Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary 3 (2010)
DESIRE GLOSS: A SPECIMEN
Kristen Alvanson, Nicola Masciandaro & Scott Wilson
Presented here is a specimen of dESIRE Gloss, a collaborative
commentary on a series of 100 photographs drawn from Kristen
1
Alvanson’s dESIRE Project. Befitting the polysemy of the word gloss,
1
“THE DESIRE PROJECT is an ongoing investigation on dESIRE which
includes artistic components, the anti-disciplinary reading of desire texts by
individuals such as Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Baudrillard, Lyotard,
Melanie Klein, Reich, Marx, Freud, de Sade, Irigaray, Hegel, Bataille, Sartre,
Derrida, Barthes, Levinas, Plato, Augustine—from which thoughts and
theories are disjointed, re-assembled, blended, ruled out—and conversations
on dESIRE with current theorists and artists or other desire-minded
individuals all in an attempt to reach concrete but not necessarily corporeal
definitions of dESIRE by tapping into its obscure formations. CAPTURING
dESIRE. Is it possible to capture desire whether abstractly, sensationally or
concretely? Is it possible that an event or an entity is desired? Do we have
any control over our desires or are they desiring-machines, flows as Deleuze
and Guattari suggest? Are we aware of our desires consciously or do they
operate according to another plane hidden or not directly connected to
consciousness? To further these and other questions, I have developed an
experiment as an art project which involves capturing what I desire on a
long-term basis. HOW THE PROJECT WORKS. When I desire something,
I document the dESIRE by capturing its photograph (currently using a
compact camera that I carry wherever I go). Presumably, the photograph is a
photographic representation of my intangible desire, yet it serves as a form of
documentation. Each stamped (or numbered dESIRE) is a part of the
ongoing string of desires which should reveal patterns which are not
necessarily visual or thematic over time. I am as interested in the intangible
desire and its qualities as I am interested in the photographic renderings –
how, for example, a photo reveals accurately or inaccurately an intangible
desire. Moreover, I am engaging in marketing and selling my dESIRES, both
intangible and photographic representations. What are the potentialities and
effects of selling desire and how can pimping dESIRE be used to better
understand and test the economy and dynamics of desire? Once desires are
produced, represented, sold, purchased and possessed, the dESIRE Project
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GLOSSATOR 3
dESIRE Gloss is designed to demonstrate the amorous relations
between photography, commentary, and desire.
*
003580
WINGS OF DESIRE. “The
children of men take refuge in
the shadow of thy wings. / They
feast on the abundance of thy
house, / and thou givest them
drink from the river of thy
delights. / For with thee is the
fountain of life; and in thy light
2
do we see light.” Do not ask
IN
SACRIFICE,
beauty’s
perfection points to death’s full
brutality. Double-take. At first
glance, it is as if the veiled
woman is warding off the
camera, the hennaed hands not
so much a blessing as a curse.
But it is the backs of her hands
that are visible, of course,
will be also a speculation on Intangible or Immaterial Art”
(<http://kristenalvanson.com/new/about.html>. Further documentation,
including the artist’s essay “The Art of Nothing: Immateriality and Intangible
Art,” is available on the website.
2
Psalm 36:7-9, The New Oxford Annotated Bible (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1977).
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Alvanson, Masciandaro & Wilson – dESIRE Gloss
about this desire—“Love’s pain, I
have endured to such a degree—
that ask not. / Separation’s
poison, I have tasted in such a
3
way—that ask not” —about what
is clear—“Beauty [claritas, splendor
formae] re-spects the cognitive
power, for things which please in
4
being seen are called beautiful” —
about what comes seminally with
its own commentary—“all our socalled consciousness is a more or
less fantastic commentary on an
unknown, perhaps unknowable,
5
but felt text” —about what I
cannot not gloss: “the phantasm
generates desire, desire is
translated into words, and the
word defines a space wherein the
appropriation of what could
otherwise not be appropriated or
6
enjoyed is possible.” There is no
answer,
only
translation,
repetition of the question. That is
enough, everything. For it is
splayed out and thrust towards
the camera lens in pride and
supplication, the tattoos perhaps
signifying
a
forthcoming
marriage. But then again, these
hands are so much in the
foreground
that
they
are
positioned in the picture almost
as if they were ‘our’ hands—or
indeed the photographer’s hands
that should be taking the photo.
It is as if we have suddenly
dropped our camera in order to
hold
back
some
sinister
apparition looming up from
behind the glass. The blurring of
the picture gives, for me, this
sense of double movement,
pushing back and forward,
thrusting and repelling. A
woman beautified, ceremonially
painted-up, adorned, veiled for
someone’s
delight,
looks
ominous.
‘We’,
similarly
adorned, hold back, with our
3
Hafiz of Shiraz, The Divan, tr. H. Wilberforce Clarke (London: Octagon
Press, 1974), 313.1.
4
“Pulchrum autem respicit vim cognoscitivam, pulchra enim dicuntur quae
visa
placent”
(Aquinas,
Summa
Theologiae,
I.5.4),
<
http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/sth1003.html>.
5
Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, eds.
Maudemaire Clark and Brian Leiter (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), 2.119. Whence philosophy as essentially the practice of
consciousness. Cf. “the genuine philosophical element in every work,
whether it be a work of art, of science, or of thought, is its capacity for
elaboration, which Ludwig Feuerbach defined as Entwicklungsfähigkeit”
(Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things, trans. Luca D’Isanto with
Kevin Attell [New York: Zone, 2009], 7-8. Photography is the technical
apotheosis of developability.
6
Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans.
Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 129.
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GLOSSATOR 3
exactly the no-thing between
things that is all in all, the line
that, being entirely nothing in
itself, omnipresently touches
each. That is what image is.
Whence eros (love demanding
the presence of the loved) as
enlightening,
levitating
entanglement
in
something
essentially linear—“Fortes tresses,
soyez la houle qui m’enlève”
[Strong tresses, be the swell that
7
lifts me away] —and desire’s
imaging as art of lineation: kohl
= focuser/refractor/deflector of
ocular rays (NB: pupilization of
the
eye’s
outside,
precise
inversion of the veil’s solar
8
border); Pondus meum amor meus —
love as gravitational alignment
(NB: black heart/dark star at
bottom
center);
seductive
collusions
between
writing,
covering, and gaze, activator of
eye as follower (line-linen-lingere)
. . . Beauty is a total
barzakhification
of
being,
absolutization of the (in)visible
line between light and dark:
“The created realm is the barzakh
between Light and darkness. In
its essence it is qualified neither
by darkness nor by Light, since it
is the barzakh and the middle,
having a property from each of
its two sides. That is why He
‘appointed’ for man ‘two eyes
hennaed hands and our slender
pointed nails, our double, our
darkened
image.
The
composition of the picture sets up
this equivalence, this Iranian
stand-off, conveying our gaze
directly into the eye-line of the
woman framed in the blackness
of the veil. One eye, obscured
behind the reflected flash of light,
the other—the evil one, no
doubt—looks directly at ‘us’, at
me, behind thick eyeliner. “As
we are about to take the final
step, we are beside ourselves
with desire, paralyzed, in the
clutch of a force that demands
our disintegration” (Bataille,
Erotism: 141). Hands are held up
against the translucent barrier
and the dark figure behind it.
What denotes the glass barrier, if
it is glass, is the reflected light
and, in the top left-hand corner,
where the left index finger points,
some painted writing. Whatever
it is, writing signifies that there is
Law somewhere, and here, as
ever, it marks the point of
separation,
all
points
of
separation, between light and
dark, subject and viewer, beauty
and its profanation, woman and
woman.
