"A victim, for Lyotard, is not just someone who has been wronged, but someone who has also lost the power to present this wrong. This disempowerment can occur in several ways: it may quite literally be a silencing; the victim may be threatened into silence or in some other way disallowed to speak. Alternatively, the victim may be able to speak, but that speech is unable to present the wrong done in the discourse of the rule of judgement. The victim may not be believed, may be thought to be mad, or not be understood. The discourse of the rule of judgement may be such that the victim’s wrong cannot be translated into its terms; the wrong may not be presentable as a wrong."
Showing posts with label Textuality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Textuality. Show all posts
Sunday, 12 June 2011
Monday, 6 June 2011
Fenêtres: II
[Quotes from Jean-Bertrand Pontalis' Windows, part 2]
"You assume he is our father. No, he's mine, I am his daughter. I'm the one he loved.
— How do parents go about convincing each of their children that they were the favorite one? And how can one be satisfied with the conventional statement, "I love you both the same"?
— J. slams the door when her husband, who had not concealed his affair with B. from her, declares, thinking it would placate her, "But I love you. I love you both, one as much as the other," making his case worse by adding, "in different ways." " (62 - 63)
"Hypermnesia, this hypertrophy of recording memory, all this energy concentrated in order to forget nothing. [...]
— Forgetting is necessary to give thickness to time, to access perceptive time. This test of mourning, of loss, of the separation with one's self is what frees us from reproducing sameness. A memory that would desire no loss is a dead memory. A living memory demands forgetting. Dead memory recorded everything except the living moments of today, which cannot be recorded.
— Hypermnesia, insomnia: they are sisters. Memory is what is asleep in us, our still waters." (69)
"Trying day, tiring, session after session, they all look alike, they all keep endlessly repeating themselves, I've heard it a hundred times [...]
— At night, to distract me from this day that doesn't end, I pick up a novel [...] It often happens, said Therese, that one invents sicknesses for oneself after a death. It's a way of feeling less alone. You split in half if you will. You take care of yourself as if you were an other. You are two again: myself and the one I"m taking care of. [...]
— A monad without doors or windows. Hostile in front of everything that would disturb self-reliance.
Analysis is, perhaps, along with love, the only experience that takes you "out of yourself." " (81 - 83)
"Clearings: light, fragile rays of sun through the leaves, opening, but opening through a crack that for so long was not visible. [...]
— In my clearings, I am never alone." (113 - 114)
"You assume he is our father. No, he's mine, I am his daughter. I'm the one he loved.
— How do parents go about convincing each of their children that they were the favorite one? And how can one be satisfied with the conventional statement, "I love you both the same"?
— J. slams the door when her husband, who had not concealed his affair with B. from her, declares, thinking it would placate her, "But I love you. I love you both, one as much as the other," making his case worse by adding, "in different ways." " (62 - 63)
"Hypermnesia, this hypertrophy of recording memory, all this energy concentrated in order to forget nothing. [...]
— Forgetting is necessary to give thickness to time, to access perceptive time. This test of mourning, of loss, of the separation with one's self is what frees us from reproducing sameness. A memory that would desire no loss is a dead memory. A living memory demands forgetting. Dead memory recorded everything except the living moments of today, which cannot be recorded.
— Hypermnesia, insomnia: they are sisters. Memory is what is asleep in us, our still waters." (69)
"Trying day, tiring, session after session, they all look alike, they all keep endlessly repeating themselves, I've heard it a hundred times [...]
— At night, to distract me from this day that doesn't end, I pick up a novel [...] It often happens, said Therese, that one invents sicknesses for oneself after a death. It's a way of feeling less alone. You split in half if you will. You take care of yourself as if you were an other. You are two again: myself and the one I"m taking care of. [...]
— A monad without doors or windows. Hostile in front of everything that would disturb self-reliance.
Analysis is, perhaps, along with love, the only experience that takes you "out of yourself." " (81 - 83)
"Clearings: light, fragile rays of sun through the leaves, opening, but opening through a crack that for so long was not visible. [...]
— In my clearings, I am never alone." (113 - 114)
Thursday, 2 June 2011
Fenêtres: I
[Quotes from Jean-Bertrand Pontalis' Windows, part 1]"Geography: The sunken part of the earth's surface, situated below sea level and generally filled in with water.
