2018 (39d-1) : Montessori and Heidegger

If we look at history, we see that man for cen-
turies lived at the same level, primitive, stupid, conserva-
tive, incapable of progress ; but this is only the outer
manifestation seen in history. There is an inner growth
going on and on, until an explosion suddenly comes !
And then another period of placidity and little progress
externally and then another revelation ! (Montessori)

To reflect on language means—to reach the speaking of language in such a way that this speaking takes place as that which grants an abode for the being of mortals… What does this mean to speak? The current view declares that speech is the activation of the organs for sounding and hearing. Speech is the audible expression and communication of human feelings. These feelings are accompanied by thoughts. (Heidegger)

So it is with the child and this language of man.
There is not merely small steady progress of word by word,
but there are also explosive phenomena, as psychologists
call them, happening without reason or teaching. At the
same period of life in each child comes suddenly this
cataract of words, and all pronounced perfectly. In
three months the children use with ease all the com-
plications of nouns, suffixes and prefixes, and verbs. All
this happens at the end of the second year for every
child. So we must be heartened by this action of the
child and wait. (And at the sluggish epochs in history
we may hope for the same ; perhaps humanity is not so
stupid as it appears, perhaps wonderful things will
happen which will be explosions of internal life.) These
explosive phenomena and eruptions of expression con-
tinue after the age of two years ; the use of simple
and compound sentences, the use of the verb in all its
tenses and modes, even in the subjunctive, the use of
subordinate and co-ordinate clauses appear in the same
sudden explosive way. So is completed the expression
of the language of the group (race, social level, etc.,) to
which the child belongs. This treasure which has been
prepared by the sub-conscious is handed over to the
consciousness, and the child, in full possession of this new
power, talks, and talks, and talks, till the adults say :
” For goodness* sake can’t you stop talking ! (M)

In such a characterization of language three points are taken for granted…

First, speaking is expression. The idea of speech as an utterance already presupposes something internal that externalizes itself. If we take language to be an utterance, we give an external, surface notion of it at the very moment we explain it.

Second, speech is regarded as an activity of man. Accordingly we have to say that man speaks, and that he always speaks some language. Hence, we cannot say, “Language speaks.” For this would be to say: “It is language that first brings man about, brings him into existence.” Understood in this way, man would be bespoken by language.

Third, human expression is always a presentation and representation of the real and unreal. (H)

After this great landmark at two and a half years,
which seems to indicate a border-line of intelligence when
man is formed, language still continues to develop, with-
out explosions, yet with great vivacity and spontaneity.
This second period lasts from two and a half to four and
a half or five years. This is the period when the child
takes in a great number of words, and perfects the
rendering of sentences. Certainly if the child is in an
environment of a few words or of * slang ‘, he will use
those words only, but if he lives in an environment of
cultured speech and rich vocabulary, the child will fix
it all. The environment is very important, yet in any
case an enrichment of vocabulary will come about*
Great interest is being taken in this fact. In Belgium
scientific observers discovered that the child of only two
and a half years knew two hundred words, but by the
time of five years he knew and used thousands of words,
and all this happens without a teacher ; it is a spontaneous
acquisition. After he has learnt all this, we allow the
child to come to school and say : ” I will teach you the
alphabet ! (M)

“When we understand the nature of language in terms of expression, we give it a more comprehensive definition by incorporating expression, as one among many activities, into the total economy of those achievements by which man makes himself.”

“According to the opening of the Prologue of the Gospel of St. John, in the beginning the Word was with God. The attempt is made not only to free the question of origin from the fetters of rational-logical explanation, but also, to set aside the limits of a merely logical description of language…” Other sciences such as biology, theology, sociology, etc. are then called upon to describe and explain linguistic phenomena more comprehensively. (H)

We must keep clearly in mind this double path that
has been followed : that of the sub-conscious activity which
prepares the language, and then that of the consciousness
gradually coming to life and taking from the sub-conscious
what it has to give. And what have we at the end ?
MAN the child of five who can speak his language
well, knows and uses all the rules. He does not realize
all the sub-conscious work, but in reality he is MAN who
has created language. The child has created it for him-
self. If the child did not have these powers and did not
spontaneously acquire language, there would have been
no work possible in the world of men and no civilization.
We see, therefore, how important is MAN in this period of
his life : he constructs all. If it were not for him, civiliza-
tion would not exist, for he alone constructs its foundation.
So we should give him the help he needs and not leave
him to wander alone. (M)

“Language is the expression, produced by men, of their feelings and the world view that guides them… In it’s essence, language is neither expression nor an activity of man. Language speaks. Accordingly, what we seek lies in the poetry of the spoken word.” (H)

2018 (39c) : Montessori , Heidegger , Derrida

So it is with the
psychic mechanism for language in the child. It begins
deep down in the darkness of the sub-conscious, is devel-
oped and fixed there, and then it is seen openly. Certain
it is that some mechanism does exist, (whether I have
made a good comparison or not) so that this under-
standing of language may be realized. Once one has
envisaged this mysterious activity, one wants to find out
how it happens ; so there is today a deep interest in the
investigation of this mysterious feature of the deep sub-
conscious. (Montessori)

Language is the house of Being, in its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. (Heidegger)

I have implied it repeatedly: the praise of living speech, as it preoccupies Lévi-Strauss’s
discourse, is faithful to only one particular motif in Rousseau. This motif comes to terms with
and is organized by its contrary: a perpetually reanimated mistrust with regard to the so-called
full speech. In the spoken address, presence is at once promised and refused. The speech that
Rousseau raised above writing is speech as it should be or rather as it should have been. And
we must pay attention to that mode, to that tense which relates us to presence within living
colloquy. In fact, Rousseau had tested the concealment within speech itself, in the mirage of
its immediacy. He had recognized and analyzed it with incomparable acumen. We are
dispossessed of the longed-for presence in the gesture of language by which we attempt to
seize it. To the experience of the “robber robbed” that Starobinski admirably describes in
L’oeil vivant [Paris, 1961]. Jean Jacques is subjected not only in the play of the mirror image
which “captures his reflection and exposes his presence” (p. 109) . It lies in wait for us from
the first word. The speculary dispossession which at the same time institutes and deconstitutes
me is also a law of language. It operates as a power of death in the heart of living speech: a
power all the more re-doubtable because it opens as much as it threatens the possibility of the
spoken word.

Having in a certain way recognized this power which, inaugurating speech, dislocates the
subject that it constructs, prevents it from being present to its signs, torments its language
with a complete writing, Rousseau is nevertheless more pressed to exorcise it than to assume
its necessity. That is why, straining toward the reconstruction of presence, he valorizes and disqualifies writing at the same time. At the same time; that is to say, in one divided but
coherent movement. We must try not to lose sight of its strange unity. Rousseau condemns
writing as destruction of presence and as disease of speech. He rehabilitates it to the extent
that it promises the reappropriation of that of which speech allowed itself to be dispossessed.
But by what, if not already a writing older than speech and already installed in that place?

(Derrida)

This however is only part of the activity of observa-
tion that adults can perform ; the other part is to watch
the external manifestations, because it is only of these
external manifestations that we can have proof ; but this
observation must be exact. Nowadays several people
are engaged in this. Observations have been carried out
day by day from the date of birth to two years of age
and beyond : what happened on each day, how long the
development remained at the same level, etc. From these
observations certain things stand out like milestones.
They have revealed the fact that there is a mysterious
inner development that is very great, while the corres-
ponding external manifestation is very small, so there is
evidently a great disproportion between the activity of
the inner life and the external expression. Another thing
that stands out in all these observations of outer mani-
festations is that there is not a regular linear develop-
ment, but development manifests itself in jerks. There
is the conquest of syllables, for instance, at a certain
time and then for months the child emits nothing but
syllables there is no progress externally. Then suddenly
he says a word ; then he remains with one or two words
for a long time. Again there seems no progress and one
feels almost disheartened to see this slow external
progress. It seems so sluggish, but the acts reveal to us
that in the inner life there is a continuous and great progress.
(Montessori)

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man. (Heidegger)

2018 (39b) : Montessori , Levi-Strauss , Derrida

LET us consider the development of language in the
child. In order to understand language, we must reflect
on what language is. It is so fundamental that we might
well call it the basis of normal human life, because
through it men join together to form a group. It brings
about the transformation of the environment that we
call civilization. (Montessori)

We only have an impression, an insistent impression through the unstable feeling of a shifting figure, of a schema, or of an in-finite or indefinite process. Unlike what a classical philosopher or scholar would be tempted to do, I do not consider this impression, or the notion of this impression, to be a subconcept, the feebleness of a blurred and subjective preknowledge, destined for I know not what sin of nominalism, but to the contrary, I will explain myself later, I consider it to be the possibility and the very future of the concept, to be the very concept of the future, if there is such a thing and if, as I believe, the idea of the archive depends on it.

