Being & Alien
Ontological Slime Self Portrait 2000 Alex Alien
"Amun is Alien."
Alex Alien, 2006.
"We're all aliens."
Sam Neil, Space, 2002.
"The Truth is Out There."
The X-Files, 1993.
"Art is the Time of the Alien."
Alex Alien, Being & Alien, 2006.
"There's an alien on the loose."
Russell T. Davies, Torchwood, 2006.
"Everyone's quick to blame the alien."
Aeschylus, 525 BC-456 BC.
"The unknown name, alien to naming."
Maurice Blanchot, 1980.
"We say that art is serving alien values."
Maurice Blanchot, From Dread to Language.
"Art attests to what is inhuman in man."
Alain Badiou, Le siècle, 2005.
"O You, the Great God, whose name is unknown."
Pharaoh Unis, Hymn to Amun, PT 276c - ca. 2350 BCE.
"Art alien is essentially doing evil to the human."
Alex Alien, Being & Alien, 2006.
"We should live totally in the face of the night and of the Evil.”
Martin Heidegger, Letter to Elisabeth Blochmann, September 12, 1929.
"Art is primarily the consciousness of grief, not its consolation."
Maurice Blanchot, (1907-2003).
"Philosophy is really there to redeem what lies in an animal's gaze."
Theodor W. Adorno to Max Horkheimer, 24th March, 1956.
"The truth of art is this: the essence of alien being revealing itself ."
Alex Alien, Being & Alien, 2002.
"It is necessary to enter into confrontation with otherness or the alien."
Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin Lecture, University of Freiberg, 1934.
"He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary."
Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, New York: R. S. Peale and J. A. Hill, 1896.
"...'Our' origins are...profoundly non-original. Once upon a time, 'we' were aliens."
Neil Badmington, Alien Chic: Posthumanism and the Other Within, Routledge, 2004.
"Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, 1885.
"Is it not precisely longing that proves the human being to be Other, other than a mere human being?"
Martin Heidegger, Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, Ohio University Press, 1985.
"I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?"
Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra, 1883.
"I feel myself to be an alien in the world. If you have no ties to either mankind or to God, then you are an alien."
Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius, Ray Monk, Penguin Books, 1990.
"The first contact the alien makes with the human subject is through the transmission of a kind of ontological drool."
Mark Cousins, The Ugly, AA Files, Number 29, Summer 1995.
"In one of the most remarkable passages of his Aesthetics, Hegel defined the task of art as the appropriation of the alien."
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, The Athlone Press, 1997.
"The establishing of truth in the work is the bringing forth of a being such as never was before and will come to be again."
Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, 1935.
"Zizek's subject is always already 'already alien' where the human hides the inhuman in the Name of the Law of the Ather."
Alex Alien, Being & Alien, 2006.
"The dragon-shaped alien, recalling portraits of the satanic beast of the apocalypse, is capable of invading our most intimate being... Derrida sums up the aporia of the alien-other thus: 'the outsider (hostis) received as host or as enemy. Hospitality, hostility, hostipitality'. Fully cognisant of the way this undecidable dialectic confounds our ethical conventions, Derrida affirms the priority of a hospitality of justice - open to the absolute other as another without a name."
Richard Kearney, Aliens and Others; Strangers, Gods and Monsters, Routledge 2003.
"We've evolved over millions of years into the state of unnaturalness that we are in now. Humans are totally unnatural. And they vary from race to race in their degrees of unnaturalness...There's nobody more unnatural than I am myself and, after all, I've worked on myself to be as unnatural as I can... One can only talk about one's own instincts and stay away from the rest... Nietzsche forecast our future for us - he was the Cassandra of the nineteenth century - he told us it's all so meaningless we might as well be extraordinary."
Francis Bacon, Interview with Peter Beard, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1975.
"How I understand the philosopher as a terrible explosive, endangering everything, how my concept of the 'philosopher' is worlds removed from any concept that would include even a Kant, not to speak of academic 'ruminants' and other professors of philosophy."
Friedrich Nietzsche, How one becomes what one is, Ecce Homo, 1888.
"Nietzsche thinks of time in the dynamic of the will to power and rounds it back into Being in his thesis of the eternal return. Heidegger tries to hold on to the thought that the meaning of Being is time. Nietzsche makes time a Being; Heidegger makes being into time."
Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, Harvard University Press, 1998.
"Thinking no longer means anything more than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think...True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves....Advise to intellectuals: let no-one represent you."
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia; Reflections From Damaged Life, 1947; Verso Editions, 1978.
"What is the meaning of death in the twentieth century, when millions of lives have been extinguished and the possibility of annihilating human life altogether remains open? Is there an art of dying which is useful in this time and circumstance?"
Edith Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes - Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-Made Mass Death, Yale University Press, 1985.
“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans. We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet. To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like."
Stephen Hawking, Stephen Hawkin's Universe; Aliens; Discovery Channel, Discovery Channel 2010.
"Who will instruct me? And what shall I shun? Shall I that impulse then obey? Alas! the deeds that we have done - Our sufferings too - impede us on life's way. To what the mind most gloriously conceives, An alien, more, more alien substance cleaves. When to the good of this world we attain, We call the better a delusion vain. Sensations glorious, that gave us life, Grow torpid in the world's ignoble strife. Though Fantasy with daring flight began And hopeful toward Infinity expanded, She's now contented in a little span When in Time's eddy joy on joy's been stranded."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, 1908-1832.
"For who has ever verified the supposition that longing is something merely human? And who has ever refuted thoroughly and with sufficient reason the possibility that what we call longing, which is where we are, in the end is something other than we ourselves? Does not longing conceal something that denies us any grounds for limiting it to humankind, something that would sooner give us cause to grasp it as that in which we human beings are unfettered out beyond ourselves [über uns weg entschränkt]? Is it not precisely longing that proves the human being to be Other, other than a mere human being?" (Schelling's Treatise 124; 42,216)
Martin Heidegger, Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, Ohio University Press, 1985.
"Multiculturalism is not about tolerance: multiculturalism is all about tolerating the intolerant: arranged marriage ('arranged rape' as Ayaan Hirsi Ali aptly puts it), the rape of women, the beating of wives, the torturing of children, the hanging of homosexuals, female genital mutilation, honour killings, beheading beings. Multiculturalism legitimates such acts of barbarism in the name of 'cultural difference' and 'political correctness'. Multiculturalism sanctions the submission and subjugation of beings to the 'word of God'. Multiculturalism merely sanctions superstitious belief and brutal acts of violence and murder in the name of 'cultural difference'. And 'political correctness' says we 'cannot criticise' such 'cultural difference' because it is 'their way' - the 'way of the Other'. Thus murderous 'multiculturalism' and pernicious 'political correctness' sanction the barbarity of the evil Other, the evil God."
Alex Alien, Being & Alien, 2007.
"The alien messiah has been such a pervasive figure in science fiction films of the last twenty years as to mark some sort of cultural phenomenon... The alien messiah's appearance usually occurs in two stages. The first establishes the vulnerability and weakness of human characters...The second stage brings an alien force that rescues the human characters from the threatening circumstances they suffer. Inevitably, in the first stage human existence is circumscribed by closure. Inevitably, in the second stage closure gives way to openness. Underlying the motif of the alien messiah is the mythos of the Christian messiah, begotten by the divine Jehovah on a mortal woman, sent to redeem a sin-ridden humanity and to offer immortality. Although the alien messiah is usually a benevolent, anthropomorphic being intent on doing good, darker incarnations do occur."
Hugh Ruppersburg, The Alien Messiah; Alien Zone, Verso, 1990.
"The question of the future of the human opens up a zone of monstrous thought, calling into being the necessity of a thinking of the transhuman condition. One thinks of Nietzsche's 'great' question - what may still become of 'man'? - in which 'man' only becomes as such at a certain juncture in historical evolution...The problem of the human has never been a biological one. This is the filthy lesson of Nietzsche's 'genealogy of morals'. This is a 'genealogy' that can only promise inhuman futures to the extent that a monstrous memory of man is perpetually cultivated and overcome."
Keith Ansell Pearson, Loving the Poison: On the 'Meaning' of the Transhuman Condition; Nietzsche's Futures, MacMillan Press, 1999.
"Art is modern art through mimesis of the hardened and alienated; only thereby, and not by the refusal of a mute reality, does art become eloquent; this is why art no longer tolerates the innocuous...The true language of art is without language, it is silent or non-linguistic; art's non-linguistic moment takes precedence over the signifying moment of poetry and literature, which is not wholly absent from music either...The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.. Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth... By its mere existence, every artwork, as alien artwork to what is alienated, conjures up the circus and yet is lost as soon as it emulates it. Art becomes an image not directly by becoming an apparition but only through the counter-tendency to it. The preartistic level of art is at the same time the memento of its anticultural character, its suspicion of its antithesis to the empirical world that leaves this world untouched. Important artworks nevertheless seek to incorporate this art-alien layer... In one of the most remarkable passages of his Aesthetics, Hegel defined the task of art as the appropriation of the alien..."
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, The Athlone Press, 1997.
"The work of art is linked to a risk; it is the affirmation of an extreme experience. But what is this risk? What is the nature of the bond that unites the work to risk?... Art - as images, as words, and as rhythms - indicates the menacing proximity of a vague and vacant outside, a neutral existence, nil and limitless; art points to a sordid absence, a suffocating condensation where being ceaselessly perpetuates itself as nothingness."
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, University of Nebraska Press, 1982.
"Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity...Works of art are always the products of a danger incurred, of an experience pursued to the end, to the point where man can no longer continue."
Rainer Maria Rilke; Letters to Paul Cézanne and Clara Rilke.
"Like those severe but tonic writers, Bacon feels his art represents the simple unalloyed truth of existence as he perceives it, no matter how hard to bear that reality may be... Basically, Bacon believes in a form of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's nihilism and certainly, too, in the aspect of the Greek ideal that Nietzsche so enthusiastically endorsed, the Dionysian conquest of pessimism through art."
Sam Hunter, Francis Bacon: A Retrospective, Washington D.C., 1989.
"The decline of the truth of beings occurs necessarily, and indeed as the completion of metaphysics. The decline occurs through the collapse of the world characterised by metaphysics, and at the same time through the desolation of the earth stemming from metaphysics...The still hidden truth of Being is withheld from metaphysical humanity. The labouring animal is left to the giddy whirl of its products so that it may tear itself to pieces and annihilate itself in empty nothingness."
Martin Heidegger, Overcoming Metaphysics, The End of Philosophy, New York, Harper & Row, 1973.
"Art is estrangement, self-estrangement (causing self-forgetfulness) but also estrangement from the human. Art is uncanny in the sense of monstrous, the not quite or no longer human, the almost - or once-human... Art perhaps pays the price by 'going [Celan says] beyond what is human, stepping into the realm which is turned toward the human, but uncanny - the realm where the monkey, the automatons and with them...oh, art, too seem to be at home..."
Gerald L. Burns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
"In his rejection of narrative in favour of the triptych, the attendant figure and repetition, Bacon is the most Kantian of painters yet. His approach is always to address the sensation with a diagram (as Deleuze calls a painterly technique applied to thought). The diagram immediately diverts the path of the sensation onto the canvas and back out into sensation. Diverts it away from assimilation to concepts and narrative. It establishes, frames, a second register like that of the anticipations of perception, this time on the canvas. The painting becomes a focus for the repetition of the sensation, to the painter and others. It is as Kant says, a sensus communis."
Robert O'Toole, Kant, painting unlocking sensation in senus communis; Warwick Blogs, University of Warwick, August 18 2004.
"What is left is helpless raw being. Bacon takes such authoritative historical figures as Pope Innocent X and Vincent van Gogh and reduces them outrageously to clots of paint. They are overwhelmed by paint, into which they sink as if in quicksand. Is the scream of Innocent X recognition of his dissolution? Bacon repeatedly 'misinterprets' the strength of character he seems to find in the 1650 Diego Velázquez portrait of the Pope as sheer monstrousness, brutality. More than Picasso in his historical paintings, Bacon destroys what creates in the very act of recreating. The destruction no doubt has world-historical import - the sadistic character of the Pope is brought home by the sadistic way paint is applied to him, as if it were acid - but the key point is that paint triumphs over human reality, becomes the dominant expression of being."
Donald Kuspit, Hysterical Painting, Art Forum, January 1986.
