Entre nous

The secrets of Polichinelle are "stage whispers" told to all the audience.

SP the secret known to all.


Mrkgnao!

Socrates Corinth Democracia

Socrates turns his back to Plato, who has made him write whatever he wanted while pretending to receive it from him

Althusser had warned (citing Bergson), “One has ‘to wait until the sugar dissolves’”:

On Thursday the 29^th and fifth day of his sicknesse, hopes began a little to diminish; howbeit that morning his headache was somewhat lessened, his breath also, which before was short, being longer, which moved him to put on his cloathes, endeavouring to rise as he had done before; but his head being so giddy that he was not able to stand alone, he was forced to betake him to his bed againe; from henceforth ever keeping to his bed. This evening there appeared a fatall signe, about two hours or more within the night, bearing the colours and shew of a rainbow*, which hung directly crosse and over Saint James’s House. It was first perceived about seven a clocke at night, which I my selfe did see, which divers others looking thereupon with admiration, continuing until past bed-time, being no more seene. This night was unquiet and he rested ill.

* A lunar rainbow, as presaging the death of Princes and the desolation of Kingdoms.

Desert in the desert (the one signaling toward the other), desert of a messianicity without messianism and therefore without doctrine and religious dogma, this arid and horizon-deprived expectation retains nothing of the great messianisms of the Book except the relation to the arrivant who may come—or never come—but of whom, by definition, I must know nothing in advance. Nothing, except that justice, in the most enigmatic sense of the word, is at stake. And, for the same reason, revolution, in that the event and justice are tied to this absolute rip in the foreseeable concatenation of historical time. The rip of eschatology in teleology, from which it must be dissociated here, which is always difficult. It is possible to renounce a certain revolutionary imagery or all revolutionary rhetoric, even to renounce a certain politics of revolution, so to speak, perhaps even renounce every politics of revolution, but it is not possible to renounce revolution without also renouncing the event and justice.
—Jacques Derrida

A demonstration is political not because it takes place in a specific locale and bears upon a particular object but rather because its form is that of a clash between two partitions of the sensible.
—Jacques Rancière

From Philip Armstrong / Recticulations

visor effect

The armour, this 'costume' which no stage production will ever be able to leave out, we see it cover from head to foot, in Hamlet's eyes, the supposed body of the father. We do not know whether it is or is not part of the spectral apparition. This protection is rigorously problematic (problema is also a shield) for it prevents perception from deciding on the identity that it wraps so solidly in its carapace. The armour may be but the body of a real artifact, a kind of technical prosthesis, a body foreign to the spectral body that it dresses, dissimulates, and protects, masking even its identity. The armour lets one see nothing of the spectral body, but at the level of the head and beneath the visor, it permits the so-called father to see and to speak. Some slits are cut into it and adjusted so as to permit him to see without being seen, but to speak in order to be heard. The helmet, like the visor, did not merely offer protection: it topped off the coat of arms and indicated the chief's authority, like the blazon of his nobility.

Derrida/ Specters of Marx p8

progressive stencil

The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, translated by Geoffrey Bennington, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009; xvi + 349 pp.
“In this seminar from 2001 and 2002, Derrida explores the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty and continues his deconstruction of the traditional determinations of the human. The beast and the sovereign are connected, he contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law—the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside it from below. He then traces this association through an astonishing array of texts, including La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb,” Hobbes’s biblical sea monster in Leviathan, D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Snake,” Machiavelli’s Prince with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, a historical account of Louis XIV attending an elephant autopsy, and Rousseau’s evocation of werewolves in The Social Contract.
Deleuze, Lacan, and Agamben also come into critical play as Derrida focuses in on questions of force, right, justice, and philosophical interpretations of the limits between man and animal.”

--Jacket copy, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I MORE

es spukt.

contacts between civilisations in time
A renaissance, on the other hand, is an encounter between a grown-up civilisation and the 'ghost' of its long-dead parent. Though common enough, it may be described as abnormal, and will be found on examination to be often unwholesome. The other encounter between present and past from which renaissances are to be distinguished is the phenomenon which we have called Archaism, using this word to denote attempted reversions to an earlier phase in the development of the society to which the archaizers themselves belong. Toynbee A Study of History, 1934-1961












SCENE V. Another part of the platform.
Enter GHOST and HAMLET

HAMLET
Where wilt thou lead me? speak; I'll go no further.

Ghost
Mark me.