(Derrida)

There is a central point that distinguishes humanity :
it is not guided to do this or that fixed task as animals
are. We never know what man will do, hence men must
come into harmony with each other or they will never
do anything. In order to come into accord and to take
intelligent decisions together, it is not sufficient to think,
not even if all of us were geniuses. What is necessary
is that we must understand one another. This under-
standing one another is possible only by means of langu-
age. Language is the instrument of thinking together.
Language did not not exist on the earth until man made
his appearance. Yet after all, what is it ? A mere breath,
a series of sounds put together not even logically, just put
together.

Whatever might have been the moment and the circumstances of its appearance on the scale
of animal life, language could only have been born suddenly. Things could not have begun to
signify progressively. Following a transformation whose study does not belong to the social
sciences, but to biology and psychology, a passage was effected from a stage where nothing
had sense to another where everything did. (M)

Sounds have no logic, the collection of sounds that
occur when we say * plate ‘ have in themselves no logic.
What gives sense to these sounds is the fact that men
have agreed that those special sounds shall represent
this special idea. Language is the expression of agree-
ment among a group of men, and it is only the group who
has agreed on those sounds who can understand them.
Other groups have other sounds to represent the same
idea. Language is a sort of wall that encloses a group
of men and separates it from other groups. That is why
language has become almost mystical, it is something
that unites groups of men even more than the ideas of
nationality. Men are united by language, and language
has become more complicated as man’s thought has
become more complicated ; it has grown with man’s
thought. (M)

Lévi-Strauss constantly
recognizes the pertinence of the division between peoples with and peoples without writing,
this division is effaced by him from the moment that one might ethnocentrically wish to make
it play a role in the reflection on history and on the respective value of cultures. The
difference between peoples with and peoples without writing is accepted, but writing as the
criterion of historicity or cultural value is not taken into account; ethnocentrism will
apparently be avoided at the very moment when it will have already profoundly operated,
silently imposing its standard concepts of speech and writing. This was exactly the pattern of
the Saussurian gesture. In other words, all the liberating criticisms and legitimate
denunciations with which Lévi-Strauss has harried the pre-supposed distinctions between
historical societies and societies without his-tory, remain dependent on the concept of writing
I problematize here. (D)

The curious thing is that the sounds used to com-
pose words are few, yet they can unite in so many ways
to make so many words. How complicated are the
combinations of these sounds ! Sometimes one is placed
before another, sometimes after another, sometimes softly,
sometimes with force, with closed lips, with open lips,
etc., etc. It needs a great memory to remember them
all and the ideas represented by these words. Then
there is the thought itself, as a whole, which must be
expressed and this is done by a group of words which we
call a sentence. The words must be placed in a special
order in that sentence so as to conform to the thought of
man and not just to string together a number of things in
the environment. There is therefore a set of rules in
order to guide the hearer as to the intentional thought of
the speaker. If man wishes to express a thought, he
must put the name of the object here and an adjective
near it and another noun there. The number of words
used is not sufficient, their position must be considered.
If we want to test this, let us take a sentence with a clear
meaning, write it out, cut the written sentence into its
separate words and mix them ; the sentence will not
make sense, yet there are exactly the same words. So
here also there must be agreement among men. Lan-
guage therefore might be called the expression of a supra-
intelligence. On first consideration we feel that language
is a faculty with which we are endowed by nature, but
after further thought we realize that it is above nature.
It is a supra-natural creation produced by conscious
collective intelligence. (M)

What is the “Writing Lesson?”

Lesson in a double sense. The title effectively preserves both senses. Writing lesson since it is
a question of the learning of writing. The Nambikwara chief learns writing from the
anthropologist, at first without comprehension, he mimics writing before he understands its function as language; or rather he
understands its profoundly enslaving function before understanding its function, here
accessory, of communication, signification, of the tradition of a signified. But the writing
lesson is also a lesson learned from writing; instruction that the anthropologist believes he can
induce from the incident in the course of a long meditation, when, fighting against insomnia,
he reflects on the origin, function, and meaning of writing. Hav-ing taught the gesture of
writing to a Nambikwara chief who learned with-out comprehension, the anthropologist
understands what he has taught and induces the lesson of writing. (D)

There is nothing more mysterious than the under-
lying reality that to do anything, men must come together
in agreement and to that they must use language, this
most abstract instrument.

This problem is always worrying humanity, but it
mast be solved, because language has to be given to the
new-born child. Attention to this problem has led
people to consider and realize that it is the child who takes
in language. The reality of this absorption is something
very great and mysterious which men have not sufficiently
considered. It is said : ” Children are among people who
speak, so they speak”. This is a very profound state-
ment indeed ! especially when one considers the com-
plications. Yet people have gone on for thousands of
years to think of it so superficially. (M)

A.The empirical relation of a perception: the scene of the “extraordinary incident.”
B.After the vicissitudes of .the day, sleepless in the watches of the night, a historicophilosophical
reflection on the scene of writing and the profound meaning of the incident, of
the closed history of writing.
A. The extraordinary incident. From the very first lines, the decor reminds us of that
anthropological violence of which I spoke above. The two parts are well engaged here, and
that restores the true meaning of the remarks on “a great sweetness of nature,” “an animal
satisfaction as ingenuous as it is charming,” the “profound nonchalance,” “the most moving
and authentic manifestations of human tenderness.”

(D)

For example:
… their more than dubious welcome combined with their leader’s extreme nervousness
seemed to suggest that he had forced their hand, somewhat, in the whole matter. Neither we
nor the Indians felt at all at our ease, the night promised to be cold, and, as there were no
trees, we had to lie, like the Nambikwara, on the bare ground. No one slept: we kept, all night
long, a polite watch upon one another. It would have been rash to prolong the adventure, and I
suggested to the leader that we should get down to our exchanges without further delay. It was
then that there occurred an extraordinary incident which forces me to go back a little in time.
That the Nambikwara could not write goes without saying. But they were also unable to draw,
except for a few dots and zigzags on their calabashes. I distributed pencils and paper among
them, none the less, as I had done with the Caduveo. At first they made no use of them. Then,
one day, I saw that they were all busy drawing wavy horizontal lines on the paper. What were
they trying to do? I could only conclude that they were writing—or, more exactly, they were
trying to do as I did with my pencils. As I had never tried to amuse them with drawings, they
could not conceive of any other use for this implement. With most of them, that was as far as
they got: but their leader saw further into the problem. Doubtless he was the only one among
them to have understood what writing was for.

(Levi-Strauss)

Let us mark a first pause here. Among many others, this fragment comes superimposed upon a
passage from the thesis on the Nambikwara. The
incident was already related there and it may be useful to refer to it. Three specific points
omitted from Tristes Tropiques can be found in the thesis. They are not without interest.
1. This small group of Nambikwara nevertheless uses a word to designate the act of
writing, at least a word that may serve that end. There is no linguistic surprise in the face of
the supposed irruption of a new power. This detail, omitted from Tristes Tropiques, was
indicated in the thesis:
The Nambikwara of group (a) do not know anything about design, if one excepts some
geometric sketches on their calabashes. For many days, they did not know what to do with the
paper and the pencils that we distributed to them. Some time later, we saw them very busily
drawing wavy lines. In that they imitated the only use that they had seen us make of our
notebooks, namely writing, but without understanding its meaning or its end. They called the
act of writing iekariukedjutu, namely: “drawing lines.”.

It is quite evident that a literal translation of the words that mean “to write” in the languages
of peoples with writing would also reduce that word to a rather poor gestural signification. It
is as if one said that such a language has no word designating writing—and that therefore
those who practice it do not know how to write—just because they use a word meaning “to
scratch,” “to engrave,” “to scribble,” “to scrape,” “to incise,” “to trace,” “to imprint,” etc. As
if “to write” in its metaphoric kernel, meant something else. Is not ethnocentrism always
betrayed by the haste with which it is satisfied by certain translations or certain domestic
equivalents? To say that a people do not know how to write because one can translate the
word which they use to designate the act’of inscribing as “drawing lines,” is that not as if one
should refuse them “speech” by translating the equivalent word by “to cry,” “to sing,” “to
sigh?” Indeed “to stammer.” By way of simple analogy with respect to the mechanisms of
ethnocentric assimilation/exclusion, let us recall with Renan that, “in the most ancient
languages, the words used to designate foreign peoples are drawn from two sources: either
words that signify ‘to stammer,’ ‘to mumble,’ or words that signify ‘mute.’ “ 21 And ought
one to conclude that the Chinese are a people without writing because the word wen
designates many things besides writing in the narrow sense? As in fact J. Geniet notes:
The word wen signifies a conglomeration of marks, the simple symbol in writing. It applies to
the veins in stones and wood, to constellations, represented by the strokes connecting the
stars, to the tracks of birds and quadrupeds on the ground (Chinese tradition would have it
that the observation of these tracks suggested the invention of writing), to tattoo and even, for
example, to the designs that decorate the turtle’s shell (“The turtle is wise,” an ancient text
says—gifted with magico-religious powers—“for it carries designs on its back”). The term
wen has designated, by extension, literature and social courtesy. Its
antonyms are the words wu (warrior, military) and zhi (brute matter not yet polished or
ornamented). (D)

