Plans

 Something about wonder.

Prologue/ Preface: an undoing   (Carla Lonzi)

Valentine, creating space ‘I walked in an I, but the room gave me the dimensions of she’

Home: At home in voices, an introduction.

To live the orange, an art performance

Autoaffection and it’s conceptions!

Movement and plasticity…. ART ART ART

Montage & body scanning

Dreammaps

Away: Folktales and Songs

Celluloid dreams

Home:

She seeks to be in the “pure present," at the “source of the spring,” “[eating] from the placenta.”

It is impossible to reach an understanding of that experience without the use of language, which separates it from the truth, and from the present.

In assigning a symbol to a thing, we necessarily destroy part of it. In order to experience anything in the core of the present—as it actually is—we have to reach a place of complete stillness where language has no use; where we no longer seek to understand, but only to be.

How to talk about eternity? How to talk about identity? How to talk about God? Each requires language, but rather than satisfactory descriptions, she finds circular ones, because each exists within the other as interlocking stories demanding to be written. 

down to and beyond gender, species, even matter, until she and everything else in the world are one with the white matter of the cockroach 

within each present moment, there lives an eternity

The more we interact with the language and try to deconstruct it, the more massive we become. 

She is a writer obsessed with fissures and lacunae; the experience of the present is left out, exists somewhere in the separations between moments, like cracks in a sidewalk, like dark matter between the bosons. We don’t see it—can’t see it. To find it, we have to stop talking about ourselves. We have to stop being things, and instead, simply be.

Generally speaking, an affect is a modification. Being affected means to be modified-that is, altered, changed-by the impact of an encounter, be it with another subject or an object. But, what, exactly, is modified by this encounter, and why does this modification create an emotional, and not immediately cognitive, phenomenon? This is because the encounter does not trigger any faculty or sense or logical structure; it touches-and thus reveals-the very feeling of existence.

Malabou: SElf and Emotion

An affect is thus always related to the feeling of existence itself through the changing of objects. We may call affect every kind of modification produced by the feeling of a difference. 

Damasio, by elaborating the theory of "somatic markers," stresses the central importance of emotions in neural regulation

wonder is what attunes the subject both to the world and to itself

Damasio states that the loss of wonder is the emotional and libidinal disease of our time.

After brain damage, the emotional brain is traumatized, and in very serious cases the subject loses any interest in life in general. Surprise, interest in novelty, amazement, astonishment just disappear.

! Neurosciences today allow us to consider subjectivity not as a biologically determined, fixed instance. On the contrary, neural subjectivity IS a plastic structure in which the emotional dimension plays a major role. 

the brain is his affirmation that the brain is primarily a sensuous and affected organ

Consciousness itself is an emotional reaction to the intrusion of the outside. Consciousness, at its most elementary, is the awareness of a disturbance of the organism's homeostasis caused by a repeated encounter with an external object. This is why consciousness is inherently emotional. It is an interested reaction to a disturbance. 30. GO WON

The Structure of the Self

Damasio distinguishes three kinds of self within the self:

(r) the protoself

(2) core consciousness

(3) extended consciousness and the autobiographical self

(I) The protoself is the non conscious, purely organic-neural self. It is made

of the interconnected and coherent collection of neural patterns that, moment

by moment, represent the internal state of the organism, that is, the neural

"map" the organism forms of itself. This map helps the organism to regulate

and maintain its homeostasis, which is continuously disturbed by intruding

objects. This preservation of life implies an attachment of the self to itself.

Emotion plays an important part in this process.