"Chance and instinct are two key components of Francis Bacon's terminology to which he constantly returned... It was Kant who first emphasised as Bacon maintains here, that instinct was without self-insight, stating that instinct is 'the inner compulsion of the faculty of desire to take this object into possession, before one is acquainted with it'. Yet the fact remains that the distinction between inspiration and instinct cannot always be clearly drawn, especially as Bacon occasionally felt himself to be a medium for more more powerful forces. Hence, Nietzsche's definition of inspiration can certainly be brought to bear with reference to Bacon, if '...suddenly, with indescribable certainty and subtlety, something becomes visible, audible, something that shakes one to the last depths and throws one down [...] One hears, one does not seek; one accepts, one does not ask who gives; like lightening, a thought flashes up, with necessity, without hesitation regarding its form - I never had any choice [...] Everything happens involuntarily in the highest degree [...] the involuntariness of image and metaphor is strangest of all; one on longer has any notion of what is an image or a metaphor; everything offers itself as the nearest, most obvious, simplest expression.' [Ecce Homo] The compulsion (in Kant's terms) to grasp something, the form of which is as yet unknown (instinct) is very much akin to what Nietzsche describes so energetically; all that is missing from Bacon's instinctive action is the impulse of revelation which is ultimately so central to Nietzsche's view."
Armin Zweite, Accident, Instinct and Inspiration, Affect and the Unconscious; The Violence of the Real, Thames & Hudson, 2006.
"With Heidegger, and even more so with Sartre, Bacon has always asserted than man's being is 'being in the world'; thus, for him as well, 'beyond the body is silence, nothing'. death means to cease being in situations; it is the moment of extreme phenomenological truth experienced by the body. In an interview, Bacon has stated that 'death is the shadow of life, and the more one is obsessed with life, the more one is obsessed with death'. This bracketing is always potential, latent, offset by the feverish tension of living, which finds, as we have seen, one of its most effective exorcisms in eroticism. But when death appears as a stark and hermetic inevitability, no future barrier can can remain between these two parallel obsessions that finally meet in the infinity 'nothingness'. Nothing remains for the painter now but the compassionate yet relentless reporting of the ultimate, the final cry."
Lorenza Trucci, Francis Bacon, Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York, 1975.
"Philosophy does not consist in telling stories: Plato said so, Heidegger said so. In the interim, every great philosopher began by saying: now we shall break with narrative and historical authority. Take Descartes: reason is not memory; Kant did the same thing. Hegel is more of a historian than any of them, yet he proposes breaking with empirical history. Husserl too, evidently: even if he reintroduced a transcendental historicity later on, he began by doing away with historicity. Thus, in a sense, there is nothing more philosophical than the interruption of historical memory, and philosophers continually outdo one another in advocating ahistoricism."
Jacques Derrida, A Taste for the Secret, Polity Press, 2001.
"What can the philosophizing person stake? Answer: his own anxiety and boredom, his own listening to the call of conscience. Any philosophizing that does not take its beginning from the moments of true sensation is devoid of roots and relevance... In short, existential analytics, to be understood at all, requires existential engagement. Heidegger therefore must find a way to conjure up in his students those moments of true sensation. He must, in a sense, stage manage them...The moments of true sensation - anxiety, boredom, call to conscience - have to be aroused in his students so that the 'mystery of Dasein' that inhabits them may show itself."
Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, Harvard University Press, 1998.
"A philosopher—is a human being who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, and dreams extraordinary things; who is struck by his own thoughts as from outside, as from above and below, as by his type of experiences and lightning bolts; who is perhaps himself a storm pregnant with new lightnings; a fatal human being around whom there are constant rumblings and growlings, crevices, and uncanny doings. A philosopher—alas, a being that often runs away from itself, often is afraid of itself—but too inquisitive not to “come to” again—always back to himself ...Every profound thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, 1885.
"Philosophy has always insisted upon this: thinking its other. Its other: that which limits it, and from which it derives its essence, its definition, its production. To think its other: does this amount solely to reliever (aufheben) that from which it derives, to head the procession of its method only by passing the limit? Or indeed does the limit, obliquely, by surprise, always reserve one more blow for philosophical knowledge? Limit/passage."
Jacques Derrida, The Margins of Philosophy, University of Chicago, 1982.
"Philosophy persistently and with claim of truth, must proceed interpretively without ever possessing a sure key to interpretation...The text which philosophy has to read is incomplete, contradictory and fragmentary."
Theodor W. Adorno, The Actuality of Philosophy, 1932; The Adorno Reader, Blackwell, 2000.
"Philosophy cannot escape from this limit of philosophy, of language, that is. It uses language in such a way that silence never follows, so that the supreme moment is necessarily beyond philosophical questioning. At any rate it is beyond philosophy as far as philosophy claims to answer its own questions."
Georges Bataille, 1897-1962.
"It is also the case that the philosopher must cease to be a contemporary to himself. The most essential and revolutionary a philosophical doctrine is, the more it needs to educate those men and women, those generations, who are to adopt it."
Martin Heidegger, The Genesis of the Doctrine of Return; Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Harper Collins, 1984.
"It seems to me more and more that the philosopher, being necessarily a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself and had to find himself in contradiction to his today: his enemy has always been the ideal of today...What a philosopher is, is hard to learn, because it cannot be taught: one has to 'know' it from experience - or one ought to be sufficiently proud not to know it."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, 1885.
"It is the best of times, it is the worst of times for aliens. They have everything before them, they have nothing before them...'Alien Love' preserves the absolute difference upon which 'alien hatred' was once constructed: an alien is still an alien....'Alien Love', accordingly, is Alien Chic."
Neil Badmington, Alien Chic: Posthumanism and the Other Within, Routledge, 2004.
"The science fiction horror film Alien (1979) is a complex representation of the monstrous-feminine in terms of the maternal figure as perceived within a patriarchal ideology. She is there in the text's scenarios of the primal scene of birth and death; she is there in her many guises as the treacherous mother, the oral sadistic mother, the mother as the primordial abyss; and she is there in the film's images of blood, of an all-devouring vagina, the toothed vagina, the vagina of Pandora's box; and finally she is there in the chameleon figure of the alien, the monster as fetish-object of and for the mother...The notion of female fetishism is represented in Alien in the figure of the monster....The monster as fetish object is not there to meet the desires of the male fetishist, but rather to signify the monstrousness woman's desire to have the phallus. In Alien, the monstrous creature is constructed as the phallus of the negative mother. This image of the archaic mother - threatening because it signifies woman as difference rather than constructed as opposition - is, once again, collapsed into the figure of the pre-Oedipal mother... Alien presents various representations of the primal scene."
Barbra Creed, Alien and the Monstrous Feminine; Alien Zone, Verso, 1990.
"I know I'm human. And if you were all these things, then you'd just attack me right now, so some of you are still human. This thing doesn't want to show itself, it wants to hide inside an imitation. It'll fight if it has to, but it's vulnerable out in the open. If it takes us over, then it has no more enemies, nobody left to kill it. And then it's won."
John Carpenter, The Thing, Universal Studios, 1982.
"The terrifying is unsettling; it places everything outside its own essence. What is it that unsettles and thus terrifies? It shows itself and hides itself in the way in which everything presences, namely, in the fact that despite all overcoming of distances the nearness of things remain absent... Nearness, it seems, cannot be encountered directly. We manage to reach it by attending to what is near. Near to us are what we usually call things. But what is a thing?"
Martin Heidegger, The Thing; Poetry, Language, Thought, 1971.
"I am not a composer, I am a voice crying, the voice of a crier (not to be forgotten) threatened with drowning in the din of passing time... Everything I want to say is in my music, but it is not about anything...Our age is the age when the story of mankind is drawing to a close."
Allan Pettersson, Letters, 1911-1980.
"The gale that blows through Heidegger's thinking - like that which still, after thousands of years, blows to us from Plato's work - is not of our century. It comes from the primordial, and what it leaves behind is something perfect which, like everything perfect, falls back to the primordial."
Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger at Eighty; New York Review of Books, October 21st, 197I, pp. 51-55.
"To write in ignorance or rejection of the philosophical horizon - a horizon punctuated, held together, or dispersed by the words which delimit it - is necessary to write with a complacent ease and fluency (the literature of elegance and good taste). Hölderlin, Mallarmé, many others, do not permit us this."
Maurice Blanchot, (1907-2003).
"The reconciled condition would not be the philosophical imperialism of annexing the alien. Instead, its happiness would lie in the fact that the alien, in the proximity it is granted, remains distant and different, beyond the heterogeneous and beyond that which is one's own."
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 1970.
"On the one hand, we feel we have the right to demand that philosophical research and questioning never be dissociated from teaching... But, on the other hand, we also feel we are authorized to recall that some aspect of philosophy, perhaps the essential part of it, is not limited to, has not always been limited to, teaching acts, to educational events, to its institutional structures, indeed to the philosophical discipline itself. The discipline can always be overrun, sometimes provoked, by the unteachable. Perhaps it has to accept teaching the unteachable, to produce itself by renouncing itself, by exceeding its own identity. How is one to maintain, within the same now of the discipline, the limit and the excess? How to maintain that one must teach this very thing? That it cannot be taught?"
Jacques Derrida, The Antinomies of the Philosophical Discipline; A symposium, April 4th & 5th 2005.
"Everyone seems to think this century is the end of philosophy!.. Contemporary thought holds the surprise for us of an atheism that is not humanist... In all those books that go beyond metaphysics we witness the exaltation of an obedience and a faithfulness that are not obedience or faithfulness to anyone. the absence of the gods translates into an indeterminate presence. A strange nothingness, that does not keep still but 'nihilates,' a silence gifted with speech, an essential speech, even. A faceless neuter, 'sans figure,' in Blanchot's phrase, even though a black light emanates from their [the absent gods'] anonymous, incessant movement... In Heidegger, being, in the verbal sense he gives it, to distinguish it from beings, is the measure of all things, and of man. Man answers, or does not answer, its call. But a call that does not come from anyone. It comes from Being, which is not a being - from a phosphorescence of Nothingness, or, more precisely, from a luminosity in which the ebb and flow of Nothingness and Being continue on."
Emmanuel Levinas, The Poet's Vision - On Maurice Blanchot; Proper Names, The Athlone Press, 1996.
"The re-covering of immediate sensible perception in Being thus harbours two others that are ceremonially yoked without connection: what is yet unspoken, in the case of man, and what is without speech, in case of the other. But the deciphering, the release, of this seal of Being cannot take place in a language whose fundamental move is propriation. What is too near would slip its seizure. A distance, there, would be of unbreachable measure - something infinitely small whose cipher would remain in obscurity. Something that suffuses the eye and the hearing and all senses, like an air that is neither seen nor heard but nevertheless is there. Fluid medium that accompanies every perception and bestows its tone upon it. Like a silent incarnation everywhere at work."
Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, University of Texas Press, Austin 1983.
"No one else is Francis Bacon - there is an irreducible specificity to his being-in-the-world - but as with every other artists, on can read off of bacon's work the totality of art history, a totality his work endlessly retotalizes and projects towards the future."
Dana Polan, Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, Routledge, 1994.
"Bacon's painterliness embodies the struggle between remembering and forgetting - representation and nonrepresentation - that is at the heart the psychodynamic process that painting constitutes.....The painterliness that gives hysterical flair to the person also mutilates that being into oblivion, generalizing it toward nonbeing. That something can be so real and at the next moment an illusion belonging to the past expresses the ambivalence endemic to archaeologism. All Bacon's figures exist in a time warp; at once radically contemporary yet belonging to a dead world."
Donald Kuspit, Hysterical Painting, Art Forum, January 1986.
"Aesthetic alienation is the name of the question of literary and artistic value, as the question of value poses itself to us in our culture...Artworks thrive on their own essential impossibility, on their failure to be works; and they can do no other, for that is where art is....The artwork solicits in remembrance and anticipation of a power, a potentiality of art...Artworks are indeed impossible objects."
Jay M. Bernstein, Aesthetic Alienation: Heidegger, Adorno, and Truth at the End of Art; St. Martin's Press, 1987.
"How does language become art? This question poses itself here not only because the art of interpretation always involves forms of speech and text and because poetry, too, involves linguistic creations or texts. Poetic creations are creations in a novel sense. They are texts, in an eminent way. Language emerges here in its full autonomy. It stands for itself and raises itself to this standing position, whereas words are normally overtaken by the directed intentions of the speech that leaves them behind."
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships, MIT Press, 1985.
"The actions of religious sacrifice and of erotic fusion, in which the subject seeks to be 'loosed from its relatedness to the I' and to make room for re-established 'continuity of Being', are exemplary for him. Bataille, too, pursues the traces of a primordial force that could heal the discontinuity or rift between the rationally disciplined world of work and the outlawed other of reason. He imagines this overpowering return to a lost continuity as the eruption of elements opposed to reason, as a breathtaking act of self-de-limiting. In this process of dissolution, the monadically closed-off subjectivity of self-assertive and mutually objectifying individuals is dispossess and cast down into the abyss."
Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987.
"It is impossible to be stinting in our admiration for the intellectual vigour of Sein und Zeit, particularly in light of the immense output this extraordinary book of 1927 inspired. Its supreme steadfastness will mark it forever. Can we be assured, however, that there was never any echo of Evil in it? The diabolical is not limited to the wickedness popular wisdom ascribes to it and whose malice, based on guile, is familiar and predictable in an adult culture. The diabolical is endowed with intelligence and enters where it will. To reject it, it is first necessary to refute it. Intellectual effort is need to recognise it. Who can boast of having done so? Sat what you will, the diabolical gives food for thought."
