Viviparous Recrudescence (a Metathetical Pasigraphy)

Notes and quotes from

Michel Foucault

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

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Metathesis – the transposition of sounds or letters in a word

Pasigraphy – a writing system where each symbol represents a concept. Its aim is universal intelligibility (The Glass Bead Game?)

Vowels in Isolation:

A for possession (avoir, to have)
E for existence
I for puissance (power)
O for étonnement (astonishment, eyes opened wide)
U for humidité (humidity) and therefor for humeur (mood)

P102. From Court de Gébelin (1816)

“This object of extension of which all natural beings are constituted – an extension that may be affected by four variables. And by four variables only:

The form of the elements,
the quantity of those elements,
the manner in which they are distributed in space in relation to each other,
and the relative magnitude of each element.

As Linneaus said, in a passage of capital importance, ‘every note should be a produce of number, of form, or proportion, of situation.”

P134. From Philosophiebotanique.

“…things can now be established in a manner that excludes all uncertainty…the arrangement of its elements into a linear series patterns representation according to an evident and universal mode.”

P134-6

“All the creatures that taxonomy has arranged in an uninterrupted simultaneity are then subjected to time.”

P151

“Imagination…the ambiguous locus in which the shattered but insistent continuity of nature was united with the empty but attentive continuity of consciousness.”

P160

“’The excessive abundance of money, which makes the power of states while it lasts, thrusts them imperceptibly and naturally into indigence.’”

P187 from Cantillon.

“It would be untrue to say that nature spontaneously produces values; but it is the inexhaustible source of the goods that exchange transforms into values, though not without expenditure and consumption.

The Physiocrats begin their analysis with the thing itself which is designated in value, but which exists prior to the system of wealth.”

P195

“The visible order, with its permanent grid of distinctions, is now only a superficial glitter above an abyss.”

P251

“…for those who are hungry, wheat is scarce; but for the rich who make up society, diamonds are scarce.

…labour – that is, economic activity – did not make its appearance in world history until men became too numerous… humanity is henceforth laboring under the threat of death…”

P256

“Homo oeconomicus is not the human being who represents his own needs to himself, and the objects capable of satisfying them; he is the human being who spends, wears out, and wastes his life in evading the imminence of death.”

P257

“Ground rent is the effect, not of a prolific nature, but of the avarice of the land. Now, this avarice becomes more perceptible every day: the population, in fact, increases; progressively poorer land is brought under cultivation; the costs of production increase; the prices of agricultural products increase, and ground rents with them. Under this pressure, it is very possible – indeed necessary – that the nominal wage of the labourers will also begin to rise, in order to cover the minimum costs of their subsistence; but, for the same reason, their real wage can never rise in practice above the sum that is indispensable to provide them with clothing, shelter, and food.”

P258 (Ricardo)

“Nietzsche…He took the end of time and transformed it into the death of God and the odyssey of the last man…”

P263

Viviparous – of bringing forth live young that have developed inside the body of the parent.

Recrudescence – the recurrence of an undesirable condition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK6Gvee-ri4 – Tame Impala – New Person, Same Old Mistakes

“Expressing their thoughts in words of which they are not the masters, enclosing them in verbal forms whose historical dimensions they are unaware of, men believe that their speech is their servant and do not realize that they are submitting themselves to its demands.”

P297

“…in the very heart of empiricity, there is indicated the obligation to work backwards – or downwards – to an analytic of finitude, in which man’s being will be able to provide a foundation in their own positivity for all those forms that indicate to him that he Is not infinite. And the first characteristic with which this analytic will mark man’s mode of being, or rather the space in which that mode of being will be deployed in its entirety, will be that of repetition – of the identity and the difference between the positive and the fundamental: the death that anonymously gnaws at the daily existence of the living being is the same as that fundamental death on the basis of which my empirical life is given to me; the desire that links and separates men in the neutrality of the economic process is the same as that on the basis of which everything is desirable for me; the time that bears languages along upon it, that takes up its place within them and finally wears them out, is the same time that draws my discourse out, even before I have pronounced it, into a succession that no man can master. From one end of experience to the other, finitude answers itself; it is that identity and the difference of the positivities, and of their foundation, within the figure of the Same.”

P315

“…ought we not remind ourselves that we are bound to the back of a tiger?”

P322

“…the chaotic accumulation of contents, the weight of experiences constantly eluding themselves, the whole silent horizon of what is posited in the sandy stretches of non-thought. Because he is an empirico-transcendental doublet, men is also the locus of misunderstanding – of misunderstanding that constantly exposes his thought to the risk of being swamped by his own being, and also enables him to recover his integrity on the basis of what eludes him.”

P323

“…the cogito does not lead to an affirmation of being, but it does lead to a whole series of questions concerned with being…”

P325

An sich – Noumenon – posited object or event that exists independently of human sense perception.

Für sich – Explicit/actual – Being-for-itself / being which defines its own bounds and determines its own properties (Autonomous)

Unbewusste – Unconscious Mind

“…in every case, the inexhaustible double that presents itself to reflection as the blurred projection of what man is in his truth, but that also plays the role of a preliminary ground upon which man must collect himself and recall himself in order to attain his truth.”

P327

“For modern thought, no morality is possible.

Can we say that it is not known by those who, in their profound stupidity, assert that there is no philosophy without political choice, that all thought is either ‘progressive’ or ‘reactionary’?”

P328

“This is because man, in fact, can be revealed only when bound to a previously existing historicity: he is never contemporaneous with that origin which is outlined through the time of things even as it eludes the gaze; when he tries to define himself as a living being, he can uncover his own beginning only against the background of a life which itself began long before him; when he attempts to re-apprehend himself as a laboring being, he cannot bring even the most rudimentary forms of such a being to light except within a human time and space which have been previously institutionalized, and previously subjugated by society; and when he attempts to define his essence as a speaking subject, prior to any effectively constituted language, all he ever finds is the previously unfolded possibility of language, and not the stumbling sound, the first word upon the basis of which all languages and even language itself became possible. It is always against a background of the already begun that man is able to reflect on what may serve for him as origin.”

P330

“…psychoanalysis moves towards the moment…This means that, unlike the human sciences, which, even while turning back towards the unconscious, always remain within the space of the representable, psychoanalysis advances and leaps over representation, overflows it on the side of norms, conflicts burdened with rules, and significations forming a system, the simple fact that it is possible for there to be

System (therefore signification),

Rule (therefore conflict),

Norm (therefore function).

…function and norms, attains its foundation in the mute repetition of Death,

Conflicts and rules their foundation in the naked opening of Desire,

Significations and systems their foundation in a language which is at the same time Law.

…this Death, and this Desire, and this Law can never meet within the knowledge that traverses in its positivity the empirical domain of man; but the reason for this is that they designate the conditions of possibility of all knowledge about man.”

P374-5

“…man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.”

P387