Wounds Of Non-Meaning Poem by gershon hepner

Wounds Of Non-Meaning



You have to leave a space for thought
to heal the wounds nonmeaning causes;
they won’t recover as they ought
if you attempt to close with clauses
the way they gape. You must debride
the wound and leave them open to
free contemplation till they bleed,
coagulating once they do.

Inspired by an article by Dennis Lim on the movie that Astra Taylor is making in which thinkers and philosophers muse out loud (“Thinkers in Transit, Philosophy in Motion, ” NYT, February 22,2009) :
WHEN the documentary filmmaker Astra Taylor speaks of a cinema of ideas, she means it more literally than most. Her first film, “Zizek! ” (2005) accompanied the Slovene philosopher Slavoj Zizek on a lecture tour. Her second, “Examined Life, ” opening Wednesday at the IFC Center, recruits a wide array of thinkers and theorists to muse out loud about the role of philosophy in our lives, playing off the Socratic observation that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” After “Zizek! ” Ms. Taylor,29, wanted to tackle philosophy again. The producer Ron Mann, a veteran documentarian himself, encouraged her to make an ensemble movie with an all-star cast of philosophers, a prospect that was both enticing and somewhat alarming. If people found talking-head films uncinematic, what would they make of a talking-egghead film? “Secretly I thought it was going to be disastrous, ” Ms. Taylor said in a recent interview. “I might as well do an audio interview.” Then it occurred to her that her talking heads should walk and talk. She had just read “Wanderlust, ” a discursive study of the history of walking by Rebecca Solnit, and was reminded of the figure of the peripatetic philosopher, from Aristotle (who paced the Lyceum while teaching) to Kierkegaard (a proponent of thinking while walking, which he frequently did in the Copenhagen streets) to Walter Benjamin (the embodiment of the Paris flâneur) . She realized that putting her subjects in motion would elicit a different kind of interview than if they were seated behind their desks in offices. This conceit became a guiding principle for a film that would attempt to take philosophy out of the ivory tower and affirm its place in the flux of everyday life… Once Ms. Taylor settled on her list of subjects — “I didn’t have to strong-arm anyone, ” she said — she looked for locations that would spark connections both for the interviewees and for viewers. The reliably excitable and contrarian Mr. Zizek questions received notions of ecology and the environment as he rummages through heaps of garbage in a London dump. Mr. Singer reflects on the morality of affluence while walking past the luxury storefronts of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah discusses cosmopolitanism within the glassy confines of Toronto’s international airport. (He had just stepped off a plane, Ms. Taylor said.) Other settings are less pointed but take on an unexpected relevance or lend an intriguing tension. The deconstructionist critic Avital Ronell strolls through Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, provoking looks from bystanders as she theorizes on “the wound of nonmeaning.” Michael Hardt, the co-author (with Antonio Negri) of the new-world-order treatise “Empire, ” rows a boat in Central Park while wondering what a present-day revolution might look like. Symbols of aristocratic wealth are all around, he notes, but the idyllic location also reinforces the revolutionary idea of an everyday utopia.

2/22/09

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