The Cubist Garden of Villa Noailles, Hyeres, France 1926
Gabriel Guevrekian
Designed in December 1923, the original villa was built for Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles by the architect Rob Mallet-Stevens.
Gabriel Guevrekian
Designed in December 1923, the original villa was built for Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles by the architect Rob Mallet-Stevens.
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Spinoza means something very simple, that sadness makes no one intelligent. In sadness one is wretched. It’s for this reason that the powers-that-be [pouvoirs] need subjects to be sad. Agony has never been a cultural game of intelligence or vivacity. As long as you have a sad affect, a body acts on yours, a soul acts on yours in conditions and in a relation which do not agree with yours. At that point, nothing in sadness can induce you to form the common notion, that is to say the idea of a something in common between two bodies and two souls. What he’s saying is full of wisdom. This is why thinking of death is the most base thing. He is opposed to the whole philosophical tradition which is a meditation on death. His formula is that philosophy is a meditation on life and not on death.
Gilles Deleuze, On Spinoza
Gilles Deleuze, On Spinoza
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The hierarchy between emotion and thought/reason gets displaced, of course, into a hierarchy between emotions: some emotions are ‘elevated’ as signs of cultivation, whilst others remain ‘lower’ as signs of weakness. The story of evolution is narrated not only as the story of the triumph of reason, but of the ability to control emotions, and to experience the ‘appropriate’ emotions at different times and places (Elias 1978). Within contemporary culture, emotions may even be represented as good or better than thought, but only insofar as they are re-presented as a form of intelligence, as ‘tools’ that can be used by subjects in the project of life and career enhancement (Goleman 1995).
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion