iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

aphelis @aphelis.net · 27/06/2026

1/2 «Un jour viendra ou il ne naîtra plus de poètes. La ville, la redoutable urbanisation de l’avenir, l’empêchera. Alors, les gouvernements garderont, dans de vastes jardins installés sur les terrasses des gratte-ciel, les malades “de la beauté et du passé” [...]»

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 03/06/2026

“... university managers, who promise blue skies on the other side of every new spree of culling and cutting, mergers and ‘re-structures’ (the Vice-Chancellor of my university tells us that we are sailing towards ‘financial sustainability with soul’).” newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

newleftreview.org

Lorna Finlayson, Irreversible — Sidecar

On Britain’s universities.

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 25/04/2026

“... by the 1970s, movements stopped demanding things of politicians and bosses and instead turned to each other and said, “Let's take it all!” For a while, it looked like they might.” Forthcoming August 2026 from @illwill.bsky.social store.illwilleditions.com/products/let...

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 24/02/2026

1/2 “Le Coup de Tête” 1960 – First version of one of Dionys Mascolo’s rare work of fiction, featuring the protagonist “Baptiste”. This version was extensively reworked by Mascolo, but only published posthumously as a novel in 2016. aphelis.net/wp-content/u...

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 01/02/2026

1/2 “I came to better understand the closeness of friendship and the sensation of existence through reading Fallot’s extraordinary book on Epicurus.” — Friendship and Philosophy: An Interview With Giorgio Agamben, Cabinet, Spring 2012 www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/45/du...

Giorgio Agamben in 2012: “By rewriting the idea of pleasure. I came to better understand the closeness of friendship and the sensation of existence through reading Fallot's extraordinary book on Epicurus. Epicurus writes that pleasure is what we feel when we feel no pain. This had always seemed to me incomprehensible —until I read Fallot. For Epicurus, pleasure coincides with the lowest limit of sensation-the sensation of existence. True hedonism does not involve the search for excessive pleasures, but lies instead in the—rare—capacity to joyously perceive this minimal threshold. But if this is the case, then the faculty of pleasure and the faculty of friendship are the same faculty. Only he or she who is capable of experiencing the miniscule joy of existing can thus experience friendship. For this reason Epicurus, the philosopher of pleasure, is also the philosopher of friendship.”

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 25/01/2026

“But myths and symbols, in attempting to establish spiritual bonds between man and the outside world, create space for devotion and scope for reason which are destroyed by the instantaneous electrical contact” — Aby Warburg, A Lecture on Serpent Ritual, [1923] 1939 doi.org/10.11588/art...

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 24/01/2026

“Imagine the tools a cow would make. This idea, humorously illustrated in Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoon, captures a widespread assumption: cows are neither problem-solvers nor tool users.” www.cell.com/current-biol...

cell.com

Flexible use of a multi-purpose tool by a cow

Osuna-Mascaró and Auersperg report flexible, multipurpose tool use in a cow, expanding the known range of mammalian tool users and underscoring overlooked cognitive capacities in livestock.

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 03/01/2026

“Wars are destroying the world, & the ruins are visibly haunted / By an enormous spectre, not simply born of war.” — Bertolt Brecht, The manifesto [1945], tr. Darko R. Suvin, Socialism and Democracy, 2002, 16:1, 1-10 darkosuvin.com/wp-content/u...

Bertolt Brecht, Journals, February 11, 1945: since LAUGHTON has to work on a pirate film for eight weeks i look around for work to do, and decide to set myself a little task and put the manifesto into verse, in the manner of a lucretian didactic poem, the decision being influenced a little by the possibility of producing little photographic editions which not only give the illusion of miniature books, but also promise critical correspondence. the manifesto as a pamphlet is itself a work of art; but it still seems to me that today, a hundred years later, and given new, armed authority, it would be possible to revitalise the propaganda effect by removing its pamphlet character.

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 03/01/2026

“All that I have written seems to me straw compared with what has now been revealed to me” “Omnia que scripsi videntur michi palee respectu eorum que vidi et revelata sunt michi” — MS Latin 3112 “Processus canonizationis s. Thomae Aquinatis, Neapoli” gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/b...

