French Lessons #243

"Mais ce par quoi Bacon reste cézanien, c'est l'extrême poussée de la peinture comme langage analogique." (Deleuze)

Quotes 2017 #243

"He wanted to test his interpretation against hers. Since she had no such thing, she was dumbfounded that sound and image could be connected with abstract language in one's mind. His words poured into her head like sawdust." (Kyoko Yoshida)

French Lessons #242

"Mais la déformation est toujours celle du corps, et elle est statique, elle se fait sur place ; elle subordonne le mouvement à la force, mais aussi l'abstrait à la Figure." (Deleuze)

Quotes 2017 #242

"Homer, you spoke about a one-substance world, a world in which mortals and deathless gods coexist, a rich Hellenic past, font of Western rationality. However, you argue, it is when that one-substance world is abolished, when the panoply of gods are sent packing for a one-god/two-substance split between the secular and spiritual, that a truly rational world is set in place." (Karen Yamashita)

French Lessons #241

"La chute est ce qu'il y a de plus vivant dans la sensation, ce dans quoi la sensation s'éprouve comme vivante." (Deleuze)

Quotes 2017 #241

"This is the memory of your childhood village that later becomes transparent as theater." (Karen Yamashita)

French Lessons #240

"De la peinture abstraite, on a envie de dire ce que Péguy disait de la morale kantienne, elle a les mains pures, mais elle n'a pas de mains." (Deleuze)

Quotes 2017 #240

"One day, you leave and you realize that it was theater. Everything you have known shifts. It's a terrible freedom. Everywhere you roam, you can see it. All the world is a stage." (Karen Yamashita)

French Lessons #239

"On dirait que Bacon est d'abord un Égyptien. C'est son premier point d'arrêts." (Deleuze)

Quotes 2017 #239

"One question can occupy a lifetime. What is poverty, Homer? However defined, you point out, it depends on notions of the social, moral judgment, and responsibility. What rights do people have to labor and to the fruits of the earth? If poverty is undesirable, what is our duty?" (Karen Yamashita)

French Lessons #238

"Quant à la possibilité que la chair ou le corps soit traité par un seul ton rompu, ce serait peut-être une des inventions de Gauguin, révélation de la Martinique et de Tahiti." (Deleuze)

Quotes 2017 #238

"Stories blossom as a kaleidoscope, a space where events aggregate in infinite designs." (Karen Yamashita)

French Lessons #237

"La peinture n'a ni modèle à représenter, ni histoire à raconter." (Deleuze)

Quotes 2017 #237

"History, gently you remind me and urge me back. I have told myself, since I am prone to write fiction, that history and knowledge what really happened is necessary because someone has to be accountable. Yet how close can anyone get to history even if you live it?" (Karen Yamashita)

French Lessons #236

"À la violence du représenté (le sensationnel, le cliché) s'oppose la violence de la sensation." (Deleuze)

Quotes 2017 #236

"The body is a Figure, not a structure. Inversely the Figure, being a body, is not a face, nor does it have a face. However, it has a head, because the head is an integral part of the body." (Deleuze)

French Lessons #235

"La peinture est l'art analogique par excellence. Elle est même la forme sous laquelle l'analogie devient langage, trouve un langage propre : en passant par un diagramme." (Deleuze)

Quotes 2017 #235

"In an interview with Dosse, Fromanger recalls how Deleuze asked him how he managed to paint on a blank canvas. Fromager's response, that the canvas was not actually black but black 'with everything every painter has painted before me,' clearly excited Deleuze, who is said to have exclaimed: 'So it's not about blackening the canvas but about whitening it.'" (Frida Beckman)

French Lessons #234

"Mais ce par quoi Bacon reste cézanien, c'est l'extrême poussée de la peinture comme langage analogique." (Deleuze)

Quotes 2017 #234

"I realize that for my family the automatic and habitual of their prewar childhoods had been entirely overturned. A terrible way to be freed to new knowledge and to change. But this is fiction." (Karen Tei Yamashita, Letters to Memory)

