard-system-the-key-for-remembering-organizing-and-using-everything-you-read/

    1. What if something happened to your box? My house recently got robbed and I was so fucking terrified that someone took it, you have no idea. Thankfully they didn’t. I am actually thinking of using TaskRabbit to have someone create a digital backup. In the meantime, these boxes are what I’m running back into a fire for to pull out (in fact, I sometimes keep them in a fireproof safe).

      His collection is incredibly important to him. He states this in a way that's highly reminiscent of Jean Paul.

      "In the event of a fire, the black-bound excerpts are to be saved first." —instructions from Jean Paul to his wife before setting off on a trip in 1812 #

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanus_pagination

      Stephanus pagination is a system of reference numbers used in editions of Plato based on the three volume 1578 edition of Plato's complete works published by Henricus Stephanus (Henri Estienne) and translated by Joannes Serranus (Jean de Serres).

      See also: - Bekker numbering (for Aristotle) - Diels-Kranz numbering (for early pre-Socratics)

  20. Sep 2022
    1. The list is compiled each year by the Marist Mindset team of Professor Tommy Zurhellen, Associate Professor of English; Dr. Vanessa Lynn, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice; and Dr. Joyce Yu-Jean Lee, Assistant Professor of Art and Digital Media.
  21. Aug 2022
    1. Der Gelehrte griff bei der Wissensproduktion nur noch auf den flüchtigen Speicher der Exzerptsammlungen zurück, die die loci communes enthielten: die "Gemeinplätze", die wir auch heute sprichwörtlich noch so nennen. Gesner nannte diese Sammlungen "chartaceos libros", also Karteibücher. Er erfand ein eigenes Verfahren, mit dem die einzelnen Notate jederzeit derangierbar und damit auch neu arrangierbar waren, um der Informationsflut Rechnung zu tragen und ständig neue Einträge hinzugefügen zu können. "Du weißt, wie leicht es ist, Fakten zu sammeln, und wie schwer, sie zu ordnen", schrieb der Basler Gelehrte Caspar Wolf, der Herausgeber der Werke Gesners.

      For the production of knowledge, the scholar only resorted to the volatile memory of the excerpt collections, the [[loci communes]] contained: the "platitudes" that we still literally call that today. Gesner called these collections "chartaceos libros", that is, index books. He invented his own method with which the individual notes could be rearranged at any time and thus rearranged in order to take account of the flood of information and to be able to constantly add new entries. "You know how easy it is to collect facts and how difficult it is to organize them," wrote the Basel scholar [[Caspar Wolf]], editor of Gesner's works.

      Is this translation of platitudes correct/appropriate here? Maybe aphorisms or the Latin sententiae (written wisdom) are better?

      I'd like to look more closely at his method. Was he, like Jean Paul, using slips of paper which he could move around within a particular book? Perhaps the way one might move photos around in a photo album with tape/adhesive?

    1. https://www.preservearticles.com/business/what-is-card-indexing-and-explain-its-advantages-and-disadvantages/1740

      This page seems to be broadly copied from the book Secretarial Practice and Company Law by Arun Kumar and Rachana Sharma (Atlantic Publishers & Distributors (P) Limited, 1998) # and specifically page 529.

      It contains no other history or references that I can immediately see. The book seems to be written for a secretarial audience in India in the 1990's, and while interesting not otherwise pertinent to immediate to my historical questions.

    2. The system of card indexing was propagated by a French Person called Abb’e Jean Rozier (1734-93). The index is prepared by allotting a separate card to each piece of information. The required information are written on the cards. All cards are of uniform size and are arranged in alphabetical, numerical or geographical order.

      https://www.preservearticles.com/business/what-is-card-indexing-and-explain-its-advantages-and-disadvantages/1740

      This source is questionable in it's sourcing and seems to mix several different methods and systems, so we'll need to treat it with a massive grain of salt.

