Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2000 15:52:32 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Re: acephale




Acephale.  a word referring to the state of having no head.  The image of
a decapitated person or animal as a symbol of a State without a head.  
Anarchy?  Bottom-up socialism?  There was a religious community by this
name, under this image, in France, which met secretly in the woods...  
Religious?  In Levinas, atheism is a necessary pre-condition for religious
questions, a separation, the I on its own.  In Bataille, a kind of
religion is the pre-condition for an understanding of the separation, the
inner being.  In Hegel, at a certain point, the state measures up as a
religious community. Not no state but State without... with no Power?
where Power is not the same as power, as in Foucault, Spinoza.  The inner
experience, death, sex, religion.  The face as a subjectifying,
disciplinary apparatus.  No head.  Fascism, without playing that silly
game of accusation, ducking it, throwing it.  There's some of this meeting
in the woods, loving secret hiding places, hating the bourgeois, ... that
bifurcates according to which kind of power it finds?  the head or the
body?

Some issues swirling around this image, an energy point, perhaps, in
Bataille's corpus.  flies around a corpse?  Maybe we could tease out some
things here, if anyone wants to elaborate a bit or re-centre or whatever.

Marcus