(2) Then, the conscious core self emerges, which is the zero-level form of

consciousness (also called "thick consciousness"), the locus of the "feeling of

ourselves." The feeling of existence coincides with the being of an individual. As the first form of subjective ownership and agency, it is a modification of the protoself, which implies the distinction between me and others. The core self may be determined as a pure affective awareness with no cognitive function. (3) Eventually, the core self is supplemented by the autobiographical self "The autobiographical self,' Damasio writes, "is based on autobiographical memory which is constituted by implicit memories of multiple instances of individual experience of the past and of the anticipated future. The invariant aspects of an individual's biography form the basis of autobiographical memory."10 Contrary to the preceding types, this autobiographical self is conscious. Insisting upon the nonverbal and even nonpictorial character of the protoself, Damasio asserts: "The basic neural device does not require language. The metaself construction I envision is purely nonverbal, a schematic view of the main protagonists from a perspective external to both. In effect, the thirdparty view constitutes, moment-by-moment, a nonverbal narrative document of what is happening to those protagonists. The narrative can be accomplished without language, using the elementary representational tools of the sensory and motor systems in space and time. I see no reason why animals without language would not make such narratives."l1 It is very clear for Damasio that there is a self which cannot be identified with consciousness: "The focus on self does not mean that I am talking about self-consciousness." 12 In using the notion of self, I am in no way suggesting that all the contents of our minds are inspected by a central, single knower and owner, and even less that such an entity resides in a single brain place. I am saying, though, that our experiences tend to have a consistent perspective, as if there were indeed an owner and knower for most, though not all, contents. I imagine this perspective to be rooted in a relatively stable, endlessly repeated biological state. The source of the stability is the predominantly invariant structure and operation of the organism, and the slowly evolving elements of autobiographical data.

The subject is fundamentally, immediately, biologically a stranger to itself, which never encounters itself, which never touches itself.

" Spinoza writes: "Most of those who have written about the emotions (affictibus) and human conduct seem to be dealing not with natural phenomena that follow the common law of Nature but with phenomena outside Nature. They appear to go so far as to conceive man in Nature as a kingdom within a kingdom .... They assign the cause of human weakness and frailty not to the power of Nature in general, but to some defect in human nature."!

 If it is true that Nature is everywhere one and the same, that man is not an empire within an empire, and that affects do not proceed from any individual or particular defect, then we have to understand how God himsel£ or Nature, may also be affected to the extent that there cannot be any variability of infinite desire-and there is, of course, no divine conatus. 

 "Spinoza suggests ... that the relation which characterizes an existing mode as a whole is endowed with a kind

According to Derrida, the "innermost part of the brain" where the pineal gland is situated appears to be only a metaphorical space, not an effective one. Such a space plays the part of an ideal hand by means of which the soul touches itself and feels itself as united to the body. The pineal gland is the soul's hand, the nonspatial space of the soul's self-touching. Instead of opening itself to alterity, the passionate soul is first autoaffected and self-centered, to the extent that it has to touch itself first to be able to touch and be touched by the other.

A New Approach to the Self

 One of the most striking elements of Damasio's contribution to the current approach to the brain is his affirmation that the brain is primarily a sensuous and affected organ. Affects are older than reason, and all cognitive mechanisms, even the most sophisticated, need to be rooted in emotion to be able to function. Such is the case for reasoning and decision making. Damasio argues against Descartes that consciousness, or the soul, is not a pure activity of reflection that only secondarily gets stained by emotions. He asserts the existence of a constitutive, necessary link between emotion and consciousness: Consciousness itself is an emotional reaction to the intrusion of the outside. Consciousness, at its most elementary, is the awareness of a disturbance of the organism's homeostasis caused by a repeated encounter with an external object. This is why consciousness is inherently emotional. It is an interested reaction to a disturbance. 30

The Structure of the Self Damasio distinguishes three kinds of self within the self: (r) the protoself (2) core consciousness (3) extended consciousness and the autobiographical self (I) The protoself is the non conscious, purely organic-neural self. It is made of the interconnected and coherent collection of neural patterns that, moment by moment, represent the internal state of the organism, that is, the neural "map" the organism forms of itself. This map helps the organism to regulate and maintain its homeostasis, which is continuously disturbed by intruding objects. This preservation of life implies an attachment of the self to itself. Emotion plays an important part in this process. (2) Then, the conscious core self emerges, which is the zero-level form of consciousness (also called "thick consciousness"), the locus of the "feeling of

