Fido the Yak

To move in rhythm is to recall the metamorphosis of subjectivity–so we are then victims of repetition?!? No, we are just finding a place to launch a critique. (Incidentally an onompatopoetics of experience has been imagined, a becoming atmospheric. Likewise, we could simply supply an alternative, concrete hearing of sounds. The sojourns of this conversation are many.) Rhythm. Levinas' conceptualization of rhythm (in "Reality and its Shadow") can't be compared with what the poets and the musicians and those who study them teach. When I say "rhythm" I mean a slightly other concept of rhythm, not an automatic response that would make us victims of repetition (which we will momentarily disavow for the sake of meeting), but a meeting. The meaning of the interval, the space between durations, the pause, is borrowed from the meeting. In rhythm we meet, ourselves perhaps, perhaps with a flavor of the youtastic–the groove, the word groove too, jump starts the youtastic (and not merely systatic) capacitization of rhythm. Anamnesis of the youtastic, or of the borrowed meaning. Are we not in charge of our recollections? Is there a cause for anxiety? That something vital will be left out of a recollection? That a personal adventure won't be narratable, or that, conversely, we won't be able to escape a romance of totalization ("[t]he interval is no longer separable from one's personal adventure" (Levinas, "Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge," in Proper Names (trans. Michael Smith, Stanford University Press, 1996, p. 24)))?

Every meeting is a unique event that cannot be told, that cannot be joined together with other presents to make up a story. It is a pure spark, like Bergson's instant of intuition (BM, 69), like the "almost nothing" of his disciple Jankélévitch, in which the relation of consciousness no longer has a content, but is left like the point of a needle penetrating being. The relation is a fulguration of instants without continuity, which refuses to be a continuous, owned existence (IT, 109; BM, 65, 108).

(Ibid., p.29)

I am challenged by any liaison between the continuous and the rhythmic. Should I now apologize for metastic spasmorealizations of the groove? You are invited to pick up the conversation from here.

Labels: Bergson, Buber, Jankélévitch, Levinas, Passages, repetition, rhythm, you

posted by Fido the Yak at 10:52 AM.