Monumental Fragments: Places of Philosophy in the Age of Dispersion (Transmission)

158 Pages·2013·0.674 MB·English

by  George Vassilacopoulos

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MONUMENTAL FRAGMENTS
TRANSMISSION
Transmission denotes the
transfer of information,
objects or forces from one
place to another, from
one person to another.
Transmission implies
urgency, even emergency:
a line humming, an alarm
sounding, a messenger
bearing news. Through
Transmission interven-
tions are supported, and
opinions overturned.
Transmission republishes
classic works in philoso-
phy, as it publishes works
that re-examine classical
philosophical thought.
Transmission is the name
for what takes place.
MONUMENTAL FRAGMENTS
PLACES OF PHILOSOPHY IN
THE AGE OF DISPERSION
George Vassilacopoulos
re.press
PO Box 40, Prahran, 3181, Melbourne, Australia
http://www.re-press.org
© G. Vassilacopoulos 2013
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Vassilacopoulos, George, author.
Monumental fragments : places of philosophy in the age of
dispersion / George Vassilacopoulos.
9780980305296 (paperback/ebook)
Series: Transmission.
Philosophy.
190
Designed and Typeset by A&R
This book is produced sustainably using plantation timber, and printed in the
destination market reducing wastage and excess transport.
CONTENTS
Untitled 9
Rhapsodies of Emptiness 91
Untitled 103
Paradoxes 111
Untitled 113
The Command 131
Untitled 153
5
For Toula Nicolacopoulos
Fellow thinker and silent witness who teaches that before the
clarity of thinking there is the rebellion of loving.
Every word is a doorway
to a gathering, one often cancelled,
and that’s when a word is true: when it insists on the gathering.
(Yannis Ritsos, ‘The meaning of simplicity’,
translation from the Greek)

After Hegel and no longer able to write a manifesto we
can only gather the fragments of the gathering of the
future.
Philosophy arises in a philosophical world. It is pure con-
ceptuality, the vision that is empty of being, the thinking
of being without being, gathered in a single mind as the
topos of the gathering of visionary concepts. As thinking
thought, the thinker expands infinitely to embrace the
‘we’, albeit only in principle. In this sense his embracing
remains unpopulated. The philosopher knows that the
house that philosophy builds is to become the dwelling
of those who arrive from the distant future. Philosophy
is a welcoming from a far. This is the highest manifesta-
tion of the gathering’s power to ‘submit to infinite pain’
and withstand its own self as the vortex of otherness. It
sinks into the depth of its kenosis without losing itself. In
and out of this deepening philosophy emerges from the
cosmic darkness that the gathering gathers. In philoso-
phy the gathering recollects its being as a thanatology—as
the dying of its death—through which it practices a de-
fiant and visionary emerging of love out of death—that
of the concept and of history.
For the communist poet: we’ve always lived somewhere
else, and only when someone loves us do we return for
a little while (Tasos Livaditis). The fragment is the topos
9