ourselves." The feeling of existence coincides with the being of an individual. As the first form of subjective ownership and agency, it is a modification of the protoself, which implies the distinction between me and others. The core self may be determined as a pure affective awareness with no cognitive function. (3) Eventually, the core self is supplemented by the autobiographical self "The autobiographical self,' Damasio writes, "is based on autobiographical memory which is constituted by implicit memories of multiple instances of individual experience of the past and of the anticipated future. The invariant aspects of an individual's biography form the basis of autobiographical memory."10 Contrary to the preceding types, this autobiographical self is conscious. Insisting upon the nonverbal and even nonpictorial character of the protoself, Damasio asserts: "The basic neural device does not require language. The metaself construction I envision is purely nonverbal, a schematic view of the main protagonists from a perspective external to both. In effect, the thirdparty view constitutes, moment-by-moment, a nonverbal narrative document of what is happening to those protagonists. The narrative can be accomplished without language, using the elementary representational tools of the sensory and motor systems in space and time. I see no reason why animals without language would not make such narratives."l1 It is very clear for Damasio that there is a self which cannot be identified with consciousness: "The focus on self does not mean that I am talking about self-consciousness." 12

In using the notion of self, I am in no way suggesting that all the contents of our minds are inspected by a central, single knower and owner, and even less that such an entity resides in a single brain place. I am saying, though, that our experiences tend to have a consistent perspective, as if there were indeed an owner and knower for most, though not all, contents. I imagine this perspective to be rooted in a relatively stable, endlessly repeated biological state. The source of the stability is the predominantly invariant structure and operation of the organism, and the slowly evolving elements of autobiographical data.

On Wonder, Fragility, and Impairment A long chain of affects, linking primordial biological emotions with social emotions and eventually with feelings, accompanies and structures the formation of subjectivityP In this chain, wonder plays a major role because it coincides with the passage from· core consciousness to the autobiographical self Wonder marks the opening of the self to experience. From autoaffection to 

Surprise, curiosity , and the relation to objects in general: this is the normal path, followed by the primordial emotions up to conscious feelings. Wonder is, in a way, at the interface between the nonconscious homeostatic attachment of the self to itself and the conscious autobiographical experience. 

 a strangeness or estrangement of the self to its own affects

Our body is a determined set of relations of movement and rest, and our mind is the idea of our body. Body and mind are two expressions of the same nature, one expressed through the attribute of extension, the other through the attribute of thought. It is hence impossible to consider actions of the body as causing effects in the mind. The same argument prevails when it comes to ideas: 

Maps Between Affects and Concepts Unless a kind of autoaffection outside any subjectivity can exist, an autoaffection is a movement internal to essence. Such an affection is not a feeling, but rather is the opening of a space in Being, of a map, a surface of inscription

y. We have to understand that some affects are caused by external objects, and others by internal solicitations

The Deleuzian notion of autoaffection does not refer to what Derrida calls the subject's self-touching. First of all, even in the third kind of knowledge, affects never interiorize an external solicitation. Autoaffection is not the reflection of an internal or immanent movement. When essence affects itself, be it through passions or through its own capacity of referring to itself, this selfencounter always occurs as a spacing. In other words, the reflexivity of essence over and on itself is never immediate, but creates a material and spatial surface. Each kind of idea creates, by introjection and projection at the same time, a space of encounter between thought and its object. T

This encounter between thought and being may be immanent, as in the case of the third kind of know 1- edge, but it gives way to a surface creation nonetheless. Deleuze calls this surface-exterior or interior-a "plane of immanence:' It also appears in Deleuze's texts as a "map": "The map is open and connectable in all its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible of constant modifications."8 In that sense, autoaffection does not arouse any feeling, but is comparable to an artistic creation, as if the ideal solicitation were painting or imaging itself.