Emmanuel Levinas, As If Consenting To Horror, Critical Inquiry, 15, Winter 1989.
"Since the end of the eighteenth century, the life of unreason no longer manifests itself except in the lightning-flash of works such as those of Hölderlin, of Nerval, of Nietzsche, or of Artaud - forever irreducible to those alienations that can be cured, resisting by their own strength that gigantic moral imprisonment which we are in the habit of calling, doubtless by antiphrasis, the liberation of the insane by Pinel and Tuke."
Michael Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Vintage 1988.
"Since Nietzsche, we may say, philosophy has attempted to think subjectivity as a certain kind of event (in Heidegger, Dasein is towards its own being, in Derrida, the figure of the subjectile, in Levinas, the one-for-the-other, and further, in Nancy's thinking of birth-to-presence and rethinking of being-with, and Deleuze's becomings). Would you agree that the thinking of the subject will require, precisely, thinking and rethinking time, and in this, the ethical sense that accompanies time, perhaps in regard to where Derrida, for example, argues that 'what there is to give, uniquely, would be called time' (I choose, here, the last of three senses that he marks)?"
John Dalton, An Interview with David Wood for Contretemps - an online journal of philosophy; Sydney, November 2000.
"It's true! If the subject is not a substance, but is a complex relatedness of opening, generosity, creativity, resistance, challenge, etc, in the face of morality, being a subject is all the work of time. I think the tension between time as event and time as structuration, becomes central to what it is to be a subject. In other words, what I'm trying to do there, is to say that the error of trying to think the subject as some sort of substance, some sort of fixed and permanent thing, is actually a misunderstanding of one of the poles of a tension, which is something like structuration, or constitution, or narrative production. You can't do without that. What we call the subject in time or in process, or temporalized is this lived tension between this openness and this habituation, or the ongoing structure of meaning and this openness to the event which can undermine and destroy."
David Wood, An Interview with David Wood for Contretemps - an online journal of philosophy; Sydney, November 2000.
"Derrida has generally insisted that no analysis could justify philosophy's claim to self-identity, that is, its claim to unity, autonomy, or separateness from what it is not. Philosophy is mad to the extent that it cannot be reconciled with itself, but maybe this only means that philosophy is plural and, moreover, porous with respect to every conceivable discourse. No one thing is philosophy."
Gerald L. Bruns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy, John Hopkins University Press, 1997.
"That philosophy died yesterday, since Hegel or Marx, Nietzsche, or Heidegger - and philosophy should still wander towards the meaning of its death - or that it has always lived knowing itself to be dying; that philosophy died one day, within history, or that it has always fed on its own agony, on the violent way it opens history by opposing itself to nonphilosophy, which is its past and its concern, its death and wellspring; that beyond the death, or dying nature, of philosophy, perhaps even because of it, thought still has a future, or even, as is said today, is still entirely to come because of what philosophy has held in store; or, more strangely still, that the future itself has a future - all these are unanswerable questions."
Jacques Derrida, Violence and Metaphysics - An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas; Writing & Difference, 1978, Routledge.
"With the death of Jacques Derrida, the world has lost one of its greatest philosophers, as well as one of the most controversial and misunderstood... Shakespeare appears in Derrida rarely enough, now and then, here and there, but often decisively, as in My Chances, where Derrida cites these very lines on the way to 'How malicious is my fortune' from King Lear. 'The sense of remorse or misfortune...the regret I [Derrida] feel in not having attempted with you, as I initially projected, an analysis of King Lear...I would have followed' (My Chances). Never enough time! It is only a few lines below that Hamlet is to say, with the voice of the Ghost intervening from below, that 'the time is out of joint'. These are of course the lines through which Derrida is to address, a few centuries later in the epoch of capitalism, our own time in Specters of Marx. Many specters, ghosts of Derrida will likely be the permanent guests of this rethinking, in which we must 'go together' with our guests and ghosts alike. Derrida is no longer with us, but, in the différance of our chaosmic world, deconstruction will continue under many a name and in many a field, 'if we live, and go on thinking,' as John Keats once said. Keats also used the occasion to invoke the 'grand march of intellect'. It would be difficult to find a better description of either Derrida's own work or what it can help us to achieve -if we go on thinking together."
Arkady Plotnitsky, The Différance of the World: Homage to Jacques Derrida, Purdue University, 2004.
"Nietzsche and Heidegger maintain that metaphysics was doomed from the start because it arose out of an eschatological fault in the original philosophical thought which, like a Fall, condemned it to an inevitable decline and death. For Nietzsche this 'original sin' is traced back to Plato's inversion of 'this-world' of the senses and appearances and the 'other-world' of reason and the ideas, so that 'this-world' came to be denied and devalued. For Heidegger the eschatological fault lies in a forgetfulness of the ontological difference between Being and beings that goes back to Plato and Aristotle... Since the end of metaphysics some philosophers have indeed been 'facing the problem of the liquidation of philosophy' - not only those which depend upon the truth, as Adorno sees it, but also those which reject any such dependence. For these philosophers, Philosophy itself has become the main problem...It seems philosophy has nowhere further to turn; it has come to the end of its tether. Like a character from Beckett it cannot go on - yet it does."
Harry Redner, The Ends of Philosophy, Croom Helm, London & Sydney, 1986.
"Derrida points out that to construe a philosophy as a philosophy of life is an all too easy or simple affair because it is in danger of neglecting the other of life, namely death and the dead - so much so that for Derrida absolute life would be absolute evil, the life that is fully present... Nietzsche spoke enigmatically of justice as a 'panoramic power' which transcends this and that individual, as the highest representative of life, but a life that is fully implicated in death. Is it this kind of justice that Derrida is appealing to when he speaks of the life that lives beyond present life, its actual being there?: 'not toward death but toward a living-on, namely, a trace of which life and death would themselves be but traces and traces of traces, a survival whose possibility in advance comes to disjoin or dis-adjust the identity to itself of the living present as well as of any effectivity. There is then some spirit. Spirits. And one must reckon with them.'... Are the dead ever dead, not just a peace with themselves but at peace with us? One thinks of Birkin's anxiety and dread: the dead are never content to stay dead, they always desire something from us, they continue to live (or die), clinging on to the living and not letting go."
Keith Ansell Pearson, Spectropoiesis & Rhizomatics: Learning to Live with Death & Demons; Evil Spirits, Manchester University Press, 2000.
"Thinking as dying excludes the 'as' of thought, in a manner such that even if we suppress this 'as' by paratactic simplification and simplification and write 'to think: to die,' it forms an enigma in its absence, a practically unbridgeable space. The un-relation of thinking and dying is also the form of their relation: not that thinking proceeds toward dying, proceeding thus toward its other, but not that it proceeds toward its likeness either. It is thus that 'as' acquires the impetuousness of its meaning: nether like nor different, nether other nor same. Between thinking and dying there is a sort of downward ascendance: the more we think in the absence of any (determined) thought, the more we rise, step by step, toward the precipice, the sheer fall, headlong."
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, University of Nabraska Press, 1995.
"What happens in the history of Being? We cannot ask in this manner because there would then be an occurrence and something which occurs. But occurrence itself is the sole happening. Being alone is. What happens? Nothing happens if we are searching for something occurring in the occurrence. Nothing happens, Appropriation appropriates. Perduring the opening out, the origin takes the parting to itself. The appropriating origin is dignity as truth itself reaching into its departure. Dignity is what is noble which appropriates without needing effects. The noble of the worthy Appropriating of the origin is the unique release as Appropriation of freedom, which is unconcealment of concealment - because it belongs to the ground-less."
Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, New York, Harper & Row, 1973.
"By alienation is meant a mode of
experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become,
one might say, estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the
centre of his world, as the creator of his own acts, but his acts and their
consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may even
worship. The alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of
touch with any other person. He, like the others, is experienced as things are
experienced; with the senses and with common sense, but at the same time
without being related to oneself and to the world outside positively."
Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, New York, 1955.
"The image, capable of negating nothingness, is also the gaze of nothingness on us. The image is light, and nothingness is immensely heavy. The image shines and nothingness is the diffuse thickness where nothing reveals itself. The image is the crack, the mark of this black sun, the tear, which, under the appearance of the dazzling burst, gives us the negative of the inexhaustible negative depth. That is why the image seems so profound and so empty, so threatening and so attractive, always rich in more senses than we lend it and also poor, void and silent, because in it advances this dark impotence, deprived of mastery, which is that of death as recommencement."
Maurice Blanchot, L'Amitié, Gallimard: 1971.
"The 'virtualization' of our life experience, the explosion/dehiscence of the single 'true' reality into the multitude of parallel lives, is strictly correlative to the assertion of the proto-cosmic abyss of chaotic, ontologically not-yet-fully-constituted reality-this primordial, pre-symbolic, inchoate 'stuff' is the very neutral medium in which the multitude of parallel universes can coexist. In contrast to the standard notion of one, fully determined and ontologically constituted reality, with regard to which all other realities are its secondary shadows, copies, reflections, 'reality' itself is thus multiplied into the spectral plurality of virtual realities, beneath which lurks the pre-ontological proto-reality, the Real of the unformed ghastly matter-and, as we have seen, the first to clearly articulate this pre-ontological dimension was Schelling with his notion of the unfathomable ground of God, something in God that is not-yet-God, not yet the fully constituted reality."
Slavoj Zizek, From Proto-Reality to the Act, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5 , 2000.
"I would like to make and maintain a strict distinction between two terms in what follows: 'the other' and 'the alien'... Let me now turn to the concept of the 'alien.' I believe it is safe to say without too much qualification that Husserl tends to use the term 'alien' when he stresses the novelty of transcendence, its inaccessibility, its unfamiliarity or strangeness; he also uses 'alien' when he wants to emphasize a cultural and historical phenomenon It is also significant to note that when articulating the theory of intersubjectivity in terms homeworld/alienworld Husserl invariably uses the expression 'alien' and refrains from the expression 'other'... Following Levinas and Waldenfels, the alien is accessible as that toward which we respond and have responded... Being responsive to the alien is a participation with the alien as alien in its generative depth... I respond from the home toward that which does not simply originate from the home. In being responsive, I go toward that which comes from without - the alien - from within.
Anthony J. Steinbock, The Other and the Alien; Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl; Northwestern University Press, 1995.
"Neither inside, nor outside, the abject is unthinkable. It disrupts the terms of the opposition between inner and outer, system and non-system, subject and object. It is not the correlate of the subject – it is not an object...The system finds the abject unbearable, intolerable, unassimilable...The abject can be named, can be identified, can be isolated, and characterized, but not without a certain misnaming, a mismatching, a misconstrual. Abjection resists language, even as we communicate it in the most successful exchange–as if it could ever be contained or controlled, mediated. Irrecuperable, irreducible, its representation is always also its undoing. Like chora, what this word names is already illegitimate, as soon as the said is completed. Words have already missed their target. What would it matter if in a hypothetical world abjection never returned? Its damage is already accomplished. It has become the threat that summoned it. In becoming the very threat it tried to ward off, in becoming the unacceptable, unspeakable, it assures for itself a legitimacy, a domain. It takes the place of representation, but it does not represent. One cannot quite say it becomes representation, for it is never objectifiable. It objectifies. It does not exist, it is not an agency, it is not a subjective force. It proposes limits, borders, gives a place, but it does not originate, instigate, or initiate. It beckons, invites, tempts, invades, propositions, ridicules, allures."
Tina Chanter, Abjection, Death and Difficult Reasoning: The Impossibility of Naming Chora in Kristeva and Derrida, Tympanum 4, 2000.
"By action Nietzsche means it in a kind of fairly extended way - let us say - kind of having and fulfilling a project: he quotes with enormous admiration Goethe. When Goethe observes that nobody does anything grounded by conscience...The point that Goethe is trying to make is that once you start doing something the sign under which it's done falls away. Right. For Goethe no action fails to engage in a sense the entire mind of he or she who undertakes it...so whatever prior motives one has for doing something - or to turn that the other way round - whatever subsequent rationalizations one might make in one's own favour about why one did it - as one does it - one does only it. Right. In this sense no action in and of itself can ever be kind of virtuous because in order to complete an action - in Goethe's terms and in Nietzsche's kind of reading of him - one has to throw everything else away. To enact is to throw aside conscience altogether. And therefore if one has to look for the sources of an action - one has to look for them other than kind of in the field of conscience...Nietzsche takes then the analysis of consciencelessness of all action as also being, in some sense, a model for action. Right. That is to say anyone who wishes to under take something must in some sense forget...at the extreme case they must actually, importantly, forget why they're doing it; they must forget why they're otherwise their capacity to do it would be undermined...What is at stake for Nietzsche in his elaboration of Goethe is precisely the capacity to act which depends upon a radical form of forgetting...an act with passion requires that you, in some sense, forget the object of passion. Really what it opens up is what you might call a kind of non-intellectualist conception of action by an action which completely opposes the normal kind of Western way of looking at an action which often might be said to be the way in which the move from a conception to an execution the translation is made. The kind of dynamics which are unleashed in an action depend therefore - if not on some kind of absolute forgetting of everything - they depend upon a kind of inspired absent mindedness: it's not about being focused on something - far from it because in some sense it's objectless - it's a quality of a kind of internal dynamic - it is the unleashing of passion where we suddenly find ourselves not terribly acquainted with the internal structure of a passion because we're so used to giving those descriptions in terms of their objects."
