A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film.-Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things Transparent thingsThe opening generic of Tsai Ming-Liang's Face (2009) has just ended. In the background, we hear the hum of a café. On a white screen, calligraphy of the Chinese character for face, 脸 (lian), fades-in. It is full and well-proportioned, yet it seems to irresistibly flee toward the right, as if drawn in a fury -or better, furiously drawn forth. This transient and animated calligraphic gesture already prefigures the general movement of the movie to come: faces moving through and passing away; faces in time, trans-appearing faces.Simultaneously, we hear a short dialogue between the café waiter and some visitors. 'Bonjour. We're looking for Antoine. -You just missed him.' Through the café's window, we see a flock of pigeons rapidly vanishing. We are left with an empty cup of coffee on a table, a view on the café's descending street, and some pale, shadow-like reflections on the window of the movement of the people inside the café. Antoine was here. His cup is still there. The film production crew had an appointment with him at 10h. Too late -he is at the dentist now. Xiao Kang's reflection appears where Antoine

What does it mean to initiate life? According to Giorgio Agamben, the question of initiating life concerns how we conceive and experiment with the “how” of a form of life. In short, it involves ways of envisaging an absolutely immanent life on the threshold of its political and ethical intensification. To follow Agamben's paradigmatic problematization, an initiated life is a life made inextricable from its manner or form—a form-of-life. It is within this practical and ethopoietical horizon of thought that I envisage Agamben's work here, on the lookout for what I call “signs of passion.” Signs of passion are what an initiated life is composed of; they are inherently precarious and participate in a political use of intimacy in which a form-of-life nurtures and preserves its sense of nonknowledge and the generative limits of its own (absence of) mystery.

"Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains" -A.N. WhiteheadThe aim of the Immediations book series is to prolong the wonder sustaining philosophic thought into transdisciplinary encounters. Its premise is that concepts are for the enacting: they must be experienced. Thought is lived, else it expires.It is most intensely lived at the crossroads of practices, and in the in-between of individuals and their singular endeavors: enlivened in the weave of a relational fabric. Co-composition. "The smile spreads over the face, as the face fits itself onto the smile" -A. N. Whitehead Which practices enter into co-composition will be left an open question, to be answered by the Series authors. Art practice, aesthetic theory, political theory, movement practice, media theory, maker culture, science studies, architecture, philosophy … the range is free. We invite you to roam it.

Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Association Vacarme. © Association Vacarme. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays.La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.

No abstract