[...]wledge that impossibility determining, by direct measurement, most of the heights and distances we like to know.

Thales, geometry as ruse
construction of summary

operation of application
use of metrics
in applied sciences

(often) measurement is the essential element of application,
but primary in the touch (sensory)

practice <--> ruse <--> theory
we need a ‘ruse’ to go from practice to theory
(mathematics? Is this why young philosophers are lured into math?)

the length my body cannot reach, sun, horizon, the far side of the river

greek idea of theorize: see
sight: by “placing” measurement, measurement by sighting
greek:
vision is tactile without contact
Descartes knew this better than anyone

inaccessible (is at times) accessible to vision

the ruler (the mode notion of module) has been placed accurately on the thing

the eye is a witness of covering-over

to measure is to relate
but, the ‘relation’ implies a transporting, of the ruler

(we are with this) at the realm of the accessible (=/= metaphysics?)

in the realm of inaccessible, vision must take care of displacement

The goal is either civil or astronomical
civil =/=? astronomical

to ask the object in motion to provide a constant flow of information about the object at rest.

Thales stops time to measure space
time freeze in order to perceive
eternity of mathematical figure

how geometry came to the Greeks?
•a practical genesis: build a reduced model, have a notion of module, bring the distant to the immediate.
•a senatorial genesis: organize a visual representation of that which defies physical contact.
•a civil or epistemological genesis: take astronomy as a starting point, reverse the question of the gnomon.
•a genesis that is either conceptual or esthetic: erase time in order to measure and master space.

exchange of the stable and the variant

in a culture with oral tradition, story takes the place of schema, and theater equates intuition.

In Thales story, the schema is the invariant of the tale instead of the tale being the origin of the schema. To teach the theorem is to tell the pseudo-myth of the origin =/= mythical tales being the dramatization of content
Thales theorem is itself anecdotal in relation to the invariable concept that it expresses its own genre: that of similarity***

from a practice he gets another practice


which messages, and how, answers and questions was covered over the centuries by the scenography of shadow-light opposition?
Descartes story: perspectival geometry, theory of shadows.
Plato's story: the sun of the same, the other and empirical object, cast shadow on shaded surface, similarity, the cave of representation.
The tales of origin? --> origin of a technology? Of an optics? Of a geometry?

The ruse of applied mathematics

cultural settings of an architect and an expert builder...

Descartes followed by Descartes

archaic forms of pre-mathematics that run through history

(thinking with geometry must be careful because of its roots in engineering and ruse)

Plato's cave: even flat wall bright, light creates a shaded area; my knowledge is limited to these two shadows. And it is only a shadow of knowledge.
Conclusion of the story of confrontation with solid objects, compact volumes, objective indefinite unknowns.

recognizing the object by its shadow => geometry* (-- transparency and emptiness. the world they constitute is thoroughly knowable)
or
i allow a kernel of shadow within the object --> history of science: the solid always envelopes something that can be rendered explicit***

radical negation of interior shadows

pyramid is itself fire, sun passes through it


Plato kills the hen that laid the golden eggs
“the future of the square and the diagonal is decided as much on the sand where we describe them through the language that names them as it is decided in the sky of ideas.”
the realism of transparent idealities is still immersed in a philosophy of representation.
Iconography is replaced by scenography

the shadowless theatre
the inevitable realism is (still) an idealism

without shadow ~= without secret

kernel of an implicit science: what are the relationships of a technique, (with) of a myth, (with) of a communication.. ?

The idealities implicit in technology --> mobilized in representation
(--> dramatized by myth) : obscure articulation of rigorous knowledge (--> totality of human activity)

the birth of beauty never stops
.
.the eternal geometer

(mathematical science's) sudden fits

...................................

on defeat:
the original power: ‘victorious’ [--> mastery is (so far presented as) victorious]
=/= a song to the pleasures of life, a guilt-free knowledge
-choosing between springtime or plague
[--> “phenomenology of defeat"]


-(can we) be and think (, stay, come from, or arrive) on the side of the *retreat* (whether strategic or historically mandated) ? (@Leo)
retreat --> (re)trace ...{is about the traces of things that are left that need to be read, condition of research practice, but never coming with a full-on truth-telling logos, rather stay in the twilight(ment) and not the blinding sun of an enlightenment}--> learning from Derrida and Avital
-when things start getting internalized --> ‘depressive position’ --> you can manage your relations to the ‘good object’ --> integration [=/~-> the twin-other: melancholia] [=/= when everyone is out to get you --> schizophrenic paranoid position]
...dealing with what we are left with, the reminiscence, die Reste, and so on
(Rousseauian, Heidegger also,) there is too much action, let's back off, let's retreat, let's listen to what the retreat is...
-retreat not as a military tactic, which means you are doing it in order to win something

---->[the story of writing]
within the artist world [artist as a creative being who inscribe on the world and in the world] (including apass) “writing” is internalized as the ‘bad object’
always considered secondary, excremental مدفوعى, the sign of something lacking: if you were in the real space of action, of being, you wouldn't need to write
-(for artists) writing distressed as an activity
-[the question remains] who holds the phallus? (in a converstaion and elsewhere) (=/= being open to being)
-taking dictations, an abjected position
writing is always linked to modalities of #retreat, evacuation, nonpresence
(am i associated with ecriture?) ==> being persecuted (on some level), there is something unbearable about the retreat ----> panic of the political
-let's inhabit an understander of retreat and what it involves, and, taking the responsibility of leaving your post. [we learn from what Kafka(‘s architecture of decision) surveils and marks for us > Avital --> where we are speaking/speeding from? and what is the architecture from which language emerges? is it a textual ventilator? or things are threatening to fixate?]

how Iran named its Iran-Iraq war? Défense sacrée, the Holy Defense, دفاع مقدس, (and many other names)
how did we “have” an experience---after the war? (much less an adventure or an adventurous encounter with history pumped up with meaning and sense-making and productive futurity)

to tabulate

ok, i am refering to things that don't come up as part of the master discourse, things that don't come up as something we can assimilate (جذب) or appropriate



towards the gaze --> a theatrical gesture : to see everything serenely (in quiet contemplation) --> to be (at last) free from the Gods

(those who believe that) there is only transcendence, (that transcendence is all there is)
(this is also the common mistake in reading Iranian old mystic literature)

cruel hallucinations

laws criss-cross the world

...for i am a slave of science

the chain of orders : the new is born of the old =/= angle (interrupts the stoic chain, the chain of cause and effect)

extermination and determination
laws of identity,[...]