The Birth of the World, Joan Miró (1925).
Origin of the World, Gustave Courbet (1866)
Do you see what I see?
Friday, July 23, 2010
Vagenesis
The Birth of the World, Joan Miró (1925).
Origin of the World, Gustave Courbet (1866)
Do you see what I see?
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Venus Enfer[s]
currently working on two studies, 1. on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's 'Venus in Furs' and 2. on Saul Bellow's 'Seize the Day'.
until then:
until then:
Saturday, November 14, 2009
See the Child: Blood Meridian and Lacan's Mirror Stage (part 4)
4. The judge.
The most striking character in Blood Meridian is that of the judge. He is an enigma, an enormous, hairless beast of a man who, despite the mystery of his existence, is ironically the most defined. Like the kid, he is said to have simply appeared, “There he set on a rock in the middle of the greatest desert you’d ever want to see…Brown thought him a mirage” (124). His existence is spectral. He is as authoritative as he is insane. The judge first appears in an early episode when he without motive turns an entire revival against a preacher. After the riot, a man asks him “Where did you know him to know all that stuff on him?” to which the judge casually responds, “I never laid eyes on the man before today. Never even heard of him” (8). The absolute nature of his power and his violence establish the judge as spiritual leader of the company, as well as executor of the desert.
The judge has an understanding of the world which the other characters lack. He has with him a journal in which he catalogues things in nature, “he is a draftsman…he seemed much satisfied with the world, as if his council had been sought at its creation” (140). The judge is indeed creator of the pandemonium that is the desert. By his will comes destruction. Conversely, though, he is also very much existent within the symbolic register. One anecdote relates that the judge had “once drawn an old Hueco’s portrait and unwittingly chained the man to his own likeness” (141), thus establishing himself as the one from which all imagos are formed. He is the draftsman of the symbolic order, elevating the things he draws to their proper place in the signifying chain. He himself explains, “Whatever exists in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” (198). In the chaotic world of Blood Meridian, he is father.
It is precisely the kid who exists without the judge’s consent. Elevating the kid into the symbolic register, becoming the father, is the object of the judge’s jouissance. He desires nothing else. The judge twice in the novel takes on a perverted fatherly persona. After a raid on an Apache camp, the judge takes with him on his saddle a small boy, only to scalp the child four pages later: “The judge rode…bearing before him a strange dark child covered with ash…with huge black eyes like some changeling…Toadvine saw him with the child as he passed…but when he came back ten minutes later leading his horse the child was dead and the judge had scalped it” (160-164). The judge’s second adoption, a caged half-wit that calls “hoarsely after the sun like some queer unruly god abducted from a race of degenerates” (251), is a dumb show of the inevitable relationship that will emerge between the judge and the kid. Like the kid, the idiot is excluded from the symbolic. He has no language, no notion of itself. Mute in its own way, the idiot is entirely fragmented. The judge does not love the idiot as much as he uses him. It becomes a representation of the kid. Its mother is dead, and although it has a name, “there don’t anybody call him it” (256). It is the judge’s aim to keep him mired in idiocy. At a river crossing a group of women see the idiot and he is mothered by a woman named Sarah Borginnis. She calls him by name (James Robert) and bathes him, preparing him for elevation into the symbolic, freeing him from the filth of the blah-blah-blah. The women “led James Robert into the waters…he sees hisself in it, they said” (258). That night the idiot discovers his voice. It “passed from him like a gift” (258). The idiot then falls into the river, submerged in the symbolic. The judge “seized up the idiot…and restored it among its fellows” (259). The judge restored the idiot to its original psychotic state. Only the judge has the right to elevate his children into the symbolic.
The elevation of the kid to a speaking body, the body of signification which he has rejected, becomes the object of jouissance for the judge. While jailed, the kid is visited by the judge. The kid, “began to speak with a strange urgency…and his jailers said that his mind had come uncottered” (305). The judge comes to the kid and begins his final luring, “Don’t you know that I’d have loved you like a son?” (306). Imprisoned, it is the first the kid is contained. He is captive audience to the judge. He may finally be spoken to. Having rejected the father, the judge explains, “you were the person responsible…you and none other shaped events along such a calamitous path” (306). The calamitous path in question is psychosis.