Another thought has entered men’s minds through
their study of this problem of language ; a language might
be difficult and complicated for us to learn and yet it has
been spoken once by the uncultured people of the country
to which it belonged. Latin is a difficult language, even
for those who speak the modern languages that have
developed from Latin, but the language that the slaves of
imperial Rome spoke was this same complicated and
difficult Latin ! And what did the uncultured peasants
speak as they laboured in the fields ? This complicated
Latin ! And what did the children of three years speak in imperial Rome ? They expressed themselves in this
complicated Latin and understood it as it was spoken to
them. It is probably the same in India. Long ago, the
people who worked in the fields and roamed in the jungle
spoke Sanskrit. To-day this mystery has aroused
curiosity and the result is that the development of
language in children is receiving attention and, let us
remember, it is development, not teaching. The mother
does not teach language to her little one. Language
develops naturally as a spontaneous creation. And
what strikes one is that language develops following
certain laws and in certain epochs that development
reaches a certain height. This is true for all children
whether the language of their race be simple or com-
plicated. Even today there are some very simple
languages spoken among certain primitive people ; the
children who live among them attain the same develop-
ment in their language as the children with a more
difficult language do. There is a period for all children
when only syllables are spoken ; then words are spoken
and finally the whole syntax and grammar is used in its
perfection. The differences of masculine and feminine,
of singular and plural, of tenses, of prefixes and suffixes,
all are used by children. The language may be com*
plicated and with many exceptions to the rules, yet the
child who absorbs it learns it all and can use it in the
same time as the African child learns the few words of
his primitive language. (M)

In this operation, which consists of “drawing lines” and which is thus incorporated into the
dialect of this subgroup, Lévi-Strauss finds an exclusively “aesthetic” signification: “They
called the act of writing iekariukedjutu, namely ‘drawing lines,’ which had an aesthetic
interest for them.” One wonders what the import of such a conclusion could be and what the
specificity of the aesthetic category could signify here. Lévi-Strauss seems not only to
presume that one can isolate aesthetic value (which is clearly most problematic, and in fact it
is the anthropologists more than anyone else who have put us on guard against this
abstraction), but also to suppose that in writing “properly speaking,” to which the
Nambikwara would not have access, the aesthetic quality is extrinsic. Let us merely mention
this problem. Moreover, even if one did not wish to treat the meaning of such a conclusion
with suspicion, one could still be troubled by the paths that lead to it. The anthropologist has
arrived at this conclusion through a sentence noted in another subgroup: “Kihikagnere
mu~iene” ((NB! ordet foran inneholder et spesialtegn som likner en speilvendt S.)) translated
by “drawing lines, that’s pretty.” To conclude from this proposition thus translated and
recorded within another group (bl), that drawing lines held for group (al) an “aesthetic
interest,” which implies only an aesthetic interest, is what poses problems of logic that once
again we are content simply to mention. (D)

If we look at the production of the different sounds
we also find it follows laws. All the sounds which com-
pose words are made by putting into use certain mechan-
isms. Sometimes the nose is employed together with
the throat, and sometimes it is necessary to control the
muscles of the tongue and cheek, etc. Different parts
of the body come together to construct this mechanism.
Its construction is perfect in the mother tongue, the
language taken by the child. Of a foreign tongue, we
adults cannot even hear all the sounds, let alone re-
produce them. We can only use the mechanism of our
own language. Only the child can construct the mechan-
ism of language, and he can speak any number of
languages perfectly if they are in his environment.

This construction is not the result of conscious work,
but takes place in the deepest layer of the sub-conscious
of the child. He begins this work in the darkness of
the sub-conscious and it is there that it develops and
fixes itself as a permanent acquisition. It is this that
lends interest to the study of language. We, adults, can
conceive only a conscious wish to learn a language and
set about to learn it consciously. We must however have
another conception of a natural, or rather supra-natural
mechanism that takes place outside of consciousness, and
this mechanism, or series of mechanisms, is fascinating.
They take place in a depth not directly accessible to
adult observers. Only the external manifestations can
be seen, but these are very clear in themselves if we
observe them properly, since they take place in all
humanity. Especially striking is the fact that the sounds
of any language keep their purity age after age ; another
curiosity is that complications are taken in as easily as
simplicities. No child becomes * tired’ of learning his
mother tongue, his mechanism elaborates his language
in its totality. (M)

When, in Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss remarks that “the Nambikwara could not write . . .
they were also unable to draw, except for a few dots and zigzags on their calabashes,”
because, helped by instruments furnished by them, they trace only “wavy horizontal lines”
and that “with most of them, that was as far as they got,” these notations are brief. Not only
are they not to be found in the thesis, but, in fact, eighty pages further on (p. 123), the thesis
presents the results at which certain Nambikwara very quickly arrived and which Lévi-Strauss
treats as “a cultural innovation inspired by our own designs.” It is not merely a question of
representational designs (cf. Figure 19, p. 123) showing a man or a monkey, but of diagrams
describing, explaining, writing, a genealogy and a social structure. And that is a decisive
phenomenon. It is now known, thanks to unquestionable and abundant information, that the
birth of writing (in the colloquial sense) was nearly everywhere and most often linked to
genealogical anxiety. The memory and oral tradition of generations, which sometimes goes
back very far with peoples supposedly “without writing,” are often cited in this connection.
Lévi-Strauss himself does it in the Conversations (p. 29) [p. 26]:
I know, of course, that the societies we call primitive often have a quite stag-gering capacity
for remembering, and we have been told about Polynesian
(communities who can recite straight off family trees involving dozens of generations; but that
kind of feat obviously has its limits.Now it is this limit which is crossed more or less everywhere when writing—in the colloquial
sense—appears. Here its function is to conserve and give to a genealogical classification, with
all that that might imply, a supplementary objectification of another order. So that a people
who accede to the genealogical pattern accede also to writing in the colloquial sense,
understand its function and go much farther than Tristes Tropiques gives it to be understood
(“that was as far as they got”). Here one passes from arche-writing to writing in the colloquial
sense. This passage, whose difficulty I do not wish to underestimate, is not a passage from
speech to writing, it operates within writing in general. The genealogical relation and social
classification are the stitched seam of arche-writing, condition of the (so-called oral)
language, and of writing in the colloquial sense. (D)

2018 (39a) : Montessori , Elkind , Derrida , John 8:26 , Montessori , Elkind , Prashna Upanishad , Montessori , Elkind , Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj , John Ashbery , Montessori , Elkind , Derrida

Each animal has but one sort of movement. Man
has a great variety of movements. So his behaviour is not
fixed like that of the animals. Another thing is also
certain. In the child none of these abilities we have
mentioned are present. So we can conclude that though
it is true that the abilities of man are infinite, each has to
be acquired by the human individual during childhood.
It is by an active conquest, by work, that he acquires
language. He who is born without movement, who is
born almost paralysed, by means of exercise can learn to
walk, to run and to climb like any animal. But all these
capabilities he must acquire by his own effort. Every-
thing must be conquered by him. Whatever abilities man
possesses, there must have been a child who conquered
them. So we might say that the values of man have their
beginning in the work of the child. (Montessori)

6e teacher of a group of four-year-olds at the Children’s School at Tu(s
University near Boston o7ers simple, straightforward testimony of how these
drives can work together to create a positive learning experience. 6e kids, a(er
the usual bombardment of romanticized images of the heart that typically accompanies Valentine’s Day, became fascinated by the operations of this basic
human organ. Keying in on their curiosity, the teacher had the children take her
pulse and showed them pictures of a real heart. She even brought in a cow’s heart for them to examine. Because they were the ones interested in the topic in the 9rst place, the kids considered themselves to be playing with hearts. But such play le( them hem open to “working” on their skills of measurement, vocabulary and anatomy. (Elkind)

This archival technique has commanded that which even in the past instituted and constituted whatever there was as anticipation of the future.

And as wager [gageure]. The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge
[gage], a token of the future. To put it more trivially: what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way. Archivable meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives. It begins with the printer. (Derrida)

He who sent me is trustworthy, and what I have heard from him I tell the world.
(John 8:26)

Let us consider language.
No language is born as it is now. Language evolves
like everything else. First it is simple. Then it becomes
more complicated. How is it that those who live in a
time when language is so complicated, take it without
pain and without paying any attention to it learn it
so easily ?

