Tuesday, February 25, 2014

PPM13 February 25, 2014 10:50 AM

PPM13 is an example of a meditation that happens in 'the zone,' which, as I say in the commentary I make after reading the meditation, is the very 'place' I was hoping to go each and every time I sat down to write a daily meditation.  This is the essence of the philosophical experiment: to inhabit the place of thinking, which Arendt reminds us is called (by Medieval philosophy) the 'nunc stans,' the standing now.  As I said to my students two weeks ago, this moment of learning, what Baudelaire called the 'heroic present,' is always there, waiting for us, so to speak.  The challenge for us who are interested in such things is to be ready or to make ready when it appears to us.  Is the writing of poetic phenomenological mediation, then, a preparation for this moment, or it is an experience of this moment?  It is always first and foremost the former, and, on occasion, the latter, and after reading today's meditation it strikes me that it was written in the opening offered by the heroic present.









1 comment:

  1. 3.0 (20/10 yrs later) - "As if" (to borrow one of my favorite phrases from Derrida) I had anticipated today's 2.0 meditation in yesterday's 3.0 commentary! Yesterday I called attention to the shift in my focus from temporality to what, for a lack of a better term or perhaps because it is the better term, we might call geography. From 'time' to 'place,' specifically, describing the place that opens up, indeed, the opening that is revealed with the evacuation of the subject. This 'hole' or 'cavity' -- the place of the 'Nothing'? -- is the central geographic phenomenological category in my most recent writing, namely the full 40k word "To Be All Ears" paper I wrote last summer (2023). This is not to say that the specific temporality of the event of evacuation -- happening most intensely in the aesthetic experience -- is somehow philosophically displaced by the focus on 'place.' Rather, it only shift in focus that appears to balance and complete the 'mapping' of the event.

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