A moving prism

Image: Cactus Man, Odilon Redon - 1881 » How horrible boredom is – how horribly boring. I know no stronger expression, none truer, for only like knows like. If only there were a higher expression, a stronger one, then at least there would still be another movement. I lie stretched out, inert; all I see is emptiness, all I live on is emptiness, all I move in is emptiness. I don’t even suffer pain. At least the vulture kept pecking at Pr ometheus’s liver; at least the poison kept dropping on Loki; there were interruptions, however monotonous. Even pain has lost its power to refresh me. If I were offered all the world’s glories or all its torments, I’d be equally indifferent, I wouldn’t turn over either to reach for them or escape from them. I die death itself. What could possibly divert me? If I saw a loyalty that outlasted every trial, an enthusiasm that bore everything, a faith that moved mountains; if I sensed a thought that bound together the finite and the infinite. But my soul’s po

Image: The Key, Jackson Pollock , 1946 » Are we hearing from Derrida again, does he still live, or is this what is left of him in the words we read and speak? A certain haunting or spectrality is induced through this equivocation, and this equivocation, he tells us, is structural, even originary. We expect survival to come later, as a concept that follows a life, as a predicament we face upon the death of the author, but Derrida tells us, here, at the end of his life, that the predicament was always there and that this equivocation, this question of survival, even this imperative to affirm survival, is there from the outset, built into the language that precedes us.  – Judith Butler, On Never Having Learned How to Live

Duane Michals, A Man Dreaming in the City, 1969 » Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends. From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk: then time returns to the shell. In the mirror it’s Sunday, in dream there is room for sleeping, our mouths speak the truth. My eye moves down to the sex of my loved one: we look at each other, we exchange dark words, we love each other like poppy and recollection, we sleep like wine in the conches, like the sea in the moon’s blood ray. We stand by the window embracing, and people look up from the street: it is time they knew! It is time the stone made an effort to flower, time unrest had a beating heart. It is time it were time. It is time. – Celan 

» Transcendence is passing over to being’s other, otherwise than being. Not to be otherwise, but otherwise than being. And not to not-be; passing over is not here equivalent to dying. Being and not-being illuminate one another, and unfold a speculative dialectic which is a determination of being. Or else the negativity which attempts to repel being is immediately submerged by being. The void that hollows out is immediately filled with the mute and anonymous rustling of the there is, as the place left vacant by one who died is filled with the murmur of the attendants. – Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (trans. Alphonso Lingis)

» I went in; I closed the door. I sat down on the bed. Blackest space extended before me. I was not in this blackness, but at the edge of it, and I confess that it is terrifying. It is terrifying because there is something in it which scorns man and which man cannot endure without losing himself. But he must lose himself; and whoever resists will founder, and whoever goes toward it will become thi s very blackness, this cold and dead and scornful thing in the very heart of which lives the infinite. This blackness stayed next to me, probably because of my fear: this fear was not the fear people know about, it did not break me, it did not pay any attention to me, but wandered around the room the way human things do. – ‘ Death Sentence ’ , Maurice Blanchot

Dream21, Safwan Dahoul (2009) » Compared to the person I love, the universe seems poor and empty. This universe isn't 'risked' since it's not 'perishable'.  [...] I love irreligiousness, the disrespect involved in risk taking and gambling. In risk taking, I sometimes push my luck so far that I lose even anguish as a possibility. Anguish in this case would be withdrawal from risk. Love is my necessity. I'm impelled to drift into happiness, sensing chance there. First rapturously to win - then laceratingly to let go of the winnings - in a game that exhausts me.  — The Bataille Reader , Edited by Fred Botting and Scott Wilson 

The Banquet, Rene Magritte, 1958 » I was thinking about the challenge that life and death lay down to writing. For writing moves at the pace of the hand. And life and death go by in a flash. We catch fire, surprised. Writing is far behind. How are the fiery moments to be grasped? How can that fire be caught in our hands? Besides, we had better catch the fire in our hands quickly. Because if we catch the fire in our hands quickly enough, we won’t get burned. Fire grasped with the speed of fire: that’s how it must be done. To write. — In October 1991…, Stigmata: Escaping Texts, Hélène Cixous; 

» Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive. – Rilke, from The Sonnets to Orpheus II, 13

The Kiss of Death, Edvard Munche (1899) »  I called for my horse to be brought from the stable. The servant did not understand me. I myself went into the stable, saddled my horse and mounted. In the distance I heard a bugle call. I asked him what it meant but he did not know and had not heard it. By the gate he stopped me and asked, ‘Where are you riding to sir?’ I answered, ‘away from here, away from here, always away fr om here. Only by doing so can I reach my destination’. ‘Then you know your destination’, he asked. ‘Yes’, I said, ‘I have already said so, “Away-From-Here”, that is my destination’. ‘You have no provisions with you’, he said. ‘I don’t need any’, I said. ‘The journey is so long that I will die of hunger if I do not get something along the way. It is, fortunately, a truly immense journey.’ – Franz Kafka 

Memory - Rene Magritte (1948) » The art of our time is noisy with appeals for silence. A coquettish, even cheerful nihilism. One recognizes the imperative of silence, but goes on speaking anyway. Discovering that one has nothing to say, one seeks a way to say that. Beckett has announced the wish that art would renounce all further projects for disturbing matters on "the plane of the feasible," that art would retire, "weary of  puny exploits. weary of pretending to be able,of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going further along a dreary road." The alternative is an art consisting of "the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with theobligation to express." From where does this obligation derive? The very aesthetics of the death wish seems to make of that wish something incorrigibly lively. - The Aesthetics of Si

Bellmer, Hans: Madame Edwarda » Anguish only is sovereign absolute. The sovereign is a king no more: it dwells low-hiding in big cities. It knits itself up in silence, obscuring its sorrow. Crouching thick-wrapped, there it waits, lies waiting for the advent of him who shall strike a general terror; but meanwhile and even so its sorrow scornfully mocks at all that comes to pass, at all there is.  - Madame Edwarda | Georges Bataille;

Z | Costa Gavras, 1969 Concurrently, the military banned long hair on males; mini-skirts; Sophocles; Tolstoy; Euripedes; smashing glasses after drinking toasts; labour strikes; Aristophanes; Ionesco; Sartre; Albee; Pinter; freedom of the press; sociology; Beckett; Dostoevsky; modern music; popular music; the new mathematics; and the letter "Z", which in ancient Greek means "He is alive!" - The closing moments of 'Z'