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 31/12/2025

«Je m’aperçois de ceci — ce 31 décembre [19]40 — [...] que je me sens un certain 𝘮𝘰𝘪 étranger par essence à tout ce que je suis et qui ne voit aucune nécessité dans toute cette vie nécessaire qu’on lui fait vivre et qui le fait vivre.» — Paul Valéry gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/b...

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 29/12/2025

”Let us imagine an individual who is what one might call scatterbrained, who has started on seventeen things but has carried none of them through to completion; who knows a bit about everything possible, but does not know anything fully...” — Kierkegaard, Papirer VIII 2 B86 lines 13-22, p. 169

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 27/12/2025

«Sur le plan de la vérité de l’être de l’homme, il n’est jamais fait don que de ce que l’on ne possède pas.» — René Schérer, Philosophies de la communication, Paris: SEDES, 1971, p. 349 archive.org/details/sche...

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 25/12/2025

«quand vient la fin des fêtes et le moment de reprendre le travail, je suis encore enrhumée, et, surtout, brisée de fatigue. Jeune chômeur rencontré le jour de Noël ...» — Simone Weil, La condition ouvrière, 1951, p. 41 archive.org/details/weil...

Le mardi 4 décembre 1934, Simone Weil entrait comme «manoeuvre sur machine » dans une usine. Ce professeur agrégé voulait vivre la vie d’un ouvrier, partager sa misère et ses peines, mais éprouver aussi la solidarité, l’amitié, le dévouement.
Ce livre de Simone Weil que nous publions aujourd’hui est la somme de cette expérience, c’est-à-dire ses observations et les conclusions qu’elle en a tirées. Il se compose de son Journal d’usine et d'une série de textes, dont il se dégage une philosophie et une morale.

La condition de l’ouvrier est une des plus injustes dans le monde moderne. Non seulement il est victime d’une iniquité matérielle: travail exténuant pour un salaire relativement minime — mais encore d’une iniquité morale, à savoir le manque d’intérêt de ce travail. L’ouvrier, par le fait qu'il est cantonné indéfiniment à la fabrication d’une seule pièce ou d’un élément, est privé de la joie de la création qui serait sa seule et efficace compensation. Aux deux formes traditionnelles d’oppression de l’humanité, dit Simone Weil, oppression par les armes et par l'argent, s’en ajoute une troisième: l’oppression par la fonction.

La Condition ouvrière n’est pas un livre écrit par un intellectuel en mal d’expériences extrêmes. C’est le cri bouleversant d’une âme qui a vécu, au niveau le plus haut de l'amour et de l’intelligence, l'injustice profonde de la condition prolétarienne

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 14/12/2025

«Mi En-leh énumérait de nombreuses conditions nécessaires pour la révolution. Mais il ne connaissait pas de moment où l’on ne dût pas y travailler.» — Bertolt Brecht, Me Ti. Livre des retournements, tr. Bernard Lortholary, Paris: L’Arche, 1978, p. 59 archive.org/details/brec...

VIELE BEDINGUNGEN FÜR DEN UMSTURZ
Mi-en-leh nannte viele Bedingungen für den Umsturz. Aber er wußte keine Zeit, wo nicht an ihm zu arbeiten war.

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 13/12/2025

“But before the fourth day’s rocky travelling was done, A customs man interposed his authority. ‘Please declare your valuables!’ - ‘None.’ And the boy who led the ox said: ‘A teacher, you see.’ This met the contingency.” — Bertolt Brecht, 1938, tr. Michael Hamburger, 1961

Bertolt Brecht: “Legend of the Origin of the Book Tao Te Ching on Lao Tzu's Way into Exile” (1938) in Tales From the Calendar, tr. Michael Hamburger, 1961. [Legende von der Entstehung des Buches Taoteking auf dem Weg des Laotse in die Emigration]

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 08/12/2025

“the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time” — H. Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958, p. 52 Photo: Martin Parr, Bored couples, England, New Brighton, 1985, Pigment print, 100 x 125 cm www.paris-b.com/artist/marti...

A photograph by Martin Parr from 1985 showing a couple, with each sitting on the opposite side of a small square table, in a restaurant, not looking at each other.

