thesis instructions

1. Consider death.
2. Consider the deathes of those who have come before you.
3. Go to these places.
4. Record them.

the lens

"The world must be romanticized. In this way its original meaning will be rediscovered. To romanticize is nothing but a qualitative heightening. (...) Insofar as I present the commonplace with significance, the ordinary with mystery, the familiar with the seemliness of the unfamiliar and the finite with the semblance of the infinite, I romanticize it."  

-Novalis

1. Consider Death: the Concept of Life

"How can we think of death in a context that defies the Heideggerian Being-toward Death (how is death concerned with life-living where life is always in some sense beyond the human)?"


 Death… is not a material state; on the contrary, having renounced all matter, it corresponds to a pure form – the empty form of time… it is neither the limitation imposed by matter upon mortal life, … death is rather, the last form of the problematic, the source of problems and questions which designate this (non)being. (Deleuze 1968: 148) 

Chant du cygne

D’après une légende, le cygne, sentant venir sa mort, chanterait une dernière fois, et de la manière la plus merveilleuse qu’il n’ait jamais faite. Le cygne porte aussi le nom de Cygne muet.

Le philosophe grec Socrate en parle au moment de mourir, selon Phédon de Platon. Cette légende est infirmée par Pline l'Ancien dans son oeuvre L'Histoire naturelle : "On dit qu'au moment de mourir les cygnes font entendre un chant lamentable; erreur, je pense : c'est du moins ce qui résulte pour moi de quelques expériences. olorum morte narratur flebilis cantus, falso, ut arbitror, aliquot experimentis."

Pline l’Ancien, L'Histoire naturelle, livre X, chapitre XXXII.

Le madrigal The silver swan d’Orlando Gibbons reprend la légende:

The silver Swan, who living had no Note,
when Death approached, unlocked her silent throat.
Leaning her breast upon the reedy shore,
thus sang her first and last, and sang no more:
"Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes!
"More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise."