Date: Wed, 13 Aug 1997 04:07:51 -0600 (CST)
Subject: Re: festival



   The trace of festival moments.. like scattered paper, like shards of
glass, are bound to a double memory or double perspective that could for
convenience be called internal and external. 
     What is marked first of all is the movement into the ab-soluteness of
the subject, the uniqueness that first invites death into its attunement.
This is the property marked off by Hegel, the risk essential to the
sovereign movement.
       Bataille in one of his meditations on this transformation comments
upon the flies whose swarm is never diminished nor experiences death save
but through the possibility of an artificial separation that he says is a
only a separation for the experimenter or spectator not to the fly.
Although the death of a fly is an easy thing to demonstrate its uniqueness
as an event is only apparent to us and to our conception of a subject.
Here is a longish quotation,
         "To separate itself from the others a fly would need the
monstrous force of the understanding; then it would name itself and do
what the understanding normally effects by means of language, which alone
founds the separation of elements and by founding it founds itself on it,
within a world formed of separate and denominated entities. But in this
game the human animal finds death; it finds precisely human death, the
only one which frightens, which freezes - but which frightens and
transfixes the man who is absorved in his future disappearance, to the
extent he is a separate and irreplaceable being." (YFS #78, p.15-16).
            The individual is not only made free through a seperation from
a completely subordinate cultural role but is also offered in a unique way
to a death of one's own; Heidegger ponders this self-same coincidence that
must identity the essence of Dasein with a being-towards-death as one's
"ownmost" possibility. This ownmost is something inalienable from the one,
not to be substituted or displaced, not to be bartered or bribed away,
that leads Heidegger into an explicite discussion of sacrifice, that
denies any real chance for a sacrifice of oneself in place of the death of
another which is always remains irreplaceable; what is only ever given is
some more credit.
                This is also my object that is so difficult to describe. 
What's occuring at one level is the establishment of the symbolic as
internal to the real but inexpressible. Nothing is more real than this
nothingness that looms out there extending for us our line of possiblity. 
Nothing is also further from reflective experience that always brings back
what is strange into its net, that always needs to represent (however
impossible) this certain something that noone shares. 
                   The uniqueness of a kind of experience closes off while
maintaining something, some trace, of a secret. Here, something is not, as
it were, withheld from view, nothing is concealed except that which never
could appear in the first place, which falls beyond the realm of
experience and memory. Only what is average and common can be expressed,
shared in a discourse of referents. The individual is somewhat of an
anomily in these systems of signification. Unspeakable save for its
trembling anxiety.

still in the blanks,
Leonardo R.