Where does the explanation lie ? We face a con-
tradiction. There is a sort of mystery. Man must adapt
himself to the changing conditions of civilization. The
older humanity becomes, culture progresses the more. So
there must be a continuous adaptation on the part of
man, not only to geographical changes as we saw, but
also to the continuous changes of civilization. And yet
as we saw, adult man is not very adaptable. Here is a
real enigma ! (Montessori)

Many of us can easily observe the benefits of integrating play, love, and
work at home. During the first few years of their lives, young children are—in a
quite literal sense—visiting a foreign country for the first time. Because kids do not think in adult concepts and categories, they often approach this “new land” from many different perspectives simultaneously. Metaphorically speaking,
they observe water and sand, trees and woods, plants and animals, the moon,
the sun, the stars, all of it, as if through the eyes of an artist, or a naturalist, or
a writer, or a scientist. When we offer our children opportunities to explore
this new and exciting world in their own time and at their own pace, we open
them up to powerful learning experiences they could not encounter in any other
way. Why intrude on a time when children are instinctively learning with such
joy and enthusiasm? Why rush babies and preschoolers and school kids into
adult-led learning experiences. (Elkind)

‘Life falls from Self/Atman as shadow falls from man. Life and Self/Atman are interwoven, but Life comes into the body that the desires of the mind may be satisfied. (Prashna Upanishad)

The solution is found in the child, whom we can call
the instrument of the adaptability of humanity. The child
whom we saw born without any special movement, not
only acquires all the human faculties, but also adapts the
being that it constructs to the conditions in his environ-
ment. And this takes place because of the special
psychic form of the child, for the child’s psychic form is
different from that of the adult. Psychologists today
show great interest in the study of this different form of
psychology. The child stands in a different relationship
to the environment. We may admire an environment.
We may remember an environment, but the child absorbs
it into himself. He does not remember the things that he
sees, but he forms with these things part of his psyche.
He incarnates in himself the things which he sees and
hears i.e., in us there is no change, in the child transfor-
mations take place. We merely remember an environment
while the child adapts himself to it. This special kind of
vital memory, that does not remember consciously, but
absorbs images into the very life of the individual has
received from the psychologists a special name : they
have called it Mneme. (Montessori)

Children learn through play, but their capacity for learning is limited by their
social situation, their emotional condition, and their physical and intellectual
development. Yet we best ensure a child’s healthy growth, whatever these conditions, by supporting and encouraging the child’s own self-initiated learning activities. (Elkind)

The particular is born and reborn, changing name and shape, the jnani is the Changeless Reality, which makes the changeful possible.
Anything you do for the sake of enlightenment takes you nearer. Anything you do without remembering enlightenment puts you off. But why complicate? Just know that you are above and beyond all things and thoughts. What you want to be, you are it already. Just keep it in mind. (Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

You’ve got to remember we don’t see that much.

We see a portion of eaves dripping in the pastel book

And are aware that everything doesn’t count equally —

There is dreaminess and infection in the sum

(John Ashbery)

So today the child begins to be visualized as it should
be, as the connection, the joining link between different
phases of history and different levels of civilization.
Childhood is now considered by psychologists as a very
important period because they realize that if we wish to
give new ideas to the people, if we wish to alter the habits
and customs of the country, or if we wish to accentuate
more vigorously the characteristics belonging to a people,
we must take as our instrument the child, as very little
can be done by acting upon adults. If one has really
a vision of better conditions, of greater enlightenment
for people, it is only the child that one can look upon
in order to bring about the desired results. (Montessori)

No one teaches a baby to babble, for instance. Infants naturally make a wide
variety of vowel and consonant sounds. By babbling, the infant creates all the
sounds he or she will need to use a language. Without these self-created sounds,
the child would never learn to speak, or would do so with great di=culty. So
when the child begins to make recognizable sounds—and only a”er the child
has initiated these sounds on his or her own—we can support and encourage
the child’s linguistic skills and help to hone the use of language that will shape the rest of the child’s life. (Elkind)

on my computer. I asked myself what is the moment proper to the archive, if there is such a thing, the instant of archivization strictly speaking, which is not, and I will come back to this, so-called live or spontaneous memory (mneme or anamnesis), but rather a certain hypomnesic and prosthetic experience of the technical substrate. Was it not at this very instant that, having written something or other on the screen, the letters remaining as if suspended and floating yet at the surface of a liquid element, I pushed a certain key to “save” a text undamaged, in a hard and lasting way, to protect marks from being erased, so as thus to ensure salvation and indemnity, to stock, to accumulate, and, in what is at once the same thing and something else, to make the sentence thus available for printing and for reprinting, for reproduction? (Derrida)

2018 (38g) : Montessori , Elkind , Derrida , Montessori , I Ching , Elkind , Bhagavad Gita , Montessori , Revelation 4:7 , Elkind , Derrida , John Ashbery

Take the bees. They come out in hot weather.
They are covered with a sort of fur or a sort of yellow
and black velvet. This fur is not necessary in a hot
country, but it collects the pollen from flowers which the
bee itself does not use. This pollen, however, is useful
to other flowers to which it is brought by them and which
are thus fertilized. So the work of the bee is not useful
to itself alone, it is useful for the propagation of plants so
that one might say that this fur has been developed by the
bees for the propagation of plants, not for themselves. Don’t
you begin to see in this behaviour that animals sacrifice
themselves for the welfare of other types of life, instead
of trying to eat as much as possible merely for their own
existence or upkeep ? The more one studies the behaviour
of animals and of plants, the more clearly one sees that
they have a task to perform for the welfare of the whole.
(Montessori)

6e play drive 9rst appears as infants try to adapt the physical world to their needs.
At a few months, a baby transforms every object that can be grasped into one that
can be sucked. By the time children become preschoolers, they begin to create
playful associations between objects—which is what a four-year-old does, say,
when holding up a potato chip and exclaiming, “Look Mummy, a butter)y!” For
school-age children, play soon becomes more about making and breaking rules—
in a game of hide-and-seek, the lead child decides on the physical limits and time
frame of the game, then all the other players attempt to outwit the leader
(Elkind)

There must be event—and therefore appeal to narrative and event
of narrative—for there to be gift, and there must be gift or phenomenon
of gift for there to be narrative and history…How is one to behave with regard to this originary productivity,and this event, event of chance and necessity of donating nature? That is the question …
(Derrida)

So the more one studies the functions of these
animals, the more one finds, that these functions are
not for the upkeep of the animal’s body only, but
that all give their contribution to the harmony of the
whole. Let us say then that these animals are not
merely inhabitants of the earth : they are the con-
structors and workers of this earth, they keep it going.
This is the vision given by these new discoveries. Once
given this light, by studying the geological epochs of
the past, we find testimony of similar work carried out by
animals which are now extinct. There has always been
this relation between the animals and the earth, of the
animals between themselves and between the animals
and the vegetation. A new science has arisen from this
which is called Ecology, a science which is widely
applied today and forms an important part of the study
in universities. Ecology is a study of the different
behaviours of animals, and it reveals that they are not
here to compete with each other, but to carry out an
enormous work serving the harmonious upkeep of the
earth. When we say they are workers, we mean that
each one of them has a purpose, a special aim to fulfil
and the result of these tasks is our beautiful world.
(Montessori)

A tower of this kind commanded a wide view of the country; at the same time, when situated on a mountain, it became a landmark that could be seen for miles around. Thus the hexagram shows a ruler who contemplates the law of heaven above him and the ways of the people below … (I Ching)

In work we adapt our own behavior to the demands of our physical and social
environment. Toddlers learning to eat with a spoon rather than with their
9ngers are learning the skill of 9tting in with their environment, both physically
and socially. 6ey are learning to adapt. 6ey are learning to work. A
preschooler’s rapid acquisition of language constitutes the most impressive
marker of this social adaptation. At primary school, as children take turns and
accept non-parental authority while they develop motor skills with such tools
as paintbrushes, balls, and books, work assumes the form of learning social
rules. To the casual observer, it may be difficult to distinguish here between
work and play because the real difference lies more with the intent than the
act: When we work, we adapt ourselves to our environment; when we play, we
adapt our world to our imagination.
(Elkind)

Be in Truth eternal, beyond earthly opposites. Beyond gains and possessions, possess thine own soul.
(Bhagavad Gita)

Now, when we study the human kind and compare
it with the animal kind, we find some differences and an
important one is that the human kind has not had allotted
to it a special kind of movement or a special kind of re-
sidence. Certainly, it is a facilitation of life to have one’s
task assigned by nature. The study of nature shows, how-
ever, that there is no animal which is as capable as man
to adapt itself to any climate or to any place upon this
earth. We find man in frozen lands where certain animals
such as tigers or elephants cannot live. Yet if you look in
the jungle where elephants and tigers are to be found there
man can also be found. Man can be found even in
deserts. So we can see that man has been allotted no fixed
place. He can adapt himself and can live in any part of
the world, for he is destined to invade every part of the
world. Let us say then that because of this adaptability,
man is the only being who is free to go wherever he likes
upon this earth. (Montessori)

