A post on Graham Harman’s blog reminded me about Zizek’s wisdom regarding “the inherent stupidity of proverbs” — ‘showing how any proverb can be reversed into its opposite and sound equally profound’, however I find this to be an instance where the reversal of the well-known adage results in an incredibly rich modification of insight not present in the original formulation.
(Source: plutonumetrio, via enigamii)
Last month, a colleague of mine who has recently accepted a position at a University in Singapore told a group of us having lunch together at a little Vietnamese restaurant in downtown Boston that Singapore exists in the future. I spontaneously agreed, thinking along vaguely accelerationist lines interwoven with the apprehension of unequally distributed futurity. Weeks later, still thinking about Singapore, a climatological bent — a kind of dust-bowl futurity — has been following my thought and I’m curious as to how it should be thought in relation to Lee Kuan Yew’s quasi-olgarchic “stronghold” (my colleagues term). While the air-conditioned nation (air-conditioned nightmare?) seems to be thinking about humanity’s carbon bloom with the possibility of an artificial canopy of supertrees and they are resolutely poised to be a major player in commercial spaceflight (though the list of obstacles to getting off-planet is too long and too nuanced to litanize here) it will be getting hotter and hotter down here all the while; it’s the psychotropics of gradual immolation that provoke a certain curiosity.
Online journal continent. announces a Call for Papers.
Pedagogies of Disaster is organized to address the fate of relation and the future of pedagogical practice in the University, and especially as it concerns the humanities. We seek to address the infrastructural or interpersonal changes in the modes of production as it relates to current academia. Through this conference we aim to examine the elements and spaces of the rifts opening up in the polis of the University—its students, professors and administrators. Through two general, though not mutually exclusive, topics—Teaching and Being Taught—we desire to address the pedagogical horizon at a critical limit. We ask for whom or for what are we teaching and we ask from whom or from what are we learning?
The organizers have chosen to forgo parallel sessions in order to promote a shared experience to develop sustained intellectual exchange as expressed by the conference program. Opening and closing lectures will be given by Italian autonomist philosopher and media activist Franco Berardi and French poetry scholar Judith Balso, respectively.
Accepted proposals will engage new propositions toward thinking the “academy” in regards to its state of existence and fact of its productions. Considered proposals may engage themes such as:
Those interested in submitting a proposal are kindly requested to send a 2 paragraph abstract and a short biography to vincent@continentcontinent.cc before December 6, 2012.
______________________________________
The conference page is here.
“I’ve always felt FW translations tried to tame the book somehow. After succeeding at punning with two or three possible meanings for a word, the translator usually leaves the others outside his work even if he knows they were there in the original.
So I’ve conceived of the following trick to translate the Wake: whenever I cannot put any more meaning into the words, I draw them. Above you read the book’s most famous words, “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s” written in Elian script. I translated them into Portuguese as “reverrio, passadelos eva e o ádamas”. Reverrio does quite well for the German Erinnerung ( rever means “to see again” ), but it does not convey that riverrun sounds kinda like river-Ann and reminds us of ( well, at least insomniac FW scholars do ) a well-known passage in Kubla Khan: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/ A stately pleasure-dome decree:/ Where Alph, the sacred river, ran”. Well, besides of the fact that my reverrio looks slightly like a woman, if you tilt your head you’ll notice I drew something between a baseline Helvetica A and an eerie Borgesian Alef.” - F.W.
