notes.husk.org/likes images.

Top, photograph by Leo Ramírez, from the series Los Anegados, 2010. Via. At the lowest end of the prison power structure are los anegados – the unwanted ones – prisoners who have angered the pranes or allies of the pranes, on the inside or outside, and fear for their lives. And so, in an act of desperation, they stitch their mouths shut. Within the country’s prisons there is an unspoken, but religiously followed, agreement among inmates: When one sews his lips, no one can kill him. More. Bottom, Helena Almeida, Ouve-me [Hear Me], 1979, 4:50 min. Via. Ouve-me shows a mouth with the work’s title superimposed over the lips, making it look as if the lips were sewn together.

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d’Alembert: And how?

Diderot: How? I shall make it edible.

d’Alembert: Make marble edible? That doesn’t seem easy to me.

Diderot: It’s my business to show you the process. I take the statue you see there, I put it in a mortar, then with great blows from a pestle …

d’Alembert: Careful, please; that’s Falconet’s masterpiece! If it were only by Huez or some one like that –.

Diderot: Falconet won’t mind; the statue is paid for, and Falconet cares little for present respect and not at all for that of posterity.

d’Alembert: Go on then, crush it to powder.

Diderot: When a block or marble is reduced to impalpable powder, I mix it with humus or leaf-mould; I knead them well together; I water the mixture, I let it decompose for a year or two or a hundred, time doesn’t matter to me. When the whole has turned into a more or less homogenous substance, into humus, do you know what I do?

d’Alembert: I’m sure you don’t eat humus.

Diderot: No; but there is a connection, of assimilation, a link, between the humus and myself, a latus as the chemist would say.

d’Alembert: And that is plant life?

Diderot: Quite right, I sow peas, beans, cabbages, and other vegetables; these plants feed on the soil and I feed on the plants.

d’Alembert: Whether it’s true or false, I like this passage from marble into humus, from humus to the vegetable kingdom, from the vegetable to the animal kingdom, to flesh.

Diderot: So, then, I make flesh, or soul as my daughter said, an actively sensitive substance […]

Extract from “Conversation between d’Alembert and Diderot”, Diderot, Interpreter of Nature, trans. Jean Stewart and Jonathan Kemp (New York: International Publishers, 1937) and quoted in Lewis White Beck (ed.), 18th-Century Philosophy (New York: The Free Press, 1966), pp. 173-174. Via.