Because
I
must
remember that the woman does
not look at an ‘us’. These hands
at the foreground of the picture
7
Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil (New York: Oxford, 1993), ‘La
Chevelure,’ line 13.
8
Augustine, Confessions, 13.9.
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Alvanson, Masciandaro & Wilson – dESIRE Gloss
and guided him on the two
highways’ (Koran 90:8–10), for
man exists between the two
9
paths.” “Such a one, as soon as
he beholds the beauty of this
world, is reminded of true
beauty, and his wings begin to
10
grow.” N
address another woman—the
photographer—as if in challenge
and complicity, each woman
looking the other in the eye.
What do they see—each other’s
life, love and beauty, or death?
In her place, my looking enacts
her sacrifice. S
9
Ibn Arabi, al-Futûhât, 1911 edition, 3:274.28, cited from William Chittick,
‘Ibn
Arabi,’
Stanford
Encyclopedia
of
Philosophy,
<
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ibn-arabi/>. “Know that the word barzakh is
an expression for what separates two things without ever becoming either of
them, such as the line separating a shadow from the sunlight, or as in His
Saying--may He be exalted!: ‘He has loosened the two Seas. They meet: /
between them a barzakh, they do not go beyond’ (55: 19-20)—meaning that
neither of them becomes mixed with the other. But even if our senses are
unable to perceive what separates those two things, the intellect judges that
there is indeed a divider separating them--and that divider grasped by the
intellect is precisely the barzakh. Because if something is perceived by the
senses, it must be one of those two things, rather than the barzakh. So each of
those two things, when they are adjacent to each other, have need of a
barzakh which is not the same as each of them, but which has in itself the
power of each of them” (Ibn Arabi, al-Futûhât al-Makkîya [The Meccan
Illuminations], chapter 63, trans. James. W. Morris, forthcoming).
10
Phaedrus, 249e, cited from The Collected Dialogues of Plato, eds. Edith
Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1961), 496. Plato elaborates: “For by reason of the stream of beauty entering
in through his eyes there comes a warmth, whereby the soul’s plumage is
fostered, and with that the roots of the wings are melted, which for long had
been so hardened and closed up that nothing could grow; then as the
nourishment is poured in, the stump of the wing swells and hastens to grow
from the root over the whole substance of the soul” (251b). Cauda pavonis,
Melek Taus, elaboration of the colorful space between dark and light,
nigredo and albedo, opening up of the original-final relation between wings
and eyes: “And round the throne, on each side of the throne, are four living
creatures, full of eyes in front and behind . . . And the four living creatures,
each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all round and within”
(Revelation 4:6-8).
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GLOSSATOR 3
003501
Desire and the drive: A Persian tale baked upon an arch made of
brick. Que vuoi? I don’t know anything about photography. I don’t
know anything about Kristen Alvanson except that she is American
and has an Iranian partner. What does that have to do with
anything? Are all these photographs taken in Iran? I don’t know
anything about Iran, couldn’t identify a monument, square, rock. We
think you know a lot about desire. This is the last, terrifying sentence on
the email from N, inviting me to participate in this project. Who are
we? And what do they suppose about my knowledge of desire? I’ve
written on Lacan. But the page mock-up, determining the length of
each gloss, consists entirely of repeated denunciations of
psychoanalysis in favour of Deleuze and Guattari! Already my
looking has been pre-directed by an imagined dichotomy I reject.
This picture, the first one allotted to me, I cannot see now as
anything but a staging of the question of desire, in a picture
structured by a series of dualities, too many. But mainly: two planes
and surfaces, ceramic tiles and whitewashed brick. I am struck by the
awkwardness of the framing that truncates the images glazed on the
tiles and makes the nature of the building difficult to read. (Already
visual desire is provoked through a brutal act of photographic
100
Alvanson, Masciandaro & Wilson – dESIRE Gloss
‘castration’!) Modern (Western) consumer desire finds its origin and
definition in eighteenth-century Orientalism in a fantasy of despotism
and Other jouissance: The Arabian Knights but also Montesquieu’s
11
Persian Letters (1721). Scheherazade’s 1001 glosses, wagering life on
the desire of the Other, for “desire is interpretation itself” (Lacan,
4fcs, 176). Who is he, horseman of desire with his train of followers,
is he laying siege or coming home to the golden citadel I imagine in
the top corner, the point towards which all the lines tend? Visual
desire is related to the scopic drive that is all the more deadly and
machinic for being photographic, click after click, picture after
picture, arching around a vacuole in brick-like, stolid satisfaction. But
the desire that this drive supports, I wager (but we will see), is not to
picture, objectify or possess Iran or Iranian objects, but to “operate on
a sacrificial plane” and arouse Iranian desire itself, “for what makes
the value of the icon is that the god it represents is also looking at it”
(Lacan, 4fc: 113). S
11
Which illustrates interestingly how the East and the West—the Orient and
th
the Americas—could, in the 18 c., be related in a triangular structure that
connected virtue with erotic and economic value.
101
GLOSSATOR 3
003510
CHAINS
without
OF
12
BEING.
But
hierarchical
SEQUINED SEA of space-time /
the multiple / an apparition of
12
“[S]ince Mind emanates from the Supreme God, and Soul from Mind, and
Mind, indeed, forms and suffuses all below with life, and since this is the one
splendor lighting up everything and visible in all, like a countenance
reflected in many mirrors arranged in a row, and since all follow on in
continuous succession, degenerating step by step [degenerantia per ordinem] in
their downward course, the close observer will find that from the Supreme
God even to the bottommost dregs of the universe [a summo deo usque ad
ultimam rerum faecem] there is one tie [conexio], binding at every link and never
broken. This is the golden chain [catena aurea] of Homer which, he tells us,
God ordered to hang down from the sky to the earth” (Macrobius,
Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William Harris Stahl [New York:
Columbia University Press, 1952], 14.15). “The chain principle is an
ontological wholism. It threads the fact of universe itself, expressing the
inseparability of the what and the that [NOTE: The distinction does not
happen to us arbitrarily or from time to time, but fundamentally and constantly.
. . . For precisely in order to experience what and how beings in each case are
in themselves as the beings that they are, we must—although not
conceptually—already understand something like the what-being [Was-sein]
and the that-being [Dass-sein] of beings. . . . We never ever experience
102
Alvanson, Masciandaro & Wilson – dESIRE Gloss
(de)generation, and like the
weird placeless place we see
ourselves in (universe), without
center or edge. Those are
projections of perspective, ocular
ego, the cameral eye that, judging
all in the space of its body-
forms. Immersed, neither inside
nor out, how can I tell that this
doesn’t
go
on
forever?
Undulating, an iridescent mirage
that discloses nothing but desert
without end or horizon reaching
from the earth to the farthest
anything about being subsequently or after the event from beings; rather
beings—wherever and however we approach them—already stand in the light of
being. In the metaphysical sense, therefore, the distinction stands at the
commencement of Dasein itself. . . . Man, therefore, always has the possibility
of asking: What is that? And Is it at all or is it not?” (Martin Heidegger, The
Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William
McNeill and Nicholas Walker [Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1995], 357)]. The cosmic catena is the necessary point of identity, piercing
every entity, between essence and existence, the invisible thing making it so
that everything is next to something else and part of everything itself. It is
thus in a full and total sense the chain of being, the fact of being’s being a chain
or binding: at once the universal necessity of the actuality of the everything
(the fact that there is such a thing as everything) and the individual necessity
of the actuality of individuation (the fact that each thing is inexorably
shackled to itself) [NOTE: “Why am I me? A stupid question. . . . I am too
stupid to answer this question. And to ask it, just stupid enough. What is the
mechanism of such stupid questioning? I imagine a small organ, neither
inside nor outside myself, like a polymelic phantom limb, a subtle psychic
appendage implanted at birth behind my crown, during the moment of my
coming to be, whenever that was. This organ (or appendix, or tumor), whose
painful inflammation is despair—’despair is the paroxysm of individuation’
(Cioran)—is like a strange supplementary bodily member, intimate and
inessential, which I can feel yet not move, barely move yet without feeling.
