[-empyre-] concerning violence, and more Antigone's bones

[Ana Valdés]

Octavio Paz, Nobelprize in literature from Mexico, was Mexico's
ambassador in India several years and come very near Hinduism and
Buddhism. He wrote some superb books discussing the differences
between Christianity and the Oriental philosophies from the Eastern
parts of the world.
He said our Christ, the figure of a man being tortured, tense between
spikes and the arms of the cross, is a violent archetypical image of
our civilization, based in rape, torture and conquest.
In the Eastern the image of God is a wheel, no beginning, no end, a
circle, Nirvana.
Today with the sad confirmation about the Mexican students burned to
death and ash becoming ashes the circle ends, again, but not in a
Nirvana but in the paroxism of mothers and fathers crying their
anguish and their dispair.
I was this morning in the funeral of a dear friend, his wife was in
jail with me, he was in another jail. Among the mourners was several
jail comrades, male comrades to him, mine female friends. Among my
female jail comrades were many raped and heavily tortured they went
today straight happy to be among the survivors   I was one of the
youngest and was saved from heavy torture and from rape the women I
met today are over seventy years old they were not old ladies asking
for permission to live they were still the strong and brave women I
met in jail and it's to their solidarity and warmth I own my life
today

Ana

On Sat, Nov 8, 2014 at 3:13 PM, Johannes Birringer
<Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
>
> Several participants have now raised the idea of terror (event, representation, or the 'graphe,' the visual scaffold that Jon had implied) as cliché, and as kitsch.
>
> Alan however has always insisted here that the abject (experience and image) invades and destroys, it causes extreme anguish.
>
> And we have not fully addressed it yet –   "such dissolution, falling apart, within and among the abject, that self and other are uncomfortably bound, felt as such, repulsive" (Alan) –- when we seek recourse to the narratives and theories and philosophies. (Though the notion of the abject comes, as well, via Kristeva and an anthropological analysis of dirt, impurity, and the repulsed).
>
> A performance, however (and thanks Erik for sharing your cryptic epilogue of Woman/Raven,  to 'Mother Courage'), when/where?  how would it respond? for whom? And relate to what Alicia names the "orientalized Debord", an other spectacle? Plenty of dust from the actions of the porn erotic of the masculinity of a populist maleness, vital, organized and lethal, like gangs like mass graves,  symmetric rituals?  (I extrapolate from Alicia, and her brief account of a more surreal sequence even, one disappearance to another finding -  estudientes/federales/narcotraficantes:  <en México, 43 estudiantes desaparecen como en un pase de magia y se descubre otra fosa común con cadáveres NN.>>
>
> Jon -- your question is about performance?  <To ask Reinhold’s question differently: How to navigate such genealogical strata while making performances that cite and grapple with violence and terror and graphe? >
> Is that not somehow the issue that Olga tried to broach, using approximate but "alienated" media strategies to re-site the evidences (say, combatant confessions in a night club called "Death Cub")?  And how does verbatim theatre grapple? is there any grappling that could answer Alan's statement of dissolution?
>
>
> regards
> Johannes Birringer
>
>
> [Jon schreibt]
> From hashassins and anarchist bombings to drone strikes and YouTube beheadings, modern terror develops within a global network of increasing density and resonance. Terror one sees “over there” suddenly is here, collapsing space and time and with them one’s points of reference.....And if clichés, images, ghosts preceded the real - what violence would there be in that?
>
>
> [Erik schreibt]
> excellent. in the perpetrator, victim, witness triad - the witness is shocked/severed out of the equation, specifically in order to collapse imaginative and expressive space for the victim. the witness still exists, but to demonstrate estrangement. the perpetrators are fine because they have space behind them, up in the large house they've stolen.
>
>
> [Ana schreibt]
>
> "Violence is a key ingredient of human storytelling: from our first oral tales, violent acts have heightened audience attention and underlined the dangers of our world. What happens to a child who goes
> off alone? She is beset by ogres! Djinn! Child-eating witches! As different story traditions developed, most were rich in violence, which was often focused around a single enemy. This enemy could be
> battled (and tricked or beaten), offering the audience a psychological release.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu



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