A Retard
Once they had arrived, it was quite clear they were late. Looking at them were a crowd, a bunch of hunchbacks and clowns.
Ein Instrument, ein Instrument der Anonymisierung im Dienste einer Position. How do you speak under these conditions?
Paris, November 24, 1999
Dear Eric,
You will find enclosed the new version, largely augmented and divided into sections, of Men-machines, Directions for Use. Despite its appearance it does not behave like a book, but like an editorial virus.
The Book is a dead form, in so far as it was holding its reader in the same fraudulent completeness, in the same esoteric arrogance as the classic Subject in front of his peers, no less than the classic figure of “Man”.
How fitting the way they wallow on top of those fat boys, beery eyes flying from iPhone to printout and back, no way to read a book and orderly discuss it. This is Hasidism, Kabbalah: Mystic beings eager to be affected, infected by text.
Mystic beings, they are both Golem and Tzadik, and neither in fact, just self-medicating and tired (or not). Young Girl, I couldn’t stop thinking, that’s very precise. My compliments.
Life in Capitalism is contradiction and mainly based on death (and born again-whatevers). To spend sunday night with Zombies, the undead, is therefore the most pleasant of feelings.
Yours,
Bloom and the Flight of the Bloom
And this time, sitting and (still, on re-) chewing, inhaling, reading Irigaray's first chapter of This Sex Which Is Not One; with Alice who is a multitude, twisting between being she, she other, and others, and who opens and reopens her eyes. Her indefinite selves and those around her, her multifaceted awareness in escaping a fixed being, and the multitudinous selves which others prescribe unto her. And more: a lovers' struggle hinged on points of view and gazes.
The reading uploads the spaces of the text; the spaces within and without Alice's being(s), the rooms in the houses and the objects within them, the gardens outside - while we, as readers, are once again confronted with an indirect reflection upon our own spaces, among them the space of this moment of shared reading.
A question in particular arises afterwards in the room in which thirty-odd bodies sat and read, one by one and/or many by some: why would this theoretical text be written as prose - as a story even? Its intricacies and unsettling characters so unlike the intricacies and difficulties of the more recognized, academic text. In a way: why hasn't the content of this short text been presented in a form more recognizable, more established perhaps, or more prone to being identified, cross-read, indexed?
Alice in the meantime has eyes which recognize the right side, the wrong side, and the other side: the blur of deformation, and as we take a turn individually on the page it turns out to us as a counter-gazing entity in which it (she?) beckons, asks: have you (they? us?) not also been this, these?
Maybe a text and/or act which demands embodiment, and experiencing as well as understanding, can be felt as almost violent - inasmuch as it demands vulnerability, as well as an extension and mingling which will bring about an affective sensing. In a way, what might be possible as well, is that this sense was already latently present within (or without, but in reach of the self's oscillation) the reader, receiver.
And as I (they?) receive, they transmit, and they (we?), almost comically, are sat in a room filled with oversized cushions, candy and beer, and enunciate our (their?) understanding of the text, which may reach them (me?) through funnels and folds so intimate; so part of my, our, changeling being.
Jacky Poloni
