dead gain

 

 

 

Emblema CCVIII Buxus

Alciato's Book of Emblems

Emblem 208
The box tree

The box tree is always green and has a curly head. From it is made the reed pipe with its uneven harmonies. It is suited to tender delights, and is a tree for lovers -- it has a pale colour, and every lover is pale. 

FTW!

the handicraft version / slipware sua cuique persona

FTW! collection

emblematics of the prison

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2014/sep/18/decoding-russian-criminal-tattoos-in-pictures

quirinus of neuss

During the siege of the city of Neuss by Burgundian troops in 1474, the citizens had worn a metal emblem of their patron saint, Quirin, on their clothing. Under the saint's protection, they all had remained uninjured, and if one of them was hit by an enemy missile, it quite simply bounced off the emblem, which quite literally shielded them from harm.

Defaced / Groebner/ 54

ANDERSON, Benedict 1991: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Revised Edition. London and New York: Verso

In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the 
nation: it is an imagined community – and imagined as both inherently 
limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the 
smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, 
or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their 
communion. (...) The nation is imagined as limited because even the 
largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has 
finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation 
imagines itself coterminous with mankind. (...) It is imagined as sovereign 
because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and 
Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, 
hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history 
when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were 
inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, (...) 
nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and 
emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state. /

Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and 
exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal 
comradeship. (p. 5-7

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

-->

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/

Aug und seiner Mandel

Emblem 93 /// Against parasites

Take these river-crabs we give to you; these gifts suit your character. They have watchful eyes, many a row of claws armed with pincer, a vast belly. Thus your gut, with its fat stomach, hangs down; you have agile feet, and stings are fitted to them. As you go about in the cross-roads, you wander by the chairs and tables, and, bitter, hurl sharp taunts at others.

Nupta contagioso.

flyers

Quentin Skinner: Word and image in the philosophy of Hobbes

beginning ceramics project

Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness

And he said unto them, Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness. And they could not in three days expound the riddle.

See here a helmet which a fearless soldier previously wore and which was often spattered with enemy blood. After peace was won, it retired to be used as a narrow hive for bees; it holds honey-combs and nice honey. - Let weapons lie far off; let it be right to embark on war only when you cannot in any other way enjoy the art of peace.

Samson went down to Timnah together with his father and mother. As they approached the vineyards of Timnah, suddenly a young lion came roaring toward him. ⁶ The Spirit of the Lord came powerfully upon him so that he tore the lion apart with his bare hands as he might have torn a young goat. But he told neither his father nor his mother what he had done. ⁷ Then he went down and talked with the woman, and he liked her.
⁸ Some time later, when he went back to marry her, he turned aside to look at the lion’s carcass, and in it he saw a swarm of bees and some honey. ⁹ He scooped out the honey with his hands and ate as he went along. When he rejoined his parents, he gave them some, and they too ate it. But he did not tell them that he had taken the honey from the lion’s carcass.
¹⁰ Now his father went down to see the woman. And there Samson held a feast, as was customary for young men. ¹¹ When the people saw him, they chose thirty men to be his companions.
¹² “Let me tell you a riddle,” Samson said to them. “If you can give me the answer within the seven days of the feast, I will give you thirty linen garments and thirty sets of clothes. ¹³ If you can’t tell me the answer, you must give me thirty linen garments and thirty sets of clothes.”
“Tell us your riddle,” they said. “Let’s hear it.”
¹⁴ He replied,

“Out of the eater, something to eat;
    out of the strong, something sweet.”

For three days they could not give the answer.

¹⁵ On the fourth day, they said to Samson’s wife, “Coax your husband into explaining the riddle for us, or we will burn you and your father’s household to death. Did you invite us here to steal our property?”
¹⁶ Then Samson’s wife threw herself on him, sobbing, “You hate me! You don’t really love me. You’ve given my people a riddle, but you haven’t told me the answer.”
“I haven’t even explained it to my father or mother,” he replied, “so why should I explain it to you?” ¹⁷ She cried the whole seven days of the feast. So on the seventh day he finally told her, because she continued to press him. She in turn explained the riddle to her people.
¹⁸ Before sunset on the seventh day the men of the town said to him,

“What is sweeter than honey?
    What is stronger than a lion?”

Samson said to them,

“If you had not plowed with my heifer,
    you would not have solved my riddle.”

¹⁹ Then the Spirit of the Lord came powerfully upon him. He went down to Ashkelon, struck down thirty of their men, stripped them of everything and gave their clothes to those who had explained the riddle. Burning with anger, he returned to his father’s home. ²⁰ And Samson’s wife was given to one of his companions who had attended him at the feast.

william faithorne

‘The Embleme of Englands distractions as also of her attained, and further expected Freedome, & Happines’ (1658), traditionally known as ‘Cromwell between Two Pillars’

 

The Wilkinson Head of Oliver Cromwell and Its Relationship to Busts, Masks and Painted Portraits

olympic iconography/ homo signorum

PANIC

RAGE

Brecht's donkey

-->

July 24 On a horizontal beam supporting the roof of Brecht’s study, there is a painted inscription: "The truth is concrete." On a window ledge stands a little wooden donkey that can nod its head. Brecht has hung a little notice round its neck with the words: "I, too, must understand it."


Hobbes: there is no covenant with beasts