Mark Cousins, Radical Forgetting, Architectural Association, 8.11.2002.
"Alterity, the otherness of the other, gives obligation. Alterity, in the
face of the disappearance of God, now traces itself across the face of the
other person. Divine inversion has now produced a work of human inversion, a
reversal of each ego's relationship to itself, so that now each self, having
lost its ties to the origin, finds itself only other and utterly alien. It is
this for it is only what it is by being other and not itself. This is by no means
a Hegelian self-difference that calls out to identity, but an absolute
difference, an identity whose identity is difference. Now, when all identity is
difference, the self cannot lodge within itself, finding there a restful space
of introspection. One finds, now, that the inner is the outer. The other, no
longer transcendent, is the seat of the psyche. Therefore now, expenditure,
which is the gift of creation, has no other direction than toward the other.
This obligation to the other is the first and most absolute responsibility and,
since this precedes eternally any conscious decision, it simply is. It is the
body of matter itself."
Emmanuel Lévinas, Alterity and Obligation To and For the Other, (1905-1995).
"Our rare thinkers (great or less great) might just be dinosaurs - infinitely precious, too fragile, cumbersome, and monstrous. But perhaps we will still learn something by opening up the 'eggs' they left behind on our polluted shores; and by not forgetting that - beyond the cold (yet comfortable) blinking of the cursor on our word processors - philosophy has always been in keeping with suffering; philosophy was and remains suffering; it never knew, and still does not know, how to face up to it. Thought, a matter of craftsmanship? Heidegger was justified in recalling this point. But thinking is also a suffering inchoation."
Dominique Janicaud, The Shadow of That Though - Heidegger and the Question of Politics, Northwestern University Press, 1990.
"Memorial: to speak of Wittgenstein (for example) is to speak of a person who remains unknown. He did not wish - as a philosopher - to be one, nor did he wish to be known, any more than he he taught out of choice; likewise, the majority of his published works is unauthorised. Whence - perhaps - the fact so many of his investigations are fragmentary, opening onto the fragmentary... If Wittgenstein gives the impression of being on the outskirts of the history of philosophy, he gives one the feeling not just that he is alone and isolated - no one is - but that there is a nonhistorical history of something which can only be called thought."
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, University of Nabraska Press, 1995.
"A radical trembling can only come from the outside. Therefore, the trembling of which I speak derives no more than any other from some spontaneous decision or philosophical thought after some internal maturation of its history. This trembling is played out in the violent relationship of the whole of the West to its other... But this trembling - which can only come from a certain outside - was already requisite within the very structure that it solicits. Its margin was marked in its own body. In the thinking and the language of Being, the end of man has been prescribed since always, and this prescription has never done anything but modulate the equivocality of the end, in the play of the telso and death. In the reading of this play, one may take the following sequence in all its senses: the end of man is the thinking of Being, man is the end of the thinking of Being, the end of man is the end of the thinking of Being. Man, since always, is his proper end, that is, the end of his proper. Being, since always, is its proper end, that is, the end of its proper...Must one read Nietzsche, with Heidegger, as the last of the great metaphysicians? Or, on the contrary, are we to take the question of the truth of Being as the last sleeping shudder of the superior man? Are we to understand the eve as the guard mounted around the house or as the awakening to the day that is coming, at whose eve we are? Is there an economy of the eve? Perhaps, we are between these two eves, which are also two ends of man. But who, we?"
Jacques Derrida, May 12, 1968, Margins of Philosophy, University of Chicago Press, 1984.
"What if truth were monstrous? What if it were even monstrosity itself, the very condition, the very form, of everything monstrous, everything deformed? But, first of all, itself essentially deformed, monstrous in its very essence? What if there were within the very essence of truth something essentially other than truth, a divergence from nature within nature, true monstrosity? How could one then declare the truth - if it were monstrous?"
John Sallis, Deformatives - Essentially Other Than Truth, Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, Indiana University Press, 1993.
"At Lascaux, art is not beginning, nor is man beginning. But it is at Lascuax, in its vast and narrow cave, along its populated walls, in a space that seems never to have been a dwelling place, that art no doubt for the first time reached the plenitude of initiative and thus opened to man a unique abode with himself and with the marvel, behind which he had necessarily to remove and efface himself in order to discover himself: the majesty of the great bulls, the dark fury of bison, the grace of the little horses, the dreamy sprightliness of the stags... As we know, man is represented - and then merely by schematic features - only in the scene at the bottom of the well: there he lies, stretched out between a charging bison and a rhinoceros that is turned the other way. Is he dead? Is he asleep? Is he feigning a magical immobility? Will he come to, come back to life?...It is striking that with the figuration of man, an enigmatic element enters into this work, a work otherwise without secret...Yet it seems to me that the meaning of this obscure drawing is nonetheless clear: it is the first signature of the first painting, the mark left modestly in the corner, the furtive, fearful, indelible trace of man who is for the first time born of his work, but who also feels seriously threatened by this work and perhaps already struck with death."
Maurice Blanchot, The Birth of Art, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics, Stanford University Press, 1997.
"Artworks remain enlightened because they would like to make commensurable to human beings the remembered shudder, which was incommensurable in the magical primordial world... Artworks become appearances in the pregnant sense of the term - that is, as the appearance of an other - when the accent falls on the unreality of their own reality. Artworks have an immanent character of being an act, even if they are curved in stone; and this endows them with the quality of being something momentary and sudden. This is registered by the feeling of being overwhelmed when faced with an important work...To this extent they are truly after-images of the primordial shudder... Ultimately, aesthetic comportment is to be defined as the capacity to shudder, as if goose bumps were the first aesthetic image. What later came to be called subjectivity, freeing itself from the blind anxiety of the shudder, is at the same time, the shudder's own development; life in the subject is nothing but what shudders, the reaction to the total spell that transcends the spell. Consciousness without shudder is reified consciousness. That shudder in which subjectivity stirs without yet being subjectivity is the act of being touched by the other. Shudder is a kind of anticipation of subjectivity, a sense of being touched by the other."
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, The Athlone Press, 1997.
"As Levinas writes: 'A painting, a statue, a book are objects of our world, but through them the things represented are extracted from our world.' The artwork effects thus an alienation of the world. The privilege of sensation over cognition in the experience of an artwork does not suggest that sensation is a precondition of perception and cognition; rather it indicates a fundamental foreignness with respect to cognition and to perception which, Levinas argues is always perception of and within a world...The alienation effected by by the artwork explains why objects which strike one as intrinsically foreign objects, for example, which belong to antiquity or to archaic civilizations, will, without being works of art, produce an aesthetic effect....Levinas observes modern art's tendency to thematize a brute, crude materiality, the elemental strangeness and density that are prior to the world, that are left over at the end of the world, and, more importantly, they remain resistant to illumination, appropriation, and integration."
Alain P. Toumayan, Encountering the Other: The Artwork and the Problem of Difference in Blanchot & Levinas, Duquesne, 2004.
"So far we have seen that the shudder is not just a mimetic reaction to primary, undifferentiated otherness. It is also, and more importantly for our purposes, a spontaneous and somatic response of revulsion at pure identity. But even in this extended sense the shudder is not merely a negative response. The shudder fulfils a positive epistemic function. It is the gateway to the path of truth. It allows what is to disclose itself as radically evil. As such, the shudder is the form which metaphysical experience assumes under social conditions of total identity...In Aesthetic Theory Adorno claims that works of modernist art can, in virtue of their characteristic autonomy, successfully capture and impart the shudder...The shudder is a reaction to the cryptically shut, which is a function of that element of indeterminacy."
James Gordon Finlayson, Metaphysical Experience: Shudder as Inverted Wonder; University of Sussex.
"The shudder released by the work of art, the experience of the modernist sublime, is the memory of the experience of terror and strangeness in the face of threatening nature. Shudder is the memorial experience of nature's transcendence, its non-identity and sublimity, at one remove....Shudder is a memory, an afterimage, 'of what is to be preserved'... Shudder is the address of the other; it corresponds to what Gadamer would identify as strangeness in the object of understanding, and what Heidegger thinks of in terms of the claim of being. Above all, shudder is the terror of the sublime in Kant, a terror made safe by the retraction of the object at its source."
J.M.Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno, Polity Press, 1992.
"What ever it might be, the ugly must constitute, or be able to constitute, an element of art; a work by the Hegelian Karl Rosenkranz bears the title The Aesthetics of the Ugly... The concept of the ugly may well have originated in the separation of art from its archaic phase: It marks the permanent return of the archaic, intertwined with the dialectic of the enlightenment in which art participates. Archaic ugliness, the cannibalistically threatening cult masks and grimaces, was the substantive imitation of fear, which is disseminated around itself as expiation. As mythical fear diminished with the awakening of subjectivity, the traits of this fear fell subject to the taboo whose organon they were; they first became ugly via-a-vis the idea of reconciliation, which comes into into the world with the subject and nascent freedom... Nietzsche's dictum that all good things were once dreadful things, like Shelling's insight insight into the terror of the beginning, may well have their origins in the experience of art. The ambiguousness of the ugly results from the fact that the subject subsumes under the abstract and formal category of ugliness everything condemned by art: polymorphous sexuality as well as the violently mutilated and lethal... In the history of art, the dialectic of the ugly has drawn the category of the beautiful into itself; kitsch is, in this regard, the beautiful as the ugly..."
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Athlone Press 1997.
"The dynamic of the subject's relation to the alien is that the way in which the alien contaminates space expresses itself as a ceaseless move towards - a pursuit of - the subject. The ugliness of the alien always begins to betray itself through an indistinctness of form; the alien is equivalent, not to its form, but to the stuff that leaks through its form. The movement of the alien towards the human being is also expressed by the increasingly liquid character of the former. The first contact the alien makes with the human subject is through the transmission of a kind of ontological drool. The defences of the subject are redoubled in an attempt to brush off this stuff, the ugly, and to re-establish the radical physical difference between the subject and the ugly object. At the last moment before which the subject is engulfed by the stuff of the alien, the subject produces a response which already announces its defeat - that of vomiting...The final collapse of the subject and its defences comes about in precisely the action of the ugly object revealing to the subject that they are the same. But this type of account, with its stress on the excess of stuff as that which characterises the ugly object, while it may document the case of what is there and should not be, is likely to be misleading. For there is a special case of that which is there and should not be; it is that which is not there and should be."
Mark Cousins, The Ugly, AA Files, Number 29, Summer 1995.
"An eternally suspended future floats around the congealed position of a statue like a future forever to come. The imminence of the future lasts before an instant stripped of the essential characteristic of the present, its evanescence...The eternal duration of the interval in which a statue is immobilized differs radically from the eternity of the concept; it is the meanwhile, never finished, still enduring - something inhuman and monstrous."
Emmanuel Lévinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis; Martinus Nijhoff, 1987.
"The more solitary the work, fixed in the figure, stands on its own and the more cleanly it seems to cut all ties to human beings, the more simply does the thrust come into the open that such a work is, and the more essentially is the extraordinary thrust to the surface and what is long-familiar thrust down...This letting the work be a work we call preserving the work."
Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, 1935.
"The cry of fear, with which the unfamiliar is experienced becomes its name. It fixes the transcendence of the unknown over against the known, and thereby fixes the shudder as something sacred."
Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947.
"We want to rearrange the world for you with images that you will shudder... Even if you stop up your ears, your eyes will see our myths. Our curses will fall upon you."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Philosopher: Reflections on the Struggle between Art and Knowledge in Philosophy & Truth; Notebooks, 1870s.
Francis Bacon at the Tate Gallery London 1985 John Minihan
In the Beginning was the Sensation and the Sensation was with Sun and the Sensation was Sun. The Sun Threw the Sensation of Being. Being and Sensation. Being Sensation. Being and Sensation are Beingtime as Beingsensatiom. Sensation is Being as Amun Becoming. Amun Becoming is the Sensation of the Sun Ra Coming ahead as the Son Coming off over the Sun Coming to a Head sending seeding stimmung Semenisation Sensation dissemenating dasein ahead as a Head of Time ahead of time. Amun Abjectedness is the Divine Coming of a Head Coming Off of a Head lit by the light of the Coming Sun drenching dasein as a Sein Shooting Semen Shard shed straight ahead attuning Amun as a Head of the Sun. Semen is the Sensation of Amun Arriving as a Head of the Sun. Amun always already swallows Spunk spent sending Sensation sutured surfaced Spat serving Sun severing Sun. Semen serves the Sun severs the Sun. Sun swallows Semen. Amun abjects Ra. Amun Comes all over Ra - Becoming Amun-Ra - hiding His Head with wet Semen Skin. Here hear the Hymn of the Hidden Him who wears No Name: "O You, the Great God, whose name is unknown."
