Original quote in German: “[Ich] sehe mit fühlendem Aug, fühle mit sehender Hand,” translation by the author. Unpublished during Goethe’s life, this quote was first published only in 1914.
Ashley Montagu, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 3.
Plant photosynthesis is probably the most abused metaphor and analogy of life, widely quoted across a diverse spectrum of schools of thought to justify naturalist ideologies. It is believed that photosynthesis is behind a process of energy accumulation central to natural equilibrium and the food chain. However, there are various ways the process of light metabolism could be understood. It could also be understood as a process towards cosmic corruption and fermentation, or as a process towards more “complex architectures of light,” as recently discussed in this Supercommunity series; see Matteo Pasquinelli, “On Solar Databases and the Exogenesis of Light,” in “Supercommunity,” special issue, e-flux journal 65, Day 22 (June 4, 2015) →.
See the insightful account of Runge’s work in Esther Leslie, Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).
Leslie, Sythentic Worlds, 58.
Leslie, Synthetic Worlds, 49. In another essay Runge “reflected on the harmony of animal life, and here he envisaged every organ as an animal in an animal, which grows with its mouth on the anus of another and uses its excretions as nourishment and produces excreta for another in similar fashion.” Ibid, 50.
Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge, Der Bildungstrieb der Stoffe, veranschaulicht in selbstständig gewachsenen Bilder [The formative tendency of substances illustrated by autonomously developed images], Oranienburg, self-published, 1855. New edition ed. Judith Schalansky (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2014).
Leslie, Synthetic Worlds, 68.
George Bataille, “Van Gogh as Prometheus (1937),” October 36 (Spring 1986): 59. As quoted by Charles Stankievech, “Supercritical Decay,” in “Supercommunity,” special issue, e-flux journal 65, Day 61 (July 29, 2015) →.