MachineMachine /stream - tagged with sacrifice http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com Georges Bataille Electronic Library http://supervert.com/elibrary/georges_bataille/ Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was by profession a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In his off hours, however, he was also a fringe Surrealist, vanguard intellectual, and writer of a wide-ranging body of work that includes philosophy, economics, poetry, and pornography. In all of these writings, Bataille was concerned to articulate a "science of the heterogeneous," a philosophy of everything repudiated by civil society: shit, blood, sacrifice, deviance, violence. The wellsprings of this philosophy apparently lay in personal experience — in particular his childhood with a suicidal mother and a blind, syphilitic father — and yet his ideas resonated… ]]> Wed, 01 Jun 2011 16:18:13 -0700 http://supervert.com/elibrary/georges_bataille/ A Diatribe from the Remains of Dr. Fred McCabe http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/07/a-diatribe-from-the-remains-of-dr-fred-mccabe.html

by Daniel Rourke

About a month ago in handling the remains of one Dr. Fred McCabe I found rich notes of contemplation on the subject of information theory. It appears that Fred could have written an entire book on the intricacies of hidden data, encoded messages and deceptive methods of transmission. Instead his notes exist in the form of a cryptic assemblage of definitions and examples, arranged into what Dr. McCabe himself labelled a series of ‘moments’.

I offer these moments alongside some of the ten thousand images Dr. McCabe amassed in a separate, but intimately…

]]> Sun, 11 Jul 2010 21:25:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/07/a-diatribe-from-the-remains-of-dr-fred-mccabe.html Sacrifice, speech, writing and art http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/146805 Sacrifice, speech, writing and art: I am interested in the different ways in which a sacrifice, a sacrament, a spoken word and a written word act as signifiers. The notion for instance that the sacrament, at the point of its acceptance, is understood as becoming the signified. What can you tell me / what has been written about the notions of sacrifice and their relationship to speech, art and the technologies of writing? I am at the very early stages of writing on these themes (so forgive any gross generalisations I make here).

I have a sort of… ]]> Wed, 24 Feb 2010 06:28:14 -0700 http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/146805 On Seeing (an Imitation) http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/01/on-seeing-an-imitation.html

by Daniel Rourke

“Mimesis here is not the representation of one thing by another, the relation of resemblance or of identification between two beings, the reproduction of a product of nature by a product of art. It is not the relation of two products but of two productions. And of two freedoms... 'True' mimesis is between two producing subjects and not between two produced things.”

Jacques Derrida, Economimesis

Enlarged pupil (an eye with iritis)
As the day drew closer to its end so I strained…
]]> Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:04:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/01/on-seeing-an-imitation.html Profanity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profanity The original meaning of the adjective profane (Latin: "in front of", "outside the temple") referred to items not belonging to the church, e.g. "The fort is the oldest profane building in the town, but the local monastery is older, and is the oldest building," or "besides designing churches, he also designed many profane buildings". As a result, "profane" and "profanity" has therefore come to describe a word, expression, gesture, or other social behavior which is socially constructed or interpreted as insulting, rudeness, vulgarism, desecrating, or showing disrespect. Other words commonly used to describe profane language or its use include: cuss,…
]]> Mon, 30 Nov 2009 08:12:00 -0700 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profanity The Unveiled Divide http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/the-unveiled-divide

The Wall Comes DownThe object holds within itself a series of meanings and values, both imminent and latent. The Berlin Wall, long standing as a symbol of closure, restriction and confinement, came down as a symbol of movement, release and freedom. The Berlin Wall embodies each and every one of these meanings, whilst latent within it stir the possibility of yet more, as now, unseen symbolic possibilities.

In Roman law objects belonging to the Gods were ascribed as sacred. Sacred objects exist removed from the world of…

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