The first living creature was like a lion, the second was like an ox, the third had a face like a man, the fourth was like a flying eagle.
(Revelation 4:7)

Though play can be fun, as one of
the three essential drives—love, play, work—it contributes to the best kind
of learning. Play operates as more than a creative urge; it also functions as a
fundamental mode of learning. (Elkind)

Hence the necessity, today, of working out at every turn, with redoubled
effort, the question of the preservation of names: of paleonymy. Why should
an old name, for a determinate time, be retained? Why should the effects of
a new meaning, concept, or object be damped by memory?
Posed in these terms, the question would already be caught up in a whole
system of presuppositions that have now been elucidated: for example,
here, that of the signifier’s simple exteriority to “its” concept. One must
therefore proceed otherwise. (Derrida)

it was ambrosia

In the alley under the stars and not this undiagnosable

Turning, a shadow in the plant of all things

That makes us aware of certain moments,

That the end is not far off since it will occur

In the present and this is the present.

(John Ashbery)

2018 (38f – 53) : Derrida

This archival technique has commanded that which even in the past instituted and constituted whatever there was as anticipation of the future.

And as wager [gageure]. The archive has always been apledge, and like every pledge
[gage], a token of the future. To put it more trivially: what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way. Archivable meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives. It begins with the printer.

(Derrida)

on my computer. I asked myself what is the moment proper to the archive, if there is such a thing, the instant of archivization strictly speaking, which is not, and I will come back to this, so-called live or spontaneous memory (mneme or anamnesis), but rather a certain hypomnesic and prosthetic experience of the technical substrate. Was it not at this very instant that, having written something or other on the screen, the letters remaining as if suspended and floating yet at the surface of a liquid element, I pushed a certain key to “save” a text undamaged, in a hard and lasting way, to protect marks from being erased, so as thus to ensure salvation and indemnity, to stock, to accumulate, and, in what is at once the same thing and something else, to make the sentence thus available for printing and for reprinting, for reproduction?

(Derrida)

Well, concerning the archive, Freud never managed to form anything that deserves
to be called a concept. Neither have we, by the way. We have no concept, only an
impression, a series of impressions associated with a word. To the rigor of the concept, I am opposing here the vagueness or the open imprecision, the relative indetermination of such a notion. “Archive” is only a notion, an impression associated with a word and for which, together with Freud, we do not have a concept. We only have an impression, an insistent impression through the unstable feeling of a shifting figure, of a schema, or of an in-finite or indefinite process.

(Derrida)

We only have an impression, an insistent impression through the unstable feeling of a shifting figure, of a schema, or of an in-finite or indefinite process. Unlike what a classical philosopher or scholar would be tempted to do, I do not consider this impression, or the notion of this impression, to be a subconcept, the feebleness of a blurred and subjective preknowledge, destined for I know not what sin of nominalism, but to the contrary, I will explain myself later, I consider it to be the possibility and the very future of the concept, to be the very concept of the future, if there is such a thing and if, as I believe, the idea of the archive depends on it.

(Derrida)

in his or her culture and discipline, whatever it may be, in particular philosophy, medicine, psychiatry, and more precisely here, because we are speaking of memory and of archive, the history of texts and of discourses, political history, legal history, the history of ideas or of culture, the history of religion and religion itself …

(Derrida)

It is thus our impression that we can no longer ask the question of the concept, of the history of the concept, and notably of the concept of the archive. No longer, at least, in a temporal or historical modality dominated by the present or by the past. We no longer feel we have the right to ask questions whose form, grammar, and lexicon nonetheless seem so legitimate, sometimes so neutral. We no longer find assured meaning in questions such as these: do we already have at our disposition a concept of the archive? a concept of the archive which deserves this name? which is one and whose unity is assured? Have we ever been assured of the homogeneity, of the consistency, of the univocal relationship of any concept to a term or to such a word as “archive”?

(Derrida)

In their form and in their grammar, these questions are all turned toward the past: they ask if we already have at our disposal such a concept and if we have ever had any assurance in this regard. To have a concept at one’s disposal, to have assurances with regard to it, this presupposes a closed heritage and the guarantee which is sealed, in some sense, by this heritage. And the word and the notion of the archive seem at first, admittedly, to point toward the past, to refer to the signs of consigned memory, to recall faithfulness to tradition. If we have attempted to underline the past in these questions from the outset, it is also to indicate the direction of another problematic. As much as and more than a thing of the past, before such a thing, the archive should call into question the coming of the future.

(Derrida)

“This condensation of history, of language, of the encyclopedia, remains here indissociable from an absolutely singular event, an absolutely singular signature, and therefore also of a date, of a language, of an autobiographical inscription. In a minimal autobiographical trait can be gathered the greatest potentiality of historical, theoretical, linguistic, philosophical culture — that’s really what interests me.

(Derrida)

In an enigmatic sense which will clarify itself perhaps (perhaps, because nothing
should be sure here, for essential reasons), the question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past. This is not the question of a concept dealing with the past which might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what this will have meant, we will only know in the times to come. Perhaps. Not tomorrow but in the times to come, later on or perhaps never. A spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and ties it, like religion, like history, like science itself, to a very singular experience of the promise.

(Derrida)

In order to make apparent a play that is not comprehended in this philosophical or scientific space, one must think of play in another way. Indeed, this is what I am trying to do within what is already a tradition-that of Nietzsche, for example-but
one which also has its genealogy. On the basis of thinking such as Nietzsche’s (as interpreted by (Eugen) Fink), the concept of play, understood as the play of the world, is no longer play· in the world. That is, it is no longer determined and contained by something, by the space that would comprehend it. I believe that it is only on this basis and on this condition that the concept of play can be reconstructed and reconciled with all of the-if you will-“deconstructive”-type
notions, such as trace and writing …

(Derrida)

Once play is no longer simply play in the world, it is also no longer the play of someone who plays. Philosophy has always made play into an activity, the activity of a subject manipulating objects. As soon as one interprets play in the sense of playing, one has already been dragged into the space of classical philosophy where play is dominated by meaning, by its finality, and consequently by something that surpasses and orients it. In order to think of play in a radical way, perhaps one must think beyond the activity of a subject manipulating objects according to or against the rules, et cetera.

(Derrida)

In very summary terms, then, this is the principle of what I would have liked to set in motion. The fort/da* at the center of “Freud’s Legacy” is also, of course, a discourse on play. And, typically, Freud indeed does propose an interpretation
of the child’s game.

(In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud describes a child’s play with a bobbin on a string. As he casts it away from him, he utters “o-o-o,” which his mother interprets as the word “fort” (away, far): as he pulls it back, he says .. a-a-a,” which according to the mother means “do” (here).-Tr. )

(Derrida)

He piles up hypotheses: the child throws his bobbin. he brings it back in order to say this or that to his mother, and so forth. I won’t attempt to reconstitute here this whole very complicated scene. To be sure, the theme of play is there. However, if one understands the fort/da beyond what it seems Freud intends to say, then one may exceed the limits of the game toward the play of the world where the fort/da is no longer simply the relation of subject to object. It is. instead, that which has absolute command over all experience in general.

(Derrida)

To arrive at such a point-and I think I attempt this gesture. in a discreet manner at least, in the course of that text-one must nevertheless begin by reading Freud in a certain way. If one does, then one realizes that basically he does not stop at any single interpretation of the fort/da.

(Derrida)

He himself is doing fort/da with his own interpretations, and it never stops. His own writing,his own deportment in this text is doing fort/da. Perhaps the performative is in play as well, in a very serious manner. but the game is also very serious and demands great concentration. He plays with this fort/da in his writing: he doesn’t “comprehend” it. He writes himself this scene, which is descriptive
or theoretical but also very profoundly autobiographical and performative to the degree that it concerns him in his relation with his heirs

(Derrida)

I understand that the place I am now occupying will not be left out of the exhibit or withdrawn from the scene. Nor do I intend to withold even that which I shall call, to save time, an autobiographical demonstration, although I must ask you to shift its sense a little and to listen to it with another ear.

(Derrida)

A discourse on life/death must occupy a certain space between
logos and gramme, analogy and program, as well as between the differing senses of program and reproduction.

