“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, January 16, 2012

Trigger Happy

Who is Dylan Trigg? 

—A most interesting young phenomenologist man.

What has he done?

—He has published The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny, which I now hold in my hand, perhaps before he is doing so, which is in itself uncanny.

An insight on every page?

—Why yes, it looks that way. For instance, I just opened the book at random to see an excellent argument about the arbitrary divisions between history and memory.

What is most excellent about it, as far as you are concerned? 

—Well I've only glanced through it. But what it does is to make the one thing that seems so obvious (the sense of place) become very weird. For instance, Harman on Lovecraft makes a special guest appearance. This weirdness is badly needed in ecological philosophical necks of the wood. I've been trying to make this sort of argument in my way for a little bit.

Is it the sort of book that makes you want to read it all the time, a not unpleasant, slightly evil compulsion? 

—Without doubt.

On a scale of 1 to Fucking Good, where would you put this book? 

—Oh, Fucking Good, definitely.

1 comment:

Henry Warwick said...

place is neurological. like face is neurological. Prosopagnosia - no face is familiar. sense of place is the same only for other objects. No philosophy: neuroscience. place | not place | canny | uncanny | familiar | strange : serotonin(?)

a sense of place is emotional and a product of a subject (as a type of object that creates objects)(?)

just thinking out loud...