Saturday 11 December 2010

Neroplatonism


‘The One engenders science. Not in the sense of the one as measurement. It is not what is measured in science that is important. ... What distinguishes modern science from the science of antiquity ... is precisely the function of the One, the One insofar as it is only there, we can assume, to represent solitude’. Jacques Lacan, XX.

Ma l’ora e ‘l giorno ch’ io le luci apersi
Nel bel nero
Francesco Petrarch, Rime Sparse 29.

‘All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.’ Georges Bataille, ‘Formless’.

Novo piacer che ne gli ingegni
Spesse volte si trova,
D’amar qual cosa nova
Più folta schiera di sospiri accoglia
Petrarch, Rime 37.

'What is striking about visual form agnosia is the complex nature of the stuff that can be represented in the absence of things. The perception of depth, velocity, acuity, and especially color (as opposed to wavelength), which are at least roughly intact in many visual form agnostics, requires considerable cortical computation. These computations yield a kind of rich but formlessgoo, which requires some additional and separately lesionable grouping process to represent objects.'
Farah, Visual Agnosia.

With what is perceptible to [the eye/mind] there is presented something else: what it can directly apprehend it sets on one side as its own; but the something else which Reason rejects, this, the dim, it knows dimly, this, the dark, it knows darkly, this it knows in a sort of non-knowing’.
Plotinus: Enneads, 100).


For I have seen beyond the stars
I have felt the strength of chaos
I have reached the point of sanity
And was married by the Chaos star
I welcomed the darkness that filled my soul
I was blessed by the madness of the Chaos star
1349, ‘Manifest’