2019 (#85) : Malaguzzi , Bruner , Derrida , Heidegger — “an image of the child that directs you … the stories we tell about our lives … personal or intellectual anamnesis … no implementation of the archive can be sheltered … an environment that grows out of your relationship with the child is unique and fluid … ‘world making’ is the principal function of the mind … what is getting archived! … beyond the alternative of presence and absence … overdetermined paths … destiny’s language thrives … we never come to thoughts. they come to us.”

There are hundreds of different images of the child. Each one of you has inside yourself an image of the child that directs you as you begin to relate to a child. This theory within you pushes you to behave in certain ways; it orients you as you talk to the child, listen to the child, observe the child. It is very difficult for you to act contrary to this internal image. For example, if your image is that boys and girls are very different from one another, you will behave differently in your interactions with each of them.
(Malaguzzi)

But logical thought is not the only or even the most ubiquitous mode of thought. For the last several years, I have been looking at another kind of thought (see, e.g., Bruner, 1986), one that is quite different in form from reasoning: the form of thought that goes into the construction not of logical or inductive arguments but of stories or narratives. What I want to do now is to extend these ideas about narrative to the analysis of the stories we tell about our lives: our “autobiographies.”
(Bruner)

This deconstruction in progress concerns, as always, the institution of limits declared to be insurmountable,’ whether they involve family or state law, the relations between the secret and the nonsecret, or, and this is not the same thing, between the private and the public, whether they involve property or access rights, publication or reproduction rights, whether they involve classification and putting into order: What comes under theory or under private correspondence, for example? What comes under system? under biography or autobiography? under personal or intellectual anamnesis? In works said to be theoretical, what is worthy of this name and what is not? Should one rely on what Freud says about this to classify his works? Should one for example take him at his word when he presents his Moses as a “historical novel”? In each of these cases, the limits, the borders, and the distinctions have been shaken by an earthquake from which no classificational concept and no implementation of the archive can be sheltered. Order is no longer assured.
(Derrida)

The environment you construct around you and the children also reflects this image you have about the child. There’s a difference between the environment that you are able to build based on a preconceived image of the child and the environment that you can build that is based on the child you see in front of you — the relationship you build with the child, the games you play. An environment that grows out of your relationship with the child is unique and fluid. The quality and quantity of relationships among you as adults and educators also reflects your image of the child. Children are very sensitive and can see and sense very quickly the spirit of what is going on among the adults in their world. They understand whether the adults are working together in a truly collaborative way or if they are separated in some way from each other, living their experience as if it were private with little interaction.
(Malaguzzi)

Philosophically speaking, the approach I shall take to narrative is a constructivist one—a view that takes as its central premise that “world making” is the principal function of mind, whether in the sciences or in the arts. But the moment one applies a constructivist view of narrative to the self-narrative, to the autobiography, one is faced with dilemmas. Take, for example, the constructivist view that “stories” do not “happen” in the real world but, rather, are constructed in people’s heads. Or as Henry James once put it, stories happen to people who know how to tell them. Does that mean that our autobiographies are constructed, that they had better be viewed not as a record of what happened (which is in any case a nonexistent record) but rather as a continuing interpretation and reinterpretation of our experience? Just as the philosopher Nelson Goodman argues that physics or painting or history are “ways of world making” (Goodman, 1978), so autobiography (formal or informal) should be viewed as a set of procedures for “life making.” And just as it is worthwhile examining in minute detail how physics or history go about their world making, might we not be well advised to explore in equal detail what we do when we construct ourselves autobiographically? Even if the exercise should produce some obdurate dilemmas, it might nonetheless cast some light on what we might mean by such expressions as “a life.”
(Bruner)

What is getting archived!
That is not a question. It is once again an exclamation, with a somewhat suspended exclamation point because it is always difficult to know if it is getting archived, what is getting archived, how it is getting archived — the trace that arrives only to efface itself / only by effacing itself, beyond the alternative of presence and absence. It is not merely difficult to know this; it is strictly impossible, no doubt not because there is always more to be known but because it is not of the order of knowledge.
This is never a sufficient reason not to seek to know, as an Aufklarer — to know that it is getting archived, within what limits, and how, according to what detoured, surprising, or overdetermined paths.
(Derrida)

When thought’s courage stems from
the bidding of Being, then
destiny’s language thrives.

As soon as we have the thing before
our eyes, and in our hearts an ear
for the word, thinking prospers.

We never come to thoughts. They come
to us.

(Heidegger)

2019 (#84) : Heidegger , Derrida

Teaching is even more difficult than learning. We
know that; but we rarely think about it. And why is teaching
more difficult than learning? Not because the teacher
must have a larger store of information, and have it always
ready. Teaching is more difficult than learning because
what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher,
in fact, lets nothing else be learned than-learning. His conduct,
therefore, often produces the impression that we
properly learn nothing from him, if by “learning” we now
suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information.
The teacher is ahead of his apprentices in this
alone, that he has still far more to learn than they-he
has to learn to let them learn. The teacher must be capable
of being more teachable than the apprentices.