Hunger – The Dark Night of the Soul The dark night of the soul refers mainly to what Medieval mystics called their apophatic experience, that of experiencing the absence of God, of language or of sense. According to Dionysius the Areopagite, it is only in this situation that we can truly become reborn. This absence of God and of words is also sensed as a hunger, one in which one is deprived of the basic necessities of being, unable to communicate or to create. According to Jacques Studii şi cercetări filologice. Seria Limbi Străine Aplicate 184 Derrida, apophatic discourse: “says something of the end of discourse itself and is an address to the friend, the extremity of the envoi, the hail, the farewell” (Derrida, 2005: 41). However, it is only in this radical displacement of the self that the new, awakened I can affirm itself in all its plenitude. As Derrida and Franke see it, the apophatic moment of discourse is constitutive of the real language of presence, the one entails the other. In Vivre l’orange, Cixous unwittingly avows going through a similar experience in 1978, one year after Clarice Lispector’s death. She is at a loss for words, sense, capacity of valuing her previous work, possibility of relating with other fellow beings, not to mention the capacity to write and create which has vanished in the thin air. She is on the brink of madness: - “j’avais peur qu’elle devienne folle, je n’osais plus m’écouter” (Cixous, 1989: 11); Je ne parlais plus, je craignais ma voix, je craignais la voix des oiseaux, et tous les appels qui regardent au-dehors, et il n’y a pas de dehors sauf le neant, et sont eteints – une ecriture ma trouvee quand j’etais introuvable a moi-meme” (Cixous, ibid.: 13). Mystic experiences throughout the world talk about this temporary loss of soul which precedes a transformational experience in which one embraces a new spirituality. Cixous vaguely speaks of a guilt – “moi qui n’ai pas paye le prix” (ibid: 27) and, read in the context of the interplay orange/apple, we can interpret it as women’s shared guilt of Eve, of the burden of the fall or the guit associated with leaving her Oran je (ibid: 41). However, through her experience of absence and loss, Cixous atones and, as she herself remarks, it is only in this senselessness that one can regain (although not in the manly fashion of investment and gain) one’s soul again. Cixous’ way is again that of the mystics and of Derrida: the gift – she gives voice to Lispector’s words, she assimilates and chews them with the hunger proper for one who recovers after a long illness, lets them breathe their own air, without intervening, without interpreting or analyzing: “A partir d’une si grande faim, peut naître la force d’aimer la vie” (ibid: 41). Cixous suggests that it was a question of her écriture féminine itself that the writings of Clarice Lispector came to inspire her, comparing her previous writing as under the sign of the masculine – the sun/le soleil as she suggests in Portrait du soleil with her newly found discourse in the encounter of Clarice Lispector’s words: J’ai erré dix années glaciales dans la solitude surpubliée, sans voir un seul visage de femme humaine, le soleil s’était retiré, il faisait un froid mortel, la vérité s’était couchée, j’ai pris le dernier livre avant la mort, et voici que c’était Clarice, l’écriture. Je ne dormais pas, mais j’avais les yeux glacés, ma vue n’arrivait pas aux choses. L’écriture est venue jusqu’à moi, elle s’est adressée à moi, l’une après l’autre, elle s’est lue à moi, jusqu’à moi, à travers mon absence jusqu’à la présence” (ibid: 49) From here on, Cixous will read Lispector’s texts with voracity, finding in them a feminine voice who was not afraid to go to the source and in whom she found many common points. The I - L’orange In her article, Anu Aneja says the following of the orange in Cixous’ text: “Orange is woman’s fruit. A bright, glistening ball of flame, a magic circle of desire. Orange desire is not the desire to have, to take; it is rather, the pleasure of giving, the pleasure of having pleasure in giving” (ibid: 189). While Aneja is attentive at extracting the intensely feminine flavor of Cixous’ writing as well as its qualities of gift-giving, Cixous might not be so innocent when it comes Derrida’s economy of the gift as she herself avows her guilt in her exchange of orange/apples with Clarice Lispector. To use one of Cixous’ play upon words, with the apple/orange, Cixous appelle, interpelle, arête mais s’arrête de dévorer because the orange is the ultimate image of her poéthique, she refuses to be one of those women who capture, devour or castrate. And for this, Clarice Lispector is an excellent example. Studii şi cercetări filologice. Seria Limbi Străine Aplicate 185 I argue that the orange is not only an image of Cixous’ feminity or feminism but, as other authors have argued, her Ariadne thread to her place of origin, her Algeriance, therefore of her journey towards encountering the self; her political presence among other women of her time and not only; her own historicity, her firm emplacement in a time and space defined by her strong personality; her ethical choice especially as concerns not eating the other but saving and adoring him/her. For Cixous, the orange is a model of gift-giving – a fruit which gives itself peacefully and whose benediction she had lost in the previous period. “Toute orange est originaire” (Cixous, ibid: 19) says Cixous referring to this fruit’s symbolism of beginnings and genesis but such beginnings as they were engendered by a feminine god. Moreover, the fruit is atemporal: “Trois regards autour d’une orange, d’ici au Brésil aller aux sources en Algérie. Le fruit brille dans le temps sans heures. Le jus du temps coule selon les besoins. Je vis en plongée sous l’heure, sans souci, sans pressentiment, sans peur. […]A ce moment-là je séjournais en Orient intérieur” (21). It is worth remarking that via the restorative properties of the orange, the author has converted the dark night of the soul into the Orient which is the place of rest and revelation of Sufi mystics like Sohravardî and Ibn Arabî. In Cixous’ poetics, the orange is co-substantial with pre-existence, with writing in the present, it ensures an anchorage in the history of the time with the inclusion of archetypal ethics. It turns writing into a more palatable enterprise - “la saveur acidulée et apaisante de l’écriture-présent” (65). Finally, the orange is a symbol of Cixous’ feminine writing – liquid, pungent and solar.

