Catherine Pagani: “Eastern Magnificence & European Ingenuity”: Clocks of Late Imperial China (2001)

“The period from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries was one of complex change for the Chinese. Europe was eagerly looking to the East with an interest in developing a China market, not just in commercial and diplomatic enterprises but in evangelical ventures as well. The resulting contacts produced significant cultural exchanges and appropriations, as well as misconceptions and stereotypes. Profoundly affected by these interactions were the areas of technology and the decorative arts. Europe became enamored of Chinese style, and a fashion known as chinoiserie permeated the decorative arts. In China, one result of Sino-European contact was the introduction of a new and important technology: the Western mechanical clock.

Called in Chinese zimingzhong, or “self-ringing bells,” these elaborate clocks were used as status symbols, decorative items, and personal adornments, and only occasionally as timepieces. Most importantly, they were signifiers of cultural power: Europeans, whether missionaries or ambassadors, controlled the introduction of both object and technology, and they used this control to advantage in gaining access to the highest reaches of Chinese society.

Through her focus on technology and the decorative arts, Catherine Pagani contributes to an overall understanding of the nature and extent of European influence in late Imperial China and of the complex interaction between these two cultures. This study’s interdisciplinary approach will make it of interest to those in the fields of art history, the history of clockwork and of science and technology, Jesuit history, Qing-dynasty history, and Asian studies, as well as to the educated general reader.”

Publisher University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2001
ISBN 0472112082, 9780472112081
286 pages

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See also Volume 4-2 (part j) of Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China

Martin Hägglund: Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (2012)

“Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov transformed the art of the novel in order to convey the experience of time. Nevertheless, their works have been read as expressions of a desire to transcend time—whether through an epiphany of memory, an immanent moment of being, or a transcendent afterlife. Martin Hägglund takes on these themes but gives them another reading entirely. The fear of time and death does not stem from a desire to transcend time, he argues. On the contrary, it is generated by the investment in temporal life. From this vantage point, Hägglund offers in-depth analyses of Proust’s Recherche, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Nabokov’s Ada.

Through his readings of literary works, Hägglund also sheds new light on topics of broad concern in the humanities, including time consciousness and memory, trauma and survival, the technology of writing and the aesthetic power of art. Finally, he develops an original theory of the relation between time and desire through an engagement with Freud and Lacan, addressing mourning and melancholia, pleasure and pain, attachment and loss. Dying for Time opens a new way of reading the dramas of desire as they are staged in both philosophy and literature.”

Publisher Harvard University Press, 2012
ISBN 0674070844, 9780674070844
197 pages
via falsedeity

Debates: Adrian Johnston/Jean-Michel Rabaté/Hägglund (Derrida Today, 2013), Michael W. Clune & Hägglund (CR, 2015).

Reviews: David Winters (Los Angeles Review of Books, 2013), Humberto Brito (NDPR, 2013), Sarah Senk (MLN, 2013), Jennifer Yusin (Studies in the Novel, 2013), Zohar Atkins (Oxonian Review, 2013), Marc Farrant (Textual Practice, 2013), Audrey Wasser (Modern Philology, 2014).

Wikipedia
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PDF (updated on 2020-10-29)

Henri Bergson: Mémoire et vie (1957–) [FR, ES, PT]

Dans cette collection a paru ce choix de textes de Bergson. Ces textes, qui dépassent rarement deux pages, sont extraits de la plupart des ouvrages de Bergson et disposés selon un ordre systématique par Gilles Deleuze. Une table analytique clôt le volume.

Selected by Gilles Deleuze
Publisher Presses Universitaires de France, Paris
154 pages

Mémoire et vie (French, Fourth Edition, 1957/1975, part of the Index is missing)
Memoria y vida (Spanish, trans. Mauro Armiño, 1977, added on 2014-5-27)
Memória e Vida (Portuguese, trans. Claudia Berliner with Bento Prado Neto, 2006)

See also Deleuze’s Bergsonism (1966-)