Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Wednesday, 28 November 2007
The mind has deeper ecstasy than the body could ever obtain. In some way it lives from the fact that ecstasy is the dowry of woman. It must have experienced her. ... Finally imagination climbs four flights of stairs, in order not to find the woman, and right up to heaven, without seeking her. It has relinquished matter. But it has form, in which ideas come and with them delight. It has intuitions of what no one may know. It has found itself through ecstasy and from now on, thrusting continually through new circles of experience to new potencies, can never fail, where desires not of the mind would long since have failed. Now imagination no longer needs a stimulus, it becomes self-sufficient and finds its own delight in the rapture of associations, here chasing in pursuit of a metaphor which has just disappeared around the corner, there match-making with words, perverting phrases, falling for similarities, in the blissful abuse of chiastic intertwining, always out for adventure ...
Karl Kraus
Die Fackel, issue 323, page 22
Translated by Edward Timms
Posted at 9.29 am in /Quotes
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Wednesday, 28 November 2007
Philosopher Giorgio Agamben, explaining the reasons for his cancellation of a class he was scheduled to teach at NYU in 2004 (the US now requires visitors to the country to submit either retinal scans or fingerprints for entry):
Some years ago, I had written that the West's political paradigm was no longer the city-state, but the concentration camp, and that we had passed from Athens to Auschwitz. It was obviously a philosophical thesis, and not historic recital, because one could not confuse phenomena that it is proper, on the contrary, to distinguish.
I would have liked to suggest that tattooing at Auschwitz undoubtedly seemed the most normal and economic way to regulate the enrolment and registration of deported persons into concentration camps. The bio-political tattooing the United States imposes now to enter its territory could well be the precursor to what we will be asked to accept later as the normal identity registration of a good citizen in the state's gears and mechanisms. ...
From an article by Agamben published in the 10 January 2004 edition of Le Monde. Many thanks to Rainer Hanshe for calling it to my attention.
Posted at 9.23 am in /Politics
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