French Lessons #233

"C'est en ce sens qu'Artaud transforme le poème de Humpty Dumpty sur la mer et les poissons, sur le problème d'obéir et de commander." (Deleuze)

French Lessons #232

"Aiôn, c'est le passé-futur dans une subdivision infinie du moment abstrait, qui ne cesse de se décomposer dans les deux sens à la fois, esquivant à jamais tout présent." (Deleuze)

Quotes 2017 #233

"All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this--as in other ways--they are the opposite of paintings. " (John Berger)

Quotes 2017 #232

"German words from recent times trying to translate Latin words from a bygone age that were trying to translate Greek words from antiquity. But what were the Greek words trying to translate?" (David Farrell Krell)

Brilliant.

エドワード・ヤン論集完成！

『エドワード・ヤン　再考／再見』（フィルムアート社）完成しました。片岡義男さん、蓮實重彦先生、四方田犬彦さんをはじめ、幅広い年齢層の執筆陣による 充実した論集です。ぼくは見過ごされがちな傑作、『エドワード・ヤンの恋愛時代』をめぐるエッセーを書きました。ぜひ読んでみてね。

「日本経済新聞」８月１９日（土）

日本経済新聞、きょうの読書欄に、レベッカ・ソルニット『ウォークス』（東辻賢治郎訳、左右社）の書評を書きました。いい本です。ぜひ読んでみてください。

すぐ隣は鶴田真由さんの「あとがきのあと」、右端には星野智幸さんの「半歩遅れの読書術」（さすがのおもしろさ）。右下には星野博美さん『今日はヒョウ柄を着る日』の紹介。こうして互いに関係ない本たちが、著者たちが、おなじ見開きに並ぶんだから新聞書評欄はおもしろい。

French Lessons #231

"Sur les lignes de fuites, il ne peut plus y avoir qu'une chose, l'expérimentation-vie." (Deleuze & Parnet)

Quotes 2017 #231

"Deleuze also refers to the different 'speeds' of animal and plant life." (Claire Colebrook)

French Lessons #230

"Avant Nietzsche, il dénonce toutes les falsifications de la vie, toutes les valeurs au nom desquelles nous déprécions la vie : nous ne vivons pas, nous ne menons qu'un semblant de vie, nous ne songeons qu'à éviter de mourir, et toute notre vie est un culte de la mort." (Deleuze)

Quotes 2017 #230

"Life is difference, the power to think differently, to become different and to create differences." (Claire Colebrook)

French Lessons #229

"Oui, le mourir s'engendre dans nos corps, il se produit dans nos corps, mais il arrive du Dehors, singulièrement incorporel, et fondant sur nous comme la bataille qui survole les combattants, et comme l'oiseau qui survole la bataille." (Deleuze & Parnet)

Quotes 2017 #229

"Literature destroys this border between perceiver and perceived. We are no longer placed in a position of ordering judgement but BECOME OTHER through a confrontation with the forces that compose us." (Claire Colebrook)

French Lessons #228

"Ce qui définit Spinoza voyageur, ce ne sont pas les distances qu'il parcourt mais son aptitude à hanter des pensions meublées, son absence d'attachement, de possessions et de propriétés, après son renoncement à la succession du père." (Deleuze)

Quotes 2017 #228

"This, it seems to me, is like saying that because most restaurants are very bad, one should play the percentage game, forget about trying to find the good ones, and eat at McDonald's every meal." (Nick Hornby)

French Lessons #227

"Bref, la ligne de fuite se convertit en ligne d'abolition, de destruction des autres et de soi-même, chaque fois qu'elle est tracée par une machine de guerre." (Deleuze & Parnet)

French Lessons #226

"Fuir, ce n'est pas du tout renoncer aux actions, rien de plus actif qu'une fuite. C'est le contraire de l'imaginaire." (Deleuze)