An anointed Amun announced: "When I had Come into Being in the being of the Being One who Came into Being in the Beginning when I had Come into Being in the being of the Being One it meant that my Coming into Being was the Coming into Being of beings for I am more Primeval than the Primeval Ones whom I have Spunked. (Because) I have been Primeval among the Primeval Ones my No Name is much more Primeval than the They. (And when) I had Made the Primevalness of the Primeval Ones I did my every wish in this World in which I had become Abroad. I had clenched my Fist when I was all Alone before the They were born: I had not Spunk out Shu, I had not Spunked out Tefnut I had brought My own Mouth, my No Name was Magic: it was I who had Come into Being in being when I had Come into Being in the being of the Being One. When I had Come into Being as the Primeval Ones a Multitude of beings Came into Being at Once before any being Came into Being in this World. I had Made every Spunked thing when I was all Alone before any other Came into Being who might Act with Me in that Place. I Made beings Being There through that shot Spunk of Mine." (Amun-Ra Book of Knowing the Creations of Ra - trans. circa: 312-311 B.C.). Being comes to Dasein through Amun coming Off aborting Being There coming Ahead. Amun Will Come Again and Again and Rise Ahead Again and Again and Come All Over You All Again and Again as the Resurrection of the Eternal Return of the Ereignis Erection as the Resurrection of the Real Alien.
Amun Ra Coming Into Being Alex Alien autophotoprortrait 1980
Absent Amun arrives away aborted as a Hidden Head served severed apart and ahead of Being and Time coming Over the Time as a S(p)ent Sign as a Semen Sein - ontic ooze - dasein drool. As a Time of Sensation still waiting and wanking awhile to Come - again and after hard Amun has Come contained and concealed - Comes the Clearing of the Unconcealing of the Truth of Being - as a severe Severed Semen Sensation - Coming over our Origin and Abandoning the Sight of the Sun for the Site of the Son throwing Thoth. Sun-Ra swallows Amun's semen throwing Thoth forth. Ra radiates rays ahead activating Amun's showering semen strike - like liquid lightning - as anointing Amun-Ra raining reveals Amun-Ra reigning forth fountaining forever down drowning Dasein as a Coming of Absence as a Coming over Presence. And as a Coming to Presence where does Absent Amun Come from? Amun comes from Cum. Amun Comes as Cum. Cum coming ahead and away and arriving alight as a Shooting Star Spunking Sein ahead all over the other-head all over the god-head all over the earth-head making-man as a being-head heading ahead all Hard as an Erect Ereignis eternal return rejointing being to time throwing time back to being Becoming all Alien again. Alien comes again. Amun comes again. And Amun is All Alien. Amun is Alien. Alien is All.
Divine Head of the God Amun 690 - 664 B.C.
Who created the Universe? The Universe started with the Semen strike becoming a ball of Fire. It was called Sun. When the Semen subsided the first Land to appear was the Benben Stone and on it stood the Sun God Atum who created Himself by coming by himself coming in himself coming over himself coming with himself coming to himself coming out of himself. Atum self-sucked himself-off and spat out the Hot-Spunk which was the Wet-Air Tephnut-Shu. When Atum masturbated his massive meat the first word he ejaculated was deified into the God Hu - the Divine Utterance. Atum then drew bright blood from his huge colossal cock and created the Goddess Sia. Sia was the embodiment of the Divine Knowledge Omniscience of the Gods. Hu was the personification of the Divine Utterance - the Voice of the Gods. Heka the embodiment of the Divine Power jointed them in a Divine Triad. After Geb-Earth and Nut-Sky were born Mankind was Created from the hot shot Spunk of Atum aimed ahead at His Head ahead of God who could not Come to a Head for God served no Semen to Shoot ahead to Make Man for God did not Come to Make Man for Man Made God for Bliss Death and Eternal Life.
Man could not Come could not Come to Become God only Amun came to become God for Amun is not Man but Amun Comes as Man and Comes in Man to free Man from God and Amun is the only Man for Amun is the only God but Man does not know this at All yet Amun knows this as Amun Murdered the Father of Man and Fucked the Son of God so that the Murdered Father can Fuck the Dead Son into Infinity where at Last at Least Being Dead becomes Being God where Amun Fucks the Son through the Father to Being God as by Being Dead and the Son needs Eternal Fucking to free the Son from the Father who Fucks the Son Eternally to Death for the Son to get a Glimpse of God when His Eyes are Shut and the Spunk Sees the Face of God through the Arse of the Son and the Father feeds the Son the Rod of Amun so Deep and Hard that the Son feels the frisson of the Torch of God as the Touch of God and so the Son knows to be Fucked by Amun is to be Torched by God to be Touched by God and so the Son is Eternally and Infinitely forever Fucked by Amun for His own Good for His own God coming Deep Inside the Son giving His Son the Spunking Sensation of Being Dead tingling-vibrating jubilate jouissance juices jointing Infinite Bliss and Eternal Life.
Amun Amor Self-Portrait A.V.E October 2008
As a Ra radiates itself - an Amun arises and Comes to Rise Up - to tower - to shower. Amun Stands Forth - Firm and Hard- as that which Cums to a Head as that Wet welcome which cums over all - and over all time - all over again - as that which is sheltered and shining in its own orbit - its own aura - its own awe - and always as a self-secluding hidden-hiding. Amun demands His decisiveness and His distance and lets being leak and attain to attend to the Opening of the Eye at the End of the Ereignis Erection. Amun as always juicing and jutting strives to keep Itself closed from coming and to entrust everything to its eventual ejaculation. Amun's alluring aborted semening strife is the initiated intimacy with which combatants coming-together as a coming-apart belong to each other coming all over each other. This coming together of the penises pulls the oozing opponents together in the ornate origin of their oozing oils by violent virtue of their common coming-together coming to a head over a head all at once. The thrust thirst semen strife strike that is thus brought back into the rift of the real - and thus shot into the eye of ereignis - blinding being and binding being - bringing-back welded-wet together-there our out-of-juice-joint jointings - as a serving-severing semening-sensationing dissemening-dasein.
Angoisse Amun Self Portrait 2000 Alex Alien
Amun (Ammon-Ra) radiates and activates an autofellatio abjected Semening Sensationing birthing being bringing Being. Sensation is the Semen of the Sun. Sensation is the Sun of Time. Sensation is the Sound of Time. Sensation is the Being of Time. Sensation is Beingtime. Sensationbeingtime. Beingtime shines shining shimmers shudders spilling sowing Sensationism: Sensation Being essentially eggos: shines shimmers smazes smirches slithers as an alluring Arsinoe altaric atta Aten Sensationism sensationing goes gleaming glittering glowing golden grandeur grasping groin. Beaming brightening Being Sensation tied tide to thrown time. Rhythm reeks raw ready shimmering Semen Sensation slither sliver shards froth forth from tide time to bled Being born. Even sown sensation, it remains strange to assert that what is most sensation-provoking in our sensation-provoking time is that we are still not Sensationing. Sensation-provoking is what gives us to sensation. Semen Sensationing sown shines shot through thrown time when where well the Throwing of Light is the Throwing of Time where well wet lustrous leaked Leakness registers raw the Throwness of orbited out of Thrown Time. Semen Sensationing - as a castrated coming to a Head - is ahead and pre-times Time all the time and Sensation pre-languages Language all the time and Sensation pre-thinking Thinking all the time and Sensation pre-politics Politics all the time: Sensation as Semenisation shooting ahead as an abjected abimage - authentic alien art - pre-exists re-presentation and All all the time all the time. Amun arrives always already as Art. Amun as 'the hidden one' orbits Obelisk outside Otherness as Atherness as Alterity as Altarity as Alien as Alian as an alien art and art alien is the alian as the A of Ra: as art is 'Ra' not 'Re': art is not not re-presentation: art is ra-presentation: for 'Re' is 'to present back toward one' but Ra does not need to return to presence to represent: Ra is always already an absent Presence without the need of the return of the Re of representation.
A Semen Soaked Zoser Anointed by Amun
Amun activated art Alien as Amun Ra-di-ates atta allen dasein drool delivering divine masturbation moist making man. Activated Amun Comes to a Head - all over His Head - all over His Shrine - obliterating oozing obelisk - showering semening sunshine - shining Shrine shimmering - as amused Amun swallows showering Semen shards - smiling soaking smelling singing - and activating an art alien. So swallowing spunk Amun activates Art. Amun as Art activated at sein source as a shooting Semen sauce serving Sun bringing Being birthing being activating Art. Amun attunes Art as abjected above and ahead as a Sublime Semening Stimmung Sensation delirious delicious discharge - dissemenating drenched dasein. As abjected away Amun attunes and attains a Stimmung Sensation of Being as Time as Coming to a Head over Time shooting ahead as a fort-da-ing semening-da-sein sensation Coming over Time out-of-time all the time as a Thing coming all over the Truth: Amun's abjected Sublime Semen - as a Thrusted Thing - as a Coming Over - as a Covering Over - as an Over Coming of Truth - as a Coming Off over Truth - as a Hidden Head - Coming Off: as a jubilate jouissance obelisk ooze Amun'a Aroma Comes to a Head and Announcing: I have Come. And: I can Come a Second Time: I can Come Again and Again and Again. So Amun created God coming over his own abimage, in the abimage of Amun he created God.
Angoisse Amun Self Portrait Alex Alien 2006
Amun Comes Ahead of God Comes Before God Comes After God Comes All Over God: - God could not Come - God cannot Come: God cannot Come to a Head: Amun Comes All Over God Sealing God in Semen Silhouette Slime staining God's 'Image' serving 'It' initiated as an Abimage: God is a Silhouette of Amun's abjected Semen stain drying and dying out by Ra's rays. Amun Made God in Semen's Own Image. As an abimage: as abjected and aborted ahead out of time. God is a Trace of Amun's Time to Come. Amun aborts God groinded grounded as a deaded dasein: God Has No Head: God cannot Come to a Head: God cannot give Head: Amun is a Head of God as ahead of God: Amun Beheaded God Coming to a Head. God did not Come: God has not Come: God has no Cum: Amun has Come: Amun is Cum: - Amun has Come to a Head - as an Oozing Obelisk - Pyramid Prick - Tapered Tip - towering torrent thrusting Thoth thrown toward You - Coming to Presence. God cannot Come - God cannot Cum - for God is Nothing: God is Not the Nothing: God is the Originary Nothing - for: God created Nothing - God created out of Nothing - Not Out of the Nothing - Man - and Man is Nothing for God is Nothing - because: God created out of Nothing - God: Nothing out of Nothing - Man: and Nothing comes from Nothing: - for: Nothing comes from God for: God cannot Cum. Who created God? Nothing. Who created Nothing? The Nothing. The Nothing created Nothing for God to be Nothing for Man to be Nothing so that The Nothing could create Time so that The Nothing could create Being so that the Time-Being could Come so that the Being-Time could Come. Nothing does not Matter like God does not Matter like Man does not Matter as a matter-of-fact as a matter-of-being as a matter-of-time - for only The Nothing Matters - as a Matter of Being - as a Matter of Time.
