Date: Mon, 18 Aug 1997 22:11:17 -0700
Subject: "Summit and Decline" and the re-turn of Fumario


> Lucio,
>
>         When you address "the distinction that _(arouse_*)[_sic_]
> between
> festival and sacrifice" what is it that you see? Of course I point out
>
> this usage of yours, for there one may attempt to show how, as
> Nieztsche
> notes, "we seek our honour in _affirming_." That is also tied to an
> "_approval_", again, in Nietzsche, ("Morality as Anti-Nature", 6).
> Doesn't this [arise*/arose] from how our "is" versus "ought"
> die-scotomizes a grammer (when used as a leading rein of a moralist)
> to
> the "enchanting wealth of types, [and] luxuriance of a prodigal play
> and
> change of forms[?]". In a way, that, as an "opsign", (see Deleuze,
> _Cinema 2_, 18, 22-23, 273) is where I work. The festival, and
> sacrifice
> are an addression of the utter(angoisse) ability of act-experiences
> in/as
> "_direct-time-image_." (see, p. 273-280). Someone mentioned this
> 'time'
> element in some recent enough posts, but damned if I'm going to flip
> back
> and search,...(at least for this posting), for who the hell knows what
>
> truffles I might turn up, hog of conceptual delicacies that I am.
>                                                           [_laughter_]
>
>

I'll come back to your first question. I have not read _Cinema2_ but at
the end of your comments you seem to use festival and sacrifice as
synonyms. Looking over _Sur Nietzsche_ the past two days I see a similar
conflation. I was trying to separate them such that festival is
something like "orgique chaos" in Deleuze's _Difference and
Repetition_(I'll come back to this in more detail) and operates in
accordance with the eternal recurrence of the same which I read, as far
as the region of communication metaphors is concerned, as a filter of
information -- a firewall. It operates as meditation without aim or
goal; without that "anxious worry for the future" that Bataille
discusses in "Summit and Decline" which as an expression of exhaustion
or a degenerate instinct because motivated as Nietzsche would say leads
to the theatrical set-up of symbolic, substitute representations upon
which to invest our interest. This is the side of decline which is
actually always there and certainly can't be extirpated. It is not
"bad". The hardest play for me to understand in this section of _Sur
Nietzsche_ is this paradox. See comment on top of section 11. [note:
graft Bakhtin on carnival] As festival without a why art constitutes a
free domain where the life of action, of the real;- is suspended. The
suppresion of denotative reference means the suppression of talking
which is to say the effacement of language which as an immotivated
instant drifts across a desert while following clouds of thought. A
person for whom life is a festival is a (w)hole man where "the integrity
of being(s)" has been violated by the madness of 'evil' that gives me my
wings. Supression here is not the result of an effort on my part but is
effectuated by exteriority which passes, disturbs, or obsesses "the
present without allowing itself to be invested by the arche of
consciousness, striating with its furrows the clarity of the ostensible,
is what we have called a trace."(Levinas - "Substitutions") In this
'sense' the heart is woven. But I'am digressing(clinamen). I was
exploring how reading Caplan has helped me drive a wedge between
festival and sacrifice. He writes on page fifty eight: "Perhaps the
convent exemplifies a whole set of institutions, both pre and
post-Revolutionary, which as _institutions must abstract_ from free
bodily intensities." The energy that is refered to as "free bodily
intensities" I read as Niezsche's "immotivated instinct" which morality
being anti-natural supresses or invests in a symbolic conception that
then constitutes the typical forms of memory applied to impressions. The
whole purpose of the tableau is to evoke pity which according to Canto
XIII of _Purg_ is the look of the proud who are blind and "as no profit
of the sun can reach/Blind men, so with the aforesaid shades: the fire/
Of heaven  is niggard of his light to each;" The classical source for
the bridle is the story of Orestes and its voice cracks like Thunder in
Canto XIV (lines 133-139) which makes me slide, take a "step
backwards"(line141) and which is "the iron bit, meant to keep man in
bounds and out of harm;" (line143) The heavens hold out all kinds of
ideal goodies, goals to seek and profit from but beneath my feet what is
there but the roughness of an irregular ground crossed by a turbulent
lighting of phrases cracking language into ungraspable pieces....
plastic remarks flowing without color, designing spelled words whose
electricity gather feligrees of silver with minimal strokes.

Fumario Della Rosa(...)




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