Stupid organ, organ of stupidity. It moves, is moved, like an inalienable
shackle, only to reinforce its immobility. Am I to sever this organ,
hemorrhage of haecceity, escape it? ‘[E]scape is the need to get out of oneself,
that is, to break that most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I
[moi] is oneself [soi-meˆme]’ (Levinas). Just who, then, would escape?” (Nicola
Masciandaro, “Individuation: This Stupidity,” Postmedieval 1 [2010],
forthcoming). “The act whereby being—existence—is bestowed upon us is an
unbearable surpassing of being” (Bataille)]. The chain encompasses from within
the impossible unity of perspective on being that cosmos presupposes: the
definite vision of the unbounded whole from the position of one-sided
asymmetry occupied by the individual” (Nicola Masciandaro, “AntiCosmosis: Black Mahapralaya,” in Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium
1, ed. Nicola Masciandaro [New York: 2010], 71-3, my emphasis in bold).
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GLOSSATOR 3
chamber, is bound to frame
things, above all the frameless, to
capitalize what it cannot see
crossing: “The human being
arrives at the threshold: there he
must throw himself headlong
[vivant] into that which has no
13
foundation and has no head.”
Hence: the cosmological principle
(homogeneity & isotrophy). Yet:
“the world does not consist of
infinitely
many
essentially
identical things—atoms moving in
space—but is in reality a
collection of infinitely many
things,
each
constructed
according to a common principle
yet all different from one
another. Space and time emerge
from the way in which these
ultimate entities mirror each
14
other.” And: “Picture yourself
as drops, and your body as
bubbles inside the ocean. Now,
each of you drops sees neither
your own drop-state nor the
drop-state of others. You see
your own bubbles and bubbles of
others, and this large bubble of
heavens, extending to remotest
space,
countless
particles
multiplied as often as there are
leaves in the forest, feathers upon
birds, scales on fish, drops of
water in the mighty ocean, atoms
in the vast expanse of the air . . .
How much do I love thee? Let
me count the ways . . . Love is of
course the immeasurable and the
unaccountable. It’s not the
sequins that she wears, it’s not
her baby-fine blond hair, it’s
more the desert in her stare (Iggy
Pop). The truth of desire
discloses itself as nothing but
semblance. But what is this autodisclosure? Desire of course
transcends the object, directed by
the semblance of being immanent
to it. Desire is always directed
towards another desire which,
without mediation or regulation,
replicates itself endlessly in
sequences so that desire is desire
of desire of desire of desire of
desire of desire . . . Not signifiers
but sequins: no longer zecchino,
medium of exchange, but pure
13
Georges Bataille, “The Obelisk,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 19271939, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985),
222. “L’ être humain arrive au seuil: là il est nécessaire de se précipiter vivant
dans ci qui n’a plus d’assise ni de tête” (Oeuvres Completes, 12 vols. [Paris:
Gallimard, 1970-88], 1: 13).
14
Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in our Understanding of the
Universe (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999), 240, cited from “The
View from Nowhen: Interview with Julian Barbour,” Collapse V (2009): 108,
my emphasis.
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Alvanson, Masciandaro & Wilson – dESIRE Gloss
15
the world.” Until you finally
find
yourself:
“that
last
amorphous blight of nethermost
confusion which blasphemes and
bubbles at the center of all
16
infinity.” Following the sequins,
17
a bubble-catena is in order. Led
metonymy, pure sequentiality
without order of priority or
narrative, flickering in the full
nothingness
of
evacuated
exchange-value,
the
empty
plenitude of digitality. Who
could make a metaphor of it?
15
Meher Baba, cited from Bhau Kalchuri, Meher Prabhu, 14 vols. (Myrtle
Beach, SC: Manifestation, 1980), 8.2885, commenting in 1943 on a version of
the following chart.
16
H. P. Lovecraft, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, in The Dreams in the
Witchhouse and Other Weird Stories (New York: Penguin, 2004), 156.
17
“A somewhat surprising application of fermentation to cosmology . . .”
(Walter Pagel, Joan Baptista Van Helmont: Reformer of Science and Medicine
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], 85, describing Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz’s Hypothesis physica nova (1671), wherein “divine ether is
made to penetrate the major part of matter, which becomes the earth, and to
be enclosed in bullae [bubbles]”). “Unicorns do not exist, but a soap bubble
would burst were it punctured by a unicorn horn” (John Heil, From An
Ontological Point of View [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], 221). “And
even to me, one who likes life, it seems butterflies and soap bubbles and
whatever is of their kind among human beings know most about happiness”
(Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian Del Caro
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], 28). “There will be no social
solution to the present situation. First, because the vague aggregate of social
milieus, institutions, and individualized bubbles that is called, with a touch of
105
GLOSSATOR 3
antiphrasis, “society,” has no consistency” (The Invisible Committee, The
Coming Insurrection, <http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/>).
“The innocent cruelty; the opaque monstrosity of eyes scarcely
distinguishable from the little bubbles that form on the surface of mud; the
horror as integral to life as light is to a tree” (Georges Bataille, Encyclopedia
Acephalica: Comprising the Critical Dictionary and Related Texts, trans. Iain White
[London: Atlas, 1996], s.v. “Metamorphosis”). “. . . these and many other
instances which could be given prove that indeed the personal consciousness
is but a bubble floating on the tide of Being, and liable, at any moment of
strong emotion, to be swept into nothingness” (Oliver H. P. Smith,
“Evolution and Consciousness,” The Monist 9 [1899]: 231). “The devout soul
is a fountain which glides and flows, and which ever springs up anew,
because it is renewed in God. It never ceases to bubble forth, and break out
in love for Him, to swell for its own needs, and to expand itself in affection
for its neighbor” (Richard of Saint Victor, cited from Richard Frederick
Littledale, A Commentary on the Song of Songs, from Ancient and Medieval Sources
[London: Joseph Masters, 1869], 192). “The bubble was formed from water,
in water it disappears” (‘Abd al-Quddus, Cited from Scott Alan Kugle, Sufis &
Saints’s Bodies: Mysticism, Corporeality, & Sacred Power in Islam [Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 2007], 246). “But elsewhere, deeper in
the granite, are there certain chambers that have no entrances? Chambers
never unsealed since the arrival of the gods. Local report declares that these
exceed in number those that can be visited, as the dead exceed the living—
four hundred of them, four thousand or million. Nothing is inside them, they
were sealed up before the creation of pestilence or treasure; if mankind grew
curious and excavated, nothing, nothing would be added to the sum of good
or evil. One of them is rumoured within the boulder that swings on the
summit of the highest of the hills; a bubble-shaped cave that has neither
ceiling nor floor, and mirrors its own darkness in every direction infinitely”
(E. M. Forster, A Passage to India [Orlando: Harcourt, 1984], 136). “Animals
and plants come into being in earth and in liquid because there is water in
earth, and air in water, and in all air is vital heat so that in a sense all things
are full of soul. Therefore living things form quickly whenever this air and
vital heat are enclosed in anything. When they are so enclosed, the corporeal
liquids being heated, there arises as it were a frothy bubble” (Aristotle, On the
Generation
of
Animals,
trans.