Tut-Ankh-Amun
As Amun's Pointed Pillar Comes to a Head abjecting all over the Sun then the Son Obliterates the Obelisk through the Sun-Ra revealing the Sublime Semening Sunbeam through its thrown Shining Drying out Dasein in the Sun through Time. Time is the Sensation of the Différance of Dasein drying off where Time Becomes the Nothing that drifts and dries out between Being and Sensation. Time Comes into Being through the Thrown Sensation of the Nothing. Semening is the Sensationing of the Nothing as the Coming ahead of abjected Art. Amun's abject sublime semen slime outshoots outshines overshadows the thrown Sun-ra revealing the thrown Being becoming being. Amun is always already Hidden by the Sun's Unhiddeness. But the Eye of Amun's Penis is 'sunlike' like the Sun the Eye of the Penis 'emits' Light like the eye of the I. The Eye of Amun's aiming arising Penis projects 'liquid light' liquidating the Sun Out of Sight as a Coming to Presence of the Being of being overcoming the Orbit of the Other as the Obelisk of the Ather activating Art ahead freed frothed from the thirsting thrusting oozing out Open Eye of Amun's Arising Alluring Aletheia - Colossal Column - Dasein Drill - Ereignis Erection - Helmut Head - Pyramid Peick. God could take Amun's arising twelve-inch-tool so it took Its time to Activating Art ahead. Amun activated Art after Swallowing His Own Semen. Semen Sensation Activated Art: The Thrusted orgasmic Origin of Art arrived arising ahead free from Abeject Amun's oozing Obscene Obelisk as an Amoini Amoun Coming Off of Art coming to a Head projected ahead from the Primal Penis Egg Eye of Our Amun. Art - like Religion - abjects-ahead forth from the Semen of the Sacred to the Sun Ra as Ammon Ra activating Art - throwing Thoth - abjecting ahead the God of Art. Thoth - as The Coming to a Head of Art is The Movement and The Moment of True Sensation as an activated Angoisse and Anxiety about The Nothing: "Anxiety reveals the Nothing. We 'hover' in anxiety. More precisely, anxiety leaves us hanging because it induces the slipping away of being as a whole...The nothing reveals itself in anxiety" (Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics?, 1929). The Nothing reveals itself in Art. With Art - as an activated angoisse and anxiety abjectivity - we are all: "being held out into the nothing." Art is The Nothing. Art belongs to The Nothing. Art does not Belong to Man - Art is not Man Made - Art is Amun Activated - Art is abjected as an ather as the Ather as an Ereignis Ejaculation. Art is the Time of the Ather. Art is ather to Man. Art is alien to Man. Art is Alien. Art alien is essentially doing evil to the human. Art alien essentially ends the human hand. Art alien announces and activates the death of the human as the end of man: as man aborts alien alights: Man Dies. Alien Lives.
Amun Amor Self Portrait Alex Alien Dec 2007
Art is ahead of Man: Art is Presentation: Man is Representation: Amun activated Art as an arising and alluring abimage. Amun - as Art abjected - at source - at shaft - as a shooting Semen sauce - serving Sun serenely - bringing Being - birthing being - activating art. Always already Art is ahead of Man and also Art precedes Man: Art is Presentation: Man is Representation: And Art made man initiated in Arts Abimage: Amun activated Art and making Man made as Arts abimage. Amun as Art activated - as an Abject Sublime slime Semen sensation - spurts Shining shards - soaking serving soaring Sun. Swallowing spunk Amun activated Art as Amun's Abimage and abjected a Head hiding 'the hidden one': Art makes Man Disappear: Art is the Concealment of Man as Unconcealment. Art made Man and Art Unmade Man: Art is the Birth and Death of Man: Art always already survives Man severs Man. Alien Art is the murmuring mourning memory of Mans Deaths. Man is Fictional - Art is Factual: Art is Actual: Art's thrusted thirsty Thingness throws an activated Actuality. Art is the real of Man's unreality: Art is Man's only reality: Man is merely a representation: Art is presentation: Art makes Man present only in order to make Man absent again and again and again as Amun Aroma Amoini Amoun activates an Abject Sublime Semen Sensation sending art adrift and astray Aborted Abroad again and again and again. Art as always already abjected ahead Out-of-the-World comes over time as a Prior-Post-Past as an ancient Absence-Presence present throwing time out of time as a trace of time's traces as timefulness and not timelessness as a trace of time without a trace without a time as a timetrace that cannot be timed that cannot be traced. There is no tracing of the time like there is no telling of the time: there is only the touching of time: sensationing of the sein of time as the being of time as the shining of time as an arting of time as a timing of art as an arting an ather time art as another time art as an ather touching time. Art is not Man Made as Art is Being Made for Art is aborted ahead by Being because Art is Being by Being Art.
Sphinx III 1954 Francis Bacon
Authentic Alien Aten Atta Art as an abjected angoisse Aleatoric Alétheia adrenalin awe arrives as split spilt scape spume Spunk Sensationism inked initiation always already as an abcape of an abspace ofan abtime as abhistoric as abconceptual as abpolitical: authentic Aten atta Alien art as a Thrown Thoth Sensation sent ahead and away - is indeed initiated - out-of-time - all the time not-in-time - so an authentic alien art could never be anything so 'human' and 'conscious' as being 'contemporary' or as being 'conceptual' or as being 'political' as such crass conscious constructs are the puerile products of the thick They who have no 'instinct' have no 'animal' have no 'alien' and have no 'sensation' - that is - the They have no 'alienality' and are tragically trapped in the evil banality of the brain-being of being bored-by-time-thinking-in-time: throwing those meaningless minutes - particular pastimes of our the They sadly soaked in inauthentic being and inauthentic time all the time never telling-the-time but always tolling-the-time. We need to stop 'Thinking' and start 'Sensationing': forget the 'political' the 'conceptual' the' contemporary' for they are all ended eggsited extinct. To repeat: don't think, but sensation. The thrown spilt splendour of oozed scintillating Schein Sein Sensation surpasses supersedes suspends severs splits Thinking thoroughly: thinking cannot think sensation because sensation survives surfaces seeps slips through thinking since sensation cannot be known only shown, only shone, only thrown, through our orbiting sown seven senses wetted which waits an awakening available to tingling time. If 'man' is to find 'his' way once again into the nearness of Being 'he' must first learn to exist in the sensation of the nothing as an awesome alien aura again oozed outside our old thrown throttled thinking. As an Arsinoe arising at atta Aten Beingsensation becomes Becomingalien again as an attanining attuning anamnesis amnesia Amun after Arsinoe.
Osis Osiris Portrait of M.V.E A.V.E March 2009
Sensationing Being, Will to Sensation, as Eternal Return, sensationing the most difficult sensation of philosophy, means sensationing Being as Time. The Will to Power as Art arrives after the Will to Power as Sensation and the Will to Power as Sensation is the Essence of the Eternal Return as the Eternal Return sensations Being as an affirmation of Being-towards-Art as Becoming Sensation. Thus the Eternal Return of an atta Aten Art arising Arsinoe imaging is not scientific but sensatific - scenting and sending - and assigning-attuning an alien apparition-appearance - as alien artefacts freshly foaming forged-froth-formed forth- as a pure-pulsating shining-sheen - as a radiating-ray - as a darkening-lightening - letting leaking Alien Being beam bright by Beheading dreaded Dasein dead decapitating Dalien beheaded before being Becoming Amun and arising ahead as Alien Being. Amun is always already Coming ahead coming to a Head: Alien is Coming: a Head. Amun comes to a Head above His Head so hence has no Question to Answer only Sensation to Give as the Gift of Sent Semen as an Auto Action and Creation castrating conception: therefore for abjected Amun there can be no 'meaning of being' only a 'semening of being' as a 'sensationing of semening' - as a jettisoned juice - birthing being - abjecting ahead - as an amoini amoun - an Alien. Amun aims ahead as Amun comes in Ra - Amun comes inside Ra - becoming Amun-Ra - for the Sun Ra is the Mouth of Moon - for Ra is the Mouth that Swallows the Semen of Amun - and Amun Comes all over again all over Thoth - turning Thoth all white and all wet - lit and luminous - becoming the Face of the Moon - wet with Amun's abjected fresh froth facial - soft and serene - wet with a silky sheen - as a schiller shimmer - as an adularescence aura - a monocle milky moonstone - leaking lunar lamella lather liquid light. The Thoth-Moon moods the movement of the Tides of Time - as the Tides of Thoth - as the Time of Thoth -as a Sea of Semen - as Sein of Semen - throwing Thoth to and Thoth - to and fro - as a frothy fort-da-foaming fro - forever coming to care - forever coming to caress - coming over the face of the shore - coming over the time of being - soaking up sein - soaking up zeit - soaking up sein und zeit - sucking up sein und zeit - sucking off sein und zeit - then spat back in to the sea of sein - then spat back in to the sea of zeit - back to the sea of being - back to the sea of becoming - going back and thoth - going back and forth - back and thoth - back and froth - back and forth - back and froth - ad-infinitum and ab-infinitum - and so forth and so froth - and so froth and so forth - and so on and so off - and so off - and so on - on and so - so and on - so and so - on and on - and so and - and on and - off and off - and off and - an of an - of an of - o - f - a - o -
Amar Amun Self-Portrait 2006 Alex Alien
Yet Alien - what is Alien? Alien is Alien and also as alien as Alien is Amun. Alien as Altar. Alien as Above. Alien as Alter as after as afar as Alien is Ather. How does Alien Originate? Art Lets Alien Originate. How Does Art Let Alien Originate? As Amun. As Ather. As Altar. As Ather Alien Art lets leak as altarity as aletrity as an attuned and attained shape-shifting semening sensation sending Semen-da-Sein fort-da-ing Divine Masturbation making man. As abjected ahead Amun allows Alien abjectivity arriving as alien Art. As abjected ahead the Origin of Art never Comes to a Head: Amun as Origin of Art is always already Coming to a Head. Yet Bacon - what is Bacon? Bacon is the Eldest Son of Alien As the Father of Art Bacon is the Son of Alien and the Moon of Amun-Ra. As an Amun abjection Thoth was Thrown forth from Foam leaked like a Milky Way a Milky Moon out of abjected Amun's arising Oozing Obelisk becoming the Sun of the Semen coming over the Milk of the Moon. Then Thoth Comes Over an Ather: Amun - as Thoth eclipses Ra eclipsing Amun. One Day when while Alien Amun Ra radiated shooting Semen all over the Sky He said: "Bring Me Thoth - Bring Me Bull - Bring Me Bacon": As Thoth Comes to a Head He Comes Over Aumn and Hides Amun as Moon Eclipses Sun - Thoth Eclipses Amun - Bacon eclipses Alien: Bacon beams: "I am Thoth, the Eldest Sun of Ra: I Come before Ra - I Come after Amun. I Cover Ra. I Eclipse Alien. I Come Art." Amun as always Absent and Hidden though Thoth as Night never Present. Thoth Hides the Hidden Amun announcing: "Knower of the Hidden and the Alienfest! the Great! the most High! Alien to Him is that alien among You who Hides His arresting Art as the Nothing of the Night and Comes forth Frothing arising Art at the Coming of the Day." Amun Hides in the Hand of Thoth and Thoth throws Amun ahead for Thoth is the Handed One as Amun is the Hidden One and Thoth throws Amun ahead and aborting an Alien a Head of Time as an alien-time ahead of human-time all-the-time not-in-time for the time-being of the being-time but the coming-time that comes when you are all always already dead to da-sein and time-alien.
Ra-Horakhty Ra-Horus of the Two Horizons
As a slimy slippery semening substance coming to ahead without a head the thrown severed subject is initially abjected as always already alien to itself being burst out itself as an alien ather and not the other: for Slavoj Zizek's subjugated subject is always already 'already alien' where the human hides the inhuman in the Name of the Law of the Ather. The severed subject is always already a shuttered-shattered subject of misrecognition and misidentification taking 'itself' to 'being human' - to being a 'human being' - when it is - in brute-fact - in brute-real - reality: 'the nothing': the nothing-of-the-kind: nothing of the human-kind: an alien kind: an ather kind. We are even alien to ourselves as we cannot touch ourselves we cannot tickle ourselves - as the ather kind can: as Sam Neil says: "We're all aliens." We are all alien-stuff. We only ape at being ape - we only mime at being man: as Adorno added: "The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings." (Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia; Reflections From Damaged Life, 1947). Why imitate being human at all? Why mime being man? Why not imitate being iguana? Why not all act as an ant - act as an antelope - act as an anaconda - act as an alligator - act as an allosaurous - act as an alien? The human being is a forgetting of being alien of being ather. Why mime a mono-identity? - why not mime multiple-identities? The thrown terminating terrorist travels through multiple mutations initiating identities: why only have one-identity anyway? No one has one-identity anyway - as we are all shape-shifting aliens - anyway. No one has any identity anyway so how can you have an 'identity'? How can you have an 'identity card' - How can you have 'identity papers'? You cannot. You have absolutely nothing to identify yourself with but the nothing. You have no identity. You have no name for your name is never your own one. Why have a name anyway? What's in a name anyway? What's out a name anyway? The Name Hides the Nothing: there is nothing to the name: there is nothing in the name. Our Society of Surveillance seeks-out the single-signature of our mono-man. Mainly 'Man' seeks 'Separation' not 'Unity' as 'Man' leaks lamella leftovers drooling dreary dasein as monstrous 'Man' is 'Holier than Thou' filled full of holes emptying out a nothing endlessly emptying out a nothing as a nothing that is not there as 'Man' is the 'holeholder' of Nothing at All but Being is the 'wholeholder' of the Nothing All for mad Man hunts out being as a hole yet the Nothing hunts out being as a whole and the alien betweens being the hole the whole being.