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 15/11/2025

«... un ensemble de cinq textes qui méditent l'histoire et le destin de l'Université européenne. Réflexion issue d'abord d'une rébellion et remettant en cause l'horizon même de la réalité politique, syndicale et culturelle contemporaine... » — Gérard Granel, 1982 archive.org/details/gran...

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 15/11/2025

«Voyant qu’on n’a rien, on essaye de se donner, Essayant de se donner, on voit qu’on n’est rien, Voyant qu’on n’est rien, on désire devenir, Désirant devenir, on vit.» — René Daumal, mai 1943, in Jean Biès, [1967] 1973, p. 174 archive.org/details/bies...

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 25/10/2025

«L’identité, le moi, aussi bête que la 'patrie'» — Dionys Mascolo, c. 1940 «je prends conscience de moi en me niant» — René Daumal, Tu t'es toujours trompé, 1970 «La fin du Moi sera la genèse de la présence» — Giorgio Cesarano, Manuel de survie, 1974

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 17/08/2025

— Derrida, Jacques. (1987). “Chôra,” in Poikilia: Études offertes à Jean-Pierre Vernant, Paris: Éditions de l'EHESS, pp. 265-296 Première version de cet essai, reproduit dans le volume 'Khôra' publié chez Galilée en 1993. aphelis.net/wp-content/u...

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 27/07/2025

“My gaze is never vacant my eye pitchdark and full I know what I must announce and many other things as well I am an unsymbolic thing I mean what I mean you turn the magic ring in vain there is no sense to me” — Gershom Scholem to Walter Benjamin, July 15, 1921 archive.org/details/gree...

Digital facsimile of a postcard from Gershom Scholem to Walter Benjamin, with the poem “Greeting from Angelus” dated July 15, 1921

Gershom Scholem, “Greetings from Angelus” to Walter Benjamin, July 15, 1921

I hang nobly on the wall
and look no one in the eye
I have been sent from heaven
an angelman am I.
Man is well within my realm
I take little interest in his case
I am protected by the Almighty
and have no need of face.
The world from which I come
is measured, deep and clear
what keeps me of a piece
is a wonder, as it here appears.
In my heart stands the town
where God sent me to dwell.
The angel who bears this sign
falls not beneath its spell.
My wing is poised to beat
but I would gladly turn home
were I to stay to the end of days
I would still be this forlorn.
My gaze is never vacant
my eye pitchdark and full
I know what I must announce
and many other things as well.
I am an unsymbolic thing
I mean what I mean
you turn the magic ring in vain
there is no sense to me.

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 24/07/2025

Dionys Mascolo sur le sens du sous-titre («Entêtements») donné au livre 'À la recherche d’un communisme de pensée' (Paris: Fourbis, 1993). — «Haine de la philosophie», entrevue par Jean-Marc Turine, La Revue nouvelle, 1994, Vol. 99, No. 4, pp. 88-92 aphelis.net/wp-content/u...

Extrait de “Haine de la philosophie,” interview avec Dionys Mascolo par Jean-Marc Turine, La Revue nouvelle. 1994, Vol. 99, No. 4, pp. 88-92

«R.N. : Pour ce livre aussi vous donnez un sous-titre, «Entêtements».
D.M.: Je veux dire que ce ne sont pas des pensées de type philosophique dictées par des concepts de la logique. C'est un mélange d'intuitions, d'aperçus, d'hypothèses, tous hasardeux, incertains, qui, peu à peu, par leur permanence ou leur répétition, finissent par entrer dans la tête, finissent par vous «entêter» et par devenir l'équivalent de «pensées», mais qui à l'origine n'étaient pas des pensées, mais des humeurs, des révoltes, des dégoûts, des désirs.»

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 13/07/2025

“Pessimismo dell'intelligenza, ottimismo della volontà” — R. Rolland, «Le Sacrifice d’Abraham: un livre de Raymond Lefebvre», L’Humanité 19 mars 1920: 1-2 gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/b... — A. Gramsci, “Discorso agli anarchici,” L’Ordine Nuovo, 3-10 avril 1920: 339-340 archive.org/details/Ordi...

