From: textured-AT-riseup.net
Date: Wed, 26 May 2004 12:01:00 -0700
Subject: [postanarchism] Re: bataille adorno the popling


> our powerlessness being turned into jouissance? or, real political
> atrocity being turned into jouissance?
> i don't follow you here.

how can 'real political atrocity' be turned into jouissance without
affirming ones powerlessness? if we are bataille looking at someone being
tortured in a photograph, or we are looking at images from the nazi death
camps, etc. it is not a direct experience of that violence, no? when i bring
up the issue of powerlessness, i am thinking of the unavoidable concession
that is made in the process of representation (adorno writes about this in
his essay on brecht). even political art that represents an atrocity creates
pleasure. it becomes an act of complicity simply by allowing art to stand in
for actual political resistance. by articulating resistance through a
cultural artwork, the artist is already speaking from *within* the very
culture which the artwork claims to refuse.
but back to bataille, it is a question of this jouissance, and the
impossibility of ever being 'outside' (for adorno it is not quite the same
since for him there is the so-called 'autonomous artwork'). bataille is not
so much interested in resistance or really so much in politics at all. his
understanding of transgression is really not political at all, or only
secondary to this other sort of economy (--libidinal). he never really
engages very deeply with the question of 'real political atrocity' and
excludes the question of justice from that of politics.
...

> what about "the bird of the woods & the solitude of the forest?"

where is it located? or whats so special about it?

> where does it come up?

the history of sexuality, the use of pleasure, the care of the self.

> they included it in HATRED OF CAPITALISM too,
> which also has a good short story by bill burroughs.

woah talk about morphic resonance-- i read that story to my friend just this
morning! the popling. she painted a portrait of this odd-looking creature
and then pasted some fish in the background and i had said wow that is just
how i imagined a popling would look like. yeah i forgot the lyotard article
is in that book. sometimes i try to look at people with my body like a
popling, i bend over and they say what are you doing and i tell them i am
looking at them with my ass.
-daniel.


=it takes two to cogito.
=