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Reposted by Liam Sprod

I found it. The lecture was a higher seminar by Andrew Benjamin, and the etching is reproduced in his book 'Art's Philosophical Work'. It is De Maria Virgine (1583) by Petrus Canisus.

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 19h

'That the Virgin is positioned on axis with the corner pier and canopy serves to emphasize that she defines the threshold between the Old Law (further symbolized by the worn and cracked step in front of the prie-dieu) and the New, that arises into vision at this crucial juncture.'

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 19h

With regards to the broken step, Walter S. Melion (which is the reference that Benjamin draws on) writes:

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 19h

I found it. The lecture was a higher seminar by Andrew Benjamin, and the etching is reproduced in his book 'Art's Philosophical Work'. It is De Maria Virgine (1583) by Petrus Canisus.

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

In my memory it was a Rembrandt, but I can't seem to find one that matches... I had thought that this was a standard trope, but I can't find a trace of it (searching online is next to useless these days). It seems like something Agamben would discuss as well...

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I have a memory of once attending a lecture that discussed an etching that depicted the messianic abolition/completion (aufhebung even) of the Law with the image of a staircase with a broken step. It is pretty niche, but does this ring a bell with anyone, what might this etching be?

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Thinking of the old associations: 'Middle English tollen, tolen; akin to Old English fortyllan to seduce'

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

My Žižek story is that he signed my book 'To Liam Neeson' because when I said my name was Liam he started telling me how good it was to have that name because I would receive displaced sexual fantasies intended for Liam Neeson...

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Found the notes from my first encounter with critical theory as an undergrad in 1999... I still haven't finished that reading list.

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

(Plus, my grandfather ran an antiquarian bookshop that was called Astrolabe Books, so there's another positioning.)

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I've been looking at auctions for astrolabes a lot recently... Forget this humanistic clock/GPS orientation in time and space... I want to know my cosmological position, that is, my place in both the cosmos and the logos.

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I'm sorry, but this world really is intolerable. What wretched awful creatures we humans are.

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I had this thought 7 months ago, but today I discovered that of course Panofsky had written about it 75 years earlier...

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

"'capable of harming the national interests of our country' — Ministry of Information" is a pretty good blurb...

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

The state broadcaster SVT also did a big profile ("Australia's most famous author") on their fantastic literary program earlier this year (I will link, but it is probably region restricted). We will keep our fingers crossed, or hold our thumbs, as you say in Swedish... www.svtplay.se/video/84doGE...

svtplay.se

Babels bibliotek – Alexis Wright om förtrycket mot urbefolkningen

Australiens mest kända författare, Alexis Wright, brukar ofta nämnas när det ska tippas Nobelpristagare. Wright tillhör Waanyifolket och är en stark förespråkare för aboriginernas rättigheter. Den sen...

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

There have been quite a few translations of Alexis Wright into Swedish recently, which is why I think it will be her this year...

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

It is not my area of expertise, but my suspicion is that the Faroe Islands is a fruitful context. A quick look seems to suggest that although whaling in general (including dolphins) dates back to the Viking Age, there is little documentation from before 1600. books.google.se/books?id=25d...

books.google.se

Pilot Whaling in the Faroe Islands

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Here is the work (plus artist). Many thanks to Helle and Ed for their thoughtful curation and overall fantastic show. I originally envisaged the piece on the wall, but they tested it with the table, and I agree that it gives it an archival character that elevates it to another level.

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Many thanks Deborah! I think I can guess, but I can appreciate all of them anyway as I read through. (This also made me realise that my Messaging settings seem to have changed... so double thanks for that)

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

This is like a mash-up of The Seventh Seal and Indiana Jones... forget about playing chess.

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Anyway... the exhibition opens today at 1400h. Come and discuss the melancholy of survival with me.

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

In this dialectics of melancholy, Benjamin is perhaps, somewhat paradoxically, more optimistic than Agamben about the possibility of escaping the fated determinations of mere/bare life, about the potentiality of some survival beyond mere biological life...

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

'The problem was to separate sublime melancholy, the melenolia ‘illa heroica’ of Marsilius Ficinus, and of Melanchthon, form the ordinary and pernicious kind. A precise regimen of body and soul is combined with astrological magic.’ (p. 151)

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Benjamin continues to follow this dialectical thread: 'the melancholic posed the question of how it might be possible to discover for oneself the spiritual powers of Saturn and yet escape madness.

