[-empyre-] Smelly Objects

[Timothy Morton]

Dear Lauren,

This is a very resonant phrase IMO: 

"as a process that works against being known, and therefore against death."

In my theory of causality death is precisely when an entity is fully "known," that is, successfully mistranslated. The thing becomes sheer appearance-for others. Say an opera singer matches the resonant frequency of a glass. The glass ripples and explodes into not-glass. The dead (as it were) glass is nowhere, there are just memories, including fragments of glass, which are new things. 

I believe that at the moment when the sound envelopes the glass perfectly, if the glass could speak, it would say it was experiencing beauty, in the Kantian sense, of an object-like entity that is not-me yet intimately me. 

In this sense beauty is death. 

Maintaining the unknown, resisting consistency, is resisting death. What is called life is a small region of an undead, uncanny space where the rifts between things and appearances coexist. 

Tim



http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com

On Jun 18, 2012, at 11:00 PM, "lauren.berlant at gmail.com" <lberlant at aol.com> wrote:

> as a process that works against being known, and therefore against death.
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