(pre)faces

Giorgio Agamben in The Gospel According to St. Matthew, dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini (1964)

"The face is at once the irreparable being-exposed of humans and the very opening in which they hide and stay hidden. The face is the only location of community, the only possible city."

Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics (2000)

I've been thinking of James's (pre)faces, what they do and do not expose, the ways in which they save face even as they face what cannot be saved: the work as inviolable, sacred, austere. To preface is to not merely to supplement--to move towards an illusory whole, a flawless artifact--but also to expose the logic (or illogic) of the supplement, and James's prefaces in particular seem to theatricalize this double movement. He gives himself away, exposes himself in order to save face... concedes the ecstasy of method but promises not to lose his head in the process...

I blush when I write, now, alone in my library carrel (which doubles, all cold metal, as a citadel). If I didn't know it before, I am reminded that writing is a circular--a circulatory--system. And not without shame: to write, too, is to be exposed. "Be only your face," Agamben exhorts: "Go to the threshold. Do not remain the subjects of your properties or faculties, do not stay beneath them: rather, go with them, in them, beyond them."

See also Brian Dillon's piece on Agamben circa 1964 at Frieze.

negative space

Kara Walker, "Cut"

"So our writing, as much as our living, becomes extensive, opening out pursuant to filmy trails of the unsayable, not closing down on the secret quivering in fear of imminent exposure. So our writing becomes an exercise in life itself, at one with life and within life as lived in social affairs, not transcendent or even a means to such, but contiguous with action and reaction in the great chain of storytelling telling the one always before the last. Yet how can you be contiguous with the not merely empty, but negative, space?"

Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative

The need here to think about the negative space of form, what cuts off and cuts into form as an idea of wholeness (of 'holiness'); defacement and decay and exposure. Taussig's distinction between "empty" and "negative" space, recognition that the negative space is never itself empty but contiguous, formative and trans-formative and pointing always to the de-formed nature of form itself. Here is a theory of writing and living, he says: open secrets, exposed borders, extensions, piece-meal, contiguity.

on the madness of the real

Excising the Stone of Folly, Pieter Huys, c. 1530-1581

"This, then, is Derrida’s fundamental interpretive gesture: the one of 'separating, within the Cogito, on the one hand, hyperbole (which I maintain cannot be enclosed in a factual and determined historical structure, for it is the project of exceeding every finite and determined totality), and, on the other hand, that in Descartes’s philosophy (or in the philosophy supporting the Augustinian Cogito or the HusserlianCogito as well) which belongs to a factual historical structure' (60).

"Here, when Derrida asserts that '/t/he historicity proper to philosophy is located and constituted in the transition, the dialogue between hyperbole and the finite structure, /…/ in the difference between history and historicity' (60), he is perhaps too short. This tension may appear very 'Lacanian': is it not a version of the tension between the Real – the hyperbolic excess – and its (ultimately always failed) symbolization? The matrix we thus arrive at is the one of the eternal oscillation between the two extremes, the radical expenditure, hyperbole, excess, and its later domestification (like Kristeva, between Semiotic and Symbolic...). Illusionary are both extremes: pure excess as well as pure finite order would disintegrate, cancel themselves... This misses the true point of 'madness,' which is not the pure excess of the Night of the World, but the madness of the passage to the Symbolic itself, of imposing a symbolic order onto the chaos of the Real. (Like Freud, who, in his Schreber analysis, points out how the paranoiac 'system' is not madness, but a desperate attempt to ESCAPE madness – the disintegration of the symbolic universe - through an ersatz, as if, universe of meaning.) If madness is constitutive, then EVERY system of meaning is minimally paranoiac, 'mad.'"

Slavov Zizek, "Cogito, Madness and Religion: Derrida, Foucault, and then Lacan"