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Find open, until March 10, the deadline for submission of abstracts and / or proposals for artistic creation, for the No 8 of the Warp Magazine, Oriented by the word "Fragility".

fallen leaves-
when the gods are absent
arise the ruins


(Matsuo Bashô, translated by Joaquim M. Palma)


Perhaps it is easier to find outside of Western tradition a thought guided by fragility-by the evidence of what is fragile-, than in the interior of what we call the "our" culture.
Roland Barthes spoke of the haïku in these terms: an art "contradicting, in that the whole state of thing is immediately, obstinately, victoriously converted into a fragile essence of apparition" (The Empire of Signs). It's quite what happens to the metamorphosis of the leaves already fallen in the sudden vestige of a ruinous emergence: the fragile appearance of an absence. In this sense, fragility is not a mandatory sign of the loss, mortality or disease. She is on the inside of life in her way of manifestation. A sort of secret patent but one needs to make it appear, yet it is against the solid evidence of everything that goes on as "thing". Or as a living body.

However, for art, including literature, this direction of thought will be perhaps less strange than for other regions of the Western spirit. And hence it was an artist, Alberto Giacometti, to say: "I have always had the impression or the feeling of the fragility of the living beings, as if an incredible energy is needed to keep up." There is anything in Kafka's fictions that comes from (or propagating) a similar impression, entire pages in which to stand or move around or act-with the most elemental of purposes-seems to require prodigies of energy and technique. A fragility to there from all forces, dir.

"Strength" is customary word in the philosophical vocabulary and the human sciences, from psychoanalysis to political science. It is not the least in the physical sciences or at least in one part of them. Will this proliferation of forces and of force relations a symptom, a way of obscuring the very idea of fragility, of obstinate to enunciation of fragility at least as long as problem? Would there be a deconstruction of the force that is ongoing and in exercise in the work of the arts? And in the fragility that affects from within the very survival of that work?

In the words about the haiku, Roland Barthes underlines, however, the obstinate and victorious character of the poetic operation, that is, the affirmative way of saying or inscribed the value of the fragility. A few decades ago, Gianni Vattimo moved forward, from Nietzsche and Heidegger, the program of what it called "pensiero debole" as a preferred or necessary condition of postmodernity. It would come to reassess the pertinence, the scope, the effect of that proposition. Can the fragility assert itself as value?

Two ways of enunciating, very diverse, suggest that the question perhaps is neither absurd nor impertinent. The first, from Wittgenstein, forms one of the handwritten annotations that gave substance to the posthumous book edited with the title Culture and Value: " What I write here can be weak material; well, in that case I am not able to bring to light the important and great things. But hidden in these weak observations are great possibilities. " (Translation by Jorge Mendes)

At the other extreme, the present attempt to induce and figure out the value of fragility recalls two more haiku from Bashô, in a gesture that also invites to consider the fragility, today, of the literary borders and the exemplary opening of certain poetry to the human circle.

 

The first is a summer haiku:
under the fragility of my hat
enjoying the freshness-
I am alive!
The second is a haiku from the late Spring:
on the same day
were born Buda
and a small deer


(Matsuo Bashô, translated by Joaquim M. Palma)
 

 

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