Facing the gallows, the kid is surprisingly released. It is not until thirty-one years later does the kid again meet the judge. In a bar he is commanded by the keep, “Speak or forever” (325). A man now, the kid is still premature. He sees himself, “There was a mirror along the backbar but it held only smoke and phantoms” (325). The kid, the man-child, is still in the phantasmagoria of the imaginary. The bar is as incoherent as the kid, ghostlike, carnivalesque, “a little girl in a smock cranked a barrel organ and a bear in a crinoline twisted strangely upon a board stage” (324). Among all of this is the judge, who has remained unchanged. The judge again interrogates, “Was it always your intention that if you did not speak you would not be recognized?” (328). The kid had forged an unsustainable identity on silence, indifference, and the annihilation of the father. It is necessary he come full circle and return to the father, to accept signification. It is precisely why he could not kill the judge in the desert (298). The shooting of the dancing bear and the judge’s first words to the kid, “Do you believe it’s all over, son?”(327) begin anew the ritual of the mirror stage. The judge tells him there are “Bears that dance, bears that don’t” (331). The kid must join the dance in order to truly forge an identity, to assume an imago. As his original path was that of the destruction of the name-of-the-father to fill the hole it had created, to become “the child as father of the man” (3), the kid must himself be consumed. This consummation takes place in an outhouse. In the jakes “the judge was seated upon the closet. He was naked and he rose up smiling and gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh and shot the wooden barlatch home behind him” (333). What better place than the shithouse to be baptized into what was so wholly rejected?
As well, one may read the episode in the jakes as the moment of the kid’s castration. There is a sexual undertone to whatever is happening between the kid and the judge. “I wouldn’t go in there if I were you,” a pissing man tells another. The only reaction to the event is “Good God almighty” (334). The judge, as the father, is the agent of castration, akin to his scalping the Apache child. There is an experience of jouissance in this for the judge. The novel ends in celebration, as “Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing…He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite…He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die” (335). The kid had no choice but to accept the father. He could not continue to ex-sist. He could not simply be a body, as Miller explains. The subject must accept language in order to elevate into the symbolic, to become a speaking-being so as to truly to forge an imago.
Lacan, Jacques. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function. Ecrits. Trans.
Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2007.
McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian or: The Evening Redness in the West. New York: Vintage,
1985.
Miller, Jacques-Alain. Lacanian Biology and the Event of the Body. Trans. Barbara P. Fulks.
Lacanian Ink. (15).
The most striking character in Blood Meridian is that of the judge. He is an enigma, an enormous, hairless beast of a man who, despite the mystery of his existence, is ironically the most defined. Like the kid, he is said to have simply appeared, “There he set on a rock in the middle of the greatest desert you’d ever want to see…Brown thought him a mirage” (124). His existence is spectral. He is as authoritative as he is insane. The judge first appears in an early episode when he without motive turns an entire revival against a preacher. After the riot, a man asks him “Where did you know him to know all that stuff on him?” to which the judge casually responds, “I never laid eyes on the man before today. Never even heard of him” (8). The absolute nature of his power and his violence establish the judge as spiritual leader of the company, as well as executor of the desert.
The judge has an understanding of the world which the other characters lack. He has with him a journal in which he catalogues things in nature, “he is a draftsman…he seemed much satisfied with the world, as if his council had been sought at its creation” (140). The judge is indeed creator of the pandemonium that is the desert. By his will comes destruction. Conversely, though, he is also very much existent within the symbolic register. One anecdote relates that the judge had “once drawn an old Hueco’s portrait and unwittingly chained the man to his own likeness” (141), thus establishing himself as the one from which all imagos are formed. He is the draftsman of the symbolic order, elevating the things he draws to their proper place in the signifying chain. He himself explains, “Whatever exists in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” (198). In the chaotic world of Blood Meridian, he is father.
It is precisely the kid who exists without the judge’s consent. Elevating the kid into the symbolic register, becoming the father, is the object of the judge’s jouissance. He desires nothing else. The judge twice in the novel takes on a perverted fatherly persona. After a raid on an Apache camp, the judge takes with him on his saddle a small boy, only to scalp the child four pages later: “The judge rode…bearing before him a strange dark child covered with ash…with huge black eyes like some changeling…Toadvine saw him with the child as he passed…but when he came back ten minutes later leading his horse the child was dead and the judge had scalped it” (160-164). The judge’s second adoption, a caged half-wit that calls “hoarsely after the sun like some queer unruly god abducted from a race of degenerates” (251), is a dumb show of the inevitable relationship that will emerge between the judge and the kid. Like the kid, the idiot is excluded from the symbolic. He has no language, no notion of itself. Mute in its own way, the idiot is entirely fragmented. The judge does not love the idiot as much as he uses him. It becomes a representation of the kid. Its mother is dead, and although it has a name, “there don’t anybody call him it” (256). It is the judge’s aim to keep him mired in idiocy. At a river crossing a group of women see the idiot and he is mothered by a woman named Sarah Borginnis. She calls him by name (James Robert) and bathes him, preparing him for elevation into the symbolic, freeing him from the filth of the blah-blah-blah. The women “led James Robert into the waters…he sees hisself in it, they said” (258). That night the idiot discovers his voice. It “passed from him like a gift” (258). The idiot then falls into the river, submerged in the symbolic. The judge “seized up the idiot…and restored it among its fellows” (259). The judge restored the idiot to its original psychotic state. Only the judge has the right to elevate his children into the symbolic.
The elevation of the kid to a speaking body, the body of signification which he has rejected, becomes the object of jouissance for the judge. While jailed, the kid is visited by the judge. The kid, “began to speak with a strange urgency…and his jailers said that his mind had come uncottered” (305). The judge comes to the kid and begins his final luring, “Don’t you know that I’d have loved you like a son?” (306). Imprisoned, it is the first the kid is contained. He is captive audience to the judge. He may finally be spoken to. Having rejected the father, the judge explains, “you were the person responsible…you and none other shaped events along such a calamitous path” (306). The calamitous path in question is psychosis.
Facing the gallows, the kid is surprisingly released. It is not until thirty-one years later does the kid again meet the judge. In a bar he is commanded by the keep, “Speak or forever” (325). A man now, the kid is still premature. He sees himself, “There was a mirror along the backbar but it held only smoke and phantoms” (325). The kid, the man-child, is still in the phantasmagoria of the imaginary. The bar is as incoherent as the kid, ghostlike, carnivalesque, “a little girl in a smock cranked a barrel organ and a bear in a crinoline twisted strangely upon a board stage” (324). Among all of this is the judge, who has remained unchanged. The judge again interrogates, “Was it always your intention that if you did not speak you would not be recognized?” (328). The kid had forged an unsustainable identity on silence, indifference, and the annihilation of the father. It is necessary he come full circle and return to the father, to accept signification. It is precisely why he could not kill the judge in the desert (298). The shooting of the dancing bear and the judge’s first words to the kid, “Do you believe it’s all over, son?”(327) begin anew the ritual of the mirror stage. The judge tells him there are “Bears that dance, bears that don’t” (331). The kid must join the dance in order to truly forge an identity, to assume an imago. As his original path was that of the destruction of the name-of-the-father to fill the hole it had created, to become “the child as father of the man” (3), the kid must himself be consumed. This consummation takes place in an outhouse. In the jakes “the judge was seated upon the closet. He was naked and he rose up smiling and gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh and shot the wooden barlatch home behind him” (333). What better place than the shithouse to be baptized into what was so wholly rejected?
As well, one may read the episode in the jakes as the moment of the kid’s castration. There is a sexual undertone to whatever is happening between the kid and the judge. “I wouldn’t go in there if I were you,” a pissing man tells another. The only reaction to the event is “Good God almighty” (334). The judge, as the father, is the agent of castration, akin to his scalping the Apache child. There is an experience of jouissance in this for the judge. The novel ends in celebration, as “Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing…He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite…He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die” (335). The kid had no choice but to accept the father. He could not continue to ex-sist. He could not simply be a body, as Miller explains. The subject must accept language in order to elevate into the symbolic, to become a speaking-being so as to truly to forge an imago.
Lacan, Jacques. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function. Ecrits. Trans.
Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2007.
McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian or: The Evening Redness in the West. New York: Vintage,
1985.
Miller, Jacques-Alain. Lacanian Biology and the Event of the Body. Trans. Barbara P. Fulks.
Lacanian Ink. (15).
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Action! [on Artaud]
Currently working on an essay regarding Artaud. Until it is completed, here is something from Žižek to mull over...
"The transfixed gaze isolates a stain of the real, a detail which 'sticks out' from the stain of symbolic reality - in short, a traumatic surplus of the real over the symbolic...it is 'substantiated', caused, created, by the transfixed gaze itself."
[from 'everything you wanted to know about lacan (but were afraid to ask hitchcock)' pg. 236]
"The transfixed gaze isolates a stain of the real, a detail which 'sticks out' from the stain of symbolic reality - in short, a traumatic surplus of the real over the symbolic...it is 'substantiated', caused, created, by the transfixed gaze itself."
[from 'everything you wanted to know about lacan (but were afraid to ask hitchcock)' pg. 236]
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Claude Lévi-Strauss 1908-2009
Sad News, Sad Tropics
We have learnt with great sadness
of the death of Lévi-Strauss,
whose inspiration was decisive
in the genesis and first developments
of Lacan’s teaching.
We bow with respect
to the memory of this great man.
I will recall here the name of Roman Jakobson,
whose students and friends Lévi-Strauss and Lacan were,
and to whom we are all indebted.
There must be a fourth:
Saussure? Dumézil? Bourbaki? The Foucault of The Order of Things?
Who was their philosopher, their Minerva’s owl?
Or Mallarmé, who knows?
As he was wont, Lévi-Strauss has passed away,
the haughty and melancholy genius of structuralism.
He had to fight hard to be recognised,
and to clear the room, to build the house,
we live in still.
We shall not see his like again.
Jacques-Alain Miller, 3 November 2009, 6.15pm.
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