— These depressions have always been of unequal depth, which allows the following distinctions: a neritic zone or all marine waters that lie at depths of less than 3,000 meters, a pelagic zone that extends from 3,000 to 5,000 meters deep and an abyssal zone that includes large marine craters beyond 5,000 meters deep. [...]
— The abyssal mother at the very bottom of depression?" (26 - 27)
"I can only trust signs and no sign is reliable. [...]
— Hypochondria: my organs persecute me. My organs: so many objects inside of me became my present and potential adversaries, merciless attackers. I am now their prey.
— Jealous passion: she is hiding something from me, she lies, she has a life of her own and that's it -- I have nothing left in me except this "object," I am conflated with it. I am possessed [...]
— When the woman he thought he loved left him -- she was his, he was hers -- this man became a hypochondriac." (38 - 39)
"Meaning is not the opposite of nonsense. If you work at it, if you "rack your brains," you can always find some meaning in nonsense. Meaning is opposed to the formless, to the meaningless." (55)
"[The sensitive] quickly transform their perceptions, or rather their impressions, into signs, or rather into clues. They extend the empire of uncertain signs well beyond its definite borders [...]
— The jealous type is sensitive, always on the lookout for clues proving that he has been duped -- he isn't always mistaken; the lover also, about signs that would assure him that he is loved -- he is often mistaken." (56 - 57)
"[A]ll our efforts to master what we aren't assured of grasping or retaining, [...] the whole game of representations, which suffer from the lack of presence and that however tireless those representations are as well, they look for it, demand it, this presence.
— All this thread, as fragile as it is, is what connects us to the other, to life. Should it break -- existence is held only by a thread -- then it's death." (60)
Saturday, 21 May 2011
Fæg Robotics
Expansion upon Distention:
whereas, Science produces Functives (predictabilities in a becoming-useful on a plane of reference), Philosophy creates Concepts (consistency in a becoming-thought on a plane of immanence), and Art composes Works (sensation in a becoming-other on a plane of composition), as their respective modes of response to the provocations and problematics of existence and enhoming in chaos, we wonder at the enclosing of this discourse in political sovereignty; what of the warriors and labourers in chaos.
Philosopher-gods: one-eyed, celeritas, magician-emperors, signs that capture, tying knots at a distance, encasting nets, the bind/bond, making moves 'once and for all'.
Scientist-kings: one-armed, gravitas, jurist-priest-kings, law and technology, giving laws, making a pact, alliances, laying out a field, organizing, principling and disciplining, appropriating, starting all over again each and every move.
Artist-barbarians: not the warriors appropriated by the State maschine with their dō and honour codes. (No more magic violence of the emperor; no more military institution of the king) Instead, the divine law-destroying violence and terror of barbarians flooding out of the desert and cutting intense nomad lines through cities and forests, burning as they go. Against State gravity disciplining art into craftspersons of paint, clay, and so on, or into principles of art theory (and interpretosis proper) and history (and the hysteria of artistic periods/movements/collectives), the pure aesthete is the intensifier of the outside, the scapegoat turned queer, turned into the goat's anus demanding a new anti-logic of anilingus, the guerrilla whose secrecy and spying form a War maschine against. Simply: counter.
This leaves the martial class of warriors: the engineers and applied scientists who protect the Law and harvest technocratics with reason. And, the caste of fecundity: the varieties of proles. But, among the fecund, the applied theorists, or theorists for short, who finally make use of the conceptual universes of philosophers, turning these dusty grave-stones into homes, into centripetal eco-nomies of (dis)contact, and whose activity becomes the social. Not sign-making, but sign-working: semiurgy.
We each are already malfunctioning, wounded, blinded, maimed techno-bodies, patchwork circuits, who have to stop pretending. The signs that control us, the signs we emit, the signs we hope to dominate, or eat; stop rooting in the filth, becoming a petty king or prophet to a false god, or burning our lips and praying without praying for psychosis. Labour in the signs, rustle up their ghosts, and set them to work; become conjurors and sorcerors. We must learn to be semiurgists, ready to speak the tongues our gods have taught us then forbid us to use.
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