(Heidegger)

However affirmative deconstruction is, it is affirmative in a way that is not simply positive, not simply conservative, not simply a way of repeating the given institution. I think that the life of an institution implies that we are able to criticize, to transform, to open the institution to its own future. The paradox in the instituting moment of an institution is that, at the same time that it starts something new, it also continues something, is true to the memory of the past, to a heritage, to something we receive from the past, from our predecessors, from the culture. If an institution is to be an institution, it must to some extent break with the past, keep the memory of the past, while inaugurating something absolutely new.

That is what deconstruction is made of: not the mixture but the tension between memory, fidelity, the preservation of something that has been given to us, and, at the same time, heterogeneity, something absolutely new, and a break. The condition of this performative success, which is never guaranteed, is the alliance of these to newness.

(Derrida)

2019 (#83-14a) : Derrida ,Tao Te Ching , William Blake , Wilhelm Reich , Rumi , Nietzsche

… the witness I am seeking, for, yes, for, without yet knowing what this sublime vocable, for, means in so many languages, for already having found him/her, and you, no, according to you, for having sought to find him/her around a trope or an ellipsis that we pretend to organize, and for years I have been going round in circles, trying to take as witness not to see myself being seen but to re-member myself around a single event …
(Derrida)

There is a time for being ahead, a time for being behind; a time for being in motion, a time for being at rest; a time for being vigorous, a time for being exhausted ; a time for being safe, a time for being in danger.
(Tao Te Ching)

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.
(Derrida)

I will arise, Explore these dens, & find that deep pulsation
(William Blake)

The trace is in fact the absolute origin of sense in general.
Which amounts to saying once again that there is no absolute origin of
sense in general. The trace is the differance which opens appearance
[1′ apparaUre] and signification. Articulating the living upon the nonliving
in general, origin of all repetition, origin of ideality, the trace is not more
ideal than real, not more intelligible than sensible, not more a transparent
signification than an opaque energy and no concept of metaphysics can
describe it. And as it is a fortiori anterior to the distinction between regions
of sensibility, anterior to sound as much as to light, is there a sense in
establishing a “natural” hierarchy between the sound-imprint, for example,
and the visual (graphic) imprint? The graphic image is not seen; and the
acoustic image is not heard. The difference between the full unities of the
voice remains unheard. And, the difference in the body of the inscription
is also invisible.
(Derrida)

To gratify senses unknown? trees, beasts and birds unknown;
Unknown, not unperciev’d, spread in the infinite microscope,
In places yet univisited by the voyager, and in worlds
Over another kind of seas, and in atmospheres unknown
(William Blake)

I told him to give in to every impulse. Thereupon, his lips began to protrude and react rhythmically and to hold the protruded position for several seconds as if in a tonic spasm. In the course of these movements, his face took on the unmistakable expression of an infant.
(Wilhelm Reich)

by a kind of spacing that punctuates it … if thought belongs from the beginning to no one … blended into the continuum of something always – already – there … the origin is suspended by this multiple punctuation … moving again …
(Derrida)

The Web of Life is woven & the tender sinews of life created …
(William Blake)

“Multiplicity and migration of languages, certainly, and within language itself, Babel within a single language … multiplicity within language, insignificant difference as the condition of meaning. But by the same token, the insignificance of language, of the properly linguistic body : it can only take on meaning in relation to a place. By place, I mean just as much the relation to a border, country, house, or threshold, as any site, any situation in general from within which, practically, pragmatically, alliances are formed, contracts, codes and conventions established which give meaning to the insignificant , institute passwords, bend language to what exceeds it, make of it a moment of gesture and of step, secondarize or ‘reject’ it in order to find it again.”
(Derrida)

Spacing as writing is the becoming-absent and the becoming-unconscious
of the subject. By the movement of its drift/derivation [derive] the
emancipation of the sign constitutes in return the desire of presence. That
becoming-or that drift/derivation-does not befall the subject which
would choose it or would passively let itself be drawn along by it. As the
subject’s relationship with its own death, this becoming is the constitution
of subjectivity. On all levels of life’s organization, that is to say, of the
economy of death. All graphemes are of a testamentary essence.31 And the
original absence of the subject of writing is also the absence of the thing
or the referent
(Derrida)

‘Why of the trace? What led us to the choice of this word? I have begun
to answer this question. But this question is such, and such the nature of
my answer, that the place of the one and of the other must constantly be
in movement. If words and concepts receive meaning only in sequences of
differences, one can justify one’s language, and one’s choice of terms, only
within a topic [an orientation in space] and an historical strategy. The
justification can therefore never be absolute and definitive. It corresponds
to a condition of forces and translates an historical calculation. Thus, over
and above those that I have already defined, a certain number of givens
belonging to the discourse of our time have progressively imposed this
choice upon me. The word trace must refer to itself to a certain number
of contemporary discourses whose force I intend to take into account.
(Derrida)

To
make enigmatic what one thinks one understands by the words “proximity,”
“immediacy,” “presence” ( the proximate [proche], the own [propre], and
the pre- of presence ), is my final intention iIi this book. This deconstruction
of presence accomplishes itself through the deconstruction of consciousness,
and therefore through the irreducible notion of the trace (Spur),
as it appears in both Nietzschean and Freudian discourse. And finally, in
all scientific fields, notably in biology, this notion seems currently to be
dominant and irreducible.
(Derrida)

