(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 convergence

Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London, 2005)

p. 16, n. 3:

"Once more my reflection dovetails with the work of William Connolly, who--in Identity/Difference (Ithaca, 1991) and The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis, 1995)--argues for a 'politics of paradox'. While we put the accent on different aspects, since Connolly is particularly interested in bringing to the fore what he calls the 'paradox of difference' and I am specially concerned with the paradox of liberal democracy, our approaches converge on many important points. We both consider that it is vital for a pluralist democratic politics to expose and acknowledge paradoxes instead of trying to conceal or transcend them through appeals to rationality or community."

c.f. Connolly's anti-rationalist stance in Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minnesota, 2000), and particularly the "visceral register," relevant here to Mouffe's agonistic pluralism.