o Damasio's reading of Spinoza, developed in Lookingfor Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain.1 The general purpose of the book is to show mat Spinoza, as the "first neurobiologist:' insists upon the importance of emotions and feelings in the very process of reasoning. Spinoza's nondualistic conception of me relationship between mind and body implies a definition of the conatus in which the ontological and the biological are intertwined. According to Damasio, Spinoza anticipates the brain's importance as the meeting point between being and life. This meeting point is materialized through the operation of neural "mapping." Here also, there is a projection or a production of surfaces and planes

s. I will focus here upon the specific way in which Damasio elaborates the problems of the preservation of life, the relationship between the surface and the event, and the conception of a neural subjectivity.  

y, it is sensible to ask; why Spinoza? The short explanation is that Spinoza is thoroughly relevant to any discussion of human emotion and feeling. Spinoza saw drives, motivations, emotions and feelings-an ensemble Spinoza called affects-as a central aspect of humanity. Joy and sorrow were two prominent concepts in his attempt to comprehend human beings and suggest ways in which their lives could be lived better."3

Damasio concludes that "Spinoza might have intuited the principles behind the natural mechanisms responsible for the parallel manifestations of mind and body .... I am convinced that mental processes are grounded in the brain's mappings of the body, collections of neural patterns that portray responses to events that cause emotions and feelings."4

The unity of the body and mind determines a conception of bodily manifestations of mental processes. These manifestations coincide with what are called DAMASIO AS A READER OF SPINOZA • SI neural maps, that is, sorts material upon which all kinds of events, both mental and inscribe themselves. These in their turn, way to feelings, which are superior forms of social emotions: embarrassment, shame, guilt, contempt, indignation, sympathy: compassion, awe, wonder, elevation, gratitude, pride.

a: "For Spinoza, organisms naturally endeavor, of necessity, to persevere in their own being; that necessary endeavor constitutes their actual essence. Organisms come to being with the capacity to regulate life and thereby permit survivaL Just as naturally, organisms strive to achieve a 'greater perfection' of function, which Spinoza equates with joy. All of these endeavors and tendencies are engaged unconsciously."6

Because of this extremely modern conception of the conatus, Spinoza may be regarded as a "proto biologis

t. This the biological thinker concealed behind countless propositions, axioms, lemmas, and scholia."7

s. "It is apparent that the continuous attempt at achieving a state of positively regulated life is a deep and defining part of our existence-the first reality of our existence as Spinoza intuited when he described the relentless endeavor (conatus) of each being to preserve itself. Striving, endeavor, and tendency are three words that come close to rendering the Latin term conatus, as used by Spinoza in Propositions 6, 7 and 8 of the Ethics, Part III. In Spinoza's own words; 'Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being' and 'The striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing."'8

Damasio shows that the different actions of self-preservation hold the different parts of a body together and maintain the unity of the whole. Fighting against external threats of destruction allows the unity of the individual being to take shape and helps the constitution of the body scheme or schema. Despite the transformations due to age or experience, the conatus remains the same all through life because it respects the same structural deSign. The conatus is a process of repetition or recurrence of the self. This repetition as such is the very origin of personal identity. Emotions and feelings playa major role in this

 The ontological and ethical meaning of affects is rooted in this biological tendency to survive. Being itself is survival, or endeavor. God, or Nature, is within ourselves. Ontology thus means the immanent presence of nature in us. Can we deduce that this immanence gives way, in Damasio as in Deleuze, to the construction of planes of immanence?

