The Life-Illusion

  Black Landscape (1939-40) by Graham Sutherland I've had lots of ideas for blog posts for the future. I see the topic I've chosen for my PhD as a bridge towards discussing a lot of other stuff. My intention for this blog has been, thus far, to use it primarily as an instrument in my research – when collating a large amount of information and ideas it really helps to write things down as you go, forcing yourself to think through an argument logically and consistently, finding the precise words you wish to use. I'm very much guilty of not doing this and it really takes some effort to translate thought to page, but I think it is absolutely essential practice as a researcher and a writer. This has been the main purpose of this blog so far, and I will continue to use it in this way throughout my PhD. However, I would also like to start using it to explore other ideas including stuff that's tangential to my research topic as well as my own personal thoughts and reflections....

  One text I have been engrossed in recently is Daniel Colson's A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze (2003/trans. 2019). Colson presents an “exploration of hidden affinities between the great philosophical heresies and “a thought too scandalous to take its place in the official edifice of philosophy”, with profound implications for the way we understand social movements” Whilst contemporary anarchism presents itself primarily as “a radical critique of representation,” thus appearing to problematise the taxonomical aspects of such a project, it in fact proves to be a vital toolkit for exploring and conceptualising anarchism as an intellectual framework [strike through] tradition. As is evident from the “slight parody” of the title, this is a “Little Philosophical Lexicon” rather than an exhaustive, total and teleological system of thought. Rather than an “array [of] complete and authoritative” definitions, we are presented with “a rhizome – a centr...

  Here is an excerpt from early on in Herbert Read's The Innocent Eye (1933), an autobiography covering his childhood years up until his father's death when he was ten. It comes right at the beginning of the book after he outlines the topographical features of the Yorkshire Vale he was raised in: “Sometimes the child's mind went on living even during the darkness of night, listening to the velvet stillness of the fields. The stillness of a sleeping town, of a village, is nothing to the stillness of a remote farm; for the peace of day in such a place is so kindly that the ear is attuned to the subtlest sounds, and time is slow. If by chance a cow should low in the night it is like the abysmal cry of some hellish beast, bringing woe to the world. And who knows what hellish beasts might roam by night, for in the cave by the Church five miles away they once found the bones of many strange animals, wolves and hyenas, and even the tusks of mammoths. The night-sound that still ec...