'In the end it is ex tempore eloquence that is the primal manifestation of the rhetoric of the time. Philostratus searched, literally, for the person in whom "the waves of improvised speeches found their source [skhediôn … pêgas logôn … ek … rhuênai]" (482): the metaphorics of time is evidently a metaphorics of flux, of waves. The time of discourse and the time of becoming: this is the perspective—it has been remarked—from which the alignment of sophistics with Heracliteanism appears correct; "everything flows" in the world of those who speak. But what has not yet been understood is how ex tempore is said in Greek: skhedioi logoi, "improvised speeches," skhediazein, "improvise." The adverb and the verb indicate proximity, whether it be spatial (that of two warriors in close combat) or temporal (the approach of death, as well as the unexpectedness of an event); such that skhedia, for example, is the word used by Zeus in book V of the Odyssey to designate the "stout binding" [epi skhediês poludesmou, V, 33] of the ties as numerous as those that bind Ulysses himself to the mass when he sails past the Sirens. This conjunction of spatial adjustment and precarity, of temporal immediacy, makes up the approximative essence of the "raft" Ulysses fabricates to escape his love for Calypso. Improvised discourses are the rafts upon which man embarks along the course of time.'

'the specter of supreme disregard that lurks in the margins of their compositions'

’Capitalism thrives on the upward pressure produced by reserve labor because it enables employers to exploit the increasingly cheap, docile, and pliable work of those for whom the threat of being supplanted often overrides any progressive concerns regarding decent pay, regular hours, worker solidarity, or a shared humanity. To the enduring benefit of the bourgeoisie, anxieties surrounding personal expendability (of having to “deskill”) intensify in relation to perceptions of a flooded labor supply, producing a variety of disciplinary and reactionary divisions and antagonisms throughout any given labor market. Vocational modernity, then, is one such reaction to “reserve anxiety.” It describes a historical process whereby the exceptional “sovereign individual is formed in relation to precariously embodied representations of difference, a relation that intensifies at those junctures when the promises of personal calling seem most at risk of unravelling.’

(Reading, an automatism)

Adjuncts and the academy: of it but not in it.

Cavell's uses of the continental tradition are a form of philosophical arbitrage.

'One of my experiments has become a sort of legend. It consisted of photographing a white cup and saucer placed on a graduated scale of tones from pure white through light and dark grays to black velvet. This experiment I did at intervals over a whole summer, taking well over a thousand negatives. The cup and saucer experiment was to a photographer what a series of finger exercises is to a pianist. It had nothing directly to do with the conception or the art of photography.'

Neige.

Moins je pratique mon français, plus il devient authentiquement le mien, n'est-ce pas ? Je ne pratique jamais mon anglais, et aucune langue n'est plus proche de moi qu'elle.