(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.

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

on gesture

Brian Rotman, Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being (Durham, 2008):

"We listen, it seems, not to speech sounds as such, not, that is, as isolatable sonic entities, but to the movements of the body causing them; we focus on what happens between the sounds, to the dynamics of their preparatory phases, pauses, holds, accelerations, fallings away, and completions--the very features of gestures we attend when we are perceiving them." (23)

"In other words, gesture is outside the domain of the sign insofar as signs are coded and call for a hermeneutics, an interpretive apparatus separable from, and in place prior to, the act of signification. Rather, the mode of action of gesture is enactive, exterior to anything prior to its own performance: it works through bodily executed events, creating meaning and mathematical significance 'before one knows it.'" (36)

This last bit is of particular relevance for my own (meagre) efforts, my circling around what it might mean to read gesture into literature, and particularly the repetitive tick that seems to mark the body's presence in the very moment of its (literary) translation into a (disembodied) sign. Rotman resists Agamben's assimilation of gesture to silence, to aphasia, to memory loss: a crucial contribution in trying to think the history (the re-membering) of gesture.

Here my critical interest in gesture runs into a deeply personal, unexplained attachment to ASL:

This, too, is on my wish list.