Arthur
Platt,
<http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/generation/>). “As in the multiple
worlds view, the spacetime sheet separates into two opposing curvatures,
resulting in a ‘bubble’ or ‘blister’ in underlying reality” (Stewart R. Hameroff
and Jonathan Powell, “The Conscious Connection: A Psycho-Physical Bridge
Between Brain and Pan-Experiential Quantum Geometry,” in Mind That
Abides: Panpsychism in the New Millenium, ed. David Skrbina [Amsterdam: John
Benjamins, 2009], 117). “Imagine the infinitely unconscious God state A,
before the Creation came into being, as motionless infinite ocean. A puff of
106
Alvanson, Masciandaro & Wilson – dESIRE Gloss
by its thread, I return nowhere.
Unless the line belongs to
Ariadne, bride of Dionysius,
unless I am moved: “A l’alta
fantasia qui mancò possa; / ma
già volgeva il mio disio e ‘l velle,
/ sì come rota ch’igualmente è
mossa, / l’amor che move il sole e
18
l’altre stele.” Then something
else happens: the shockingly
silent current of a being so deeply
outside that touching it short-
Who would turn this multiple
into the likeness of One? She
puts on a universe comprised
entirely of sequins strings,
patterns emerge—life seems to
glisten in semblants of being—in
folds and clusters, in degrees of
intensity, in the fabric of
space/time, to arouse the desire
of God, who names her the
Universe, the One. But she is la
belle noiseuse, querulous beauty
wind then stirred the tranquil uniformity of this ocean, and immense waves,
countless drops of water, and innumerable bubbles appeared from out of the
uniformity of the limitless, infinite ocean. The puff of wind that set the ocean
into commotion may be compared to the impulse of the infinite, original
urge-to-know originating with the infinite, orginal whim of God, surging in
God to know Himself through His infinite God State II. The stir on the
surface of the ocean, caused by the infinite urge, surcharged every drop of
that infinite ocean with the infinite urge-to-know itself. Thus Paramatma
[Over-Soul] in His infinitely unconscious state A, being urged to know
Himself, simultaneously bestirs the tranquil poise of every atma [soul] in
Paramatma with an urge to know itself. This could only be understood when
Paramatma is compared to an infinite ocean and the atmas to the drops of that
infinite ocean. But it must also be well noted that every drop of the ocean,
when in the ocean, is ocean itself, until the drops inherit individuality
through bubble formations over the surface of the ocean. Every bubble thus
formed would then bestow a separate and a particular individuality upon
every drop. And this created separateness would exist with the uniform
indivisibility of the drops of the infinite ocean as long as these bubbles
creating separateness exist. As soon as the bubbles burst, the drops, which are
and were already in the ocean itself, come to realize that they are and were
one with the infinite ocean; and they gain this consciousness of the eternal
infinity in the infinite ocean only after they first experience separateness
and then dispel the bubbles of ignorance that were instrumental in bestowing
upon them the experience of their apparent separateness from their inherent
indivisibility” (Meher Baba, God Speaks: The Theme of Creation and Its Purpose,
nd
2 ed. [New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1973], 182-3, original emphasis).
18
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, ed. Charles Singleton (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1977), Paradiso 33.142-5. [Here power failed the
lofty phantasy; but already my desire and my will were revolved, like a
wheel that is evenly moved, by the love which moves the sun and the other
stars].
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GLOSSATOR 3
circuits interiority by keeping it
all the more intact, so that
everything intensifies contact by
staying right where it is,
accelerating
individuation’s
thrilling spin: “Individuation as
such, as it operates beneath all
forms, in inseparable from a pure
ground that it brings to the
surface and trails with it. It is
difficult to describe this ground,
or the terror and attraction it
19
excites.” Here one disk flashes
above all the others, becoming
20
solar. And this is due only to
the undulation of the (w)hole, the
movement of everything within
its own emptiness. Physicist says,
“We must understand how the
universe
can
‘swim
in
21
nothing’.” Waves. Wave is how
ocean swims, so that somewhere,
somehow, somewhen, “Wave,
sea and bubble, all three are
22
one.” N
(Serres), flashing eyes and
glinting hatred: noisily not (not)
one she ex-sists in the domain of
the infinite with which she is
continuous.
Glistening
jouissance, pure surface – not of
the repetitive circuit of the drive
(the brickwork, the crumbling
walls, the undead historical
process that goes nowhere) but in
the en-corps (Lacan) which insists
in the body beyond its sexual
being (Seminar XX 26/23). “It is
in the traces of jouissance
inscribed in this en-corps that we
can, perhaps, discern something
of the poesis—the something
coming from nothing—that Lacan
links to the contingency of being
and, ultimately, to the path of
love” (Suzanne Bernard). S
19
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton. (New York:
Columbia, 1994), 152.
20
I.e. instantaneous participation “in the Project of Tellurian Omega, where
the Earth reaches utter immanence with its burning core – or the metal core
of the tellurian real – and the Sun” (Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity
with Anonymous Materials [Melbourne: re.press, 2008], 45).
21
“The View from Nowhen: Interview with Julian Barbour,” Collapse V
(2009): 117. “Seeing something simply in its being-thus—irreparable, but not
for that reason necessary; thus, but not for that reason contingent—is love”
(Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt [Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993], 105).
22
Shah Nimatullah Wali, cited from Leonard Lewisohn, The Heritage of
Sufism, Volume II: The Legacy of Mediaeval Persian Sufism (1150-1500) (Oxford:
Oneworld Publications, 1999), xviii. Cf. “The hyperlocality of the Cosmos is
the feature of the Cosmos causing instantaneous geometrical change either on
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003543
THOUGHT IS WAR. In one noetic stroke I ‘mak siccar’ my tanist
23
ascension-succession to the throne of blood, suffer decollation by
the scale of the Cosmos itself or between volumes of space not locally
connected by matter but connected only by the vacuum bubbles of the
cosmic foam. The whole of physical space across the entire Cosmos has a
vibrating topology (vibrations too small to be physically detected) caused by
the undulation of all of the Cosmos’s composite vacuum bubbles connected
in one seamless continuum. This is the hyperlocality of the Cosmos” (Kip K.
Sewell, The Cosmic Sphere [New York: Nova Science, 1999], 120).
23
“The ancient succession of Scotland had been by tanistry, that is, the
monarchy was elective within a small group of kinsmen, the descendants of
Macalpine. In consequence, the king was almost as a matter of course
assassinated by his successor, who chose the moment most favourable to
himself to ‘make siccar’ an inheritance that could never be regarded as
assured . . . by tanist law Macbeth had as good a claim as Duncan, and his
wife a rather better one” (M.C. Bradbrook, “The Sources of Macbeth,” in
Shakespeare Survey 4: Interpretation, ed. Allardyce Nicoll [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1951], 38). Here is a telling of Robert Bruce’s
killing of John Comyn in the Franciscan church at Dumfries that allegorizes
perfectly unintentionally the binary verbo-violent dynamism of murder (Cf.
“Roussillon waited until Cabestanh was at close range, then he rushed out at
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GLOSSATOR 3
him with murder and destruction in his heart, brandishing a lance above his
head and shouting: ‘Traitor, you are dead!’ And before the words were out
of his mouth he had driven the lance through Cabestanh’s breast. Cabestanh
was powerless to defend himself, or even to utter a word, on being run
through by the lance he fell to ground” [Boccaccio, Decameron, trans. G.H.