To put the old names to work, or even Just to leave them in circulation,
will always, of course, involve some risk: the risk of settling down or of
regressing into the system that has been, or is in the process of being,
deconstructed.
(Derrida)

The configurative unity of these significations-the power of speech, the
creation of being and life, the sun (which is also, as we shall see, the eye),
rhe self-concealment-is conjugated in what could be called the history of
the egg or the egg of history. The world came out of an egg. More precisely,
the living creator of the life of the world came out of an egg: the sun, then,
was at first carried in an eggshell. Which explains a number of AmmonRa’s
characteristics: he is also a bird, a falcon (“I am the great falcon,
harched from his egg”). But in his capacity as origin of everything,
Ammon-Ra is also the origin of the egg. He is designated sometimes as the
bird-sun born from the primal egg, sometimes as the originary bird, carrier
of the first egg
(Derrida)

The subordination of Thoth, the ibis, eldest son of the original bird, is
marked in several ways: in the Memphitic doctrine, for example, Thoth is
the executor, through language, of Horus’ creative project. 21 He bears the
signs of the great sun-god. He interprets him as a spokesman, a standardbearer.
And like his Greek counterpart, Hermes, whom Plato moreover
never mentions, he occupies the role of messenger-god, of clever intermediary,
ingenious and subtle enough to steal, and always to steal away. The
signifier-god. Whatever he has to enounce or inform in words has already
been thought by Horus. Language, of which he is depositary and secretary,
can thus only represent, so as to transmit the message, an already formed
divine thought, a fixed design.22 The message itself is not, but only
represents, the absolutely creative moment. It is a second and secondary
word. And when Thoth is concerned with the spoken rather than with the
written word, which is rather seldom, he is never the absolute author or
initiator of language. On the contrary, he introduces difference into language
and it is to him that the origin of the plurality of languages is
attributed.
(Derrida)

Doesn’t he have the same place in Egyptian mythology? There too,
Thoth is an engendered god. He often calls himself the son of the god-king,
rhe sun-god, Ammon-Ra: “I am Thoth, the eldest son ofRa. “I’ Ra(the sun)
is god the creator, and he engenders through the mediation of the word.
His other name, the one by which he is in fact designated in the Phaedrus, is
Ammon. The accepted sense of this proper name: the hidden. 19 Once again
we encounter here a hidden sun, the father of all things, letting himself be
represented by speech.
(Derrida)

There is a power of language, therefore, at once a dynamis, an enveloped virtuality, a potentiality that can be brought or not to actuality; it is hidden, buried, dormant. This potentiality is also a power (Macht), a particular efficacy that acts on its own, in a quasi-autonomous manner (facon) without the initiative and beyond the control of speaking subjects.
(Derrida)

the infinitely small point of meaning which the languages barely brush … What can an infinitely small point of meaning be? What is the measure to evaluate it? The metaphor itself is at once the question and the answer.
(Derrida)

The time of the “learning to live, a time without tutelary present, would amount to this, to which the exordium is leading us: to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts. To live otherwise, and better. No, not better, but more justly But with them. No being-with the other, no society without this with that makes being-with in general more enigmatic than ever for us. And this being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations.
(Derrida)

not toward death but toward a living-on [sur-vie], namely, a trace of which life and death would themselves be but traces and traces of traces, a survival whose possibility in advance comes to disjoin or dis-adjust the identity to itself of the living present as well as of any effectivity. There is then some spirit. Spirits. And one must reckon with them.
(Derrida)

I died from minerality and became vegetable;
And From vegetativeness I died and became animal.
I died from animality and became man.
Then why fear disappearance through death?
Next time I shall die
Bringing forth wings and feathers like angels;
After that, soaring higher than angels –
What you cannot imagine,
I shall be that.
(Rumi)

If it-learning to live-remains to be done, it can happen only between life and death. Neither in life nor in death alone. What happens between two, and between all the “two’s” one likes, such as between life and death, can only maintain itself with some ghost, can only talk with or about some ghost. So it would be necessary to learn spirits. Even and especially if this,
the spectral, is not. Even and especially if this, which is neither substance, nor essence, nor existence, is never present as such.
(Derrida)

And Days & Months & Years &Ages & Periods , wondrous buildings;
And every Moment has a Couch of gold for soft repose ,
(A Moment equals a pulsation of the artery)
(William Blake)

Workers rush toward some hint
of emptiness, which they then
start to fill. Their hope, though,
is for emptiness, so don’t think
you must avoid it. It contains
what you need!
Dear soul, if you were not friends
with the vast nothing inside,
why would you always be casting your net
into it, and waiting so patiently?
(Rumi)

I live–if I choose to see things this way–among a curious race that sees earth, its chance events and the vast interconnectedness of animals, mammals, and insects not so much in relation to themselves–or the necessities limiting them–but in relation to the unlimited, lost, and unintelligible aspect of the skies.
(Nietzsche)

Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:
This place made from our love for that emptiness!
(Rumi)