Première page du journal français L’Humanité, 19 mars 1920, où commence la recension qu'offre Romain Rolland du livre de Raymond Lefebvre «Le sacrifice d'Abraham»

Extrait de la recension du roman de Raymond Lefebvre, où Romain Rolland introduit la remarque qui sera reprise et rendue célèbre par Gramsci: «Mais ce que j'aime surtout en Raymond Lefebvre, c'est cette alliance intime – qui pour moi fait le vrai homme – du pessimisme de l'intelligence qui perce toute illusion, et de l'optimisme de la volonté...»

Première page du journal italien L’Ordine Nuovo, du 3-10 avril 1920, où commence l'essai de Antonio Gramsci intitulé «Discorso agli anarchici» où il reprend pour la première fois l'expression de Romain Rolland (qu'il lui attribue explicitement).

Antonio Gramsci: «La concezione socialista del processo rivoluzionario è caratterizzata da due note fondamentali che Romain Rolland ha riassunto nel suo motto d'ordine: — Pessimismo dell'intelligenza, ottimismo della volontà...»

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 29/06/2025

«[Spinoza] mit dans son travail de philosophe les explosifs les plus puissants de sa sagesse aussi, à chaque théorème de l’Éthique les cadres de la philosophie purement spéculative éclatent un peu plus. Entre les lignes dorment les germes de cent révolutions» — R Daumal archive.org/details/la-n...

Le non-dualisme de Spinoza. Ou la dynamite philosophique, par René Daumal, La Nouvelle Revue Française Mai 1934 N° 248

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 16/05/2025

“[Our time] may be called the Machine Age, not only because the men of today perhaps act & live more mechanically than anyone in the past, but also [because] not men, but machines, deal with human affairs & carry out the operations of life” — Giacomo Leopardi, Operette morali, 1824

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 03/05/2025

1/2 «Je maintiens que les grands hommes de tous les temps [...] doivent nous servir de collaborateurs vivants, et cela surtout tant que les contemporains prétendument vivants ne sont pas à la hauteur [...] Pour moi, les morts vivent, de même qu’à mes yeux un très grand nombre de vivants sont morts.»

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 13/04/2025

“[The university] admits no future beyond deadlines and student debt, and it harbors no expectations beyond the acquisition of the codes, keys, and cosmetics for entering and exiting the hegemonic market.” — Willy Thayer, The Non-Modern Crisis of the Modern University, 2025, p. 35

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 11/04/2025

«Extraits des carnets qu'il a tenus durant soixante ans, de 1938 à sa mort en 1997, ces fragments dessinent une possibilité de vie à la hauteur de notre temps, tant la configuration existentielle de l'époque a peu changé depuis les années 1930» — Oct. 2025 www.arbrealettres.com/livre/978235...

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 29/03/2025

“The first union appeared only in 1864. Any idea of class struggle was alien to it, since it presented itself as proposing, on the contrary, to reconcile the interests of the workers and the bosses” — Benjamin Péret Les syndicats contre la révolution internationalistcommunists.org/2024/08/17/t...

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 27/03/2025

«Tous ces philosophes [...] souffrent de ce qu’ils savent manquer sans pour autant savoir ce que c’est, et surtout en doutant que ce soit quelque chose d’identifiable. Mais que cela manque et surtout qu’il ne suffit pas de dire “ça manque, c’est comme ça” [...], voilà ce qui importe.»

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 23/03/2025

“This land it is a dung heap I would unload my hate for those stove-stoking bootlicking parasitical hangers-on of our princes who luxuriate in the corpse stench of spilled life's blood” — Peter Weiss, Hölderlin, tr. Jon Swan in coll. with Carl Weber, Seagull, 2010, pp. 120-121

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 15/03/2025

A roundtable with Willy Thayer about his book 'The Non-Modern Crisis of the Modern University,' originally published in Spanish in 1996, revised and expanded in 2019, and translated into English in 2025. An untimely book for an untimely crisis. www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2-4...

youtube.com

Conversaciones a la intemperie: The NonModern Crisis of the Modern University (2024) de Willy Thayer

YouTube video by Conversaciones a la intemperie

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 10/03/2025

“today’s faculties of philosophy are pure actuality and zero potentiality when it comes to reading their conditions. Into oblivion with questioning the conditions of the present. Into oblivion with the question of being.” — Willy Thayer, The Non-modern Crisis of the Modern University, 2025, p. 45

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 16/02/2025

Thousand of pages from the Ernst Kantorowicz Collection are available on Internet Archive via the Center for Jewish History, part of Leo Baeck Institute Repository (LBI), including materials pertaining to the oath controversy. archive.org/details/erns...