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

This dialectic continues the astrological theme with the presence of the magic square in the Dürer: ‘The magic square, which is inscribed on the tablet at the head of Dürer’s Melancolia, is the planetary sign of Jupiter, whose influence counteracts the dismal force of Saturn’ (p. 151)

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

There is also what Benjamin calls 'a dialectical trait in the idea of Saturn'. He describes it thus: ‘Like melancholy, Saturn too, this spirit of contradictions, endows the soul, on one hand, with sloth and dullness, on the other with the power of intelligence and contemplation’ (p. 149)

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Reposted by Liam Sprod

Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I made some edits to emphasise the contrast and to give it more of an Andreas Gursky vibe... It still does not quite capture the feeling of the desolate expanse of the hillside rising up towards the sky as you come out from the forest.

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

The greyness of a recently logged hillside against the greyness of impending rain... Welcome to Sweden in autumn.

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Shostakovich also uses the German s for e-flat, plus h for b natural in his musical motif/signature DSCH.

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The nexus of melancholy and fated mere life in Dürer comes together in astrology: ‘The theory of melancholy has a very close connection with the doctrine of stellar influences. And of such influences only the most baleful, that of Saturn, could rule over the melancholy disposition.’ (p. 148)

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

'Genius' is problematic. But it also provides a thread to follow back into the Trauerspiel book, where Benjamin devotes a long section to 'Dürer's genius of winged melancholy' (p. 158). A connection already made in his assertion that 'in great men [the empty world of mere life] produced melancholy.'

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

My uncle has a copy of the 'Shred' and sent me a picture of the first page... 'unfamiliar and unattractive'? Judge for yourself.

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

As a final note: Obviously a lot of care is needed in this issue, especially in the context of the so-called culture wars that surround the horrific violences and injustices of colonial history. I do not deny it, a brutal, inhuman attempted genocide took place in Tasmania, its effects are ongoing.

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

This is not a slight on Muller's novel, it recounts its fascinating story wonderfully. There is just a part of my mind that cannot help but considering things critically and pulling them and the entire world apart in a frenzy of research and analysis...

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

An interesting comparison would be with the voice of Ned Kelly that Peter Carey drew from the Jerilderie letter to narrate 'The True History of the Kelly Gang' (the very title of the work as a novel puts us in the realm of dichtung und warheit and the constructed nature of narrated history.

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

The report Jorgenson makes in the novel, the story he will tell his wife, the historical 'facts' around the events of Hellyer's suicide, and finally the disjunction at work in the possibility of historical fiction in relation to historical fact – dichtung und warheit, so to speak.

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

It probably says more about my own formalist proclivities, but I thought about the potential of this 'unfamiliarity' in terms of Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt [distancing effect], and how it could be used to display the constructed nature of historical discourse. This works on several levels:

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

This unfamiliar and unattractive quality of Jorgenson's voice is not present at all in 'My Heart at Evening'. And although I have no reason to doubt Muller's research and craft, it is wonderfully written, I could not help wondering about the possibilities of unfamiliarity in the context of the novel

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

'in English lands and the considerable amount of practice he had both in speaking and writing our language, he never acquired a facility in English composition. Nearly all his numerous works are written in a style that is both unfamiliar and unattractive to the ordinary reader.'

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I did get a copy of a re-telling of Jorgenson's life from 1891 by James Francis Hogan, titled 'The Convict King', and I was struck by how he describes the need to remediate Jorgenson's own writings: 'Jorgenson was a foreigner, and notwithstanding his long residence

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I started looking for primary sources, especially Jorgenson's 'Shred of Autobiography' published in Hobart in 1835 & 1838. I wanted to hear his own words. I could not find a digitised copy, and I may have to take the train to Copenhagen and the reading room of the Royal Library.

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

The voice of the novel is lucid and the narrative structure straightforward, even with its device of having Jorgen compose the tale of how he will recount the events of his mission to his wife as he walks home after giving an official report to the Governor. The layers of narrative do not interfere.

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

The use of the first person did make me wonder about the issue of Jorgenson's voice. I wondered how this nineteenth-century anglicised Dane, living in colonial Van Diemen's Land, would speak in his head, would there be first language interference, odd references, etc.

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Muller's novel is a fictionalised event featuring Jorgenson as the narrator in the first person. It is a beautiful and terrible book, lucent in its descriptions of nature, while respecting its wild power, and brutal in its context of colonial history, without falling into exploitative vulgarity.

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Liam Sprod @liamsprod.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Jorgenson's life is amazing, he was present at the founding of Hobart, was proclaimed Protector of Iceland after leading a revolution there, worked as a spy for the British during the Napoleonic wars, was in prison in London over gambling debts before being transported back to Tasmania as a convict.

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