aphelis

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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.”
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.
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]
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.
Digital facsimile of a postcard from Gershom Scholem to Walter Benjamin, with the poem “Greeting from Angelus” dated July 15, 1921
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»
René Daumal
Faculties of the Future
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
Cover image for Carlo Michelstaedter’s Persuasion and Rhetoric, Yale University Press, 2004