A moving prism

Image: It is rude to stare , Antoine Monmarché Today the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each oth er and without realising that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other’s eyes and yet deny the existence of each other. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal. — Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman, 1960

» We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence. […] Our relationship to the social is, like our relationship to the world, deeper than any express perception or any judgement. It is as false to place ourselves in society as an object among other objects, as it is to place society within ourselves as an object of thought, in both cases the mistake lies in treating the social as an object. — Other Selves and the Human World, Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception ; p 421

  Image: Marc Chagall, La vita (1964) » As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don’t do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires […] And I think of Bloy’s words: “there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable.” ― The Neutral : Lecture Course at the College de France, Roland Barthes; p 13