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Sorbonne Nouvelle
TODESSA SEASON #3, EPISODE #2

PRIME TIMES PASSATI
Prime Times Passati
Episode #2

Livestream from Todessa

Camera: Tman
Cast: Totleb & Co.
Editor: Todito
Soundmix: Todonsky Junior
Directed by: T.L.

TOPICS
Sorbonne Nouvelle, Un grand sommeil noir, Non consumiamo Marx, Giraffa gracilis, Résistance, Fine Arts Eschatology, Paideia

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PAIDEIA / Etymology

From Ancient Greek παιδείᾱ (paideíā, “rearing of a child, education”), from παιδεύω (paideúō, “rear a child”) +‎ -ίᾱ (-íā), from παῖς (paîs, “child”).

Pronunciation

Noun

paideia (uncountable)

  1. (Ancient Greece,historical, education) An Athenian system of education designed to give students a broad cultural background focusing integration into the public life of the city-state  with subject matter including gymnastics, grammar, rhetoric, music, mathematics,geography,natural history and philosophy
  2. (Ancient Greece,historical, education) The epitome of physical and intellectual achievement to which an Ancient Greek citizen could aspire; societal and cultural perfection.

Synonyms

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PAUL VERLAINE / UN GRAND SOMMEIL NOIR 

Un grand sommeil noir
Tombe sur ma vie :
Dormez, tout espoir,
Dormez, toute envie !

Je ne vois plus rien,
Je perds la mémoire
Du mal et du bien…
Ô la triste histoire !

Je suis un berceau
Qu’une main balance
Au creux d’un caveau :
Silence, silence !

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NON CONSUMIAMO MARX / Luigi Nono

The monolithic Non Consumiamo Marx, composed 1969, is based on readings from slogans used during the May 1968 Paris riots, along a background of recordings made during the 1968 Venice Biennale protestations. The music consists of a noisy electroacoustic montage of protestation sounds with dense electronic drones, mixed in a rather aggressive way.

During the 1960s, in addition to his boycott of official, bourgeois concert venues, Luigi Nono (1924-1990) abandoned orchestral music in favor of works for magnetic tape, supposedly easier to set up in the streets or in factories on light PA systems, as the composer wanted to connect with workers directly. Accordingly, in 1968, Nono decided to boycott the Venice Biennale, which was considered by leftists a “fortress of bourgeois art”. The 1968 Biennale was marked by student protest, gallery occupation and violent riot police confrontations. In 1969, Nono used audio recordings from these events in Non Consumiamo Marx, or Don’t Consume Marx, to protest against the compulsory Biennale. Both Un Volto, Del Mare and Non Consumiamo Marx were premiered at Fête de l’Huma in 1969, the annual French Communist Party festival, where Nono was invited as a member of the Central Committee of the Italian Communist Party.

NON CONSUMIAMO MARX ( 1969) / Text

1 Ouvrez les fenêtres de votre coeur

2 Le vent se lève il faut tenter de vivre

3 Ne consommons pas Marx

4 Seul la vérité est révolutionnaire

5 L’immagination prend le pouvoir

6 Aimez-vous les uns sur les autres

7 Jeunes femmes rouges toujours plus belles

8 La poésie est dans la rue

9 Il faut du rouge pour sortir du noir

10 La revolution doit cesser d’être pour exister

11 Dessous les pavés c’est la plage

12 Je t’aime! Oh! Dites-le avec des pavés!!!

13 Embrasse ton amour sans lâcher ton fusil

14 Quand le doigt montre la lune l’imbecile regarde le doigt

15 L’action ne doit pas être une réaction mais une création

16 Si besoin était de recourir à la force ne restes pas au milieu

17 Ici, on spontane

18 Plus je fais l’amour plus j’ai envie de faire la révolution

     Plus je fais la révolution plus j’ai envie de faire l’amour

19 La barricade ferme la rue mais ouvre la voie

20 Mao Tse Tung wan wan suyn

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SPEAKERS

BARTHES

Roland Gérard Barthes (1915–1980) was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician. His ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, social theory, anthropology and post-structuralism.

LACAN

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (April 13, 1901 to September 9, 1981) was a major figure in Parisian intellectual life for much of the twentieth century. Sometimes referred to as “the French Freud,” he is an important figure in the history of psychoanalysis. His teachings and writings explore the significance of Freud’s discovery of the unconscious both within the theory and practice of analysis itself as well as in connection with a wide range of other disciplines. Particularly for those interested in the philosophical dimensions of Freudian thought, Lacan’s oeuvre is invaluable. Over the course of the past fifty-plus years, Lacanian ideas have become central to the various receptions of things psychoanalytic in Continental philosophical circles especially.

DELEUZE

Gilles Deleuze (January 18, 1925–November 4, 1995) was one of the most influential and prolific French philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. Deleuze conceived of philosophy as the production of concepts, and he characterized himself as a “pure metaphysician.” In his magnum opus Difference and Repetition, he tries to develop a metaphysics adequate to contemporary mathematics and science—a metaphysics in which the concept of multiplicity replaces that of substance, event replaces essence and virtuality replaces possibility. Deleuze also produced studies in the history of philosophy (on Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson, Spinoza, Foucault, and Leibniz), and on the arts (a two- volume study of the cinema, books on Proust and Sacher-Masoch, a work on the painter Francis Bacon, and a collection of essays on literature.) Deleuze considered these latter works as pure philosophy, and not criticism, since he sought to create the concepts that correspond to the artistic practices of painters, filmmakers, and writers. In 1968, he met Félix Guattari, a political activist and radical psychoanalyst, with whom he wrote several works, among them the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia, comprised of Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Their final collaboration was What is Philosophy? (1991).

Deleuze is noteworthy for his rejection of the Heideggerian notion of the “end of metaphysics.” In an interview, he once offered this self-assessment: “I feel myself to be a pure metaphysician…. Bergson says that modern science hasn’t found its metaphysics, the metaphysics it would need. It is this metaphysics that interests me.”

DEBORD

Guy Louis Debord (28 December 1931, Paris – 30 November 1994, Bellevue-la-Montagne, Haute-Loire) was a French writer, theoretician, filmmaker, poet and revolutionary. He was one of the founders of Lettrist International from 1952 to 1957, then of the Situationist International from 1957 to 1972, of which he edited the French magazine. He is the author of Society of the Spectacle.

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UN GRAND SOMMEIL NOIR / Composers

Originally titled Berceuse (Cellulairement, no. 8).

Authorship

by Paul Verlaine (1844 – 1896), no title, written 1873, appears in Sagesse, in Sagesse III, no. 5, first published 1880 

Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive)

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Guy Debord, Paul Verlaine, Maurice Ravel, Edgard Varèse, Nadia Boulanger, Luigi Nono, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Hartmut Höll, Mireille Delunsch, Riccardo Chailly, Concertgebouw Orchestra, Edwin Crossley-Mercer, Lucy Mauro, freesound.org, Monoskop, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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LINKS

Chez Totleben | GOT | To Desca | Moon Lake | Papyri | Place Fantôme | Ivan Stanev

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