McWilliam (New York: Penguin, 1972), 4.9]) as thought’s endless war of
succession around the boundary of doubt and certainty: “They embraced and kissed
each other, after the manner of the times, with a glow of friendliness, and
then walked up the church together towards the high altar, engaged, as it
seemed, in earnest conversation. As they advanced their words grew high
and keen. Bruce accused Comyn of having betrayed him to Edward. ‘You
lie!” said the impudent traitor. Bruce, without a word more, drew his dagger
and struck him down on the very steps of the altar. It was the outburst of a
moment. Bruce instantly felt shocked at the rash deed. He rushed to his
friends, who waited him outside church. ‘I doubt,’ he said, ‘that I have slain
the Comyn!’ ‘You doubt;’ cried Sir Roger Kirkpatrick; ‘I mak siccar;’ and
running into the church, he dispatched the wretched man with repeated
wounds. ‘When you kill a man, do it well,’ says the Koran; which also seems
to have been the opinion of Sir Roger” (James Mackenzie, The History of
Scotland [London: Nelson and Sons, 1867], 131-2). Note the uncanny opining
of the word of God as internal engine and hermeneutic limit of the event.
Corollary: thinking is the material where divine logos enters as weapon: “For
the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword,
piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and
discerning [κριτικός] the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews
4:12). Whence criticism as cutting word (dis-cernere), self-naming of an
awakened one the ultimate weapon: “MUAD’DIB: [thinks] My own name is a
killing word. Will it be a healing word as well?” (Dune, dir. David Lynch
[1984]). Commentary as weirding module. “See now that I, even I, am he,
and there is no god beside me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal;
and there is none that can deliver out of my hand. . . . I will make my arrows
drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh—with the blood of the
slain and the captives, from the long-haired heads of the enemy”
(Deuteronomy 32:39-42). Playing God, the critic rains arrows on the globe:
“Ad mundum mitto mea iacula, dumque sagitto; / At vbi iustus erit, nulla
sagitta ferit. / Sed male viuentes hos vulnero transgredientes; / Conscius ergo
sibi se speculetur ibi” [I send my darts at the world and simultaneously shoot
arrows; / But mind you, wherever there is a just man, no one will receive
arrows. / I badly wound those living in transgression, however; / Therefore,
let the thoughtful man look out for himself] (John Gower, Minor Latin Works,
ed. and trans. R.F. Yeager [Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute
Publications, 2005])—no collateral damage. These lines from the frontispiece
to the Vox Clamantis:
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Alvanson, Masciandaro & Wilson – dESIRE Gloss
Whence bombs as percussive prophecy: smart missiles raining wrath and
reform on the earth (shock & awe), self-detonating auto-decapitating “voice[s]
of one crying in the desert” (Mark 1:3) — all profanely belated heralds of
presumed last prophets, martyrs (death-witnesses) to their own living deaths.
But this photograph shuts my eyes to looking from either idealized end, to
seeing the explosion arrive from heaven or earth. Here I no longer watch
through the lens of the either/or, the filter of enemy/friend. Locating me on
the endless continuum of the middle, in the living space of subtitular
existence between two spear points that never touch (“Then the king gat his
spear in both his hands, and ran toward Sir Mordred, crying: Traitor, now is
thy death-day come. And when Sir Mordred heard Sir Arthur, he ran until
him with his sword drawn in his hand. And there King Arthur smote Sir
Mordred under the shield, with a foin of his spear, throughout the body,
more than a fathom. And when Sir Mordred felt that he had his death wound
he thrust himself with the might that he had up to the bur of King Arthur’s
spear. And right so he smote his father Arthur, with his sword holden in both
his hands, on the side of the head, that the sword pierced the helmet and the
brain-pan, and therewithal Sir Mordred fell stark dead to the earth; and the
noble Arthur fell in a swoon to the earth, and there he swooned ofttimes”
Malory Le Morte D’Arthur), it shows the real case (casus, befalling event): here
111
GLOSSATOR 3
24
25
the sword of Damocles, martyrically live to tell the tale, and
wander the burnt plains of being . . . a cephalophore: “Di sé facea a sé
everyone is ‘taken out.’ “When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s
plains, / And the women come out to cut up what remains, / Jest roll to your
rifle and blow out your brains / An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier”
(Rudyard Kipling, “The Young British Soldier,” War Stories and Poems,
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990], 56).
24
“This tyrant [Dionysius II of Syracuse], however, showed himself how
happy he really was; for once, when Damocles, one of his flatterers, was
dilating in conversation on his forces, his wealth, the greatness of his power,
the plenty he enjoyed, the grandeur of his royal palaces, and maintaining that
no one was ever happier,’ Have you an inclination,’ said he, ‘Damocles, as
this kind of life pleases you, to have a taste of it yourself, and to make a trial
of the good fortune that attends me?’ And when he said that he should like it
extremely, Dionysius ordered him to be laid on a bed of gold with the most
beautiful covering, embroidered and wrought with the most exquisite work,
and he dressed out a great many sideboards with silver and embossed gold.
He then ordered some youths, distinguished for their handsome persons, to
wait at his table, and to observe his nod, in order to serve him with what he
wanted. There were ointments and garlands; perfumes were burned; tables
provided with the most exquisite meats. Damocles thought himself very
happy. In the midst of this apparatus, Dionysius ordered a bright sword to be
let down from the ceiling, suspended by a single horse-hair, so as to hang
over the head of that happy man. After which he neither cast his eye on those
handsome waiters, nor on the well-wrought plate; nor touched any of the
provisions: presently the garlands fell to pieces. At last he entreated the tyrant
to give him leave to go, for that now he had no desire to be happy” (Cicero,
Tusculan Disputations, trans. C.D. Young [New York: Harper, 1899], ch.21).
25
“Instantly the body of Saint Dionysius stood up, took his head in his arms .
. .” (Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans.
William Granger Ryan, 2 vols [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993],
2.240). “Tunc erigens se sancti viri corpus exanime, apprehendit propriis
manibus sanctum caput abscissum” [Raising itself, the lifeless body of the
holy man then grasped with his own hands the sacred severed head] (Odone,
De sanctis martyribus Luciano episcopo, Maximiano presbytero, Iuliano diacono, 5.21,
Acta Sanctorum Database [ProQuest]). “Ubi es? ecce, mirabile auditu, caput
martyris patria lingua respondebat dicens, Heer, Heer, Heer; quod est
interpretatum, Hic, Hic, Hic” [Where are you? Behold, marvelous to hear, the
head of the martyr responded in his native language, Heer, Heer, Heer, which
is to say, Here, Here, Here] (Abbo of Fleury, Passio Sancti Eadmundi, cited from
Corolla Sancti Eadmundi, ed. Lord Francis Harvey [London: John Murray,
1907], 566). On John the Baptist: “The original martyr (witness) is neither a
martyr nor not a martyr. He dies neither for the sake of what he testifies to
nor not for the sake of what he testifies to. The original martyrdom is instead
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Alvanson, Masciandaro & Wilson – dESIRE Gloss
stesso lucerna, / ed eran due in uno e uno in due; / com’ esser può,
qui sa che sì governa . . . levò ‘l braccio alto con tutta la testa / per
appressarne le parole sue, che fuoro: ‘. . . Così s’osserva in me lo
26
contrapasso’” (Inferno 28.124-42). Bertran’s bellophilic body—“Que
27
nuills om non es ren prezatz / Tro q’a maintz colps pres e donatz” —
displays the logic of war’s dyadic vortexical intensity (2-becoming-1becoming-2 in perpetuo: “He [Indra, war] can no more be reduced to
28
one or the other than he can constitute a third of their kind”) as
the supreme death of the supreme witness in relation to which other martyrs
stay original, i.e. remain in proximity to their unrepeatable origin. It is the
death of one who cannot survive his witnessing and the witnessing of one
who cannot not die. John’s identity is a severed identity which becomes the
seed ensuring that each following death is a witnessing and that each
following witness must die, the a-martyric ovum holding the Christian
meaning of martyr. What enables this generation is John’s uncanny intimacy—
‘There was a man sent from God whose name was John’ (John 1:6)—with
what he absolutely cannot be, with what he must say he is not: ‘I am not the
Christ’ (John 1:20). In a strange and unspeakable way, the martyric meaning
of John’s beheading poetically approaches its precise impossibility. It becomes
the performance of exactly what it can never be, the necessarily decapitative
murder of the theological traitor, the killing of the one who says I am God [cf.