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 12/02/2025

“Everyone can stop turning in the slavery of what he does not know and, refusing the payoff of empty words, have it out with life.” Brief summary of a section of Carlo Michelstaedter’s dissertation 'Persuasion and Rhetoric' aphelis.net/michelstaedt...

aphelis.net

Carlo Michelstaedter - The Constitution of Rhetoric - APHELIS

A brief summary of “The Constitution of Rhetoric,” a section of Carlo Michelstaedter’s dissertation Persuasion and Rhetoric

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 01/02/2025

«C'est pourquoi toute voie tracée est une nouvelle mine, toute bannière un manteau qui recouvre l'insuffisance des pauvres et leur accorde une personne et un droit : — c'est pourquoi irrésistiblement fleurit la rhétorique.» — Carlo Michelstaedter, La persuasion et la rhétorique, p. 123

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 24/01/2025

“What is tomorrow, Anna? I once asked you 'How long will tomorrow last?' And you answered me: 'Eternity and a day.'” — Theo Angelopoulos (27 April 1935 – 24 January 2012), Eternity and a Day (Μια αιωνιότητα και μια μέρα), 1998, 2:08:13

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 24/12/2024

“Here he comes now, trying to act like a normal human being, but he is that most depised of human creatures. His activities have brought down upon his shoulders, the scorn and outrage of history's multitudes. He is homo bureaucratus: the bureaucrat... ” www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g6y...

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 24/12/2024

“The main problem with a riot is that all too easily it flips into a kind of negative intensity, that in the very act of breaking out of our commodity form we become more profoundly frozen within it.” — Sean Bonney, Letters Against the Firmament, 2015, p. 8

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 15/12/2024

“If someone were to speak nonuniversitarily about the university, would that speech even be taken into consideration? [...] would it not be appropriated immediately by the university, turned into its medium, its guru of the day?” — Willy Thayer, p. 38 nupress.northwestern.edu/978081014684...

Cover image image for Willy Thayer’s The Non-Modern Crisis of the Modern University, translated by Bret Leraul, Northwestern University Press, 2025

by Willy Thayer

Image of page 38 of Willy Thayer’s The Non-Modern Crisis of the Modern University, translated by Bret Leraul (Northwestern University Press, 2025). It shows the text being quoted.

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 07/12/2024

“In every department of human endeavour, inspired talent is an intolerable insult to mediocrity. If this is true in the realm of aesthetics, it is even more true in the world of ethics. More than artistic beauty, moral beauty seems to exasperate our sorry species.” — Simon Leys, 2013, p. 42

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aphelis @aphelis.net · 17/11/2024

“Each word contains mystery, and they entrust themselves to words, weaving with them thereby a new, tacitly agreed-upon veil over the obscurity: καλλοπίσματα ὄρφνης, ‘ornaments of the darkness’: “God help me”—because I haven’t the courage to help myself.” — Carlo Michelstaedter, pp. 68-69

Cover image for Carlo Michelstaedter’s Persuasion and Rhetoric, Yale University Press, 2004

Except from the book Persuasion and Rhetoric by Carlo Michelstaedter, 2004, pp. 68-69. It reads: “Having nothing and able to give nothing, they let themselves sink into words that feign communication, because none of them can make his world be the world of the others; they feign words containing the absolute world, and with words they nourish their boredom, making for themselves a poultice for the pain; with words they show what they do not know and what they need in order to soothe the pain or make themselves numb to it. Each word contains mystery, and they entrust themselves to words, weaving with them thereby a new, tacitly agreed-upon veil over the obscurity: καλλοπίσματα ὄρφνης 'ornaments of the darkness': "God help me" —because I haven't the courage to help myself.”

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