hi!

“I find myself increasingly focused on this issue of frailty. 

“I fear falling in the street, I imagine bicycle messengers knocking me to the ground. The approach of a child on a motorized scooter causes me to freeze mid-intersection, play dead. I no longer go for breakfast to Three Guys on Madison Avenue: what if I were to fall on the way? 

“I feel unsteady, unbalanced, as if my nerves are misfiring, which may or may not be an exact description of what my nerves are in fact doing. 

“I hear a new tone when acquaintances ask how I am, a tone I have not before noticed and find increasingly distressing, even humiliating: these acquaintances seem as they ask impatient, half concerned, half querulous, as if no longer interested in the answer. 

“As if all too aware that the answer will be a complaint. 

“I determine to speak, if asked how I am, only positively.” 

“An image comes back to me; and I say in my heart: that’s really him, that’s really her. I recognize him, I recognize her. This recognition can take different forms. It takes place already in the course of perception: a being was presented once; it went away; it came back. Appearing, disappearing, reappearing. In this case the recognition adjusts—fits—the reappearing to the appearing across the disappearing. This small happiness of perception has provided the occasion for many classical descriptions. One thinks of Plato discussing the disappointments of mistaken and the opportunities of successful recognition in the Theaetetus and the Philebus. One thinks of the vicissitudes of recognition, of the anagnorisis, in Greek tragedy: Oedipus recognizes in his own person the evil initiator of the misfortunes besetting the city. […] [But] perhaps we have placed a foot in the wrong imprint or grabbed the wrong ring dove in the coop. Perhaps we were the victims of a false recognition, as when from afar we take a tree to be a person we know. And yet, who, by casting suspicions from outside, could shake the certainty attached to the pleasure of the sort of recognition we know in ours hearts to be indubitable? Who could claim never to have trusted memory’s finds in this way? Do not outstanding events like this, the founding events of a solitary existence or of one shared with others, reveal this prime trust? And do we not continue to measure our mistakes and our disappointments against the signals coming from an unshakeable recognition?” 


— Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (2004)

“A dualism of referents must not be transformed into a dualism of substances. This interdiction concerns the philosopher just as much as the scientist: for the first, the term ‘mental’ is not the equivalent of the term ‘immaterial,’ quite the opposite. Mental experience implies the bodily but in a sense of the word ‘body’ irreducible to the objective body as it is known in the natural sciences. To the body-as-object is semantically opposed the lived body, one’s own body, my body (whence I speak), your body (you, to whom I am speaking), his or her body (his or hers, those about whom I recount the story). There is but one body that is mine, whereas all the body-objects are before me. The ability to account for the ‘objectification,’ as it is called, by which the lived body is apprehended as a ‘body-object’ remains a problem poorly solved by the phenomenologist-hermeneutian. In fact, the distance is great between the body as lived and the body as object. To travel it, one must take the detour by way of the idea of a common nature and, to do that, pass by way of the idea of an intersubjectivity founding a common knowledge, and move all the way back to the attribution of comparable and concordant mental states among a plurality of embodied subjects. In the final analysis, only this plurality is entitled to speak of ‘my’ brain as one of many brains, as one other among all the other brains. I can then say that the other, like me, has a brain. At the end of this long circuit is ‘the’ brain, the object of the neurosciences. They take for granted the process of objectification that remains a considerable problem for hermeneutical phenomenology, one that in many respects has been poorly solved. Indeed, in what sense are the lived body and the body as object the same body? The problem is difficult inasmuch as we do not, at first glance, see any passage from one discourse to the other: either I speak of neurons and so forth, and I confine myself to a certain language, or else I talk about thoughts, actions, feelings, and I tie them to my body, with which I am in a relation of possession, of belonging…” 


— Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (2004)

“In the first instance and on the whole, forgetting is experienced as an attack on the reliability of memory. An attack, a weakness, a lacuna. In this regard memory defines itself, at least in the first instance, as a struggle against forgetting. Herodotus strives to preserve the glory of the Greeks and the Barbarians from oblivion. And our celebrated duty of memory is proclaimed in the form of an exhortation not to forget. But at the same time and in the same fell swoop, we shun the specter of a memory that would never forget anything. We even consider it to be monstrous. Present in our mind is the fable of Jorge Luis Borges about the man who never forgot anything, in the figure of Funes el memorioso. Could there then be a measure in the use of human memory, a ‘never in excess’ in accordance with the dictum of ancient wisdom? Could forgetting then no longer be in every respect an enemy of memory, and could memory have to negotiate with forgetting, groping to find the right measure in its balance with forgetting? And could this appropriate memory have something in common with the renunciation of total reflection? Could a memory lacking forgetting be the ultimate phantasm, the ultimate figure of this total reflection that we have been combatting in all of the ranges of the hermeneutics of the human condition?” 


— Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (2004)
 

One step closer to heaven, baby
means one step closer to a federal fellowship 

(I got the news yesterday morning but I’m still SO HAPPY)

cloudeprudis:

I like my men like I like my coffee: weak and really hot

(via stinkfishtraveller-deactivated2)