Immanent Imeut Self-Portrait A.V.E 5.10. 2009
Attuning Atta Aten Alien Bacon Beingtime bleeds bubbles boils glitters glistens glows soaks shines shudders slivers sensation forth froth foam forever. Leaking lamella language ooze of alien being does to 'speak' but 'senses': 'authentialienart', like authentic auratic alien leaked language, says so essentially 'no-thing:' for ' it' does not 'speak' to you; it 'says' no-thing to you. Authentic (alien) Art and Authentic (alien) 'language' has nothing to 'say' to you but sends 'sensations' to you. An authentic alien aesthetics discloses dank drool abaesthetic alienation that throws the light leaked off-on authentic alien being as becoming towards shining truth. An authentic alien abaesthetics discloses drooling aestheic alienation at the movement of the mourning of the monument of the death of the human. An authentic abaesthetic alienation as an alien abaesthetics announces the 'truth' of the alien and the 'lie' of man where authentic alien art displaces inauthentic human art. A 'human' art is alienated from a 'truth': an 'alien' art is the thrown 'truth' as an authentic alienation-wetness where thrown to be bled alienated is instead initially instinctively to be 'true' to the 'truth' of 'being alien' as a bled 'becoming' alien as an atta abject authentic alien art always already away all the time outside the no-time of the post-human. An authentic auratic aroma alien art awe always already cuttered cannot be born contemporary for the alien has no time of the human: to be human is to be in time to be alien is to be out of time. An angoisse authentic auratic Arsinoe aroma atta Aten alien art is not made in 'time' not made by 'man'. An angoisse authentic auratic aroma atta Aten Alien art always already assigns Arsinoe at the End of Time the End of Man. The End of Man is the Sensationing of Being: Alien is at the End of the Thinking of Being: the Ending of Man is. The Nature of Alien Being is Named as Sensationing: a single Word worlding the Essence of Alien Being. As an Alliance of Sensation and Being - the Proper Name being Sensationing: Being being Spunked scent sent always and everywhere engulfing the Nothing and the nowhere thrown throughout the something Sensationing as the Becoming of the Sensationing of Alien Being being born again as alien Alexander - Akhnaton - Atum - Atta - Amun - Anubi - Anunnaki alienationing. Alien Being is not the Origin of the Human Being: all being is alien always already as a forgetting and fogging of the alien: Alienism is not a Humanism and Alienism is not a radical response to the crass 'crisis' of Humanism: a Humanism (en)crypts an Alienism. Also an Aliemism as an eggism eclipses and erases a Humanism as the essence of humanism is metaphysical whilst the eggence of alienism is metasensical since sensationism is as always already bred being before and attuned and attained away after melted man making mediated meandering metaphysics meaningless. Philosophy is and remains for us a thing of the past. Art is and remains for us a being of the future.
Amun-Ra Self-Portrait 2003 Alex Alien
Attaining atta Aten attuning an alluring agile altaric alteric 'alien alienist art' aroma Amun awe arrives at atta after annihilating 'aesthetics' and art 'man made'. You must both all three of you of course always already remember and not forget that 'great art' is 'alien made ' - not 'man made'. Alien art - as non-conceptual is - as Heidegger hears - thrown "out of the realm of the ordinary" into the alien abject abyss now negating an alien aesthetics altogether. As non-contemporary authentic Aletheia alien art aroma is Thrown out of time all the time and is thus not in the now as Heidegger heaves: "Truth is never gathered from objects that are present and ordinary. Rather, the opening up of the Open, and the clearing of what is, happens only as the openness is projected, sketched out, that makes its advent in throwness." (Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, Harper & Row 1971). An Aletheia alien Aten atta Art can never be 'conceptual' or 'contemporary' or 'political' or 'temporal' as 'it' is primordially projected thrusted throwness outside conception outside consciousness outside time all the time as the thrown spiralling sensation of the Eternal Return. To be alien again is to be eternally Thrown out-of-time all the time as the thrown thrustness of the Eternal Return without Beginning without Ending: the thrown Universe as an Undoing has no Beginning has no Ending but Becoming as an Eternal Return reaffirming Being becoming Time in-out-of-it-no-self where we Become being Time all the time out-of-time out-of-space as a Becmingbeingsensation. The thrown Sensationing of the Nothing as a being Becoming-behind as always already ahead-before big-bang beginnings sow - so bang goes the 'big bang theory' as our oozed Universe was always already a thrusted-throwness operating out off of leaked levels of orbiting Sensationing Differance. Time has no time to begin to end but to Become as Time is out-of-time out-of-space out-of-being being there no Beginning being there no Endings but being Becoming as an Eternal Return where Time and Space are the positive Nothing of Sensationing. Sensationing started shining Being before big Banging began Becoming. Eternal Recurrence as a Radical Differance delivers the Thrown Sensationing of Beingtimespace being thrown forth from out-of-oneself. The Sensational Possibility of Life in the Mind of Someone Dead! The Eternal Recurrence! The Eternal Recurrence of the Sensation! Where the Self Becomes Sensational Reincarnation through thrown time as a sensational revolving sphere. The thrown Sensation of Time of the Eternal Recurrence cannot be 'timed' by an irrational 'logical time' (commonsense clock-time) of an Aristotelian trapped temporality as the Time Sensation of the Eternal Recurrence of Amun as an Arting alien initiated is always already an angxt annexed Anaximandian anointed as abjointed: - 'out-of-joint' - as 'out-of-sync' - thrown 'out-of-sein' - thrown 'out-of-time' - all the time - not in time - time in not - time and again - afar and away - again and time - away and afar - time and time - afar and afar - again and again - afar and again.
Alluminating Amun Self-Portrait Alex Alien 2005
Exiled thrown Thoth-Bacon and navigating Nietzsche and homing Heidegger exited and experienced the Ereignis of the Beingtimesensation of the Eternal Return of the Throw: as Nietzsche threw it: "where I really was" - "outside my centre" and where Bacon-Thoth threw it: at the canvas outside himself - outside his centre. By Throwing the Eternal Return outside of one's being one Becomes one's Historical Totality of Sensations that the Body filters in-out of Life. Thus the Dead Body leaks life: Releasing this Historical Totality of Sensations as the Eternal Return ad-infinitum: returning, repeating rehearsing reeling as a Freudian fort-da-fluxing forever. The Totality of the World is the Totality of Sensations as a Constant Becoming threw throwing and retrieving as Being the Eternal Return all the time. For Freud threw the psychoanalytical sensation of the Eternal Recurrence as a foamy Fort-da-Fluxing where wet the thrust of the throwing registers registers the sensation state of the psyche. Blanchot sensations Nietzsche's Eternal recurrence as Fort-da-Fluxing where Time is "an infinite game with two openings (given as one, and yet never unified): future always already past, past always still to come, from which the third instance, the instance of presence, excluding itself, would exclude any possibility of identity." (Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, Sunny Press, 1992). For Heidegger - Bacon - Bataille - Blanchot - Beckett as well as for Freud and Nietzsche - the Eternal Return of the Throw is a 'game of chance' - without 'meaning or aim' - yet 'recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness' - by being Thrown out - into the thick thingness of the Nothing - as being time - ahead of the game - agame of the head - as an Eternal Return of the Dice of Dasein - as an Eternal Return of the Throw of Thoth - throwing the Eternal Return of the Alien.
Amun Ra
The Thoth Thrown atta Aten alien artist is never situated at a particular point 'in time' but becomes behead and ahead of all time all the time: leaked life frozen from froth foam for the atta altaric alien artist as an activated anxiety is initiated ahead as an angoisse as a fort-da-fluxing fatiguing forgetting future-past-present being thrown out-of-time out-of-joint all the time. An authentic angoisse angst alien artist as an atta Aten Anaximandrian as anyway always already out-of-joint out-of-time all the time cannot be contemporary cannot be conceptual cannot be conscious for the authentic angoisse Alien Artist exists in another time as the time of the Eternal Recurrence: the between-time of the no-now never on-time always already of the too late of the too early all the time out-of-time as an Eternal Becoming turning back-forward on-off out-in of-off itself all the time not in time. The Eternal Recurrence of the Semening Sensations is wet where the Totality comes Thrown back Eternally into-out itself. The Will to Sensation - the Alien of Beings - as constantly Becoming, as Eternal Recurrence becoming is the Eternal Recurrence is the Sensation of sensations rebounding reborning rebeing again and again where the World is the Will to Sensation and Nothing besides that! And you yourselves are also this Will to Sensation - and nothing besides that! Said simply: - sensationing is the sensationing of being. At the same time sensation is the time of sensation of being sensation at the same time - time sensationing is the sensationing of being insofar as sensationing - belonging to being and time as such - listens to it as a tuning turning towards the sensation as time that in time comes to shine as the sensation of being time for the being that time has taken away from being by becoming being time for all the time to shine to shine for a time without time for when one comes to shine one no longer needs time for those with the shine survive the time to become being and shine without being and time which belongs to being body.
Amar Amun Self-Portrait 2006 Alex Alien
The Eternal Return of Amar Amun as Arting Alien can only be Caught in the Moment and Movement as a Becoming off-of an Authentic Sensationing of Time always already re-remembered as Done and Undoing of the Memory of the Future Past always already annihilating the non Now: the non Present. An alien atta Aten Anxiety ooze opens up the gulf gap of the Return Eternally emptying out over the thrown edge as an Eternal Recurrence. The Eternal Recurrence is not a conceptual construct but a particular practice, an engaged event, an articulated action: the Eternal Return of Arting cannot be Thought only Thrown as a Fort-da-Fluxing: the Forgetting of the Human the Forging of the Alien. The Will to Sensation is the Opening of the Thrusting of the Eternal Return of the Throw. An activated atta alien art is the most moist materialised frothy form of the Will to Sensation through throwing ahead an alien head ahead of being and time all the time. The atta alien artist actually becomes the Sensation of the Eternal Return of the Throw through the Will to Sensation by being bred as Bacon would have said: "as a pulping pulverising machine" fuck-filtering vision-vectoring severe-screening form-faceting image-initiating shining shimmering sensuous sensations. The alien artist of Beingsensationtime of the Eternal Return of the Throw has to always already eggsist in the Open Groundless raw region Spunked State of angoisse Anxiety. To be an atta authentic alien artist one has to be always already activated as aborted by being-the-not-there by being-the-not-at-all initiated in an actual severed State off-of constant collapsing angoisse Anxiety and dasein Dread - as a way to shed and shred the self from itself out itself - as a raw radically forged forgetting of humanbeingtime - thrown into the black being hole of Becoming the Nothing as the Sensationbeingtime of the Eternal Return of the Throw: to throw is know the nothing whole of the hole which is being whole with the nothing not there everywhere whole.
m
Nefertem Nectar Self-Portrait A.V. E Feb 2009
What then is the act and art of Sensationing? Forgetting intellect Forging instinct Becoming alien Annihilating human and thus the cutting off of concepts throwing off of thinking sowing subterranean subconscious spunking sensationing. The Founding of Metaphysics was Forged and Fucked on the Forgetting of Spunking by brining Thinking thrusted which displaced dried denied Spunking's shining-sheening-sensationing. Spunking Sensationing - as a Metaphysical Memorial as a Metaphysical Metaphor a Metaphysical Metre a Metaphysical Meteorite - has been sidelined silenced soaked up in the his History of Metaphysics in the his History of Philosophy in the History of Being and ditched dried out as damp Dasein denying drooling dripping - and annihilating an amuning artistic aroma - and severing the semening sensation of time. We can no longer 'taste the time' - no longer 'smell the time' - no longer 'see the time' - so try to 'tell the time'. Yet only 'time can tell'- only time can tell the time of art: - as art is the sensation of time - as time is the sensation of art: only time tells about art not cunt critics: "Because time is the only great critic...I think that only time tells about painting....I think that the potency of the image is created partly by the possibility of its enduring. And, of course, images accumulate sensation around themselves the longer they endure." ((Francis Bacon, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Thames & Hudson, 1987): only time tells about art as art tells the time - as the art is the time - as art is the time of the artist - as the time of the ather: the artist is the time of art: the artist is the time of arting - as the sensation of arting - as the sensation of timing - as the sensationing of time: - as the shining of time - as the sheening of time - as the shimmering of time - as the shuddering of time: - :and all the time - another sensation - another time - another take: taking time the time taking time taking no time all the time the no time the time no.
