Armando Verdiglione

Leonardo da Vinci

On the Center of the Galaxy. The Mirror, the Gaze, the Voice.

Wisdom in the soul is an excellent thing.

(TV, 4)

Leonardo enunciates Anaxagoras in his way (CA, 1067 r): Everything comes from everything, and from everything, each thing is made, and each thing returns to everything, because that which there is in the elements is of the same elements. Every thing. Each thing. Rather than the totality. The material of things. The elements. The coming and going. Whence. And whither. How. Certainly, Anaxagoras. Leonardo. In his way.

Leonardo reads Anaxagoras as a Catholic philosopher. The original word. Entire. The infinite of the word. The current infinite. Anaxagoras. Teacher of Euripides and Pericles. Anaxagoras and Leonardo. Or of intellect. Or of intelligence. Or of the artificial brain. Affinity of themes. The insoluble antinomies. The squaring of the circle. The Milky Way. The rain. The air. The earthquakes. The volcanos. The fossils. The genius. The myth. The particular. The time. Like Anaxagoras. And differently than Anaxagoras. The entire. The integral. By integration. The all: between the pleonasm and the infinite of the word.

The individual is theorem of the point. Rather than the point. Enunciated. It pertains to operational logic as the logic of the enunciated. The point and the counterpoint: stigmatic logic. The semblant. The object of the word. That which hinders any grasp on the point and on the counterpoint. And the surface? Dyadic or relational logic: surface as opening. The surface as a cut, time, pertains to functional logic. And the spiral is the force, intellectual, of the word.

Point and counterpoint: condition of movement and spiral, of the revolution of the word towards the cipher. The semblant resides in the word. Rather than in the substance. Unsituable site. Singular trine. Unplural. Unpopular. Not the place of the semblant, of the simulacrum, of the simultaneity. Nor of the surface. Nor of the spiral. The undeniable nothing. The undeniable semblant. Without opposition to Being, as in the tale of peoples.

This is the prophecy: “Of the hemispheres that are infinite and that are divided into infinite lines, in such a way that each man has one of these under the one and the other foot. They will talk to one another and touch one another and embrace one another, the men standing in different hemispheres, and they will understand each other's language” (CA, 1033 v). The center: point and counterpoint. One foot. The other foot. A hemisphere. The other hemisphere. The infinite of time. Hence writing, communication, understanding.

No punctuation in the notebooks. The point as a tract among words, among syntagmas. Just to indicate that the distinction (the semblant) is other, the punctuation is other, the rhythm is other. Absolutely not grammatical. Absolutely not semiological. Comparison with the semblant. Something turns and something falls. The mirror. Something is subtracted and something escapes. The gaze. Something is dreamt and something forgotten. The voice. The point: condition of culture as invention, of the machine, of the route. Counterpoint: condition of art, of technique, of the game, of the road. Route and road: the itinerary. Intellectual. Rather than mental. Rather than psychopharmacological. The point is not point of view. And not even the counterpoint. Inspecular. The mirror. No view of the world.

The semblant: the center. CA, 412 v: “The center of the universe is not the center of any element.” The earth, “like a ball, is suspended in the air.” Unstable earth. Mobile the center. The balance. The earth. The balance of the earth. The arms of the balance. The center of the galaxy? Where to grasp it? Black center (CA, 729 r): “it does as do hounds in a hunt, the species that please him, he takes those.” The center, provocation and questioning. Simulant and simulacrum. Simultaneity. Semblant. Lei, 36 r: the huge cavern, the center of the world, the center in the water, the lightness, the air. “The sinking of countries, as in the Dead Sea of Syria, that is, Sodom and Gommorah.” Lei, 35 v: the center of the galaxy. Where is it to be found?

“The object moves the sense” (W, 80 v). The semblant. Mirror. Gaze. Voice. Their color. Ungraspable: dark. The coin: the color. The semblant as unbearable. Condition. Rather than support. The painter, who acts as a mirror (A, 82 r), begins “to counterfeit, with his art, all the qualities of the forms that Nature produces.” “Where, in going about in the countryside, let your judgment fall on the various objects, and gradually regard first one thing, then another thing.” Some, “fatigued by their own imagination,” say that they have a tired mind and abandon their work and, meeting with friends or relatives, do not even greet them. A, 104 v: the mirror “makes things seem distinct to you.” The impalpable miror. The inspecular of the mirror and of speculation. Nature as a mirror. Nature as a painting. Variant of the mode of artifice and of its effects. Condition of the artifice: the semblant.

Without predicate logic, the optical entrusts vision to the structure of the semblant. To the syntax: kinesis and kinema (movement and cinema). To the phrase: theory and theatre. To the pragma: the structure of the Other. On to the writing of the semblant. On to the unimaginable.

“Things in relief seen up close with only one eye will appear similar to a perfect picture” (TV, 74). Relief is not given by the eye. Proceding from relief, the mode of the irreconcilable, the eye is taken by vision, by what things seem, by the structure of the semblant and by its writing. The picture is perfect, because it is finished. “If you touch the eye of the other man on the mirror, it will appear to him that you touch your own” (CA, 387 v). The eye as trompe-l'oeil. The deceitful “one.” The deceit appropriate to the otherness of the semblant. No deceit of the Other. And no eye of the Other. The gaze is invisible: point of subtraction and point of escape. “The masters do not trust to the judgment of the eye, because it always deceives” (CU). A, 27 r: “From which species the eye makes itself target and magnet.” The species of the air. The stone. The gaze. Provocation of the “spiritual virtue.” No eye of the world. No secret or common knowledge about the Other. The pupil. The intensity of the light: “And this thing already tricked me once in the painting of an eye, and thence I learned” (Ft, II, 158 v).

“Write the cause of the voice with no sound, as made by those who speak into the ear of another” (W, 134 r). The voice. Cause of truth. Point of abstraction and point of oblivion. Condition of the doing and of the writing about doing. CA, 211 v: “The voice is often heard in its simulacrum and not in the site of the real voice. And this happened in Ghiera D'Adda, that the fire that it took in the air gave twelve simulacra of tone in twelve clouds, and the cause was not understood.” The voice as ungraspable cause. Condition of the wall of sound and of the thread of Ariadne. CA, 987 v: “The ear is deceived with its perspective of the voice, which seems to move farther away even though not changing position.” The voice is the condition of the undulation of sound. Condition of the listening equipment. And of the diplomatic tongue.