New Spirits – Reading Deleuze in India
Consciousness exists only in connection with other consciousness
Posts on art, images, music, film, perception, and aesthetic experience beyond mere representation.
I did not bring much with me to India, a backpackful, mostly clothes, books, technology. But I packed a good pair of headphones and have now bought an external hi-fi sound card for my phone’s USB-C output from Tempotec. It was not exactly cheap, but it is excellent. I was delighted when it arrived today, and of course I tried it out immediately. What a divided experience. The music immediately evoked memories; I reveled in it. I thought of Husserl,…
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For three weeks now I have been reading in India: Deleuze, Upanishads, Sri Aurobindo. In between I sometimes meditate. The rest is still a remnant of everyday life in the New World. Reading the news, consuming entertainment media, organizing things that have no real significance here but need continuity so that they do not fall apart in old Europe and the New World. Reading, then… It seems to me that I have spent decades preparing to read here. My thinking…
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Autobahns have always been special places for me. Most of the time, I was not under time pressure; rarely did I have to get from A to B within a certain time. Rather, autobahns are travel routes. There, I find myself in in-between states, a kind of no-man’s-land with infinitely many possibilities. This opens up spaces for thought. Often they are simply empty. The brain is occupied with moving safely through traffic. It is a pleasant kind of occupation; consciousness…
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Life is so complex, and there are so many different ways of living. There is no right or wrong life. Life is a gift. But what do you say about the negative energies, destruction and aggression, greed and resentment? All of that belongs to it. There is only acceptance. But acceptance does not mean approving of everything, nor tolerating everything. If a community decides to establish rules and sanction violations of these rules, that too is a form of acceptance.…
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I love complexity, but sometimes also radical simplification—to gain a little clarity. For example, the history of ideas in the visual arts. In Europe, after the great migrations, art history can be sketched in broad strokes as a history of ideas: In medieval art, stories were told visually – mainly the stories of the Bible. Most people could not read, after all, certainly not Latin or Greek. The wood-panel painting of the altars is therefore a kind of comic, and…
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When I first came ‘home’ again from India, I looked at my library and saw that almost nothing in it interested me anymore. What had happened? What is in this library and what is not? My library is that of a philosopher and art historian who taught in Europe and the USA. It contains many books concerned with discourses of modernity and postmodernity—theoretically, historically, analytically, comparatively… Often it is about the subject of representation. What is depicted how, for what…
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