      It does Mention Abb'e Jean Rozier (1734-93) as a historical figure related to propagating a system of card indexing which is a new name to me and thus worth looking into.

      Is Abb'e here a title? (potentially the French translation of the English abbot which is correctly abbé, so this may have had a typo.)

      The dates of life given would indicate that this is not the balloonist/scientist Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Pil%C3%A2tre_de_Rozier

  22. Jun 2022
    1. Encyclopedia of Library and Information ScienceVolume 29 - Stanford University Libraries to System AnalysisBy Allen Kent, Harold Lancour, Jay E. Daily

      Contains significant section on SYNTOL.

    1. Gardin worked with the organizations UNESCO and the European Atomic Energy Community in the 1950s to the 1960s, leading the creation of an indexing language, the SYNTOL (Syntagmatic Organization Language).
    2. Jean-Claude Gardin (3 April 1925 - 8 April 2013) was a French archaeologist who is recognized as being one of the founders of archaeological computing.
  23. May 2022
    1. Ms. Jones, who had previously edited translations of the French philosophers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, the Child book opened a new career path, editing culinary writers: James Beard and Marion Cunningham on American fare, Madhur Jaffrey (Indian food), Claudia Roden (Middle Eastern), Edna Lewis (Southern), Lidia Bastianich and Marcella Hazan (Italian), and many others.
  24. Apr 2022
    1. As Calvet explains, this consisted of Barthes ‘writing out his cardsevery day, making notes on every possible subject, then classifyingand combining them in different ways until he found a structure or aset of themes’ (1994: 113) which he could proceed to work with.
    2. As Calvetexplains, in thinking through the organisation of Michelet, Barthes‘tried out different combinations of cards, as in playing a game ofpatience, in order to work out a way of organising them and to findcorrespondences between them’ (113).

      Louis-Jean Calvet explains that in writing Michelet, Barthes used his notes on index cards to try out various combinations of cards to both organize them as well as "to find correspondences between them."

    3. Louis-Jean Calvet details the pivotal role played by indexcards in the organisation of Barthes’ Michelet.
    1. Jean-Martin Charcot, the nineteenth-century physician known as the father ofneurology, practiced and taught at this very institution. Charcot brought hispatients onstage with him as he lectured, allowing his students to see firsthandthe many forms neurological disease could take

      Nineteenth-century physician Jean-Martin Charcot, known as the father of neurology, brought patients to his lectures at Universitaire Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris to allow students to see forms of disease first hand.


      When was the medical teaching practice of "rounds" instituted?

  25. Feb 2022
  26. Jan 2022
    1. Jean Paul invented a similar system and called it Witz. Like Tesauro, Jean Paul considered that the matter was to cede a prearranged ge-ography of places where everything had its own seat but was also compelled to remain in its own seat without possible deviation. The dismantlement of this architecture was required to change the rhetorical invention--that is, the retrieval of what is already known but has been forgotten--into an invention in the modern, scientific sense of the term.73 Also similar to Tesauro, accord-ing to Jean Paul, such an invention or discovery could occur only through the jumbled recording of notes taken from readings (or, from personal reflections) and retrievable by means of a subject index. By searching and recombining, the compiler would have put into practice the chance principle on which the whole knowledge storage mechanism was based; he would have likely discov-ered similarities and connections between remote items that he would have otherwise overlooked.

      73 Cf. Götz Müller, Jean Pauls Exzerpte (Würzburg, 1988), 321–22

      I'm not quite sure I understand what the mechanism of this is specifically. Revisit it later. Sounds like it's using the set up the system not only to discover the adjacent possible but the remote improbable.

  27. Dec 2021
    1. In narrative texts, the unity of the text is the result of a tension; it results from ignorance of the future which the reader is constantly [made] aware of; but it is also the result of a backward movement since, as Jean Paul noted, the resolution of the tension depends on the fact that the reader must be able to recur to parts of the text he has already read.