Mansur al-Hallaj]” (Nicola Masciandaro, “Non potest hoc corpus decollari:
Beheading and the Impossible,” in Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in Medieval
Literature and Culture, eds. Larissa Tracy and Jeff Massey [University Press of
Florida, forthcoming]).
26
“Of itself it was making a lamp of itself, and they were two in one and one
in two — how this can be, He knows who so ordains. . . . he raised high his
arm with the head, in order to bring near to us his words, which were, ‘. . .
Thus is the retribution observed in me.’”
27
“For no man is worth a damn till he has taken and given many a blow”
(Bertran de Born, “Bem platz lo gais temps de pascor,” trans. Ezra Pound,
cited from Lark in the Morning: The Verses of the Troubadours, ed. Robert Kehew
[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005], 142-3]).
28
Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 352). D&G’s “can no
more” corresponds to Dante’s “e” [and], which joins by holding separate
“uno in due” and “due in uno.” I.e. Bertran is precisely not both 1-in-2 and 2in-1, but the and of their non-intersecting identity, the touch of the split or
heresy-choice that makes them. Cf. “Severing also is still a joining and a
relating” (“[A]uch das Trennen ist noch ein Verbinden und Beziehen”
(Martin Heidegger, “Logik: Heraklits Lehre vom Logos,” in Heraklit,
‘Gesamtausgabe,’ Bd. 55 [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1970],
337).
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GLOSSATOR 3
thought’s essential gesture: holding forth a speaking head. Raising the
arm to press words towards another (ad-pressare) is a haptic nexus of
striking and speaking that indicates war to be the writing of thought’s
weight on all bodies, a bloody texting of the general violence of
dissatisfied embodiment: “war does not embody any special suffering.
People really suffer all the time. They suffer because they are not
satisfied—they want more and more. War is more an outcome of the
universal suffering of dissatisfaction than an embodiment of
29
representative suffering.” War does not typify suffering, but is the
very writing of suffering that thought constitutes as its/our splitting30
choosing (haereses) into desire/dream/reality.
“Writing is the
dissimulation of the natural, primary, and immediate presence of
sense to the soul within the logos. Its violence befalls the soul as
31
32
unconsciousness.” Consciousness is the unconscious of war. Your
thoughts are its subtitles. And if thy head offend thee, cut it off, and
cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members
should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell
(Cf. Matthew 5:30). The fog of war rises from black-biled earth,
humus/humour, dark with organic matter for thought. War-genius is
33
melancholic, a thought-sufferer, knower of its passions. And plunges
29
Meher Baba, Discourses, 3.10.
Cf. the schismatic community of Dante’s ninth bolgia to which Bertran de
Born belongs, headed by arch-self-splitter Mohammed, who identifies himself
as a visual third-person: “Mentre che tutto in lui veder m’attacoo, /
guardommi e con le man s’aperse il petto, dicendo: ‘Or vedi com’ io mi
dilacco! / vedi come storpiato è Mäometto!” (Inferno 238.28-31) [While I was
all aborbed in gazing on him, he looked at me and with his hands pulled
open his breast, saying, “Now see how I rend myself, see how mangled is
Mohammed!”]
31
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 37.
32
“Get on the ground! Get on the fucking ground! Now! [Thinking] This
great evil. Where’s it come from? How’d it steal into the world? What seed,
what root did it grow from? Who’s doing this? Who’s killing us?” (The Thin
Red Line, dir. Terrence Malick [1998]).
33
“Lastly, we come to men who are difficult to move but have strong
feelings—men who are to the previous type [choleric] like heat to a shower of
sparks. These are the men who are best able to summon the titanic strength it
takes to clear away the enormous burdens that obstruct activity in war. Their
emotions move as great masses do––slowly but irresistibly” (Carl von
Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007], 53). Kleemeier comments: “A melancholic in the
30
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Alvanson, Masciandaro & Wilson – dESIRE Gloss
us back in: “the emerging battlespace—the intermezzo where/in we make
contact with the SIMAD—is a locale in which an ungrounding of the
Earth is in process and, as such, is a vertiginous soft spot on the
34
surface of the Earth.”
Clausewitzian sense is . . . someone who will act in exactly the right way,
because his passions form a strong and solid foundation for action. So
melancholy is not an illness at all, but a source of successful action. There is a
certain ring of paradox here. On the one hand, you cannot eliminate the
element of suffering from the notion of passion (Leidenschaft). Having a
passion, as distinct from having a spontaneous emotion or affection, means
being driven by a constant and powerful mental need, and to be in
permanent need of something certainly indicates suffering. On the other
hand, passions can become the very basis of great actions. This is so, because
passions can combine with reason in a way spontaneous feelings cannot. . . .
The link between passion and reason is will power” (Ulrike Kleemeir, “Moral
Forces in War,” in Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Hew Strachan and
Andreas Herber-Rothe [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007], 112-3). Cf.
“In most persons the mind accepts ends from the promptings of wants, but
this means denial of the life of the spirit. Only when the mind accepts its ends
and values from the deepest promptings of the heart does it contribute to the
life of the spirit. Thus mind has to work in co-operation with the heart;
factual knowledge has to be subordinated to intuitive perceptions; and heart
has to be allowed full freedom in determining the ends of life without any
interference from the mind” (Meher Baba, Discourses, 1.140).
34
st
Manabrata Guha, “Introduction to SIMADology: Polemos in the 21
Century,” Collapse VI: Geo/Philosophy (2010): 327.
115
GLOSSATOR 3
003505
A trunk and a package of junk, tied with string. Let’s go. They do not
move. ‘S’ is the letter that denotes me in this glossing game. And here
is ‘my’ letter stencilled on a cardboard box flattened to provide some
loose casing for—what—wrought iron gates, a fence? This picture,
which falls to me by the law of numerical series and sequencing that
allots my place, has ‘my’ letter on it prominently placed and
underlined. But of course this picture has absolutely nothing to do
with me. I have never seen this alley, street or those objects. Then
again, what does the letter ‘S’ have to do with me? Arbitrarily,
according to the rules of the game, I am put into the picture as the
letter ‘S’, a letter as alien to me as this picture. Has someone arrived
116
Alvanson, Masciandaro & Wilson – dESIRE Gloss
35
or are they about to travel? Has someone died? ‘S’ is visible but at
the expense of ‘me’ who am absent, like the owner of these objects.
