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). The debate between scientific certainty and conjectural knowledge can never be finally resolved. We had better get used to vertigo. References Agamben, Giorgio. 2009. The Signature of All Things. Translated by Luca D’Isanto and Kevin Attell. New York: Zone Books. 85 Method, madness and montage Didi- Huberman, Georges. 2004. ‘Knowledge: Movement (The Man Who Spoke to Butterflies).’ In Aby Warburg and the Image of Motion, edited by Philippe-Alain Michaud, 7–20. New York: Zone Books. Freedberg, David. 2005. ‘ “Warburg’s Mask”: A Study in Idolatry.’ In
’s exclamation on entering – ‘you are manifest housekeepers. What are you sewing here? A fine spot, in good faith. How does your little son?’ (1.3.46–8) – disturbs at this point because it is an eruption of the ordinary into the extraordinary. But the return to domesticity is incomplete as the new guest brings a story of Volumnia’s grandson killing a butterfly: ‘When he caught it, he let it go again, and after it again, and over and over he comes, and
collaboration Les Malheurs des immortels (1922). 10 Ducornet notes how Éluard's poems and Ernst's collages are replete with sacred butterflies, totemic snakes, and talismanic birds, thus evoking a world in which there are no clear lines between humans and other animals, while also issuing a frightening portent: ‘There are no real birds anymore.’ 11 The young girl's mind may have been seeded by Éluard and Ernst's book, as interplays between words and images, imaginative inter
of the closet, spoke powerfully about his experiences: ‘The butterfly and chrysalis scenario – that’s what it felt like. Coming from a caterpillar into a butterfly – that’s what it felt like. To be able to just float off. That first summer when I came out, that was what it felt like. It was amazing. Absolutely amazing.’ Relief and freedom were themes that came up in many people’s stories, as was the idea of being able to be one’s true self. Betty said: ‘I don’t think you can ever be yourself until you come out on some level.’ Although most of the participants
-blue-black sea turtles, marching beneath a huge inflatable turtle. Others are dressed as business tycoons on stilts, alongside monarch butterflies, vegetables, fish and pigs. Drummers beat out the rhythms of resistance in what was to become a significant element in major summit protests. Messages on banners and placards highlight the diversity of those present, with radical environmental groups alongside indigenous rights groups and so on (Slyk, 2002: 56). The Direct Action Network has co-ordinated nonviolent direct action by ten thousand people to stop delegates entering the
, Tzara too evokes Taeuber’s dancing body in terms of abstract movement: ‘Miss S. Taeuber: delirious bizarreness in the spider of the hand vibrates rhythm rapidly ascending to the paroxysm of a beautiful capricious mocking madness’ (1917: 16; 1975: 558).26 Metaphors associating the dancer with the natural world frequently represent a further depersonalisation. For instance, in Richter’s description of the Laban students’ dance at the Saal zur Kaufleuten, referred to above, the dancers are transformed into butterflies: ‘In front of abstract backdrops (“cucumber
defined as ‘foreign’ he lives on the twilit margins of a society that allows its denizens no half-measures. I am trying to create this sense of foreignness in every possible way in my narrative. (Add. MS 88899/1/80) Carter’s deliberate integration of ‘otherness’ resonates throughout Fireworks. For instance, in ‘A Souvenir of Japan’, Carter’s narrator refers to herself as ‘inexpressibly exotic’ and a ‘fabulous beast’ (2009b, 8), deliberately inverting the Occidental narrative of the Orient towards the West. Likewise, in the essay ‘Poor Butterfly’ 208 The arts of
imperial capital.73 Later, butterflies fluttered in Dezeuze’s pastel series of 2003–04, Persistence du taoïsme (Everlastingness of Daoism); three diptychs – six painted ladders – the darker and longer scrolled at the base, were dedicated to the ancient Chinese artists Ma Lin, Shih Tao and Xu Xi in 2006.74 Dezeuze’s passage through media, from split canes to the cathode ray tube, his unique analysis of China’s moment of transition before 1989, his television-related arguments – the challenge of Mao to Confucius and Confucius to Mao – traces a specific trajectory, ending
literary and intellectual world displays a compelling unity: it is a world where Mandelbrotian fractal geometry (here understood as recurrent patterns in nature that defy definition and yet share a fundamental identity not encapsulated by simple rules)1 and the butterfly effect of chaos theory are the reader’s constant companions. Indeed, butterflies (and moths) often flutter a message of kinship from one volume to another as well as between Sebald and two of the many literary presences in his work, Kaf ka and Nabokov. Since the German language is the instrument and
. Like Sohrab’s childhood butterfly collection whose contents nevertheless continue to decay, change and development cannot be artificially arrested. One of the most memorable personifications of this attempt to hold on to what must be allowed to pass is the eccentric spinster Miss Kutpitia. A Parsi Miss Havisham, she preserves in a locked room the belongings of her beloved nephew, Farad, killed in a car accident thirty-five years previously, and carries on conversations with the shadows in her dusty flat. Yet, in a lesson Gustad would do well to learn, an accidental