Nietzsche on Forgetting

The opening paragraph of Nietzsche’s The Use and Abuse of History accords a certain privilege to the concept of forgetting that also marks the distinction between the history of man and the history of beast. For, in forgetting, the demarcation between the “painful” and “sorrowful” history of man is counterposed to the “unhistorical” life of the beast, of whose “happiness” he is nonetheless envious. Nietzsche writes:

"Consider the herds that are feeding yonder: they know not the meaning of yesterday or today; they graze and ruminate, move or rest, from morning to night, from day to day, taken up with their little loves and hates and the mercy of the moment, feeling neither melancholy nor satiety. Man cannot see them without regret, for even in the pride of his humanity he looks enviously on the beast’s happiness. He wishes simply to live without satiety or pain, like the beast; yet it is all in vain, for he will not change places with it. He may ask the beast—“Why do you look at me and not speak to me of your happiness?” The beast wants to answer—“Because I always forget what I wished to say”; but he forgets this answer, too, and is silent; and the man is left to wonder."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. by Adrian Collins (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. 1975), 5.

Review: Reanimating Critical Thinking

Art is imitation only to the extent to which it is objective expression, far removed from psychology. There may have been a time long ago when this expressive quality of the objective world generally was perceived by the human sensory apparatus. It no longer is. Expression nowadays lives on only in art. Through expression art can keep at a distance the moment of being-for-other which is always threatening to engulf it. Art is thus able to speak in itself. This is the realization through mimesis. Art’s expression is the antithesis of ‘expressing something.’ Mimesis is the ideal of art, not some practical method or subjective attitude aimed at expressive values. What the artist contributes to expression is his ability to mimic, which sets free in him the expressed substance.” - Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

“Rationality is immanent to art, and this rationality is in many ways similar to the rationality of the outside world, but it is also, at the same time, different from the rationality of the conceptual order. No artistic work can exist in complete isolation from the “rationality governing the world outside,” yet it may not reproduce or imitate the strictures of the governing logic that condemns it for having irrational features. What appears as irrational expression in art in the “eyes” of the conceptual ordering is actually the expression of the “forgotten experiences” that themselves cannot be understood by “rationalizing them.”” - Amresh Sinha.

Amresh Sinha at http://www.wbenjamin.org/mimesis.html#fn1#fn1 begins to elucidate the critical distinction between the rational and irrational which has the capacity to rebuke the trend towards “spirituality” as a commodity fetish and to open up a “new” rationalism in the order of Spinoza’s mind body connection revealing the limitations of dualistic thinking which has been appropriated by the trend of nouveau humanists / spiritualist / capitalists to romanticize spirit while negating the relationship of real and imagined lives. He goes on to say, “ The artworks reach the highest stage of their vulnerability at the moment when they seek to transcend the limit set by their own principle of negativity, a boundary that expresses the negation that “each and every work…seems to say: non confundar” … “That the strength of artworks lies in the fact that they can transcend the limit also makes them, at that point, the most vulnerable to their own deception and fictitiousness. For the artwork’s truth content lies not in communicating something other than itself; rather it is a mediation, a “participation,” in history. The great works of art do not transcend the boundary of their own illusion, because their illusion represents their truth, an illusion of truth, i.e., their falsity. Aesthetic truth transcends illusion, but the artworks themselves are illusory.”–Jonathan Genkin

Review

http://www.newstatesman.com/200501010060

New Statesman
Text messaging

Sukhdev Sandhu
Published 01 January 2005

Subtitles: on the foreignness of filmEdited by Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour MIT Press, 544pp, £22.95ISBN 0262050781

Ultimately, and this is what makes the book so rich and resonant, to talk about subtitles is to talk about the boundaries that we construct, or that are constructed for us, to separate the local from the foreign, "us" from "them". Amresh Sinha even argues that subtitles themselves are illegal aliens in the republic of cinema, existing "on the borderline between image and voice. They remain pariahs, outsiders, in exile from the imperial territoriality of the visual regime." Other writers des-cribe them as "symptomatic, foreign-body disturbances" and, pointing to the high proportion of subtitlers who are Jewish, speculate about the relationship between nomadism and multilingualism.

Sukhdev Sandhu's London Calling: how black and Asian writers imagined a city is published in paperback by Perennial

Review

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0412/is_2_34/ai_n16832655

Journal of Popular Film and Television, Summer, 2006 by Angelica Fenner

SUBTITLES: ON THE FOREIGNNESS OF FILM
Ed. Ian Balfour and Atom Egoyan. Cambridge: MIT P, 2004. 544 pp. $35.00 cloth.

"Amresh Sinha points out that this ideology of invisibility is threatened on several fronts. Verbose subtitles may not only rob attention from the image but may fatigue viewers struggling to synthesize visual, aural, and textual signification. However, adopting a more colloquial language could be perceived as an act of domestication. And if the translation is from a former colonized language into a formerly imperial language (say, from Hindi to English), one runs the danger of being reproached for engaging in cultural colonialism. Such challenges are further compounded by the difficulty of translating slang, puns, and sociolects, where there is the risk not only of unintended humor but also creation of stereotypes offensive to entire social groups."

That's me at La Guardia Airport.

Benjamin on Remembering and Forgetting

Benjamin, in "The Image of Proust," writes:
"For the important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, a Penelope work of forgetting? Is not the involuntary recollection, Proust's mémoire involontaire, much closer to forgetting than what is usually called memory? And is not this work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warf, a counterpart to Penelope's work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night has woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of tapestry of lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting." (Illuminations, p. 202)