      Niklas Luhmann is broadly quoting Jean Paul here. It should be noted that Jean Paul was a notable user of a note taking method very similar to that of the zettelkasten. What evidence, if any, exists for the connection between their systems. Was Jean Paul's system widely known during or after his own lifetime?

    1. Hobbes’s position tends to be favoured bythose on the right of the political spectrum, and Rousseau’s by thoseleaning left

      Relative political positions of Hobbes and Rousseau.

    2. Rather, what Rousseaupresented was more of a parable, by way of an attempt to explore afundamental paradox of human politics: how is it that our innate drivefor freedom somehow leads us, time and again, on a ‘spontaneousmarch to inequality’?8
    3. For Diamond and Fukuyama, as for Rousseau some centuriesearlier, what put an end to that equality – everywhere and forever –

      was the invention of agriculture, and the higher population levels it sustained.

      Graeber and Wengrow argue that many political theorists since Rousseau attribute the end of human equality to the rise of agriculture.

    1. the really insidious part about it is not the idea of the noble savage actually there is no noble savage in Russo's 00:54:51 discourse because his state of nature involves creatures which are like humans but actually lack any sort of philosophy at all because what they call do is project their own lives into the 00:55:05 future and imagine themselves in other states they're constantly inventing things and chasing their own tails or rushing headlong for their own chains as he puts it they invent agriculture but 00:55:18 they can't see the consequences they invent cities but they can't see the consequences so we're talking about no imagination

      Rousseau was perfectly describing the intelligence and politics of Donald J. Trump when he described creatures which are like humans, but are "rushing headlong for their own chains". Trump was able to govern, but completely lacked the ability to imagine the consequences of any of his actions.


      Not sure what name Rousseau gave these creatures. Which book was this in? Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men?

    2. you look at Rousseau he's writing two years later you know this is what everybody's discussing and the sort of social circles he's in so what does he do he synthesizes there's these two positions there's the evolutionist position and there's this sort of 00:53:31 indigenous critique possession and he does both so he comes up with the the first fusion well yes there was this primordial state where we were truly free and equal and that's cool but of 00:53:44 course then social evolution sets in and we lose it but you know someday we might get there again so basically by synthesizing these two opposed positions he essentially invents leftist discourse

      Graeber and Wengrow argue that Rousseau invents leftist discourse by juxtaposing the evolutionist idea of societies and the indigenous critique in Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes) in 1754.

    3. managed to get a hold of all the other essays that were submitted there's one book where you could find out and it was hotly tested hotly contested many of the arguments that you see nowadays were

      Rousseau's work on inequality was part of a contest circa 1753, which he didn't win.

  28. Aug 2021
  29. Jul 2021
    1. From Wikipedia I got the info about Nabokov. Jean Paul’s 1796 narration Leben des Quintus Fixlein is subtitled “aus funfzehn Zettelkästen gezogen; nebst einem Mustheil und einigen Jus de tablette” (literally: drawn from fifteen card indexes). Arno Schmidt’s so-called “book” Zettels Traum (roughly “index card’s dream”) looks like the collage it really is. You should just take a look at Zettels Traum and see for yourself! 

      Some interesting examples here. Hadn't known about Nabokov. I knew of Schmidt, but not the title or subject of this particular book.

  30. May 2021
    1. Petrus Ramus

      Just making note of the fact that Petrus Ramus was the advisor of Theodor Zwinger and apparently influcnced Jean Bodin, about whom Ann M. Blair writes about in Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age.

      I suspect these influences may impinge on my work on the history of memory and its downfall due to Ramism since the late 1500s and which impacts the history of information.

    1. Ulisse Aldrovandi, the great Bolognese natural philosopher and collector of specimens (such as the large lizards that adorn his university library museum), wrote four hundred volumes of manuscript notes. Joachim Jungius, a German professor of mathematics, medicine, logic, and natural philosophy, was famous for having produced an estimated 150,000 pages of notes. But as Blair makes clear, the vast collections of scientific notes were not simply the mad scratchings of obsessive pedants. Commonplace notes comprised the data for internationally successful scientific works, such as Jean Bodin’s Universae naturae theatrum.

