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

[Alicia Migdal]

Gracias, Johannes, por alentarnos  a escribir en nuestros idiomas
identitarios y no en el omnipresente inglés, y  por generar el compromiso
de lectura y de escucha que es uno de los temas implícitos en esta
situación de pensamiento colectivo atravesado por el terror al otro.
alicia

2014-11-06 12:23 GMT-02:00 Johannes Birringer <
Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk>:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
>
>  dear Ana
>
> >> 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.>>
>
>
> yes, I do remember our discussions on certain literary and performance
> techniques or tools, used in writing or speaking pain.
> I meant that when I made my comment, and it was a recognition of your
> work, your embrace, and yet also implicitly, a question and thus a comment
> on your lament for all, and whether this is an aspect of collective
> mourning that you, or others here, find effective or even possible, in the
> face of despair? the leveling field approach is what Pia objected to, no?
> when she argued that political contexts are different.
>
> The spectacle of the scaffold (Jon), does it not also differ from place to
> place?  from place to media (and those Tv or youtube serials of
> humiliation)?
>
> >>
> 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.
> >>
>
> dear Ana, why not send us the Spanish text of your friend? I have always
> encouraged, in debates I moderated, that any language is welcome and the
> more we are willing to listen to others, and try to translate, the more we
> engage.
>
>
> >>
> Johannes you are raised in Germany I assume you are familiar with Heinrich
> Böll's writing. For me his best book is [Billiards at Half Past Nine] , a
> very powerful novel about an elderly architect who builds a church (maybe a
> cathedral, I don't exactly remember it), his son, an architect and engineer
> who destroys the church because it's strategical value and the youngest of
> them, an architect who is rebuilding it.
> Shrines and churches and mosques and synagogues are built and rebuilt and
> they live in the memory, as in Calvino's "Invisible Cities". I was several
> times in Damascus and visited the Omeya mosque it was a Christian church
> before a Roman temple and in the beginning a Babylonian sacred place.
> The gods chose always the same spot to be worshipped :)
> Ana Valdés
> >>
>
> Very interesting literary references you make, to Böll and Calvino,  just
> as others here however reminded us of the annihilation attempts (in epic
> and mythic histories, such as Iliad or Mahabharata, and real histories of
> colonization)
> One could almost find hope in reading these poetic romances of the
> invisible cities we must imagine. Entonces,  certain imaginations must be
> more privileged than others?
>
>
> warm regards
> Johannes Birringer
> dap-lab
> http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
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