Intercepts |
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combinations, which are so organized that its impression on the ear is agreeable, and its
impression on the intelligence is comprehensible, and that these impressions have the
power to influence occult parts of our soul and of our sentimental spheres and that this
influence makes us live in a dreamland of fulfilled desires, or in a dreamed hell of...etc.,
etc.,... H2O; and we can drink it; and can wash us by it; and it is transparent; and has no Colour; and we can use it to swim and to ship; and it drives mills...etc., etc. A blind man asked his guide: The Guide answered: The Blind Man: The Guide: The Blind Man: The Guide, imitating with his arm the form of a swan's neck, lets the blind man feel the form of his arm. The Blind Man (flowing softly with his hand along the arm of the guide): Arnold Schoenberg, Letters, ed. by Erwin Stein, translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, Berkeley, U. of California, 1987.
Raphael Rubinstein, New York, 1996 "My whole problem with theoretical structures has to do with their displacement of physicality, as if there is a seepage or toxicity from the experience of the body that is going to invade language and invalidate theory. The struggle with my work from the very beginning has been that it's smart work, it's mentally aggressive and assertive. And that might be called 'essentialist.' It might be called, in lacanian terms, 'absence and lack.' Or in Freudian terms, 'envy of male linguistic expressivity.'" Carollee Schneemann, in the catalogue of "Up To And Including Her limits" at the New Museum, N.Y, (nov.24, 1996-Jan.26, 1997).
Seamus Moran, New York, 1996 "...Lacan reminds his students over and over to stop trying to understand everything, because understanding is ultimately a form of defense, of bringing everything back to what is known. The more you try to understand, the less you hear—the less you can hear something new and different." —Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance, Princeton University Press, 1995.
Josefina Ayerza, New York, 1996 "When I was ten or eleven I used to stand to one side of the bathroom mirror and converse with someone I imagined out of sight around its edge, on the far side of the glass. Often I'm ashamed of such memories, but this one seems a faithful image of how I still am: the flesh-and-bones me sitting at the table and another invisible part of me pursuing its own life. The thought of this "otherness" consoled me. Without it I would never have had my secret childhood raptures, and they, too, have a necessary place in my world: they are what allowed me to sit there happily pretending to listen to Stan." —Harry Mathews, the journalist, David R. Godine, Inc., Boston, 1994.
"Lacan, in his communication, reported this purpose of his entourage: 'Why did Joyce publish Finnegans Wake?' Strange reflexion. It is quite evident that the whole of Joyce's strategy, after the first line of this book to minimal incidents in his biography, tended towards this publication. Joyce achieved it all "according" to the Wake. His biography itself (that he supervises in fact with a lot of care) shouldn't be in his eyes but one of the "labors" in this work. The way he had, for example, of organizing the discourse around the writing of his book, of hiding the title to stir up curiosity, of calculating the confidences, etc., leave no doubt on this. From the first line, at home, all is public. In other words, the notion of "private" loses its sense. The private does not explain the public, but it is in the publishable that you can find this or that illumination of the private (partial). There's nothing to know about Joyce because his writing always knows better, and longer, than the "him" that an other one can see. Difficult to admit? Impossible. Impossible to volatilize this last fetishistic illusion; that a body is not the source of what it writes, but it's instrument." —Philippe Sollers, in Joyce et Cie, Theorie des Exceptions, Editions Gallimard, 1986
"Eloquence is a big mystery, you have to go through the nightly jouissance of indefinite contemplation of death. There has been the cloister, the oratory, flesh. There has been, thanks to Lacan, the bed, the couch, the chair—and the bus. He craved himself there, with an obstination and greatness finally without words." —Philippe Sollers, in Lacan, Theorie des Exceptions, Editions Gallimard, 1986.
David Ebony, New York, 1996
"For Lacan then the gaze is not an action. It has more the quality of an object... To understand the force of [Francis] Bacon's images we have to understand the way in which they undercut the regime of representation. Now this regime is described by the fact that it ties together my wish to see and what is presented to me, a unity of the scopic field and the spectator. But when the gaze as an object becomes detached from this scene, a dislocation occurs. A gap opens up—the circuit is broken. The illusion of wholeness has been, as it were, castrated. In fact we can treat Bacon's images as just that—castration erupting within our wish to see, within the scopic field."
—Parveen Adams, from the "The Violence of Paint," included in her book, The
Emptiness of the Image, Routledge, New York, 1996.
BOOKS OF NOTE
by Richard Klein
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