The Helmholtz Curves : : Tracing Lost Time / / Henning Schmidgen.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Schmidgen, Henning,
• MitwirkendeR: Schott, Nils F.,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Fordham University Press, , [2014]; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Series: Forms of Living
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (248 p.)

This book reconstructs the emergence of the phenomenon of “lost time” by engaging with two of the most significant time experts of the nineteenth century: the German physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz and the French writer Marcel Proust.Its starting point is the archival discovery of curve images that Helmholtz produced in the context of pathbreaking experiments on the temporality of the nervous system in 1851. With a “frog drawing machine,” Helmholtz established the temporal gap between stimulus and response that has remained a core issue in debates between neuroscientists and philosophers.When naming the recorded phenomena, Helmholtz introduced the term temps perdu, or lost time. Proust had excellent contacts with the biomedical world of late-nineteenth-century Paris, and he was familiar with this term and physiological tracing technologies behind it. Drawing on the machine philosophy of Deleuze, Schmidgen highlights the resemblance between the machinic assemblages and rhizomatic networks within which Helmholtz and Proust pursued their respective projects.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Preface -- Introduction -- 1. Curves Regained -- 2. Semiotic Things -- 3. A Research Machine -- 4. Networks of Time, Networks of Knowledge -- 5. Time to Publish -- 6. Messages from the Big Toe -- 7. The Return of the Line -- Conclusion -- Chronology -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index