Deze inspirerende presentaties van schrijvers moet je zien

ADORNO - on Valéry - … the drive to recreate in the work, immanently, some of the objectivity it loses when it stops at a subjective reaction to something pregiven, whatever form it takes (p. 142) - Hence art does not fuse perfectly with total rationality, because by its very nature it is deviation; only as deviation does it have a right to exist in the rational world and the power to assert itself The aesthetic metaphor for this kind of paradox is chance, that which is non-identical to ratio, the incommensurable as a moment within identity, a moment of rational lawfullness of a specific type – statistical lawfullness, something to which Valéry’s thoughts turn frequently.

- Chance negates law for the sake of aesthetic freedom and yet in its heteronomy remains the opposite of freedom. Valéry : ‘In all the arts – and that is precisely why they are arts – the sense of having become so out of necessity, something a work brought to succesful completion must plausibly convey to us, can be evoked only through an act of free creation.

- The joining and ultimate harmonization of traits that are independent of one another and must be woven together is achieved not through a recipe or an automatic mechanism but by miracle or ultimately by effort – by miracle in conjunction with efforts borne by a will’ - But chance also marks the limits of rationality in the material that rationality processes; - The estrangement from meaning that chance imports into every work imitates the estrangement of the age; through its unvarnished acknowledgment of the totality’s estrangement from meaning, chance lodges a protest against it. - Like Mallarmé, [Valéry] sympathized with chance without reservation or apology, splendidly unconcerned about the contradiction with his primary inclination, despite the fact that his whole pathos stems from the notion that the way the mind gains possession of itself is through the process of the work’s gaining possession of the mind. - … the dignity of artistic techniques that involve fire: ‘But all the fire worker’s admirable vigilance and all the foresight learned from experience, from his knowledge of the properties of heat, of its critical stagess, of the temperatures of fusion and reactions, still leave immense scope for the noble element of uncertainty. They can never abolish chance.’ - Valéry sets as much store by necessity as by what escapes necessity, and in chance hopes to find the neutral point between the two. It is this moment in chance, the moment that is alien to meaning, a true treshold value in temps espace, that he associates with the Bergsonian temps durée, involuntary memory as the sole form of survival. * [Valéry] is much too self-reflective to deceive himself about the fact that even artists who disdain economic considerations remain tied to the precarious status of the min in the dominant society, with which they must comply even while opposing it. Artists … are what social theory calls “third persons”: they live on profit that has been diverted to them. We mogen dus representeren hoe ‘the hand that gives’ eruitziet. * … the autonomous ego’s avowed power to control the unconscious. ‘Morning brings a sloughing off of our dreams, dispelling all that has taken advantage of our neglicence and absence to proliferate, clutter us up; … dirt, mistakes, stupidities, terrors, obsessions. The beasts go back to their dens. The Master is back from a journey; the witches’ sabbath is put to rout. - ‘We take refuge in the unknown. We hide in it from what we know. On the unknown hope stakes its hopes. Thought would die out with the end of indetermination. Hope is a mental activity that promotes ignorance, transforms a solid wall into a cloud;’ - Ultimately, for him art is not an unfolding of truth, as it was for Hegel, but rather, to use Hegel’s language, a pleasant chiming of bells. The wordly and civilizing element in it is considerable enough in comparison with the imprisonment in a kingdom of the mind that the prisoner takes literally and absolutizes. - Did “the pleasures of the Roi Solei somewhat [surpass] those enjoyed in front of the television screen”? Een open vraag. - A poem should be a festival … of the intellect. … A festival, that is to say, a game, but a solemn controlled, significant game; an image of what one is normally not, of the state in which efforts are rhythms and thus redeemed. We celebrate something by enacting it or representing it in its purest, loveliest state. - Even in the slightest of compositions one must thing of duration, that is, of memory, which is to say form… - Art is imitation, but not of something material; rather, it is mimetic behavior. In the name of such imitation, even the aesthetic category that seems to be purely subjective, the category of expression… it becomes the imitation of the language of the things themselves … ‘Poetry is an attempt to reproduce or restore by means of an articulated language those things of that thing that cries, tears, caresses, kisses, sighs, and so forth struggle obscurely to express … * Art is an imitation not of what has been created but of the act of creation itself. * To follow Valéry’s abyssal passage about the prehistoric person who, ‘must have been the first to run his fingers absentmindedly over a rough vase, and feel inspired thereby to model another, made to be caressed’, art might be the imitation of creative love itself. * It is only through blind obsession with itself and not by means of a clear-sighted intention directed toward something that would be more than itself, that the work of art becomes more than it is. Its resemblance to itself turns it into language. * Pay attention to this subtle continuous sound; it is silence. ‘What has most value should cost nothing.’ ‘All he hopes for is to make us his friends, the companions of his contemplation of a fine day, from dawn until night.’ * on Ernst Bloch… - For it is one thing to believe in ghosts and another to tell ghost stories. One is almost tempted to concede true pleasure in these stories only to the person who does not believe in them but rather gets involved in them precisely in order to enjoy his freedom from myth.