Quotes 2017 #227

"In a time of nihilism, writes Lyotard, Deleuze was the affirmation. 'Why do I speak of him in the past sense,' Lyotard asks himself, and imagines Deleuze's reply: 'It's your idiotic grief.'" (Frida Beckman, Gilles Deleuze)

Quotes 2017 #226

"Before leaving, the seven-year-old adventurer sat down to write this short, semi-literate message--Deere Mom Ime in the lake Lov Andy--then tiptoed out of the bungalow, jumped into the water, and drowned. Ime in the lake." (Paul Auster, Invisible)

French Lessons #225

"La rencontre avec le philosophe, dans VIVRE SA VIE, est particulièrement représentative de ce que le lieu qu'est le café permet au cinéma : une conversation, du 'texte', mais également de l'expérience pariticipative, de la distance tendre." (Clélia Zernik, L'attrait des cafés)

Quotes 2017 #225

"For the sad fact remains: there is far more poetry in the world than justice." (Paul Auster, Invisible)

French Lessons #224

"Sa peau noire se teintait par endroits de traînées violettes, à force d'être tendue sur les os." (Glissant)

Quotes 2017 #224

"Look at the parallels, Born said, and it's not as far-fetched as you'd think: extermination of the Indians is turned into the extermination of the Jews; westward expansion to exploit natural resources is turned into eastward expansion for the same purpose; enslavement of the blacks for low-cost labor is turned into subjugation of the Slavs to produce a similar result. Long live America, Adam, he said, pouring another shot of cognac into both our glasses." (Paul Auster, Invisible)

French Lessons #223

"Ma blessure existait avant moi, je suis né pour l'incarner." (Joe Bousquet, cité par Deleuze et Parnet)

Quotes 2017 #223

"The escalators in the Tottenham Court Road tube station are long ones; and civilized etiquette in England is that people stand on one side only, leaving a clear passage for those in a hurry (unlike the U.S., where people clog the entire width of the steps)." (Denise Levertov)

French Lessons #222

"Le visage a singulièrement changé de fonctionnement : ce n'est plus le visage despotique vu de face, c'est le visage autoritaire qui se détourne et se met de profil." (Deleuze & Parnet)

Quotes 2017 #222

"My encounters with books I regard very much as my encounters with other phenomena of life or thought. All encounters are configurate, not isolate. In this sense, and in this sense only, books are as much a part of life as trees, stars or dung." (Henry Miller)

French Lessons #221

"Il y a des devenirs-animaux dans l'écriture, qui ne consistent pas à imiter l'animal, à 'faire' l'animal, pas plus que la musique de Mozart n'imite les oiseaux, bien qu'elle soit pénétrée d'un devenir-oiseau." (Deleuze & Parnet)

Quotes 2017 #221

"But odds don't count when it comes to actual events, and just because a thing is unlikely to happen, that doesn't mean it won't." (Paul Auster, Invisible)

French Lessons #220

"Devenir-araignée, devenir-pou, devenir-tique, une vie inconnue, forte, obscure, obstinée." (Deleuze)

Quotes 2017 #220

"It would be wrong to seek a direct transposition of musical chords in the way they are developed in the Baroque; and yet it would also be erroneous to conclude with Leibniz's indifference in respect to the musical model: the question, rather involves analogy. And we know that Leibniz was always trying to bring it to a new rigor." (Deleuze)

French Lessons #219

"Une chose, un animal, une personne ne se définissent plus que par des mouvements et des repos, des vitesses et des lenteurs (LONGITUDE), et par des affects, des intensités (LATITUDE)." (Deleuze et Parnet)

Quotes 2017 #219

"The Baroque is inseparable from a new regime of light and color. To begin, we can consider light and shadows as 1 and 0, as the two levels of the world separated by a thin line of waters : the Happy and the Damned." (Deleuze)

French Lessons #218

"Les Anglais et les Américains, qui sont les moins auteurs parmi les écrivains, ont deux sens particulièrement aigus, et qui communiquent : celui de la route et du chemin, celui de l'herbe et du rhizome." (Deleuze et Parnet)