(Derrida)

To wait without waiting, awaiting absolute surprise, the unexpected visitor, awaited without a horizon of expectation … the messianic as hospitality … the madness of hospitality…

(Derrida)

“… the contradictions (atopical:madness, extravagance, in Greek: atopos) of which we are speaking produces or registers the autodeconstruction in every concept, in the concept of concept: not only because hospitality undoes, should undo, the grip, the seizure, the capture, the force or the violence of the taking as comprehending, hospitality is, must be, owes itself to be, inconceivable and incomprehensible …”

(Derrida)

In the first place, a phoenix motif. Once again, the destruction
of life is only an appearance: it is the destruction of the appearance of life. One buries or burns what is already dead so that life, the living feminine, will be reborn and regenerated from these ashes. The vitalist theme degeneration/regeneration is active and central throughout the argument. This revitalization, as we have already seen, must first of all pass by way of the tongue, that is, by way of the exercise of the tongue or language, the treatment of its body, the mouth and the ear …

(Derrida)

That which returns is the constant affirmation, the “yes, yes” on which I insisted yesterday. That which signs here is in the form of a return, which is to say it
has the form of something that cannot be simple. It is a selective return without negativity, or which reduces negativity through affirmation, through alliance or marriage (hymen), that is, through an affirmation that is also binding on the other or that enters into a pact with itself as other.

(Derrida)

“(A deconstructionist reading) would mean respect for that which cannot be eaten—respect for that in a text which cannot be assimilated. My thoughts on the limits of eating follow in their entirety the same schema as my theories on the indeterminate or untranslatable in a text. There is always a remainder that cannot be read, that must remain alien. This residue can never be interrogated as the same, but must be constantly sought out anew, and must continue to be written.”

(Derrida)

” Narcissism! There is not narcissism and non-narcissism; there are narcissisms that are more or less comprehensive, generous, open, extended. What is called non-narcissism is in general but the economy of a much more welcoming, hospitable narcissism, one that is much more open to the experience of the other as other. I believe that without a movement of narcissistic reappropriation, the relation to the other would be absolutedly destroyed, it would be destroyed in advance. The relation to the other – even if it remains asymmetrical, open, without possible reappropriation – must trace a movement of reappropriation in the image of oneself for love to be possible, for example. Love is narcissistic. Beyond that, there are little narcissisms, there are big narcissisms, and there is death in the end, which is the limit. Even in the experience – if there is one – of death, narcissism does not absolutely abdicate its power.”

(Derrida)

The point is that the eternal return is not a new metaphysics of time or of the totality of being, et cetera, on whose ground Nietzsche’s autobiographical
signature would come to stand like an empirical fact on a great ontological structure. (Here, one would have to take up again the Heideggerian interpretations of the eternal return and perhaps problematize them.) The eternal return always involves differences of forces that perhaps cannot be thought in terms of being, of the pair essence-existence, or any of the great metaphysical structures to which Heidegger would like to relate them. As soon as it crosses with the motif of the
eternal return, then the individual signature, or, if you like,the signature of a proper name, is no longer simply an empirical fact grounded in something other than itself.

(Derrida)

To be just: beyond the living present in general-and beyond its simple negative reversal. A spectral moment, a moment that no longer belongs to time, if one understands by this word the linking of modalized presents (past present, actual present: “now,” future present). We are questioning in this instant, we are asking ourselves about this instant that is not docile to time, at least to what we call time. Furtive and untimely, the apparition of the specter does not belong to that time, it does not give time, not that one: “Enter the ghost, exit the ghost, re-enter the ghost” (Hamlet).

(Derrida)

Without writing, un-writing, the unwritten switches over to a question of reading on a board or tablet which you perhaps are. You are a board or a door; we will see much later how a word can address itself, indeed confide itself to a door, count on a door open to the other.

(Derrida)

With a confident obedience, with a certain abandon that l fed here in it, the plural seems to follow: an order, after the beginning of an inaudible sentence, like an interrupted silence. It follows an order and, notice, it even obeys; it lets itself be dictated. It asks (for) itself.

(Derrida)

This concept of a ghost is as scarcely graspable in its self as the ghost of a concept. Neither life nor death, but the haunting of the one by the other. The “versus” of the conceptual opposition is as unsubstantial as a camera’s click. Ghosts: the concept of the other in the same, the completely other, dead, living in me.

(Derrida)

To write—to him, to present to the dead friend within oneself the gift of his innocence.

(Derrida)

An analysis which is not merely a theoretical analysis, but at the same time another writing of the question of Being or meaning: deconstruction is also a manner or writing and putting forward another text. It is not a “tabula rasa”, which is why deconstruction is also distinct from doubt or from critique. Critique always operates in view of the decision after or by means of a judgment. The authority of judgment or of the critical evaluation is not the final authority for deconstruction. Deconstruction is also a deconstruction of critique. Which does not mean that all critique or all criticism is devalued, but that one is trying to think what the critical instances signifies in the history of authority. Deconstruction is not a critique. Another German word of which deconstruction is a kind of transposition is “Abbau,” which is found in Heidegger, and also found in Freud.

(Derrida)

Without either showing or hiding herself. This is what took place. She had
already taken her place “docilely,” without initiating the slightest activity,
according to the most gentle passivity, and she neither shows nor hides herself.
The possibility of this impossibility derails and shatters all unity, and
this is love; it disorganizes all studied discourses, all theoretical systems
and philosophies. They must decide between presence and absence, here
and there, what reveals and what conceals itself.

(Derrida)

Yes, to whom and of what would we be making a gift? What are
we doing when we exchange these discourses? Over what are we keeping
watch? Are we trying to negate death or retain it? Are we trying to put
things in order, make amends, or settle our accounts, to finish unfinished
business? With the other? With the others outside and inside ourselves?

(Derrida)

I would like to describe, patiently and interminably, all the trajectories of
this address, especially when its reference passes through writing, when it then becomes so virtual, invisible, plural, divided, microscopic mobile,infinitesimal, specular even (since the demand is often reciprocal and the trajectory easily lost), punctual, seemingly on the verge of the zero point
even though its exercise is so powerful and so diverse.

(Derrida)

Why do I now underscore that expression: “what is happening?” Because
for me this belongs to the order of the absolutely unforeseeable, which
is always the condition of any event. Even when it seems to go back to
a buried past, what comes about always comes from the future. And it
is especially about the future that I will be talking. Something happens
only on the condition that one is not expecting it. Here of course I am
speaking the language of consciousness. But there would also be no event
identifiable as such if some repetition did not come along to cushion the
surprise by preparing its effect on the basis of some experience of the
unconscious. If the word “unconscious” has any meaning, then it stems
from this necessity.

(Derrida)

the unwritten switches over to a question of reading on a board or tablet which you perhaps are , a door open to the other , i lay down my life – only to take it up again , i have power to lay it down, and i have power to take it up again , this commandment i have received from my Father , One who sees me in all, and sees all in me , the word Om is the imperishable , in his eyes the person you take yourself to be does not exist , whatever you think yourself to be is just a stream of events , Separate the observed from the observer and abandon false identifications …

(Derrida)

Once play is no longer simply play in the world, it is also no longer the play of someone who plays. Philosophy has always made play into an activity, the activity of a subject manipulating objects. As soon as one interprets play in the sense of playing, one has already been dragged into the space of classical philosophy where play is dominated by meaning, by its finality, and consequently by something that surpasses and orients it. In order to think of play in a radical way, perhaps one must think beyond the activity of a subject manipulating objects according to or against the rules, et cetera.

(Derrida)

In order to make apparent a play that is not comprehended in this philosophical or scientific space, one must think of play in another way. Indeed, this is what I am trying to do within what is already a tradition-that of Nietzsche, for example-but
one which also has its genealogy. On the basis of thinking such as Nietzsche’s (as interpreted by (Eugen) Fink), the concept of play, understood as the play of the world, is no longer play· in the world. That is, it is no longer determined and contained by something, by the space that would comprehend it. I believe that it is only on this basis and on this condition that the concept of play can be reconstructed and reconciled with all of the-if you will-“deconstructive”-type
notions, such as trace and writing …

(Derrida)

In very summary terms, then, this is the principle of what I would have liked to set in motion. The fort/da* at the center of “Freud’s Legacy” is also, of course, a discourse on play. And, typically, Freud indeed does propose an interpretation
of the child’s game.

He piles up hypotheses: the child throws his bobbin. he brings it back in order to say this or that to his mother, and so forth. I won’t attempt to reconstitute here this whole very complicated scene. To be sure, the theme of play is there. However, if one understands the fort/da beyond what it seems Freud intends to say, then one may exceed the limits of the game toward the play of the world where the fort/da is no longer simply the relation of subject to object. It is. instead, that which has absolute command over all experience in general.