      Examples of significant collections of notes.

    2. Blair’s previous work demonstrated that the practices of literary reading and writing were central to the rise of scientific method. Focusing on the lawyer and scientist Jean Bodin in the sixteenth century, she meticulously examined how Bodin collected commonplace reading notes and then stored and analyzed them as scientific evidence.

      I really do need to create a historical timeline for commonplace books already.

      Georg Christoph Lichtenberg also did this in the late 1700's and became famous for it after his death and the publication of his Waste Books. Worth looking into who his influences may have been?

    1. The novelist and storyteller Jean Paul assembled some 12,000 paper scraps over the course of his lifetime, but died in 1825, well before the advent of standardized box systems that made it convenient and easy to store such multitudes of paper slips, as well as to realize what remained a dream to Paul: the dream of a more complex order between the paper scraps than that imposed by the linear arrangement of the written page.

      Another example of a sizeable zettelkasten prior to 1825.

  31. Apr 2020
  32. Mar 2020
    1. Notre époque est la première à disposer de si gigantesques capacités de stockage et de traitement des données

      En premier lieu l'auteur cite "Jamais notre mémoire ne s'est trouvée à ce point hors de nos têtes", puis plus bas, se réfère à Jean-Gabriel Ganascia "notre époque est la première à disposer de si gigantesques capacités de stockage et de traitement de données".

      On a ici un Raisonnement Dialectique Neutre entre deux positions : On perd progressivement notre mémoire d'une part, et on possède des capacités technologiques croissantes mémorielles au point d'avoir des enjeux commerciaux. Ainsi on est toujours dans un débat comparatif Homme/Machine.

    2. spécialistes du sujet

      L'auteur citera, et donnera des arguments en faveur de trois spécialistes : Francis Eustache, Bernard Stiegler et Jean Gabriel Ganascia. Ces trois spécialistes ont publié en 2014 "Mémoire et oubli" un recueil d'essais et documents sur la mémoire.

  33. Dec 2019
    1. They call this retribution. Hateful name!

      Retributive justice holds that the correct punishment for a crime balances the wrong, and that punishing wrongdoers deters others from committing similar crimes in the future. Note, however, that Justine is wrongfully executed for the death of William. Shelley thus seems to imply that hasty prosecution, especially for the sake of revenge, might hurt the innocent, thereby creating new injustices.

      At the time of its writing, there was already a concerted reformist effort to do away with the death penalty. For example, as early as 1762, Jean-Jaques Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract that "There is no man so bad that he cannot be made good for something. No man should be put to death, even as an example if he can be left to live without danger to society."

    2. it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses

      The Creature's awakening to consciousness alludes to accounts of consciousness and maturation by John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Locke gives an account of how the mind of a child slowly learns to distinguish the various senses before it can apprehend the world in totu, in Ch. 7 of his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Rousseau's Emile, which Mary recorded having read in 1815, also offers an account contrasting the senses of an adult to the senses of a child.

    3. the strange system of human society was explained to me

      The passage echoes Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that "human society" corrupts naturally good humans. Like Rousseau's character Emile, the Creature is only slowly introduced to society, beginning good but becoming increasingly menacing.

  34. May 2019
    1. Jean-Michel Basquiat

      From Wikipedia:

      Jean-Michel Basquiat (French: [ʒɑ̃ miʃɛl baskija]; December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was an influential American artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent. Basquiat first achieved fame as part of SAMO, an informal graffiti duo who wrote enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the late 1970s, where hip hop, punk, and street art cultures coalesced. By the 1980s, his neo-expressionist paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally.