What Spinoza was not able to see by himself is thus the neural activity of "mapping." Mapping characterizes the way in which events in the body are represented as ideas in the mind. As "representational 'correspondences;" the coincidence between ideas and bodily events draws neural maps that, looking apparently very much like the Deleuzian "planes of immanence," inscribe bodily messages on an internal projective surface,

Damasio proposes to substitute the term image for idea. Images emerge from neural patterns, or neural maps, formed in populations of neurons that constitute neural networks or circuits. Emotions and feelings playa major role in the way in which our brain forms these images. They render the mindbody correspondence easy or uneasy. Here again, Spinoza sensed this point in developing his conception of joy and sorrow. "The maps associated with joy signify states of equilibrium for the organism. Those states may be actually happening or as if they were happening. Joyous states signify optimal physiological coordination and smooth running of the operations of life. They not only are conducive to survival but to survival with well-being .... We can agree with Spinoza when he said that joy (laetitia in his Latin text) was associated with a transition of the organism to a state of greater perfection .... The maps related to sorrow, in both the broad and narrow senses of the word, are associated with states of functional disequilibrium. The ease of action is reduced .... If unchecked, the situation is conducive to disease and death."14 The variability of the conatus is induced by the modulation of the instinct of survival. The ontological tendency to endeavor in one's own being is interpreted in terms oflife drives. In that sense, wonder is the very expression of these vital impulses

Considering the neural patterns that constitute the biological basis of subjectivity, we can state that there is a process ofheteroaffection in autoaffection because the feeling of oneself speaks and refers to itself in the third person. If autoaffection can be described here as the mutual mirroring of mind and body, then it is clear that something remains nonsubjective in this process. Something remains nonconscious and nonreferable to an "I" or a first person. The maps, or the neural drawing of an internal space of correspondence, is the space of heteroaffection. 

Carla Lonzi

“What attracts me personally to recording? Really what attracts me is 075 something simple: it’s being able to move from sounds to punctuation, to a text, it’s finding a page that is not a written page but a page that… It’s just like a chemical process, when condensation is produced… to know that a sound condenses into a sign, that’s it, like gas passing to the liquid state” (p. 29). 

Lonzi interacts with a tool where sounds and writing, body and automatism, are interwoven. The transcription of the artists’ words means resorting to mechanical techniques since the sound is recorded and then replayed (reproduced) before becoming writing: this is the process Lonzi describes when she talks about “a sound [that] condenses into a sign” (infra). 

In this sequence that suggests a kind of automatic writing, Lonzi writes by hand. She struggles through this new way of writing with audio recording from the idea thatthe mechanicalreproduction ofsound 076 changesthe very process of writing. AsFriedrich Kittler has shown, the hegemony of writing had become seriously threatened near the end of the 19th century by new forms of media that offered alternative forms of communication destined to deeply affect writing itself. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999. Audio recording ends up influencing written words and their retransmission/interpretation, especially in new practices that emphasize listening. For example, psychoanalystsrecord and transcribe the words of their patients. In this regard, see the entry dedicated to “Freud comme phonographe et écrivain.” In F. Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme. 1800-1900, München, Wilhelm Fink, 1985, pp. 344—348. In the same way, Lonzi’s work outlines a kind of mimesis with the machine: the artist’s words are captured by the tape recorder and then retransmitted through writing in an informational flow that connects voice, machine, and the writer’s hand. From this standpoint, Lonzireinvents,through technique,the figure of the female writer/art critic as a medium of the artist’s words. Lonzi’s role is like the surrealist myth of woman as medium, sometimes saddled with a typewriter—

Autoritratto is not a simple transcript of interviews because Lonzi cuts the continuum of the dialogues and recomposes it, putting a series of images taken from private archives together with the text. Resorting to montage for composing the book seems almost to be a logical outcome of her use of the tape recorder: formatting recorded audio material meant stepping back and then recomposing the conversation. This process of montage makes the images scattered throughout the book dialogue with the text without ever illustrating it. In fact, the images draw all their meaning from the dynamic that their presence spurs in the reader and the stunning relations between different images and between image 079 and text. As Georges Didi-Huberman writes, montage is not merely a formal procedure but also a way of producing knowledge that means distancing yourself from the material and, consequently, taking a stance.

