Re: [-empyre-] cultural genitals

[Aliette <aliette@criticalsecret.org>]

Dear Christina,


Even I stay straight with my political interpretation of "bare life" near
other empyreans' interpretation, I can know that according the second
"leitmotiv" of "bare life" delimited in the thematic program of documenta
12, you are searching to characterize something of the domain "bare life"
being able to be revealed ?described, or announced? as new; that can be a
radical contradiction with the radical concept of bare life regarding the
matter of event in human even more no human event, (without interpretation
that means no culture) that open the disappearance of the culture or the
missing culture (not still existing) that refers to opacity in this view of
opacity not being the limit from the Illegible metaphysical enigma of the
life, but the limit of the former knowledge exceeded by the opening of a
possible new one : that is absolutely from the concept of modernity by
Habermas, still modern, in a post historical materialism that we have yet in
reference of the first letit-motiv "is antiquity our modernity" (seing the
progress as an unlimited chain from tradition to modernity ?the last
modernity becoming a tradition when a new modernity appears) , that
surprises me regarding from another part the political reference of bare
life from Agamben's in the same abstract by Roger M. Buergel himself:
http://www.documenta12.de/english/leitmotifs.html

    "What is bare life?
    This second question underscores the sheer vulnerability and complete
exposure of being. Bare life deals with that part of our existence from
which no measure of security will ever protect us. But as in sexuality,
absolute exposure is intricately connected with infinite pleasure. There is
an apocalyptic and obviously political dimension to bare life (brought out
by torture and the concentration camp). There is, however, also a lyrical or
even ecstatic dimension to it ­ a freedom for new and unexpected
possibilities (in human relations as well as in our relationship to nature
or, more generally, the world in which we live). Here and there, art
dissolves the radical separation between painful subjection and joyous
liberation. But what does that mean for its audiences?"

Agamben yet post-modern at the same time who researches the new status of
the things and of the disappearing relationships of value after the
historical time of the criticism of the political economy as modernity
(iincluded the commodity) .. Specially concerning the thematic "what it
stays after the camps". (Question that Elias Canetti opposite of
Habermas?but at the same moment?has anthropologically resolved by
conceptualizing the end of History,, that may be Agamben follows in "ce quii
reste d'Auschwitz" ?from "Mass and power" to "the territory of human" ? to
verify the title in English).

The proposition looks so much contradictory that designs more a voluntary
paradox or the choice of a dissimilar proposition voluntarily installing a
sort of misunderstanding to remix the cards. That can be fertile and make
sense through the complexity of the presented works (to see it later).

Nevertheless of Queer and genre sensitivity from the bravery of Women of
Arts:

May be we regard Queer as well genre under the aspect of "cultural genitals"
in renewing subject of reflection and of Art criticism to the pluriversal
society, as well veiled women in involving experiment of new western
sensitivity for a renewal sensibility of feminine Art works (by the same
request of critical Art to the western society and politics) ; may be near
the nuns we search a knowledge regarding the disappearance of the percept of
the body to the objective expressing it by a materialist plan to tribute
critical Art in progress, as never expressed before outside of mysticism..
That can be really very interesting critical art works (exchanging the
dissimilar cultures to a new regard).

May be the feeling of insecurity of the body (relating genre or women) from
internal point of view can be relevant at the marge of homo sacer, but the
returning term of opacity to collective.

It stays that even interesting art work as final cut or creation there is
just preceding the question of opacity of the external bare life (in all the
hardest social terms of a-cultural realities) of reference which is used to
integrate a new internal experiment by the artist.

It stays more that the perceptible signs revealing themselves as new events
from the disappearance of the current collective signification (from which
any new signification can be tracked down) write the historical progress in
the renewal of art? as the chain from tradition to modernity;-) ? but is it
to say both how the history of Art as common symbolic representation would
be in possible reconstruction (as Habermas said of historical materialism)
without new symbolic implication of the value ?and/but on which base or
negate the ethical question of the same possible renewal of the camps (that
is in fact what happens at Guantanamo more in the populations and their
territories resulting of the new wars?which bio destroy the environment):
same process in new versions of progressive realities simulating the past
but bare events. 

Because the suggestions from bare life to bare live experiments and
representative works neglecting the criticism of the ethical question of
opacity of bare life concerning the camps (both other bare realities)
installs the same default of neglecting the organic structure of the events,
regarding all other realities in progress of renewal without symbolic
relationship of value  between the question of experiment  and the question
of the renewal history (more than the question of the means and the
purposes)?  


