[-empyre-] language/discourse on terror, reporting the virtually true

[Ana Valdés]

Johannes, only a short remark, when I am writing about my pain and my
memories I am also using literary tools, the body remembers but the
language or the brain don't. I read Butler's Frames of War, Agamben's Homo
Sacer and The remnants of Auschwitz to trace the mechanisms and the forms
to perform the pain. You all maybe remember we had a good exchange in
-empyre with Monica Weiss about public lamenting and how to show the
collective mourning as exorcism and catharsis.
I am now translating a short text written by my friend the Uruguayan writer
Alicia Migdal. She was one of -empyre guests when I was moderating the list
2012. She is quoting Agamben as well. I will be back with her translated
text, she writes in Spanish and I am just now translating it.
Ana

On Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 8:17 PM, Johannes Birringer <
Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
>
> dear all,
> one can only thank those who have joined so far, and welcome Olga and Pia,
> and those who like Ana write through their memory pain and evoke the death
> of hope for human civilization;
> the destructive character seems to favor the slow or continual, steady
> collapse of all infrastructures – but John, you don't subscribe to
> annihilation, do you?
>
> >
> the contemporary  focus on, literally, digging up the past and preserving
> it has limits. (We probably only do so because we have such a glut of
> energy flowing around our 'developed' world, because re-organizing the past
> in any form (from library to archive to buildings) definitely takes
> energy!).
> >
>
> this interested me (the limit, and the changes too, in contexts of
> preservation), also in relation to Erik's and Jon's ferociously provocative
> texts on the clichés (trailers all, of moves/choreographies and movies
> predictabled)
> and the spectacle of the scaffold.
>
> >>[Jon schreibt]
> Human rights are fraying, while democratic torture practices are being
> bootlegged and remixed in the global theater of cruelty. Infrastructurally,
> alongside the democratization of media technologies unfolds the
> democratization of reservoirs of violence, violence stored and reanimated
> from bodily repertoires, historical archives, and digital databases.
> >>
>
> Pia, human rights violation observer in Gaza and West Bank, tell us what
> human rights, then?  what rights for the normalistas, people on the ground,
> to one side of the wall or border, and for those who cling to survival, or
> fear the imagined coming-to -be-experienced (tales of) tortures?
>
> Pia the last line of your doubled post left me speechless; and so I wish
> not to continue here, also needing to reflect on Olga's findings and
> strategies to speak to combatants and those for whom killing is just a job,
> not even a banality (of evil), but mere professonalism (not to be talked
> about, not worth mentioning?).  Olga you had mentioned to me a trailer of
> your "Soldiers of the Last Empire"  -- do you wish us to see it, after what
> Erik wrote?  Your performance techniques of self interest me a great deal,
> in your context (and I want to read Judith Butler's "Frames of War: When Is
> Life Grievable"  [Verso 2010] to see whether "performance" of precarious
> being is a workable theory).
>
> [Pia schreibt]
> >
> But you can never say that you are close enough.
> All the journalists and observers are left behind, arrive late at the
> scene.
> To be close enough to know you have to be the killer or the victim.
> >
>
>
>
> regards
> Johannes Birringer
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>



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