Bruno Latour

http://www.ensmp.fr/~latour/biography.html

Bruno Latour says of the objects brought back from the Amazon forest by field biologists,

"We never detect the rupture between things and signs, and we never find ourselves faced with the imposition of arbitrary and discrete signs upon shapeless and continuous matter. We only see an unbroken series of well-nested elements, each of which plays the role of sign for the previous and of thing for the succeeding." (169)

Latour, Bruno. "The 'Pédofil' of Boa Vista: A Photo-Philosophical Montage." Trans. Bart Simon and Katia Verresen. Common Knowledge 4.1 (Spring 1995): 144-87

Perspectivity Scenes

Little or no attention is being paid the Africans of the Lake Region and the Congo.
Yet, we hear of every single death of every Arabic bomber in Iraq and Egypt and Saudia Arabia.

As of December 2004,

1. 1000 people per day are dying from the war in the Congo. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4080867.stm

2. Even "Islamic" Africans in Darfur. Perhaps an equal number. No help for them.

Aid is not going in to the starving, raped, and pillaged people of the Congo, Darfur, etc.
Information about them is not coming out.

Got Cat?

Tristes Tropiques is among the most approachable of Lévi-Strauss' works, and should be read by anyone with an interest in brazilian jungle kitchen middens and modern philosophy.

The book is guaranteed to make the reader stop and think, and then think again. Kind of like a walk in the jungle.

The volume closes with the wonderful phrase "or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat."

GOT KITTENS?

Gifts of Ideas (not Tiresome Surfeited Things)

The old feudal castle of Loches in the Tourraine of France was long a prison, a labyrinthine donjon of vaulted corridors, spiral staircases, pitiless torture chambers: "Scratched in a window-embrasure by some hand in Gothic days--said to have been that of the chronicler of Louis XI -- 'Dixisse me aliquando paenituit, tacuisse nunquam.' [I have sometimes repented of speaking, never of holding my tongue.] "