An issue of La Dernière Mode
Just found out that Mallarmé once put together a women's fashion mag (La Dernière Mode) which he designed and wrote entirely himself for eight issues under a bunch of pseudonyms like Marguerite de Ponty and Miss Satin.
Édouard Manet - The Balcony
René Magritte - Perspective II - Manet's Balcony
Édouard Manet, The Balcony (1868) // René Magritte, Perspective II-Manet's Balcony (1950)
J. Crary - Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (2001)
J. Crary - Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (2001). A prehistory of the attention economy.
Sánchez: “You may have heard that Spain is alone. They’re the same people who said that when we recognized the State of Palestine, and then others followed.
“We are not alone — we are the first. Those who will end up alone are the ones defending the indefensible.”
Jonathan Crary - Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century
Current Read: J. Crary - Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century
Ultimately - or at the limit - in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. "The necessary condition for an image is sight," Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: "We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes." (Barthes, Camera Lucida).
Barthes // Kafka, on photography and looking away.
![The Western menu is very rigidly composed and ordered in sequence. Take restaurants: invariably they serve hors d'oeuvres, entrees, roasts, cheeses, and desserts in an inexorable order. It's the logicotemporal order of the classical narrative, and it's inflexible, as irreversible as it is in the Iliad and the Odyssey, in Les Liaisons dangereuses or the latest popular novel.
[interviewer:] While, in Japan, a meal is like a novel by Robbe-Grillet.
[Barthes]: Better than that. In Japanese restaurants, the customer is given chopsticks and served a tray on which the food is arranged . Chopsticks are marvelous eating utensils, they aren't pincers, or spears like our forks. You lift up a mouthful of rice, a mouthful of pickled vegetables, then more rice, then you take a swallow of soup, etc . Each person composes his alimentary discourse in a manner that is always absolutely free and reversible.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:qi6pgbiub3bcnwjej4i7nxlo/bafkreif3dssfrflnsjappeull355rkehbuc7m6p7e3wzk7dp5xpjl3dila)
The Western menu is very rigidly composed and ordered in sequence. Take restaurants: invariably they serve hors d'oeuvres, entrees, roasts, cheeses, and desserts in an inexorable order. It's the logicotemporal order of the classical narrative, and it's inflexible, as irreversible as it is in the Iliad and the Odyssey, in Les Liaisons dangereuses or the latest popular novel. [interviewer:] While, in Japan, a meal is like a novel by Robbe-Grillet. [Barthes]: Better than that. In Japanese restaurants, the customer is given chopsticks and served a tray on which the food is arranged . Chopsticks are marvelous eating utensils, they aren't pincers, or spears like our forks. You lift up a mouthful of rice, a mouthful of pickled vegetables, then more rice, then you take a swallow of soup, etc . Each person composes his alimentary discourse in a manner that is always absolutely free and reversible.
In terms of praxis this means eating with chopsticks btw
I could no longer be content with relating forms to ideological contents as I did in Mythologies. Not that I think that this is worthless, but nowadays this kind of relation is second-nature: today everyone can denounce a form's petit-bourgeois character. The struggle must be taken further now, it is not signs that must be cracked wide open-signifiers on one side, signifieds on the other-but the very idea of the sign: an operation that might be called a semioclasm . It is Western discourse as such, in its foundations and elementary forms, that we must now try to break apart. - On S/Z and Empire of Signs
Barthes: no more critiquing petit-bourgeois mystifications - time for a semioclasm of Western discourse.
The Poems of Sappho 177. transparent dress 179. purse 180. the Holder 181. fordable 182. I might go
Sappho, fragments
The global neo-Nazi ruling faction is inflicting upon the world a new era of forced mass starvation www.cnn.com/2026/02/18/a...
Roland Barthes - A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
Valentine's Reading, cont.
"This morning I must get off an 'important' letter right away — one on which the success of a certain undertaking depends; but instead I write a love letter — which I do not send". (Barthes)
Any recommendations on psychoanalysis and pets? Even pets as a metaphor (of neurosis).
Screenshot of sameerproject on IG Ramadan and Community: A Guide for Giving Back (P.S. you don’t have to be Muslim to participate) Zakat eligible Sameer Project x translating Falasteen
Can 20 people join us today in donating to the Sameer Project for Ramadan? $8 provides a meal for a family, and $32 can pay for groceries. You can also donate more to fund a water truck or a water desalination plant.
Pass this on, please.
See their IG for details: www.instagram.com/p/DUq5PoSjkK0
Jonathan Lear - Love and its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Analysis
Valentine's weekend read <3
Never Gonna Give You Up is a song about Lacanian ethics btw
Anthony Albanese and Isaac Herzog strolling a red carpet on the tarmac into the Australian capital.
the illegal chemical weapons Israel uses to incinerate Palestinians at 3,500C, leaving no identifiable traces of the dead.
www.aljazeera.com/features/202...
Bookstack of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Pascal and Aristotle.
Existenzstack
Super intriguing review of what looks to be a great read:
www.historicalmaterialism.org/fully-emascu...
It's sick, a sickness equal to the crimes but it extends it also in its own way. I'm not sure that there's any 'proper' measure of reaction to any of this which is itself part of the abyss of the crime.
God I hate the atmosphere of cloying salaciousness that hangs about all this Epstein stuff like humidity. Like, there's an oogling element, like wow, we can see the dirty underside and it's horrible but also in this barely concealed way really exciting for people.
The whole of F&T is basically K insisting on just how utterly imperceptible Abraham is, raging against all those readings that would subject him to apparatuses of capture. Squint, and Abraham becomes the figure less of faith than of the sui generis.
Deleuze's incommensurabilities just happen to be worldly and, rather than occasions to exalt the divine, are opportunities to compose the New, to lay out planes of consistency presided over by the immanence and transcendence of Problems.
The Deleuzian case for reading a shit ton of Kierkegaard is that K is an explorer of the incommensurable above all. It doesn't take much to read Fear & Trembling as a book not about faith but about becoming-imperceptible.
Depressed astronaut who just needs a bit of space right now.
nooooo 😭
Søren Kierkegaard – The Sickness Unto Death
This one's OK too
Søren Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling
This frikken cover
— explodes all restricted economy and opens into the infinite, while for Niezsche the transworldly is exactly the cause and the most dominant way in which restricted economy is introduced into the world. Only the world taken unto itself has no measure.