For Lonzi, arranging texts and images means disorganizing their normal sequence in order to create a fragmented unity and, at the same time, showing the reader the incomplete nature of what they are reading. Montage, again highlights Didi-Huberman, is a new arrangement of things starting from their differences, an act that renders everything foreign, unusual, as if we saw these things for the first time. Ivi, pp. 69—73. 

Regarding the analogies between intimate diaries, maps, atlases and archives, see Giuliana Bruno’s pages dedicated to Gerhard Richter’s Atlas in Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion. Journeys into Art, Architecture, and Film, London, Verso, 2002, pp. 331—357. 

Cinema as site seeing.

It is interesting to note that, rather than constituting itself solely as a descriptive art, mapping, in general, appears to be fleshing out its narrative impulse and new psychogeographic paths.

An impulse, after all, is a force that both impels and is impelled by waves of feeling and states of mind.

Cinema is bound to tender mapping on this terrain of intertextuality, which is itself a geography “moving” in history—as shown by the films included in this book, from the intimate plans of Antonioni and Akerman, treated earlier, to the voyages of Rossellini and Greenaway, which we have yet to traverse.

Hiroshima mon amour can be read as an actual cinematic remake of the Carte de Tendre. Like Scudéry’s map, it designs intimate space as it enacts a narrative detour of emotional “transport.” Hiroshima mon amour creates a tender map in which a lover’s body stands for a city, while, conversely, the city itself is imagined as a corporeal affair. Let us recall that the city, as the female protagonist tells us, was made to the measure of love, just as her lover was made to the measure of her body. Here, taking us beyond mimesis to the edge of “mimicry,” a body map is lived and even explored as a site as, in turn, a city is tailored to a body—one’s own and that of loved ones. Her city fits (and “fashions”) a body of love. It is an intimate geography, a body-city on a tender map. As in Scudéry’s map, where exterior landscape reads as interior, emotions are architecturally rendered and spatialized along a course. Different topographies merge on this filmic map of love,

As in the Carte de Tendre, architecture becomes a body of experience, lived and loved. It becomes a metaphor—a means of transportation—for passionate traversals. Indeed, this mapping charts a journey: the way space designs intersubjectivity. Ultimately, one desires a site as one does a person. Bodies and cities involve the same seduction, give rise to the same tales of love. We absorb them with the same passion: one can literally fall in love with a place.

What is most true is poetic. What is most true is naked life. I can only attain this mode of seeing with the aid of poetic writing. I apply myself to ‘seeing’ the world nude, that is, almost to e-nu-merating the world, with the naked, obstinate, defenceless eye of my nearsightedness. And while looking very very closely, I copy. The world written nude is poetic.

What is most true is poetic because it is not stopped stoppable. All that is stopped, grasped, all that is subjugated, easily transmitted, easily picked up, all that comes under the word concept, which is to say all that is taken, caged, is less true. Has lost what is life itself, which is always in the process of seething, of emitting, of transmitting itself. Each object is in reality a small virtual volcano. There is a continuity in the living; whereas theory entails a discontinuity, a cut, which is altogether the opposite of life. I am not anathematizing all theory. It is indispensable, at times, to make progress, but alone it is false. I resign myself to it as to a dangerous aid. It is a prosthesis. All that advances is aerial, detached, uncatchable. So I am worried when I see certain tendencies in reading: they take the spare wheel for the bird

rainer 

[I am, O Anxious One. Don’t you hear my voice]

I am, O Anxious One. Don’t you hear my voice

surging forth with all my earthly feelings?

They yearn so high that they have sprouted wings

and whitely fly in circles around your face.

My soul, dressed in silence, rises up

and stands alone before you: can’t you see?

Don’t you know that my prayer is growing ripe

upon your vision, as upon a tree?

If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream.

But when you want to wake, I am your wish,

and I grow strong with all magnificence

and turn myself into a star’s vast silence

above the strange and distant city, Time.