  35. Jan 2019
  36. Oct 2018
    1. Rousseau’s narrative of the origin shows us through antithesis how everything of the order of what is usually considered specifically human is immediately and irremediably linked to an absence of property [im propriété ], to a process of “supplementation,” of prosthetization or exteriorization, in which nothing is any longer immediately at hand, where everything is found mediated and instrumentalized, technicized, unbalanced. This process would lead today to something inhuman, or superhuman, tearing the human away from everything that, hitherto, seemed to define him (language, work, society, reason, love and desire and everything deriving thereof, even a certain feeling of death and a certain relation to time: to all of this we shall return), a process by which the realization or the “actualization” of the power of man seems to be as well the derealization of man, his disappearance in the movement of a becoming that is no longer his own. Rousseau will not, therefore, have been mistaken; he will have been right, almost, for this narrative has set us face to face with the problem: an attempt at thinking in a single movement (the origin) of technics and (the “origin”) of the human— technology and anthropology— presupposes a radical conversion of one’s point of view. The question will be that of thinking the relation of being and time as a technological relation , if it is true that this relation only develops in the “originary” horizon of technics— which is just as much an absence of origin.

      Stiegler: "specifically human is immediately and irremediably linked to an absence of property [im propriété ], to a process of “supplementation,” of prosthetization or exteriorization" || Also the introduction of the task of "thinking the relation on being and time as a technological relation"

    2. Perfectibility is this power whose actualization is negative. Perfectibility is already there, indubitably, with freedom. But it is only there virtually. Perfectibility is tantamount to an originary freedom inasmuch as the latter is virtual perfectibility, but only virtual. This freedom is almost perfectibility, but only this almost. It must in no case be conflated with actual perfectibility. The act of freedom is its loss. The origin is in-action. As long as perfectibility remains virtual, freedom remains originary and man, a quasi-animal. The only initial difference between man and animals is that man is inclined to mimic them all; he has no particular instinct, and by this very fact, he can, endowed with en enigmatic adroitness (Rousseau 1973, 54), appropriate every animal instinct. “Savage man, left by nature solely to the direction of instinct, or rather indemnified for what he may lack by faculties capable at first of supplying its place, and afterwards of raising him much above it, must accordingly begin with purely animal functions” (60, my emphasis). Only the animal is present at the origin of humanity. There is no difference between man (in his essence) and animal, no essential difference between man and animal, unless it be an inactual possibility. When there is a difference, man is no longer, and this is his denaturalization, that is, the naturalization of the animal. Man is his disappearance in the denaturalization of his essence. Appearing, he disappears: his essence defaults [son essence sefait défaut}. By accident. During the conquest of mobility. Man is this accident of automobility caused by a default of essence [une panne d’essence, a “lack of fuel,” an “empty tank”]. Man will mimic the instincts of animals to supplement the instinct he lacks without, however, ever adding anything. This mimetic-animal freedom (freedom qua the latitude that the absence of instinct, determined and proper to man, is), which is a guarantee of equilibrium as long as it not become perfectibility, has nothing to do with the ingenuity of reason, although Rousseau does speak of adroitness, of the singular capacity of man, qua his metis, corresponding to a lack or default of originary essence and determination. How shall we interpret this lack or this originary default, this lack-of… found before the fall, before the realization of the default that is the fall? How shall we interpret this lack and this default which are neither lack nor default, almost not a lack and almost not a default, since we are in the origin, in original equilibrium in which being does not default itself [ne se fait pas défaut à lui-même]? As after the fact [après coup}.