Quotes 2017 #218

"The Baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative function, to a trait. It endlessly produces folds. It does not invent things: there are all kinds of folds coming from the East, Greek, Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, Classical folds... Yet the Baroque trait twists and turns its folds, pushing them to infinity, fold over fold, one upon the other." (Deleuze)

ImaginAsia 2017

Our international workshop ImaginAsia 2017, hosted by us at Meiji, started yesterday. Students from Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, UK, and Japan work in small groups to look into the local histories of Asian immigrants in Japan. This is the statement I wrote as an introduction.

About ImaginAsia

     How many Asias are there in this world? How many do we know and how many do we live? Beyond any narrow-minded ethnocentrism and baseless identification with the Western gaze, we are now embarking, once again, on our collective journey of self-knowledge. There may be a thousand Asias that run through us, here and now, releasing and recapturing us at each moment, making us a collective flux of diversity, differentiation, and constant discovery. Imagination is the only nation we share and across cultural and linguistic borders we keep encountering our new selves, thanks to your new friends walking side-by-side with you in this unknown territory. That is the spirit of ImaginAsia. 

     This year’s edition of ImaginAsia will explore the rich presence of various Asian traditions in Tokyo. How can we see through the surface and speak to this vibrant inter-Asian mega-city with a necessary socio-historical and critical consciousness? This is a truly unique educational and research opportunity for all participants. Let’s see what comes out of it.

Keijiro SUGA, Meiji University

French Lessons #217

"Le grand secret, c'est quand on n'a plus rien à cacher, et que personne alors ne peut vous saisir." (Deleuze & Parnet)

Quotes 2017 #217

"Leibniz is political because he is utopian. His theories of curvature, movement, and point of view cannot be localized." (Tom Conley)

French Lessons #216

"Le mal-mauvaise rencontre, le mal-empoisonnement, constituent le fond de la théorie spinoziste." (Deleuze)

Quotes 2017 #216

"Why can't we get along without bodies? What leads us to go beyond the phenomenon or the perceived? Leibniz often says that if bodies did not exist outside of perception, the only perceiving substances would be either human or angelic, to the detriment of the variety and of the animality of the universe." (Deleuze)

French Lessons #215

"C'est donc la peur qui m'a enlevé l'envie du voyage." (Jean Giono)

Quotes 2017 #215

"A bifurcation, like the exit from the temple, is called a point in the neighborhood of series' divergence. Borges, one of Leibniz's disciples, invoked the Chinese philosopher-architect Ts'ui Pên, the inventor of the 'garden with bifurcating paths,' a baroque labyrinth whose infinite series converge or diverge, forming a webbing of time embracing all possibilities." (Deleuze)

French Lessons #214

"Mais au contraire le néant QUI N'EST PAS ne saurait avoir qu'une existence empruntée..." (Sartre)

Quotes 2017 #214

"A complaining guitar sound---one high, stretched, strident note that gave off the feel of someone trying to scrape dirt off his hand with a knife---rang through "30 Seconds Over Tokyo," growing more and less and more and less accepting as the drama took shape, nothing-you-can-do-about-it turning into I-can't-take-it-anymore and turning back." (Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come)

French Lessons #213

"Les phrases de Kérouac sont aussi sobres qu'un dessin japonais, pure ligne tracée par une main sans support, et qui traverse les âges et les règnes. Il fallait un vrai alcoolique pour attendre à cette sobriété-là." (Deleuze & Parnet)

Quotes 2017 # 213

"I am the prior of Clusa, and I know well how to make discourse, and how to write. In Aquitaine there is no learning, they are rustics all: and if any one in Aquitaine has learnt any grammar, he straightway thinks himself Virgil. In France is learning, but not much. But in Lombardy, where I mostly studied, is the fountain of learning." (Benedict of Clusa, quoted by Helen Waddell in her The Wandering Scholars)