Jacques Denis: Marco
Photos
Quotes
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Marco : Pieces of history. What'll we call them? Hours? Years? Centuries? It's the same and never stops. It's eaten with apple sauce. Is this sausage like time? Darwin thought so. But the stuffing changed From one end to the other. Marx thought man would one day stop eating sausage. Einstein ripped off the skin, and then it lost its form. What's the skin made of? Pig intestine. Look at the whole sausage. here are folds and bends. I'm going to talk about ow the folds of time are made. In agricultural societies, time was thought to be cyclic. Each season repeated the same moment. Of course men aged. But only because they wore out. He was the fuel that made the seasonal machine work. Capitalism brought the idea of the highway, the highway of time and progress. Progress means that the winners win not only the battle. They've also been chosen as intrinsically superior beings. Their superiority turned the cycles and seasons into a corkscrew; and the winners were the point of the corkscrew. With their point they opened the bottles of inferior cultures. Drinking till they had enough. Then they smashed the bottles. A new kind of violence. Weapons had killed in the past, but now the verdict of history killed. The winner's history. With this new violence came a new fear for the winners. Fear of the past. Fear of inferiors in their broken bottles. If the past caught up with the winners, it might show as little pity as they had shown. In the last century this fear became scientific. Time became a road with no bends. Its length was a fearsome abstraction. But abstractions take no revenge. From then on, 19th-century thinkers preferred the fear of thought to the fear of the savages with their arrows. And the road was marked with perfect regularity. Millions of years divided into eras, dates, days, working hours, clocking in clocking out, like blood sausage. Today the highway of capitalism is collapsing for more reasons than I can tell you in this bit of sausage, this lesson. In the acorn is the blueprint for the whole tree. What each of you is, was in chromosomes at my conception. Excuse me, your conception. I'm no determinist but in your first cell there was a message you're now reading. Some things make holes in time. You could pass a skewer through them. My father, remember, is a butcher. Der Bratspiess. Time bends so the holes coincide. Why are prophets misunderstood in their own time?Because only half the holes are there. They're between time. No one understood much of Diderot, till Freud came and was called a monster. It took all that while for the holes to coincide. The holes prophets make to see the future are the same ones historians use to look at the past. The holes made by Rousseau today explain the 18th century. You're looking at your watches. We'll finish with a binary rhythm like the heart's. Between each beat there's time. Time is knowing the second stroke is not the first. Time is reduced in synthesis. The human embryo whistles through evolution. In a total synthesis, time disappears.