On 13/07/06 13:01, "Christina McPhee" <christina112@earthlink.net> probably
wrote:

> 
> (quote from an internet ad, observed by Michele).
> 
>>> "Lesbian
>>> Antique Real Photograph Kissing" but then notes
>>> "Lesbian (?) two girls (?) kissing!  On a boat with
>>> Teens type bathing suits.  The more colorfully dressed
>>> person on left is of indeterminate gender as far as I
>>> can judge.  Returnable if you can prove other than my
>>> title" (2006).
> 
> 
> Real LIfe! returnable if you can prove otherwise!
> 
> 
> The ad reminds me, Conor, of Joyce's Ulysses,  Bloom as an adman
> (Plumtree's Potted Meats, etc).
> 
> "Bare Life!  returnable if you can prove otherwise!"

Once more regarding of the respective opacity (what each live being owns
self-inside ?/ her/ his/ as enigma to outside being):
> 
> Dirk thinks of going
>> straight to the bare artist and her right to claim the
>> title without the usual vestiments, the torn off shirts and
>> trousers of
>> former appearances
> 
> Is  this   'straight to the bare artist'   (straight or queer)  a
> surmise that anybody could actually catch a bare live one, her torn
> shirts tattered at her feet in a tangle, her hair wild?

So in this vision I cannot understand in what for example Jackson Pollock by
his action painting but more all his way of life (speed and so on coherent
with his painting more integrating fragments of his body) and specially
regarding the famous portrait with his wife ?that I cannot found online
since the extracts of the movie replaced her portrait? they would not be of
the relationship of art and bare life?

> 
>    (Or are we in the forest of Arden).
> 
> 
> There is no 'bare artist;''  I am just trying to figure out how to
> say something about this.  (nor bride stripped bare)
> 
> 
> "They saw a naked woman running at night..."  (Calvino)

Can be (otherwise) other vision of Messaline naked walking by night in Roma,
by Alfred Jarry (Messaline, Roman de l¹ancienne Rome. Paris : Eugène
Fasquelle éditeur, 1922) all depends of the context.
> 
> 
> Hoping to erase gender-ed self by changing names,  I was  eight,  in
> second grade when I said I'd be called henceforth "Chris".    I
> thought,  if I could do this the name would make a space for art
> work, by being inside or wearing a boy's or anyway ambiguous name.
> The wearing would create a space around.   The name stuck for about
> twenty years.

May be Chris is nothing more specific than a various tone from the bare
husband (existing Sylvère Lotringer) and the bare lover (existing the
lover), in the book "I Love Dick" by Chris Craus (existing as bare wife and
mistress)  in this critical novel of a moment of mixed biography by a trio?
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=8862
That is connoted by Queer not from the genre but from SM?

More of SM body Art such as bare suspension of lovers (don't remember their
names, I am ashamed, but a so much famous performance (in UK I presume?),
where the man suspended above the suspended woman has hairs drawn up on the
head (what Bataille quoted about the photography of the Chinese victim of
the torture "of the 8 knives" (or of the 100 pieces), in "The tears of
Eros?)
http://www.desordre.net/textes/bibliotheque/bataille.html

(...)

The question of double or false identity, the question of the mask as the
question of the clothes or/and what more  follows in your email is an
uncontestable explanation of creative sensibility in a poetic disposition;
but the explanation is not the art work, for instance even between the
sensitive situations that can be said and the works which finalize the sum
of impressions, there is a relationship of opacity taking place, more may be
an iconoclastic rupture from imagination to bare work; in art (in poetry)
the means does not inform of the final sense of the work.

And I discover how all the contrary the calling from documenta hopes for
lightening "for new and new and unexpected possibilities" it is to say to
overpass (exceeding) that opacity marks the limit of the part of
unconsciousness ? cannot be deciphered, even yet formulated thought but that
would be silent (not completely transparent nor connoted to the supreme
outside power of control). The part which is not yet "thought" and much more
that Lacanian calls "l'impensé radical" being of bare life from outside
regard to inside opacity (individual as stranger) and from inside regard to
outside opacity (collective environment).

I am so sorry of my English...

A.
> 
> 
> 
> -cm
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> 
> 
>