[-empyre-] Bare LIfe -- a lyrical and even ecstatic dimension

["Conor McGarrigle" <conormcgarrigle@gmail.com>]

Hi List
In my opening post I mentioned my interest in the lyrical and even
escstatic dimension of bare life and how this aspect of bare life
seemed to be closely relayed to my current work in progress. I'd like
to further draw the connections as I see them. To recap from my
introduction
>Agamben notes that Bare Life is " a form of life over which power no
longer seems
> to have any hold" which opens up possibilities for a "lyrical or even
> ecstatic" dimension.  Colin McQuillan in his essay 'The Political
> Life in Giorgio Agamben ' argues that Agamben  "defines this politics>
> in terms of "a life directed toward the idea of happiness and
> cohesive with a form-of-life" in which "the single ways, acts, and
> process of living are never simply facts but always and above all
> possibilities of life, always above all power." and that "Agamben's
> conception of the political life is the result of a radical
> rethinking of the potentiality of life, and life as
> potentiality."
This aspect of Bare Life is, I feel, aa far more difficult concept,
more elusive and harder to define but at the same time one worthy of
further exploration. In my current work ( Cyclops is an example of
this work www.stunned.org/cyclops ) in progress I am creating a series
of interlinked narratives based on the everyday, the series which is
broken into 18 discrete but interconnected episodes each structurally
based on a chapter of Joyce's Ulysses. It's probably worth taking a
little time to explain why I chose to play with fire like Ulysses.
Firstly a disclaimer for this work I am transposing the structure and
themes of Ulysses onto contemporary Dublin as a working structure, the
connections between this work and Ulysses are about as tenuous as the
links between Joyce and Homer. When Joyce was asked why he adopted
Homer's structure for his new novel he replied that it was the perfect
structure to tell a story and one on which he could not hope to
improve so why would he try. To tell a story based in Dublin I feel
the same.

Most importantly though Joyce wrote of the lives of ordinary people in
an ordinary city, people with little personal power, subjects of an
empire with no political power, who did no great or extraordinary
deeds,  people not normally considered worthy of inclusion in works of
literature certainly not in a work of such grand ambition. But he
revealed in these characters a extraordinarily rich,  lyrical and even
ecstatic inner life and he showed how they transformed their
environment in what can only be described as tactical way.

There's no doubt that he was influenced by political events at home in
ireland as he wrote the Irish War of Independance was raging a war in
which ordinary people - many of them his peers and friends - rose up
against the might of the British Empire at the height of it's power
(using tactics that would be the foundation of modern guerilla warfare
,tactics which in so small part would help bring about the demise of
that Empire within a generation) and against all odds won.

In Ulysses I see correlations with this aspect of bare life as " a
form of life over which power no longer seems to have any hold"  in
which "the single ways, acts, and
process of living are never simply facts but always and above all
possibilities of life, always above all power." and it is this that
informs my current work, this freedom of the everyday, the unstoppable
creativity and spirit that can't be suppressed because as Michel de
Certeau asserts in 'The Practice of everyday life' everyday practices
don't get suppresed because you can't suppress what you don't even
know exists. As I mentioned earlier I am interested in the idea that
by focusing on simple everyday things like walking through a city, we
begin a process which clarifies what we do and how we relate to our
world and reveals greater truths about ways of being in the world.It
is of necessity an open ended process one for which the result is not
clear. For me this ties in with this dimension of bare life the idea
that  stripping life down to it's essentials  opens up  new and
unexpected possibilities

all the best


Conor