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"

differential action, or the things we lean on

What characterizes gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported. The gesture, in other words, opens the sphere of ethos as the more proper sphere of that which is human.

Giorgio Agamben, "Notes on Gesture" in Means Without End (2000)

"This photograph is one of a series of what Eakins called "differential-action" studies, which culminated [...] in a lecture entitled 'The Differential Action of Certain Muscles Passing More than One Joint.' This lantern slide image was probably used as a projected illustration during the talk. In order to demonstrate the tensile strengths of a horse's muscles, the man on the ladder balances his weight on the horse's skinned hind leg."

via the getty

speaking of

"I have no authority whatsoever to talk to you about religion and experience [...] It is from this very impossibility of speaking to my friends and to my own kin about a religion that matters to me, that I want to start tonight: I want to begin this essay by this hesitation, this weakness, this stuttering, by this speech impairment. Religion, in my tradition, in my corner of the world, has become impossible to enunciate."

Bruno Latour, "Thou Shall Not Freeze Frame"

Note Latour's explicit debt to James's sense of deferral, his self-consciousness about speaking at the beginning of Varieties and in the letters, his invocation of Whitman's "To You"; also c.f. William Connolly, "often, though, the differences between liberalism and secularism are those of inflection"; Stanley Cavell, "in philosophy it is the sound which makes all the difference."

the disorder of things

Jacques Rancière, Let Mots de l'histoire (The Names of History):

"The human and social sciences are children of the scientific age: the age of a certain number of decisive revolutions in the fundamental sciences; but also the age of scientific belief, the age that conceives of rationality that has no necessary connection to the revolutions in question. But--we forget this too easily--the age of science is also that of literature, that in which the latter names itself as such and separates the rigor of its own action from the simple enchantments of fiction, as with rules on the division of poetic genres and procedures suited to belles lettres. It is finally--we 'know' this more and more--the age of democracy, the age in which democracy appears, even in the eyes of those who combat or fear it, as the social destiny of modern politics; it is the age of broad masses and great regularities that lend themselves to the calculations of science, but also that of a new disorder and arbitrariness that disturb objective rigors." (8-9)

Eugène Delacroix, "La Liberté guidant le peuple" (1831)

the creative mind

"According to James, we bathe in an atmosphere traversed of great spiritual currents. If many of us resist others allow themselves to be carried along. And there are certain souls which open wide to the beneficent breeze. Those are the mystical souls. We know with what sympathy James studied them. When his book Religious Experience appeared, many saw in it only a series of vivid descriptions and very penetrating analyses--a psychology, they said, of religious feeling. This was a complete misinterpretation of the author's thought. The truth is that James leaned out upon the mystic soul as, on a spring, we lean out to feel the caress of the breeze on our cheek, or as, at the sea-side, we watch the coming and going of sail-boats to know how the wind blows. Souls filled with religious enthusiasm are truly uplifted and carried away: why could they not enable us to experience directly, as in a scientific experiment, this uplifting and exalting force? That is no doubt the origin, the inspiring idea of the 'pragmatism' of William James. For him those truths it is most important for us to know, are truths which have been felt and experienced before being thought."

Henri Bergson, "The Pragmatism of William James," An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903)

on metaphor and metamorphosis

"To put it differently, the word « water » not only represents the encounter of the “Earthwoman” saint with her heaven, but in the state of prayer, Teresa immerses herself above the barrier of word-signs in the psyche-soma. It’s through her fiction ( better and differently than with her epilepsy) that she escapes the “powers” (understanding, memory, imagination). Thus, that which remains « words » is no longer a « signifier-signified » separated from « referent- things », as is customary with « words- signs » in an exterior reality. On the contrary, prayer, which amalgamates the ego and the Other, also amalgamates the word and the thing: the speaking subject undergoes, or nearly undergoes a catastrophic mutism, the self « loses itself », «liquefies », « becomes delirious ». Half way between these two extremes, a thin membrane rather than a bar separates the word from the thing: they contaminate each other and alternately dissociate. The self loses itself and finds itself again, devastated and jubilant, between two waters. Collapse on one side, rapture on the other : the fluidity of the aquatic touch accurately translates this alternation."

Julia Kristeva, "The Passion According to Teresa of Avila"

Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1652)