Date:        Thu, 14 Sep 1995 12:27:18 EDT
From: Karen Ocana <BJFC-AT-MUSICB.MCGILL.CA>
Subject: re: brains and refrains


cnd wrote:

>>.....Interiority and exteriority too.
>>Notions like absolute deterritorialization, pure exteriority are
>>probably not only wistfull, but serve only hinder the comprehension
>>of noneuclidean space. Outside and inside no longer apply; they are
>>eliminated.....

and des responded:

>I cannot but violently disagree. They certainly are not eliminated. You
>simply need a more functional and fluctating definition of outside, there.
>An outside is not a time-space, locality, whatever. An outside is a totally
>Nietzschean becoming - almost a becoming-outside of thought if you will.


This becoming-outside of thought & ligne du dehors (also a refrain) reminds me
of Schlegel's concept of the arabesque.  An arabesque--a painterly concept which
Friedric Schlegel redeploys and turns into a critical/clinical literary term, an
then employs at the same time in his novel _Lucinde_ (circa 1798-1802)--as
described in his Letter on the Novel/_Brief ueber den Roman_, is an interweaving
of elements, or multiplicity, both inside and outside; in painting, it is
literally a restraining border or frame, but it is composed of elements which ar
found in the painting too; for example Raphael's painting of the kiss of Eros an
Psyche is bordered by an arabesque, a frame of intertwining leaves and twigs,
ribbons and flowers which is present in the painting as the wreath crowning
Psyche.  But it is not so much the components of the 'frame' themselves which ar
important except that they are bits or parts of the 'outside' world, both natura
and artificial -- an intertwining and flowing together of different elements --
elements that are repeated differently, in the world outside the picture, in the
frame and in the world inside the picture: arabesque as separator-connector: a
frame, in between, in medias res, intermezzo, mediating and mutating...passing
and producing passage: connecting.

Addendum:

Not so fast.  And yet you have to look only for the movements, for
what escapes you, it is the sine qua non of desire, the sign, the
sign of apprenticeship which never belongs to you, nor to the
object, but mediates, like the detective's clue, the castrato's
enigma in sarrasine, marx's fetish/value of the commodity, la puta
vieja medianera celestina's 'hilado' [see Fernando de Rojas' _La
Tragicomedia de Calixto y Melibea_ (circa 1492).]

The hilado is the thread; it is not a symbol but a multiplicity a
duplicitous multiplicity; in _La Celestina_ it is a religious
fetish, a belt with the magical power to cure lovesickness but also
to infect with lovesickness; and it is the trajectories, the
comings and goings of the interlocutors; it is the mutating thread
of their discourses; it is also the thread the midwife-sorceress
Celestina uses to sew up virgins, or rather to 'contrahacer virgos'
to make counterfeit virgins (the BwO of witchcraft).

It is the double-sided one-multiple moebius strip, moebius
thread....inside-outside and always inbetween, separating and
uniting: connecting what remains different, delirious, infinite, a
deceptive concept, or the concept of deception, ie of expression:
desiring-production.

To be continued somewhere sometime/kio


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