“Reading a poem in translation,“ wrote Bialek, “is like kissing a woman through a veil”; and reading Greek poems, with a mixture of katharevousa and the demotic, is like kissing two women. Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what’s between the lines, the mysterious implications.

– Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

Couro de Gato ("Cat Skin") 1962, dir. Joaquim Pedro de Andrade

Robert Mapplethorpe. Untitled (Charles), 1974

Picture of the Starting Point, 1920

Hilma af Klint

To be human is the only way out of being human. An alternative exit— either by unbinding sentience from sapience or by circumventing sapience in favour of a direct engagement with the technological artefact—cannot go beyond the human. Rather it leads to a culture of cognitive pettiness and self-deception that is daily fodder for the most parochial and utilitarian political systems that exist on the planet. In delivering sentience from its so-called sapient yoke, one does not become posthuman, or even animal, but falls back on an ideologically charged ‘biological chauvinism’ that sapience ought to overcome, for it is the very idea of humanist conservatism that misrepresents what is accidental and locally contingent as what is necessary and universal.

Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit

A Philosophy of Walking, Frédéric Gros

Orpheus / Orphée (1950) dir. Jean Cocteau

Poster by Hans Hillmann

Fome de Amor (1968), dir. Nelson Pereira dos Santos

Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.

Giorgio Agamben, from Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press, 2000)