nymphs

The exchange of letters with Adorno in the Summer of 1935 clarifies the sense in which the extremes of this polar tension are to be understood. Adorno defines the concept of dialectical image starting from Benjamin's notion of allegory in the Trauerspielbuch, which speaks of a 'hollowing out of meaning' carried out in objects  by the allegorical intention.

With the vitiation of their use value, the alienated things are hollowed out, and as ciphers, they draw in meanings. Subjectivity takes possession of them insofar as it invests them with intentions of fear and desire. And insofar as defunct things stand in as images of subjective intentions, these latter present themselves as immemorial and eternal. Dialectical images are constellated between alienated things and incoming and disappearing meaning - and instantiated in the moment of indifference between death and meaning.

Copying this passage onto his notecards, Benjamin comments 'with regard to these reflections it should be kept in mind that, in the nineteenth century, the number of 'hollowed-out' things increases at a rate and on a scale that was previously unknown, for technical progress is continually withdrawing newly introduced objects from circulation. Where meaning is suspended, dialectical images appear. The dialectical image is, in other word, an unresolved oscillation between estrangement and a new event of meaning.  Similar to the emblematic intention, the dialectical image holds its object suspended in a semantic void.

Agamben/ Nymphs / 28-30

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The 3-D body is hollow...

Her anxiety doesn’t seem to come from the threat of physical pain. Rather, she is overwhelmed with the amount of information she must process: coordinates, shuttle manuals, ornate procedures.

Gravity presents the body as mere operational device, a cursor, an avatar who performs a set of actions. It is workflow cinema.

Her task, like ours, is simply to organize the overwhelming flow of visual data she receives through her visor.

Gravity shows a contemporary ideal of femininity still more sinister than the pinup. It presents woman as an intricate machine, strapped to dozens of wires, working her ass off with the goal of appearing weightless.

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/body-mass-index/

old news

WAR OR LAND // YOU ROGUES

http://thomas-spence-society.co.uk/3.html

paper weights

double crystal

workwear

Libidinal economizing in the early Soviet Union

“Everything is broken up and changed and become confused. Somehow love will have to be arranged differently.”

“The body is stuffed with a certain amount of energy, a certain amount of internal stress and excitement, which erupts on the outside.”

bigfombum

mandorla

In der Mandel-was steht in der Mandel?
Das Nichts.
Es steht das Nichts in der Mandel.
Da steht es und steht.

Im Nichts-wer steht da? Der Koenig.
Da steht der Koenig, der Koenig.
Da steht er und steht.

Judenlocke, wirst nicht grau.

Und dein Aug-wohin steht dein Auge?
Dein Aug steht der Mandel entgegen.
Dein Aug, dem Nichts stehts entgegen.
Es steht zum Koenig.
So steht es und steht.

Menschenlocke, wirst nicht grau.
Leere Mandel, koenigsblau.

Aug und seiner Mandel

latent dream content

for us a new psychic material intervenes between the dream content and the results of our investigations: and this is the latent dream content or the dream thoughts which are obtained by our method.

One of my female patients dreams that a man with a light beard and a peculiar glittering eye is pointing to a sign board attached to a tree which reads: uclamparia—wet.

Dream-censorship only gains its end if it succeeds in making it impossible to find the path back from the allusion to the genuine thing.

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself

The subject regresses from an attachment to a narcissistic extension of his ego with the introjections of the object into the ego.

This turning away from reality is marked by dejection, loss of interest, inability to love and inhibition of all activities.

This is the oral-cannibalistic stage /// a foreign external object.

The subject regresses from an attachment to a narcissistic extension of his ego with the introjections of the object into the ego.

August 2013 // When the libidinal drive outweighs reality the subject will return to the love object in a hallucinatory representation

“Here something is missing”

2014 //There are other characteristics of melancholia that manifest in the somatic realm A) a difficult with nourishment, digesting etc. B) A difficulty with sleeping.

Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which had taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on

August 2013 //the internal acts of moralized aggression waged in an effort to dissolve the internal trace of the other

August 2013 // a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes

'[e]ach single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it' (

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself'

In melancholia, accordingly, countless separate struggles are carried on over the object, in which hate and love contend with each other; the one seeks to detach the libido from the object, the other to maintain this position of the libido against the assault'

'So by taking flight into the ego love escapes extinction'

Just as mourning impels the ego to give up the object by declaring the object to be dead and offering the ego the inducement of continuing to live, so does each single struggle of ambivalance loosen the fixation of the libido to the object by disparaging it, denigrating it and even as it were killing it' (257). 

August 2013 // loosed object-love-object