“The signifier, whose first purpose is to bar the subject, has brought
into him the meaning of death. (The letter kills, but we learn this
from the letter itself)” (Lacan, Ecr. 848). The letter marks the point of
division wherein one locates one’s place as an effect of the chain,
SAEND, arranged in couples at four corners, “in a form homologous
36
to a pyramid”, a tomb. It is this form of fatal couplings that
determines the destiny, if not the destination, of ‘my’ desire in the
35
When I first saw this image I was reminded of Freud’s tattered hat and
coat that hangs above a weather-beaten monogrammed suitcase in the Freud
Museum in Vienna. These signs of imminent departure are virtually all that
is left of Freud in the house from which he fled from the Nazis. Almost
everything in that house is now in Hampstead. But these objects did not
leave, they were abandoned.
36
This refers to the five-pointed geometrical form that structures the dESIRE
Gloss: “Imagine a pentagram with vertices SAEND, in order of the continuous
tracing of their five-pointed star. Each vertex represents a ‘who’ or person.
The form is homologous to a pyramid (square + point suspended above it).
Imagine ten continuous tracings of all the lines joining these vertices: S-A-EN-D-S-E-D-A-N-S x 10 (each dash corresponds to a line between vertices; the
first five trace the star, the second five trace the pentagonal perimeter). This is
a geometrical representation of a unit (100) of intangible dESIRES in a form
that communicates each desire as a line or force between two points. This
form simultaneously articulates how: 1) desire always comes bundled with
other desires; 2) how desire subsists as a circulation within such bundles; 3)
how desire is essentially personal, involved with desire to be desired, a mode
of answering who am i? Furthermore, as an iteration (10, 10, 10, . . . = 100),
the form communicates how desire exists as a repetition of itself. Whence
desire as the ground of habit, as opposed to whim or incognitum hactenus, which
is absolutely spontaneous and utopically free. By commentarially submitting
ourselves to such an arbitrary (?) regimen or absolute regularization of desire,
we seriously/ridiculously desire to collectively realize, like monks in
conjoined cells, desire’s inherent freedom. This freedom is anticipated in the
structure of the photograph as an undetermined determination of a relation
between subject and object, a purely commentarial or deictic act (look!).
Dialogic (or double-sided or self-mirroring or Narcissistic or Romandelaroseian
or speculative, i.e. so beautiful that it does not at all resemble itself, what
Guillaume de Lorris gives as birdsong ‘Qu’il ne sembloit pas chans d’oisiaus’)
commentary, commentary on one object by two voices/selves, thus has the
potential to realize all at once the nature of the image, the origination of
anything/everything as our ownmost ecstasy, and the practice of
photography as the technic-erotic perpetuation of love-at-first-sight.”
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GLOSSATOR 3
context of this game. Appropriately the image seems to comprise,
again, of a series of dualities: a dark alley, an opening, where all the
lines tend, into the light. Propped up against the wall, the objects look
set to travel, but just sit there. This could simply be a pile of rubbish.
I see a couple, although there are many more than two objects: the
sealed trunk, smug, inscrutable, sphinx-like; the other(s) ragged,
dishevelled, letting it all (nearly) hang out. A game of even and odd,
odd couples: Oscar and Felix, Jacques and Jacques, Félix and Gilles,
Didi and Gogo. (Didigogo? No, he did not move. Yet desire is
movement even in stasis; it is anticipation, imaginary flight,
37
fantasy). I see a trunk and a wrought iron-cardboard-string machine
bearing a letter that has arrived by chance, as always, at its
destination. S
37
‘By The Time I Get to Phoenix’ is a song of imaginary flight. It is another
repetition in a series of failed departures—“I’ve left that girl so many times
before.” His anticipation is always displaced by nostalgia, the (love) sickness
for home. “By the time I get to Phoenix, she’ll be . . .” but he never gets to
Phoenix.
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003506
“In the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am”
(Foucault). A photographer, is this the photographer, Kristen
Alvanson? At first sight, naively, it looks like a photograph of a
woman, the street behind her, taking a photo of some desirable object
in a shop window. But it could be a reflection, yes, the glass is angled
relative to the picture plane; the photographer is the ‘desirable object’
looking at herself in the ‘shop window’. Even if it is not a reflection,
this is the ruse of the double, setting up the desire to photograph the
photographer looking at herself looking at herself. And here I am like
her—like anyone—in the place where she discovers her absence,
looking at herself looking at herself. The place of the shopper and the
commodity is the same. Her left eye, not the camera lens, seems to
look into that space from which she is now absent and from which I
am looking, being drawn into this play of glances, this exchange of
narcissisms. It is a look of intimacy, but it is not intimate. A smile
plays on the photographer’s lips as she glances at herself and through
herself into the virtual point, the empty space not of symbolic
mediation but economic exchange, from which I look back at her. I
notice the fractures in the glass hinting at the disunity of the body
that is normally veiled by the specular image but is here disclosed. I
119
GLOSSATOR 3
fragment in turn. This commentary is too facile, don’t you think? I
see a hurried yet studied impersonation of feminine desire. On
impulse, she pulls back the thick curtain, as heavy as death, unwinds
her veil, takes a quick snap of something that catches her eye
(herself). Transgressive feminine jouissance is on display even as it
takes place out of the sight of the King and his police (Purloined
Letter). It is not an image of female narcissism, but an advertising of
feminine desire and jouissance that appeals to the narcissism of the
viewer, his idiotic cleverness. This is desire pimping itself in the form
of its own semblance all the better to remain hidden. Abject, I don’t
know how long I can go on playing the role of the (Lacanian) punter.
It is time to unwind that veil, but what is behind it? Nothing but
another semblance of an imitation of a semblance . . . S
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Alvanson, Masciandaro & Wilson – dESIRE Gloss
003513
BEWILDERMENT. “So rational speculation leads to bewilderment
[hayra] and theophany leads to bewilderment. There is nothing but a
bewildered one. There is nothing exercising properties but
38
bewilderment. There is nothing but Allah.” Bewilderment means
38
Ibn al ‘Arabi, The Meccan Revelations, ed. Michel Chodkiewicz, trans.
William C. Chittick & James W. Morris (New York: Pir Press, 2005), 198.2.
Chittick explicates the concept: “To find God is to fall into bewilderment
(hayra), not the bewilderment of being lost and unable to find one’s way, but
the bewilderment of finding and knowing God and of not-finding and notknowing Him at the same time. Every existent thing other than God dwells
in a never-never land of affirmation and negation, finding and losing,
knowing and not-knowing. The difference between the Finders and the rest
of us is that they are fully aware of their own ambiguous situation. They
know the significance of the saying of the first caliph Abū Bakr: ‘Incapacity to
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GLOSSATOR 3
perplexity as a not-knowing-where-one-is-going/not-knowing-whereto-go that never stops moving, in any direction, or without direction,
or in a direction that cannot be decided, a direction that might be
either, but is absolutely neither, right or wrong: a direction that is
39
40
pure direction and not direction at all.
Beyond from and to,
bewilderment relocates movement, making it “the omnipresent term
41
of equation between anywhere and everywhere.” “The term hayra
(perplexity) often renders aporia in Arabic translations from Greek.
Aporia means that no passage (poros) has been found to the solution of
42
a puzzle or impasse.” Bewilderment is the unfinishably perfect
perpetuation of aporia’s stalling, the pure anti-freezing of impasse into
a plenitude of beautiful procession and flow. “Water. Millions of
decaliters. A treasure. Greater than treasure, Usul. We have
thousands of such caches, and only a few of us know them all. And
43
when we have enough, we shall change the face of Arrakis.”
Bewilderment is the mood of ultimate architecture: totalitarian
porosity. All is passage, every way is the way because “the way after
attain comprehension is itself comprehension’” (William C. Chittick, The Sufi
Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-’Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination [Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1989], 3-4).
