snippets

- Reading Julia Kristeva -- Black Sun -- frustratedly because the first four chapters (as far as I read until the weekend) address melancholia/loss/depression from such a psychoanalytically linguistic perspective that the communique was all but utterly obscured to a 'layperson' such as myself... reminding me of other linguistic frustrations (switzerland) but that this is supposedly my mother tongue. So - arguments for accessible theory - that isn't written like an AP address, either, but doesn't presume such elaborate prior education of the reader. Is that possible? It's a translative problem that I experience... psychoanalysis being both a rigorous academic discourse (and precise language) and a 'lingo' that has been extensively disseminated via pop-culture 'ensures' that terms such as autoeroticism / oedipal / narcissism / libidinal / neurotic / subject ... etc etc have double meanings, are actually unsure. And I have no patience to learn the true language of Freud and his readers - prefer summaries of Lacan to the man himself. (Much as I had no patience for German grammar... oh woe. Oh, failure.

- Talking to Joey from downtown to Division - his suggestion that one possible route (of all these many) to 'take' would be researching inhabiting the liminal - the divisions, as it were - the personal vs. the academic. the professor vs. the friend. the presentation vs. the conversation. acceptable vs. the invalid(ated). Meaning (I'm thinking) investigating the vs. itself - the ring time. When and where they meet and merge and how bloody fuckin emotional that space is - because we have no rules there, in the border (drag).

- I don't know if I can do this. There is no 'this' yet, really. I told our class today I was considering a leave of absence. I probably won't, I don't know what else I'd do. But I have no critical distance from my research now - to even call it research is ridiculous. I gag on Chris-lessness. I'm resisting my positioning because even though I wear the dark hair and Calaveras earrings / all in black I hate to be the poster girl for dead.

- The bartender tonight (sweet woman) thought I was her age. I knew she was older but propriety doesn't allow me to say that, does it? She's 35. I'm 27. She checked my ID and the joke was on her / on me - god I hate having a body these days.

to add to fresh bookmeat...

Peggy Phelan: Unmarked
she is awesome, I mean come on:

"Unmarked attempts to find a theory of value for that which is not "really" there, that which cannot be surveyed within the boundaries of the putative real. By locating a subject which cannot be reproduced within the ideaology of the visible, I am atrempting to revalue a belief in subjectivity and identity which is not visually representable. This is not the same thing as calling for greater visibility of the hitherto unseen."

Peggy Phelan: Mourning Sex

Ernst Van Alphen: Caught By History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art (horrible title, an even worse cover. But an excellent book!)

John Dewey: Art as Experience

Walter Benjamin: Theses on the Philosophy of History (his concept of 'acedia' is pertinent to loss and representation)

Ed. David Eng and David Kazanjian: Loss

I also just received De Certeau's Practice of Everyday Life. His chapter "Making Do" is awesome, expecially when he talks about perspective vs. prospective vision.

The challenge is how to fit it all into one thesis...

fresh bookmeat

arrived from amazon.com today:

C.S. Lewis: A Grief Observed

June Knights Nadle: Mortician Diaries: the Dead Honest Truth from a Life Spent with Death

Kim Akass and Janet McCabe: Reading 'Six Feet Under:' TV to Die for

Mike Kelley: Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism

Michel de Certeau: The Practice of Everyday Life


more soon.

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