(In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud describes a child’s play with a bobbin on a string. As he casts it away from him, he utters “o-o-o,” which his mother interprets as the word “fort” (away, far): as he pulls it back, he says .. a-a-a,” which according to the mother means “do” (here).-Tr. )

(Derrida)

He himself is doing fort/da with his own interpretations, and it never stops. His own writing,his own deportment in this text is doing fort/da. Perhaps the performative is in play as well, in a very serious manner. but the game is also very serious and demands great concentration. He plays with this fort/da in his writing: he doesn’t “comprehend” it. He writes himself this scene, which is descriptive
or theoretical but also very profoundly autobiographical and performative to the degree that it concerns him in his relation with his heirs

(Derrida)

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With his first step the child enters a higher
level of experiences. If we observe the child who has reached this level, we
see that he has a tendency to acquire still further indepen-
dence. He wants to act in his own way, i.e., he wants to
carry things, to dress and to undress alone, to feed
himself, etc. And it is not by following our suggestions
that the child begins to do things. On the contrary he
has such a strong urge, such a vital impulse that our
efforts are usually spent in restraining him from doing
things. It is not the child that we fight when we do
this, it is nature. It is not the child’s will that we fight,
he merely collaborates with nature and obeys her laws
and step by step, first in one thing, then in others, he
acquires ever increasing independence from those who
surround him, until a moment comes when he will want
to acquire mental independence too. Then he will
show the tendency to develop his mind through his own
experiences and not through the experiences of other
people. (Montessori)

Now I shall discuss an important feature of playing. This is that
in playing, and perhaps only in playing, the child or adult is free
to be creative. This consideration arises in my mind as a development
of the concept of transitional phenomena and it takes
into account the difficult part of the theory of the transitional
object, which is that a paradox is involved which needs to be
accepted, tolerated, and not resolved. (Winnicott)

That which returns is the constant affirmation, the “yes, yes” on which I insisted yesterday. That which signs here is in the form of a return, which is to say it has the form of something that cannot be simple. It is a selective return without negativity, or which reduces negativity through affirmation, through alliance or marriage (hymen), that is, through an affirmation that is also binding on the other or that enters into a pact with itself as other.
(Derrida)

He begins to seek out the reason of things.
And thus it is that the human individuality is constructed
during this period of childhood. This is not a theory.
This is not an opinion. These are clear natural facts,
they are observed facts. When we say that we must
render the freedom of the child complete, when we say
that his independence and his normal functioning must be
assured by society, we do not speak about a vague ideaL
We speak because we have observed life, we have
observed nature and nature has revealed this fact. It is
only through freedom and by experiences upon the
environment that man can develop. (Montessori)

A further detail of theory that has importance here is
described as having to do with the location of playing, a theme I
have developed in Chapters 3, 7, and 8. The important part of
this concept is that whereas inner psychic reality has a kind of
location in the mind or in the belly or in the head or somewhere
within the bounds of the individual’s personality, and whereas
what is called external reality is located outside those bounds,
playing and cultural experience can be given a location if one
uses the concept of the potential space between the mother and
the baby. In the development of various individuals, it has to be
recognized that the third area of potential space between mother
and baby is extremely valuable according to the experiences of
the child or adult who is being considered. I have referred to
these ideas again in Chapter 5, where I draw attention to the fact
that a description of the emotional development of the individual
cannot be made entirely in terms of the individual, but
that in certain areas, and this is one of them, perhaps the main
one, the behaviour of the environment is part of the individual’s
own personal development and must therefore be included. As a
psychoanalyst I find that these ideas affect what I do as an analyst
without, as I believe, altering my adherence to the important
features of psychoanalysis that we teach our students and that
provide a common factor in the teaching of psychoanalysis as we
believe it to be derived from the work of Freud. (Winnicott)

And it was always a party there
always different but very nice
New friends to give you advice
or fall in love with you which is nice
and each grew so perfectly from the other
it was a marvel of poetry
and irony
(John Ashbery)

My giving it various names and pointing it out in many ways will not help you much, unless you have the capacity to see. A dim-sighted man will not see the parrot on the branch of a tree, however much you may prompt him to look. At best he will see your pointed finger. First purify your vision, learn to see instead of staring, and you will perceive the parrot. Also you must be eager to see. You need both clarity and earnestness for self-knowledge. You need maturity of heart and mind, which comes through earnest application in daily life of whatever little you have understood. There is no such thing as compromise in Yoga.You are neither honest nor dishonest — giving names to mental states is good only for expressing your approval or disapproval. The problem is not yours — it is your mind’s only. Begin by disassociating yourself from your mind. Resolutely remind yourself that you are not the mind and that its problems are not yours.Unknown to you, your psyche will undergo a change, there will be more clarity in your thinking, charity in your feeling, purity in your behaviour. You need not aim at these — you will witness the change all the same. For, what you are now is the result of inattention and what you become will be the fruit of attention.
(Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

Blessed are the solitary and elect, for you will find the kingdom. For you
are from it, and to it you will return. (Gospel of Thomas)

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The child can only develop by means of experiences
upon the environment, we call them ‘ work.’ As soon as
language appears the child begins to chatter and no one
can silence him. Indeed one of the most difficult things is
to make a child stop talking. Now if the child were not
to talk or to walk, then he would not be able to develop
normally. There would be an arrest in his development.
Whereas the child walks, runs, jumps and by doing this
he develops his legs. Nature first makes the instruments,
and then develops them by means of functions, through
experiences upon the environment. When, therefore, the
child has increased his independence by the acquisition
of new powers, he can only develop normally if left
free to function. When the child has acquired independ-
ence, it is by exercising this independence that he will
develop. Development does not come of itself, but, as
modern psychologists express it, the behaviour is affirmed
in each individual by the experiences this individual
carries out upon the environment ‘. If therefore we think
of education as a help to the development of the child’s
life, we cannot but rejoice when a child shows signs of
having attained a certain degree of development. (Montessori)

(a) To get to the idea of playing it is helpful to think of the
preoccupation that characterizes the playing of a young child.
The content does not matter. What matters is the nearwithdrawal
state, akin to the concentration of older children
and adults. The playing child inhabits an area that cannot be
easily left, nor can it easily admit intrusions.
(b) This area of playing is not inner psychic reality. It is outside
the individual, but it is not the external world.
(c) Into this play area the child gathers objects or phenomena
from external reality and uses these in the service of some
sample derived from inner or personal reality. Without hallucinating
the child puts out a sample of dream potential
and lives with this sample in a chosen setting of fragments
from external reality.
(d) In playing, the child manipulates external phenomena in
the service of the dream and invests chosen external
phenomena with dream meaning and feeling.
( e) There is a direct development from transitional phenomena
to playing, and from playing to shared playing, and from this
to cultural experiences.
(f) Playing implies trust, and belongs to the potential space
between (what was at first) baby and mother-figure, with
the baby in a state of near-absolute dependence, and the
mother-figure’s adaptive function taken for granted by
the baby.
(g) Playing involves the body:
(i) because of the manipulation of objects;
(ii) because certain types of intense interest are associated
with certain aspects of bodily excitement. (Winnicott)

At the root of all creation lies desire. Desire and imagination foster and reinforce each other. The fourth state (turiya) is a state of pure witnessing, detached awareness, passionless and wordless. It is like space, unaffected by whatever it contains. Bodily and mental troubles do not reach it — they are outside, ‘there’, while the witness is always ‘here’. (Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

In the first place, a phoenix motif. Once again, the destruction
of life is only an appearance: it is the destruction of the appearance of life. One buries or burns what is already dead so that life, the living feminine, will be reborn and regenerated from these ashes. The vitalist theme degeneration/regeneration is active and central throughout the argument. This revitalization, as we have already seen, must first of all pass by way of the tongue, that is, by way of the exercise of the tongue or language, the treatment of its body, the mouth and the ear …(Derrida)

We cannot help saying : ” My child has today said his first
word ” and rejoice about it. Especially inasmuch as we
know we cannot do anything to bring about this event.
If, however, we realize that, although the development
of the child cannot be destroyed (because nature is too
strong for us, thanks be to God), it can however be kept
incomplete or retarded if the child is not given an oppor-
tunity of carrying out experiences upon the environment,
then a problem does arise : The problem of education.
(Montessori)

It’s taken a while since I’ve been here,
but I’m resolved. What, didn’t I print,
little piles of notes, slopes almost Sicilian?
Here is my friend:
Socks for comfort (now boys) will see later. Did they come?
The inner grocery had to take three sets of clips away.
Speaking to him of intricate family affairs.
I’m not what you think. Stay preconscious.
It’s just the “flooding of the council.” No need to feel afraid.
(John Ashbery)

