[-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz, was geschehen ist

[simon]

On 23/11/14 06:22, Johannes Birringer wrote:
> our artistic acts are untimely, necessarily, and following [a] reading of Kafka's parable, [..] justice and freedom are incompatible
do you not think so? I would say so for Kafka because of his conflation 
of untimely and timely, of Justice and the Law, as if showing us what 
divine justice might be like to live; similar to, but not the same as, 
the collapse of the Symbolic into the Imaginary, where Lacan makes a 
/tabula rasa/...

which segues quite comfortingly into

On 23/11/14 06:22, Johannes Birringer wrote:
> the world we traverse is not a fantasy but quite real
I look at Ana's picture and I would ask, What is the /real/ fantasy we 
/rehearse/ that is being /prepared/ in this picture? I think it is 
slightly different for each of us. For some it might be the death of 
innocence, pure horror - a dull ache in the eyeball as the point hits it 
in general. For me, I see boys like my son.

This is not to belittle the suffering of others, the rehearsal I conduct 
myself, from my own /theatron/, POV, because it is also to /create/ the 
suffering of others. And this happens [/gescheht/] neither by empathy 
nor by moralising.

The creature produced is monstrous, remains monstrous, is a monster, 
demonstrates an equal monstrosity - and creatureliness - to the figure 
of the terrorist. Both happen to be figures of fantasy - admixtures of 
desire and science (or a kind of necro-science?) in contact with a 
desire for life (Nick Land calls Deleuze's eye on life "cold and 
reptilian" - and in contrast with Aneta, I would hazard that death 
informs Foucault's biopolitical project) ... in contact with a desire 
for life that is generative of the image which serves as its pretext.

My own dull point about politics is much simpler but complicates as soon 
as I try to set it down - writing in order not to think anymore, is how 
Foucault put it (which is as good a reason as any to engage in the 
untimely of poetry or philosophy, or jurisprudence). I am not so 
interested in the self-reflexive gesture, or implicating your self or 
mine, or deconstruction. And although Alan's echoing of Lenin's 1902 
echo of Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire - as Aliette Gilbert-Certhoux once 
pointed out on this list - 'What is to be done?' does something, has a 
plangency to it, a dull ache, that makes me want to extract a bone, a 
tooth, a clear organ of agency and cogency, just not to think it 
anymore, this is also not what I wanted to ask. Because to me the 
discussion has been strangely silent on politics - as if the swordhands 
at the beheadings were about to find Eichmann-like wriggle-room in the 
banality of bureaucratic 'just doing our jobs' ... When, as has been 
pointed out, the job is a sacred duty. So who is playing god? These are 
not person-less mechanisms. This shit doesn't just happen. Divine 
justice /is/ being visited on work-a-day legislated life-styles. Kafka 
is apposite. The absurdity, like the commonplace, are both 'hidings in 
plain sight'. What they obscure is exactly what most effectively 
obtrudes - no, it is common; no, it is too absurd! Stupidity may in fact 
be infinite; fear may indeed induce paralysis: but the world we rehearse 
in our constructions, whether we own them as fantasy or reality, 
/theatricalises/ - takes place on its blood-soaked stage - in a certain 
way to gain certain ends for certain parties. When it asks of us that we 
bleed too, we can be sure ... that there is political profit in the ... 
pop cultural obsession with zombies, undead; our images of art can seem 
so lifeless... and vampiric.

Best,
Simon

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