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Have always found Kundera’s line ‘the unbearable lightness of being’ a very beautiful and accurate description of the general mess we find our selves in.

Feel the same about Deleuze’s notion that we’re all living on our own desert island, as something that ‘precedes beginning itself’, each moment constantly being completely new:

Those people who come to the island indeed occupy and populate it; but in reality, were they sufficiently separate, sufficiently creative, they would would give the island only a dynamic image of itself, a consciousness of the movement which produced the island, such that through them the island would in the end become conscious of itself as deserted and unpeopled. The island would be only the dream of humans, and humans, the pure consciousness of the island.

For this to be the case, there is again but one condition: humans would have to reduce themselves to the movement that brings them to the island, the movement which prolongs and takes up the élan that produced the island.

…In the ideal beginning anew there is something that precedes beginning itself, that takes it up to deepen it and delay it in the passage of time. The deserted island is the material of this something immemorial, this something most profound. (Deleuze ‘Desert Islands’)

As the enigmatic Leos Carax said at the end of a recent interview about his very amazing, and sort of disturbing ‘Merde’ (part of a trilogy about Tokyo, about a hazard wreaking man who lives in the sewer): ‘I travel, I read, I write, I have other lives,” he says. “But when I have a camera I know that’s my country, my island.”

So, reading and really excited by Prince of Networks. One interesting point I found from an initial reading of the first chapter is Latour’s difference with Bergson/Deleuze when it comes to the isolation and relation between individual things:

On one side are figures like Bergson and Deleuze, for whom a generalized becoming precedes any crystallization into specific entities. On the other side we find authors such as Whitehead and Latour,for whom entities are so highly definite that they vanish instantly with the slightest change in their properties.

I think (Harman’s description of) Latour’s take on object’s as events gives a beautiful feel of a pulsating that in each new moment, brings everything into being:

For Latour an actant [object] is always an event, and events are always completely specific: „everything happens only once and at one place“…all features of an object belong to it; everything happens only once, at one time, in one place. But this means that Latour rejects another well-known feature of traditional substance: its durability. We generally speak of the same dog as dog existing on different days over many years, but for Latour this would ultimately be no more than a figure of speech. It would entail that we abstract an enduring dog-substance o dog-essence from an entire network of relations or trials of strength in which the dog is involved at each moment of its life. ultimately the unified ‘dog’ is a sequence of closely related heirs, not an enduring unit encrusted with shifting accidents over time.

A nice review by German-based poet and translator Catherine Hales in the new Jacket about Dichten= , a new anthology of contemporary German poetry in translation (edited and translated by Rosemarie Waldrop).

I only make love to Jesus / I only fuck God. – Queen Adreena

No way, a free lunch! Prince of Networks Graham Harman’s new book on Bruno Latour has been slam dunked, Open Accessed online. It is freely downloadable from re.press, the publisher’s site. The publisher only ask that you get other people to buy it (smirk), see Anthem.