Of aesthetics, of science, of the body

"Literature,music, the passions, but also the experience of the visible world are-no less in the science of Lavoisier and Ampere-the exploration of an invisible and the disclosure of a universe of ideas. The difference is simply that this invisible, these ideas, unlike those of that of science,cannot be detached from the sensible appearences and be erected into a second positivity. The musical idea, the literary idea, the dialectic of love, and also the articulations of the light, the modes of exhibition of sound and of touch speak to us, have their logic, their coherence, their points of intersection, their concordances, and here also the appearences are the disguise of unknown 'forces' and 'laws'. But it is as though the secrecy wherein they lie and whence the literary expresssion draws them were their proper mode of existence. For these truths are not only hidden like a physical reality which we have not been able to discover, invisible in fact but which we will one day already see, provided that the screen that masks it is lifted. Here on the contrary, there is no vision without the screen; the ideas we are speaking of would not be better known to us if we had no body and no sensibility..."

"Is my body a thing, is it an idea? It is neither, being the measurement of the things. We therefore have to recognize an ideality that is not alien to the flesh that gives it its axes, its depth, its dimensions."

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY

From "The Intertwining-The Chiasm"--THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE

Comments

[Barnaby]

I have absolutely no idea what this means.

[melissa]

Yes, I was trying to figure it out myself and I think people are still trying to figure it out by reading and re-reading... the basic idea I think is that everything is in the flesh, no art/ideas can be transmitted without a physical entity, without body, without the sonic physical sound of words and or music. Thus any artistic idea is not a metaphor but is as basic as matter. Does it mean that everything starts and ends with the body? I don't know. Relating this to your post on Michaël David André, I see some form of connection. Britney Spears mutilated image, the eye, the expression of fetish and sex by mutilating her body image somehow becomes beautiful.

What the hell am I saying? I think I need to go watch Star Wars,,,

Later my cyberfren....