(i) Playing is essentially satisfying. This is true even when it leads to
a high degree of anxiety. There is a degree of anxiety that is
unbearable and this destroys playing.
(j) The pleasurable element in playing carries with it the
implication that the instinctual arousal is not excessive;
instinctual arousal beyond a certain point must lead to:
(i) climax;
(ii) failed climax and a sense of mental confusion and
physical discomfort that only time can mend;
(iii) alternative climax (as in provocation of parental or
social reaction, anger, etc.).
Playing can be said to reach its own saturation pOint, which
refers to the capacity to contain experience.
(k) Playing is inherently exciting and precarious. This characteristic
derives not from instinctual arousal but from the precariousness
that belongs to the interplay in the child’s mind of
that which is subjective (near-hallucination) and that which
is objectively perceived (actual, or shared reality).
(Winnicott)

The first problem of education is to furnish the child
with an environment which will permit him to develop
the functions that nature has given to him. This is not
an indifferent question. It is not a question of merely
pleasing the child, of allowing him to do as he likes. It
is a question of co-operation with a command of nature,
with one of her laws which decrees that development
should take place by means of experiences upon the
environment. With his first step the child enters a higher
level of experiences. (Montessori)

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The ‘ conquest of walking ‘ is very important,
especially if one considers that, in spite of being very
complex, it is achieved in the first year of life and is
made together with all the other conquests of langu-
age, of orientation, etc. To walk is for the child a
physiological conquest of great importance. Animals
do not need to make it. It is only man who has this
prolonged and refined type of development. In his
growth he has to make three different achievements,
three conquests, before being physically able to walk, or
even to stand erect on his two legs. Look at those
majestically looking animals, the oxen. Imagine if atone
year of age calves just began to stand on their legs.
Indeed they do not. They begin to walk as soon as
they are born. Yet these animals are inferior to us, even if
they are gigantic in construction. We are so apparently
powerless because the construction of man is much more
refined and takes therefore much more time.
The power of walking and being able to stand on
one’s two legs entails a thorough development composed
of different items. One of them concerns the brain.
(Montessori)

The precariousness of play belongs to the fact that it is always
on the theoretical line between the subjective and that which is
objectively perceived.
It is my purpose here simply to give a reminder that children’s
playing has everything in it, although the psychotherapist works
on the material, the content of playing. Naturally, in a set or
professional hour a more precise constellation presents than
would present in a timeless experience on the floor at home (cf.
Winnicott, 1941); but it helps us to understand our work if we
know that the basis of what we do is the patient’s playing, a
creative experience taking up space and time, and intensely real
for the patient. (Winnicott)

If you imagine yourself as separate from the world, the world will appear as separate from you and you will experience desire and fear. I do not see the world as separate from me and so there is nothing for me to desire, or fear.
The diversity is in you only. See yourself as you are and you will see the world as it is — a single block of reality, indivisible, indescribable. Your own creative power projects upon it a picture and all your questions refer to the picture. (Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

The point is right away to go beyond, in one fell swoop, the first glance and thus to see there where this glance is blind, to open one’s eyes wide there where one does not see what one sees. One must see, at first sight, what does not let itself be seen. And this is invisibility itself For what first sight misses is the invisible. The flaw, the error of first sight is to see, and not to notice the invisible. (Derrida)

Hasn’t the sky? Returned from moving the other

Authority recently dropped, wrested as much of

That severe sunshine as you need now on the way

You go. The reason it happened only since

You woke up is letting the steam disappear

From those clouds when the landscape all around

Is hilly sites that will have to be reckoned

Into the total for there to be more air: that is,

More fitness read into the undeduced result, than land.

This means never getting any closer to the basic

Principle operating behind it than to to the distracted

Entity of a mirage. (John Ashbery)

If by means of education we wished to teach the
child how to walk before this time, we could not do it,
because the fact of being able to walk is dependent on a
series of physical developments, which take place simulta-
neously. If one tried one could not achieve any-
thing without seriously damaging the child. Here it is
nature which directs. Everything depends on her and has
to obey her exact commands. At the same time, if you
tried to keep the child who has started to walk and run
from doing so, you would not be able to do it, because
in nature whenever an organ is developed, this must be
put in use. Creation in nature is not to make something,
but also to allow it to function. As soon as the organ is
complete, it must immediately be used in the environment,
(Montessori)

Interpretation outside the ripeness of the material is
indoctrination and produces compliance. A
corollary is that resistance arises out of interpretation given outside
the area of the overlap of the patient’s and the analyst’s
playing together. Interpretation when the patient has no capacity
to play is simply not useful, or causes confusion. When there is
mutual playing, then interpretation according to accepted psychoanalytic
principles can carry the therapeutic work forward.
This playing has to be spontaneous, and not compliant or acquiescent, if
psychotherapy is to be done. (Winnicott)

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These conquests of independence are in the
beginning the different steps of what is generally
known as natural development. In other words, if we
examine natural development closely, we can describe it
as the conquest of successive degrees of independence.
This is true not only of the psychic, but also of the physi-
cal field. The body also has a tendency to grow, a
tendency so strong that nothing can stop it short of death.
(Montessori)

Play is immensely exciting. It is exciting not primarily because the
instincts are involved, be it understood! The thing about playing is
always the precariousness of the interplay of personal psychiC
reality and the experience of control of actual objects. This is the
precariousness of magic itself, magic that arises in intimacy, in a
relationship that is being found to be reliable. To be reliable the
relationship is necessarily motivated by the mother’s love, or her
love-hate, or her object-relating, not by reaction-formations.
When a patient cannot play the therapist must attend to this
major symptom before interpreting fragments of behaviour.
(Winnicott)

and let us try at least to indicate (it will be only an indicator) the spectral movement of this chain. The movement is staged there where it is a question,
precisely, of forming the concept of what the stage, any stage, withdraws from our blind eyes at the moment we open them. Now, this concept is indeed constructed with reference to a certain haunting. (Derrida)

Everything is fixed in life, as are spokes in the hub of a wheel
‘Life, Lord of Creation, moving in the womb, there bringing yourself to birth, master of the five streams! A ll things offer you their tribute.
‘Life! Creator, Protector, Destroyer! Sun in heavenly circuit! Master of stars!
‘Pour down the rain, let all things find their food, thrive, rejoice.
‘Life itself! Purity itself! Fire itself, Eater, Master! All the world your food, Father in Heaven!
‘May your body be in our speech, hearing, sight, mind
(Prashna Upanishad)

The first organs which begin to function in the child
are the sensory organs. Now what are sensory organs
but organs of prehension, instruments by means of which
we grasp the impressions which, in the case of the child,
must be incarnated ? (Montessori)

Here in this area of overlap between the playing of the child
and the playing of the other person there is a chance to introduce
enrichments. The teacher aims at enrichment. By contrast,
the therapist is concerned specifically with the child’s own
growth processes, and with the removal of blocks to development
that may have become evident. It is psychoanalytic theory
that has made for an understanding of these blocks. At the
same time it would be a narrow view to suppose that psychoanalysis
is the only way to make therapeutic use of the child’s
playing. (Winnicott)

Yes. It is like a cinema-show. There is the light on the screen and the shadows flitting across it impress the audience as the enactment of some piece. If in the same play an audience also is shown on the screen as part of the performance, the seer and the seen will then both be on the screen. Apply it to yourself. You are the screen, the Self/Atman has created the ego, the ego has its accretions of thoughts which are displayed as the world, the trees and the plants of which you are asking. In reality, all these are nothing but the Self/Atman. If you see the Self/Atman, the same will be found to be all, everywhere and always. Nothing but the Self exists.
(Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

When we gaze, what do we see ? We see everything
there is in the environment. As soon as we start hearing,
we also hear every sound there is in the environment.
We might say that the field of prehension is very wide,
that it is almost universal. This is the way of nature.
One does not take in sound by sound, noise by noise,
object by object, we begin by taking in everything, a
totality. The distinctions of object from object, sound
from noise, sounds from sounds, come later as an evolu-
tion of this first global gathering in. (Montessori)

Whether the harborline or the east shoreline
consummated it was nobody’s biz until you got there,
eyelids ashimmer, content with one more dispensation
from blue above. And just like we were saying,
the people began to show some interest
in the mud-choked harbor. It could be summer again
for all anyone in our class knew.
Yeah, that’s right. Bumped from our dog-perch,
we’d had to roil with the last of them.
(John Ashbery)

It is good to remember always that playing is itself a therapy.
To arrange for children to be able to play is itself a psychotherapy
that has immediate and universal application, and it includes the
establishment of a positive social attitude towards playing. This
attitude must include recognition that playing is always liable to
become frightening. Games and their organization must be
looked at as part of an attempt to forestall the frightening aspect
of playing. Responsible persons must be available when children
play; but this does not mean that the responsible person need
enter into the children’s playing. When an organizer must be
involved in a managerial position then the implication is that the
child or the children are unable to play in the creative sense of
my meaning in this communication.
The essential feature of my communication is this, that playing
is an experience, always a creative experience, and it is
an experience in the space-time continuum, a basic form of
living. (Winnicott)