39
Counterpoint: Dante’s Belacqua, who stays still precisely by knowing
where he must go: “O frate, andar in sù che porta? . . . Prima convien che
tanto il ciel m’aggiri / di fuor da essa, quanto fece in vita, / per ch’io ‘ndugiai
al fine I buon sospiri” (Purgatorio 4.127-32) [O brother, what’s the use of going
up? . . . First must the heavens revolve around me outside it, so long as they
did during my life, because I delayed good sighs until the end]. Sloth’s
contrapasso is the self-imprisonment of being a profane qutub.
40
“For the bewildered one has a round [dawr] / and a circular motion around
the qutb / which he never leaves / But the master of the long path / tends
away from what he aims for / seeking what he is already in / A master of
fantasies which are his goal / He has a ‘from’ and a ‘to’ / and what is between
them / But the master of the circular movement / has no starting point / that
‘from’ should take him over / and no goal / that he should be ruled by ‘to’ /
He has the more complete existence / And is given the totality of the words
and wisdoms” (Ibn Arabi, Fusus al-hikam [Bezels of Wisdom], chapter 3, cited
from Michael Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying, 101-2).
41
Nicola Masciandaro, “Becoming Spice: Commentary as Geophilosophy,”
Collapse VI: Geo/Philosophy (2010): 31.
42
Joel L. Kraemer, “Maimondes, The Great Healer,” Maimonidean Studies 5
(2008): 10.
43
David Lynch, Dune (Universal Pictures, 1984).
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Alvanson, Masciandaro & Wilson – dESIRE Gloss
44
all—it does not exist!” All is process, the perpetual flashing of
unending interstitial interchange between problem and solution,
branch and intersection. “This conjunction [and] carries enough force
to shake and uproot the verb ‘to be.’ Where are you going? Where
are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are totally
45
46
useless questions.” Follow me! This is the only way of staying
with the center: constantly succeed to the furthest boundary of its
47
infinite outside. The motional essence of bewilderment—on this
48
point the English etymology is ideally confused —is captured in the
49
unspelled difference between hayra and hira (whirlpool). This image
likewise locates you at the fountal threshold between spectatorship
44
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian del Caro
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 156.
45
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987), 25.
46
“. . . Swaying drunkenly to and fro like the branches, fresh as raw silk,
which the winds have bent. Gloss: ‘Swaying drunkenly,’ in reference to the
station of bewilderment (( ”)حيرةIbn Arabi, Tarjuman al-Ashwaq [Interpreter of
Desires], trans. Reynold A. Nicholson [London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1911],
22.13).
47
“That bewilderment is achieved in the continual transformation from form
to form and in the circular motion beyond the dualism of origin and goal”
(Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying, 102).
48
According to the OED: from wilder, meaning “to cause to lose one’s way,
as in a wild or unknown place,” “of uncertain origin: prob. (by an unusual
process) extracted from wilderness on the analogy of the form of wander).” I.e.
wilder turned wilderness into a verb on the motional model of wander.
49
“‘The [Universal] Order is perplexity, and perplexity is agitation and
movement, and movement is life’ [al-’amr hīra wa-l-hīra qalaq wa haraka wa-lharaka hayāt]. I read the Arabic word حيرةhere as hīra not hayra following Ibn
‘Arabī’s intention to identify ‘perplexity’ and ‘whirlpool’. ‘ حيرةperplexity’ can
be read as hīra not hayra, Arabic dictionaries tell us, and ‘whirlpool’ (hīra) is
one of the favourite images of universal life and order in Ibn ‘Arabī’s texts.
The hā’ir ‘perplexed’ human being finds himself in constant movement. He
cannot gain a foothold at any point, he is not established anywhere. This is
why Ibn ‘Arabī says that he is ‘perplexed in the multiplication of the One’:
this ‘multiplication’ is not just epistemological, it is ontological as well, and
the perplexed human being is moving in the whirlpool of life and cosmic
Order and at the same time realises that he is at that movement” (Andrey
Smirnov, “Sufi Hayra and Islamic Art: Contemplating Ornament through
Fusus al-Hikam,” paper presented at Sufism, Gnosis, Art: The Thought of Ibn Arabi
and Shah Nimatullah [Seville, 22-23 November 2004]).
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GLOSSATOR 3
and existence. Not his drawable face, but something like this is what
Narcissus really sees, an object of supreme confusion between image
and self, line and substance. Only by standing over here, on this side
beneath impassible overhanging barriers, does the eight-sided star
50
convexly dip to kiss my crown. Simultaneously, these marbly
horizontals are absolutely steps that I am walking down, into the
51
drowning death of living. Image, dESIRE, is the guide: “guidance
means being guided to bewilderment, that he might know the whole
affair is perplexity, which means perturbation and flux, and flux is
52
life.”
50
“The Cosmos is like a net which takes all its life, as far as ever it stretches,
from being wet in the water; it is at the mercy of the sea which spreads out,
taking the net with it just so far as it will go, for no mesh of it can strain
beyond its set place: the Soul is of so far-reaching a nature—a thing
unbounded—as to embrace the entire body of the All in the one extension; so
far as the universe extends, there soul is” (Plotinus, Enneads, 4.3.9).
51
“For if anyone follow what is like a beautiful shape playing over water—is
there not a myth telling in symbol of such a dupe, how he sank into the
depths of the current and was swept away to nothingness? So too, one that is
held by material beauty and will not break free shall be precipitated, not in
body but in Soul, down to the dark depths loathed of the Intellective-Being,
where, blind even in the Lower-World, he shall have commerce only with
shadows, there as here” (Plotinus, Enneads, 1.6.7).
52
Ibn Arabi, Bezels of Wisdom [Fusus al-Hikam], trans. R.W.J. Austin (New
York: Paulist Press, 1980), 254.
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Alvanson, Masciandaro & Wilson – dESIRE Gloss
Kristen Alvanson (born 1969, Minneapolis) is an American artist
based in Iran and Malaysia. She attended The Cooper Union for the
Advancement of Science and Art in New York and holds a degree
from Sarah Lawrence College. She has participated in group/solo
shows in New York, Tehran, London, Istanbul, Berlin, Belgium,
Zürich and Vilnius including a solo exhibition of her work at Azad
Gallery in Tehran and participation in the International Roaming
Biennial of Tehran. Her writing and artworks have been published in
Collapse: Journal of Philosophical Research and Development, New Humanist,
Frozen Tears III, Cabinet, Specialten and ITCH Magazine. For more
information visit Alvanson’s website at www.kristenalvanson.com or
her photoblog at <http://lumpen-orientalism.blogspot.com>. She has
a forthcoming solo exhibition on her Women and Textiles
Photography series in Tehran (2011) and is presently working on a
book entitled Lessons in Schizophrenia.
Nicola Masciandaro is Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, The City University of New York. He is the author of The
Voice of the Hammer: The Meaning of Work in Middle English Literature
(Notre Dame, 2007) and essays on a variety of topics (beheading, the
hand, commentary, mysticism, black metal, individuation, labor,
Aesop, deixis, and Dante). Current projects include: The Sorrow of
Being, Speculative Medievalisms, and Spontaneity: A Commentary.
Scott Wilson is Professor of Cultural Theory in the London
Graduate School and the School of Humanities, Kingston University.
His two most recent books are: The Order of Joy: Beyond the Cultural
Politics of Enjoyment (SUNY Press, 2008) and Great Satan’s rage: American
negativity and rap / metal in the age of supercapitalism (Manchester
University Press, 2008). He is co-editor (with Michael Dillon) of the
Journal for Cultural Research (Taylor & Francis).
125