Ambiconti's last post (patterns or premonitions)

Monday, August 13, 2007
the missing link

I just started reading Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture by Jonathan Dollimore. It's good - it's great - at least the introduction is.


Identity is experienced ambivalently, and the urge to consolidate it is complicated by the wish to relinquish it. The seductiveness of the idea of this death of the self has always been a part of Western individualism. And, with that energetic, perverse hubris so characteristic of this individualism, there will be those who seek death not only as the release from desire, but also as its object..." (xxi)

I've been trying to find/name/articulate the connection between the ambiconti-identities project and the continuous amphibious mourning projects... and here is, at least, a clear and coherent place to 'begin' the weaving-together. Also...

Now it is the belief that Western decadence can be overcome only through a non-rational, self-risking immersion in change. Represented most brilliantly by Friedrich Nietzsche, the concern is less to control change than to identify with it - ecstatically, sacrificially, and even masochistically... rather than escaping the world of change by succumbing to the death-wish, or by seeking to transcend it metaphysically, one had to enter into a Dionysian identification with it... even to the point of welcoming destruction and the shattering of self... an urgent need simultaneously to energize and to annihilate selfhood. (xxx)

Which is all very interesting, not least because (as Joey and I were discussing only somewhat facetiously yesterday) 'it's all about me' and that paragraph right there quite neatly delineates the trajectory of last year's projects - from decadence to multiplicity, via Dionysian routes, leading 'up' to the possible 'annihilation of Zephyr' (for a short while, at least -- at least, I think --) in favor of furthering the (duplicitously) gothic (rocknroll) ambitions of Jaqcuie (which are...?).

at 10:00 PM 0 comments