      Stiegler > Rousseau: "perfectability" / originary "default" ||

    3. The prosthesis is the origin of inequality. The man of pure nature has everything about himself, carries himself whole and entire about himself; his body is “the only instrument he understands”; he is never in himself in default; no fissure is at work in him that would be provoked by a process of differentiation on the outside of himself, nor a differentiation of an “outside” that would be essential (interiorized) to him: he depends on no outside. This must be demonstrated, for Rousseau well knows that from the moment he no longer has everything within him, whatever he has (however little), not being a part of his being, becomes differentiated, diverges, disrupts, belongs already to the fall. Everything is inside: the origin is the inside. The fall is exteriorization. This thematic of exteriorization is central to Leroi-Gourhan’s definition of the process of humanization. We will see the paradox this definition struggles with as long as its own consequence is not drawn: the human is the technical, that is, time. The man that “carries himself, as it were, perpetually whole and entire about him” does not exteriorize himself, does not ex-press himself, does not speak: speech is already a prosthesis. Any exit outside of oneself is a denaturalization; to the extent that our ills place us outside of ourselves, they “are of our own making . . . and we might have avoided them nearly all by adhering to that simple, uniform and solitary manner of life which nature prescribed” (Rousseau 1973, 56).

      Stiegler: "The prosthesis is the origin of inequality" ||

    4. Rousseau, precisely, wants to show that there is no originary default, no prostheses, that the claws missing in man are not stones, or, should they be stones, they are precisely not cut or fabricated, being immediately at hand and not inscribed in any process of mediation.

      Stiegler > Rousseau: "Rousseau ... wants to show that there is no originary default" ||

    5. It is in time, in becoming, “in these successive changes in the constitution of man that we must look for the origin of those differences which now distinguish men” (Rousseau 1973, 44). If progress is profoundly a regression, it is because difference means not force (virtue, virtus), the marvelous and generous power of diversity, but inequality in the law of the strongest (or least strong). The law of the strongest is not originary, nor is the difference in which it necessarily consists. Nature is equality: the originary indifferentiation that is the universal. What is at stake in the Discourse is that nature not be the law of the strongest. Let us not forget the following: what is at stake— and this stake is above all philosophical— is a denial of an originary difference that allows one to affirm that, after the fall, there is a difference between principle and fact, here rebaptized as nature and culture. This discourse against difference passes therefore in turn through a differentiation; this is a discourse for difference as well. There is no difference at the origin, but originary equality: we must, but afterward, make an originary difference between what the origin is and what it no longer is, while recalling, reinvigorating, resurrecting in ourselves the origin qua indifferentiation: the problem will be to “distinguish properly [démêler] between what is original and what is artificial in the actual nature of man” (44) (and we will find the possibility of making this difference in the very voice of the undifferentiated origin— which can still speak to us). This is by no means a “light undertaking.” What does “distinguish properly” here mean? Is the original opposed to the artificial, or is it a matter of an a priori distinction rather than an opposition? The answer is complex, and the question full of knots. There must be in any case an original instance, and one must say what it is: the inhuman is there, everything is not permitted, history is interlaced with horrors that must be able to be denounced. But in this relation to the nonoriginary, does this “proper” strictly speaking derive from the originary? Should the original simply be opposed to the artificial? Or should one proceed as if that were the case?

      Stiegler > Rousseau: to "distinguish properly [démêler] between what is original and what is artificial in the actual nature of man" ||

    6. There is the origin, then the fall, forgetting, and loss. But it is quite difficult to distinguish the origin from the fall— which is to say also difficult to distinguish what is at the origin of the fall— this is particularly true in Rousseau.

      Stiegler: "...difficult to distinguish what is at the origin of the fall..." ||

    7. All narratives of the origin take on a mythical turn, in that they speak what is: to speak what is qua what absolutely is, is always to endure Meno’s aporia, to which a positive answer cannot be given. For there to be, in becoming (there can be an origin only when becoming is; the question of origin could never arise in a world of being), something after all, for being to be itself always the same, for it to have an identity in essence, a threshold should not be crossed but experienced. This is the difficulty Rousseau will encounter in thinking originary man7 as what he is in his nature, before any determination by his becoming. This will also be the very difficulty of our question: the human / the technical. When do(es) the human / the technical begin and end?

      Stiegler: "When do(es) the human / the technical begin and end?"

  37. Dec 2016
  38. Jul 2016