Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is one of them. It is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it sees and moves itself, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or prolongation of my body; they are incrusted in its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the very stuff of the body. These reversals, these antinomies, are different ways of saying that vision is caught or is made in the middle of things, where something visible undertakes to see, becomes visible for itself and through the vision of all things, where the indivision of the sensing and the sensed persists, like the original fluid within the crystal.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L'Œil et l'Esprit
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L'Œil et l'Esprit
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…time doesn’t always develop according to a line and thus things that are very close can exist in culture, but the line makes them appear very distant from one another. Or, on the other hand, that there are things that seem very close that, in fact, are very distant from one another. In order to explain these two perceptions we must, in fact, clarify the theory of time. The classical theory is that of the line, continuous or interrupted, while mine would be more chaotic. Time flows in an extraordinarily complex, unexpected, complicated way ... Time is paradoxical; it folds or twists; it is as various as the dance of flames in a brazier-here interrupted, there vertical, mobile, and unexpected. The French language in its wisdom uses the same word for weather and time, le temps. At a profound level they are the same thing. Meteorological weather, predictable and unpredictable, will no doubt some day be explainable by complicated notions of fluctuations, strange attractors…. Someday we will perhaps understand that historical time is even more complicated.
Michel Serres, Conversations with Bruno Latour
Michel Serres, Conversations with Bruno Latour
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