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  • Sisyphus, Outdone.Theatres of the Catastrophal
  • Nathanaël (bio)

[ extract ]

§ "Ways of dying also include crimes." 1

§ I feel myself of another time, as though there were other time.

§ Side by side or superimposed, Paul Virilio's Tilting bunker and Michal Rovner's Outside #2 exacerbate - they reiterate - the time of decay : Rovner's over-exposures 2 bring to the surface of the Bedouin house its temporal degradation, granting it oblique equivalency with the bunker sinking into the sand. Rovner slows time, measuring its imprint, extruding from the house in the desert the implanted time of accelerated degradation. What Virilio's bunker exposes (documents) Rovner's anticipates by ennervation. There is the subjective disclosure of the subject's disintegration in time, in a frame. What I see, in each instance, is not a house nor a bunker, but the work of time, the anticipation and accomplishment of death's (de)composition.

§ Un événement de lumière. 3

§ An event of light which is or might be a storm. Light storming the house in the desert. Light, which in this instance, is, has the potential to be, catastrophal. Bringing about. Standing the house more still.

§ The photograph lacks definition. A world (worlds) undefined.

§ The photograph does not lack definition. It draws out that which by definition is undefined. Undiscerned by instrument. Absent of designation.

§ Do I kiss it back.

§ Death's (de)composition is (also) a theatre of war.

§ What are we waiting for.

§ In Guy Hocquenghem's aspiration to objectless desire 4 and Hervé Guibert's consideration of subjectless photography 5 there is the intimation of the removal of a self in order to unburden a context of its context. A voice without language or touch without touch.

§ "La sexualité indépendante de tout objet ... sujet et rejet même." 6

§ In the last of language, language is subjectless. It ruins itself against an embarrassing hope for more. Its perversion is less than this. Less than its desire for itself.

§ Its rejection.

§ A ruined language is a language with neither subject nor object. It says nothing (or too much) of where it has been. Intimacy is, in this instance, intimation: "La ruine nous conduit à une expérience qui est celle du sujet dessaisi, et paradoxalement il n'y a pas d'objet à cette expérience." 7

§ Who was there in the first place.

§ The door is always open. 8 This might be History's proviso. An inhospitable hospitality. Suspect and ill at ease. 9

§ The I might be a catastrophist. Taking turns. Turning out.

§ Seismically speaking, a split self is rendered unavowably speechless. Self without self. Irreferent.

§ Is it for lack of place.

§ Or: a siteless retort, pronounced out of place. The site ridded of seeing may be a way away from pronouncement. Built or borne.

§ This is Heidegger's declaration: "The proper sense of bauen, namely dwelling, falls into oblivion." 10 This is the case, also, of the proper senses. Undwelled, obliviated.

§ The impropriety with which, for example, we are secluded.

§ For example: we bereave the sense of our freedoms.

§ A house which is built into its destruction.

§ RY King's photographic dissolve marks the paper immutable. ( Figure 1 ) Immutable in that it is always imbricated in a mechanism of deterioration. In this improper sense, the image is not separable from its degradation. Its substances are both paper and light. Thus they are neither, as they run into each other.

§ The bird, in this instance, which is scarcely discernible, is in a field of apparent surfaces. It comprises the surface by which it becomes visible, an irregularity on a structure of hay bales in a field of depleted colour. The photograph misdirects its intention. It intends for me to fall in.

§ In to America.

§ The identification of a site is improper in that it precludes situation. It steadies itself in a blur which I take to be my eyes. In this sense I become the photograph proper. It is in the skin and in the paper and against a wall. The door, here, is diminished, but not foregone.

§ The fall is ever a truncation of fallout. In this theatre of scarce forms, the photograph intimates residual catastrophe.

§ It...

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