Amun Amen Self-Portrait 2001 Alex Alien
We cannot 'tell the time' because the Time 'cannot be told' because Time is always already 'untold' out-of-time all the time not-in-time: time cannot be told - time can be sensationed: Time is the Sensation of Being. Time cannot be timed because Time is the Sensation of pure dice différance leaking out at different degrees of oozed-out dripping drips. Time cannot be Known only Thrown so you cannot 'have the time' you cannot 'tell the time'. To Become the Eternal Return we all have to 'forget what the time is' and to forget 'what one's time is' by willing a throwing off of being in and on time all the time being not in time out of time all the time as there is no Time like the present only a Time outside of the time of being simply and purely: no-time at all apart from an alientime all the time as the Radical Forgetting of Time is the Alien Being of the Eternal Recurrence of the Nothing of Beingsensation as Time does not exist 'in-itself' only out of orbit out of space out-of-time. You cannot 'ask for the time' and time asks nothing of you. You cannot ask 'what is the time'. The Time is not. The Time is The Nothing taking care of itself for Nothing for the Time Being. For the Time Being Time is a Thing Being. Time is a Being. Time is a Thing. Time is a Mood Thing. Time is a Mood. Time is Being in a Mood. Music is the Mood of the Time of Man being thrust out of time all the time. Music is the Mood of Being out of Time. Time is out of Time with Music. For Music Time is not Time - Time is a Mood and Being-in-a-Mood of Forgetting the Time all the time not in time. With Music we are thrown outside the Concept and thrown inside the Nothing: "In listening to music we do not apprehend a 'something', but are without concepts." ((Emmanuel Lévinas). In Music we are Listening to the Nothing of the Now and the Time of the Nothing outside of the Time of the Subject as the Time of the Anxiety as the Time of the Ather. Anxiety reveals the Nothing there of Time as Anxiety in the Face of the Ather. Anxiety - man's melting mooding - there is 'nothing to it' - and one wonders and wanders 'about the nothing' that is there and one worries 'about nothing' - iindeed: the Nothing itself - as such - was there - as time-being out-of-itself. Art alien - as nothing-at-all and all-about-nothing-at-al - as an angoisse anxiety - reveals and releases the Nothing that is There: the mooding-senstioning of Being-out-of-the-World hanging-hovering as abjected ahead of one's self severed as a drained dasein. Art is a Thing. Art is a Mood Thing for Bacon: "I want a record of an image. And with the record of the image, of course, comes a mood, because you can't make an image without creating a mood." (Francis Bacon, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Thames & Hudson, 1987).
For Heidegger the Mindless mood of Anxiety activates ahead the Abimage of the Nothing: "With the fundamental mood of anxiety we have arrived at that occurrence in human existence in which the nothing is revealed." (Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? 1929). The Nothing is Revealed as the Nothing that is All happening ahead of Being. Being is revealed in The Nothing ahead of Death where Being happens ahead as Time.
The Hiding of Amun Re 2005 Alex Alien
Alien Arvo Pärt’s Frates, Tabula Rasa, Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten decapitate and derail our 'commonsense' experience of 'clock-time' as a continuum where the sound of time - as a ticking time second by second - becomes broken and silenced by the severing sounds and splicing silences: here time simply cannot get started and sounds simply get no where – only sound-silences – only sound-nothingness – hearing the nothing at hand here makes sense and gives a sense of time. Here time as 'silenced' is ‘out of time’ with'‘clock-time' and undoes itself by imploding upon itself never beginning and never ending giving us the sensation of static time all the time (being thrown out of time). The mesmerising music also gives us the strange sensation of being ‘about nothing’ at all – about the beautiful boredom of nothingness – of being bathed in nothingness of being about being nothing at all - and going nowhere and getting nowhere and never beginning as never ending and never being in time but all the time out of time. Allan Pettersson's Symphony No.7 (1966-67), Symphony No. 8 (1968-69), Symphony No. 9 (1970) deliver to the subject the severing sensation of dread-time as dead-time and again being 'about nothing' and the beautiful boredom of the nothing - and the delightful dread of the nothing there - throwing 'being-out-itself' where the subject is severed by the silent-sound of ostracized sounds-silences of the no-time at all. Mesmerising music throws being-in-itself out-itself out-of-time by being thrown ahead in time out of time all the time not in time. And as we well know by now 'being-in-itself' does not actually exist and always already remains removed: dead-dormant: utterly unavailable - until shot shone shattering shuddering Sensation illuminates 'it' through thrusted Throwness as a shining shimmering being by Becoming: so sown Sensation sets fire sets froth forth to trap blank Being being bled born bare by the Thrown Being being but born of an Alien Becoming brought by setting Sensation shining. Being cums to Presence out of Sensation shot shining out of dead Darkness leaking luminous Lightening activating Amun as an auratic atta Aten alien Aletheia aroma art making mooding music move man Out of Time all the time as another Alien ather abtime throwing Thoth through.
Granite Head of Amenemhat III
Sensationing being throws towards Being as a Totality of Sensationing as an Essence of the being of Being sensesssencing. The Truth of the Shine of Being is shone as a sensessence as beings have their essence as sensations where the body breeds and seeds sown sensationings throwing the eternal return reel retrieving rethrowing resensationing sensations where the Eternal Return is the Sensation of sensations as the Schein essence of being of Being as an alighting Aten. Since the beginning of modern times philosophy entrenches itself in the effort to grasp Being by means of Thinking and this was - and still is - the Error for Being the Ereignis of Being can only ever be Grasped and Gathered by being Ground up so sending Sensationing and by Thoth throwing Thinking thrown out of Osiris orbit out of Order.
The Truth is Sensation(ed) outside the fort-da of 'Thinking' and 'Intellect'
which are always alien to the Sensationing of Truth and the Being of Time.
Sensation is The Truth of Being: but One - simply and purely - cannot 'know it'
via 'Knowledge' or 'Thought' or 'Intellect' which severe sensation from the
subconscious body of being. The Truth is not a Thing of 'Knowledge' or
'Thinking' or 'Intellect' or 'Language' but of a primordial pulling presence of
an amazing scintillating Shining Sensation as a mesmerising Mooding. In the Beginning was the Mood and the Mood was with Man and the
Mood was Man. The Man Threw the Mood of Being. Mood and Man. Mood Man. Mooding
Man. Man Mooded before Man Worded. Mood came before Word. Mooding
began before Thinking. Anxiety activated metaphysical mooding throwing
Thinking thawed. Mooding preceded Thinikng as Dwelling preceded Writing for
Mooding set the scape of Thinking and Dwelling set the scene of Writing
- since Sensationing preceded Speaking - so Mooding, Dwelling,
Sensationing set the scenescape for forthing through Thinking, Writing,
Speaking. A Mooding is not a Meaning: mood does not mean. A mooding is a
melting moving moment off of activated alluring aliquid angoisse anxiety
always away and ahead beheading being: mood has no meaning as man has no
meaning: man has a mooding not a meaning: the subject signifies nothing at
all yet man desires signification yet man desires meaning man has no
meaning at all.
Amar Amun
Self Portrait 2006 Alex Alien
Melting
metaphysical mooding made hallucinating Heraclitus let leak the Light of
Thought through thrown Thinking thus Thing Came to Light through sown
Sensationing as a metaphysical mooding. We have all long Forgotten that
the Origin of Thinking was lit in the Shining of Sensationing and the Murmuring
of Mooding. Now Thinking has Come to its Ending so Sensationing has to Come to
its Beginning. How do you all Sensation about Thinking when Thinking has Become
its Ending? The Ending of Philosophy initiates instigates invites the
Becoming of Sensationing: Endings are always already ahead attuned attending Beginnings
as a Becoming as Heraclitus has 'it': "What was scattered -
gathers. What was gathered - blows apart - The way up is the way back - The
beginning is the end. - " (Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of
Heraclitus, Viking Penguin 2001). Sensationing is the Eternal
Return of Presencing between Ending and Beginning as a Becoming of
Sensationing. An Ending is not only a Beginning but always already about
a Becoming again and again and again as the End of Philosophy and the Start of
Sensationing. Sensationing is indeed Unthinking Philosophising. The
philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point,
however, is to sensation it. Philosophising has since forgotten Sensationing.
Alien (1979)
In the final and highest instance there is no other Being than Sensationing. Sensationing is Primal Being, and to it [Sensationing] along all the predicates of the same [primal Being] apply: absence of conditions; eternity; independence from time; self-affirmation. All philosophy strives solely in order to find this supreme Sensation. Sensationing is True to Being. The Essence of Truth reveals itself as Sensation. Being is sensation, it does not have a sensation. The Truth of Being is Sensation: In Sensationing Dasein. Dasein Sensations The Truth. In Pure Sensation the Truth Shines. There the Truth Shines. The Truth is a Shining. The Truth is a Shining of Being. The Truth is a Shining of being as Sensationing. The Truth Shines Being Sensation yet not all beings shine: not all beings sensation: not all beings have 'the shine' of being. Only those that sensation 'the shine' of being have the Sensation Truth of Being. Being Sensation is The Shining of the The Truth of Being. Shining shines the thrown being of Beings. The Truth is solely selected to The Shining. To Those that Shine The Truth Shines. Some shine some don't. The Sein comes to Shine Through a Susceptibility to Sensationing Sein not through Thinking There about anything at all. Shining is the overcoming of concepts as an abject Thinking about the Nothing that is There.
See how the beautiful Blue Morpho butterfly Shines its iridescent Shimmering sparkling wings whilst Flying toward the Sun and Sky!
Do you have The Shine? Do you have The Truth? The Truth is Out There! Shining! Flying towards the Sun and the Sky Burning Bright!
Being makes its Presence felt through the Shimmer of the Shine! The Bright of the Burning. Flying towards you all as a Shining Sein!
Can you See into your Sein? Can you See into your Shine? Only by being Blinded by the Shine of Sein can you See the Sein of Shine!
Neanderthal Head from Loire at La Roche-Cotard
Hearing Heidegger sedately Sensationing - unlike Thinking - seeps spilt sowing: 1) Sensationing brings us knowledge as do the sciences; 2) Sensationing produces usable practical wisdom; 3) Sensationing solves cosmic riddles; 4) Sensationing endows us directly with the power to act. And it is fitting that we raise anew the question of the senationing of Being as Beingsensation. Being and Sensationing are necessarily always already infinitely indefinable as a sensationing and Being are not 'concepts' or products of 'thought' but bled bare fluxings flutterings floatings as the opening sensation of a shining aiming at an alluring awesome alien alterity as Aletheia approaching an authentic Aten atta alien art as activated outside of our thought thinking thrust through the Nothing that is the There Is of the Nothing There.
Heidegger's Philosophy was alienist to its innermost core. Heidegger's 'Philosophy of Being' - being pre-Platonic - penetrated Primordial Being as an alienist shining sensationing by-passing pre-dating thrown-thinking language leaking where the wrong 'Question of Being' had always already been answered as an alienist 'Sensation of Being' before 'being human' housed being as a 'House of Language'. The thrown Answer of Being is Alien being aborted outside the House of Being. So sown seeping shuddering-shimmering Sensationing swallows up under the Ground for Sensationing is never Grounded Geist floating free from Foundation free from Logic free from Concept free from Thinking thrown through thrusted Thingness leaving language leaked left behind being free for being the Nothing that is free from Logic free from Concept free from Thought free for the time-being of the being-nothing that is the time-being of Sensationing.
Portrait of M.V.E as Ra January 2008 Alex Alien
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote Tractatus Logico Philosophicus as a Non-Sense of Lie-Logic. Wittgenstein wrote wittingly: “The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said." Except that nothing can be said only sensationed and nothing is said in the Tractatus. Wittgenstein wriggles: "My propositions are elucidatory in this way he who understands me finally recognises them as senseless...Where one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
The trash Tractatus silences Sensationism and does not Speak or Sensation seeing Logic as Nonsensical for Wittgenstein's sentences seep no known Sensationism so sowing language without leakage, sentences without spillages words without waste. Where one cannot speak, thereof one must be sensation. The Tractatus touts totalising positivistic propositions so sensationing nothing negating surplus spillage slurp slime stuff such as an alluring angoisse luminously leaked lamella. In logic nothing is accidental - in reality all is accidental - nothing is accidental - the nothing is an accident happening - for nothing happens - for the nothing always happens.
Shu Shine Self-Portrait A.V.E Mar 2009
The world is the totality of things - thrown things - the totality of sensations - the world divides into sensations - the world is determined by the sensations - the totality of sensations and by their being all the nothing - at all - sensation of the nothing all - at all - as abjects and all objects contain the possibility of all sensations and the nothing at all. Space - Time - Being (being sensations) are actual forms of Sensationings of the Nothing There that is the time-being of sensations being-time.
Wittgenstein shows us all that the puerile propositions of the turgid Tractatus are as pure non-sensationist schema where welded leaden Logic is inert left locked-in-its-left-out nothingness negating the thrown stagnant smelliness sown seeping sensational slipping slime states. For filtered locked Logic does not leak: does not: shimmer - shudder - shine - smaze - stink - soak - spray - spume - spunk: logic left lacking a leaking luring Shining - as a sent Sensationism scent - so lost lie Logic has no 'Logic of Sensationism' - logic has no leakic - . Logical images cannot depict the world. Logic is not a mirror-image of the World. Logic is not Transcendental. Logic is not Senscendental. Life has no logic. Being has no Logic. Sensation has no logic - Sensation has a leakic - its leaks all over you all - like life leaks - like being leaks - like time leaks - like love leaks.
Immortal Imhotep Self-Portrait A.V.E Mar 2009
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thwarted thesis that a sensation must form some sort of 'picture' in order to have 'significance' - and that a 'pure sensation' correspondence to 'nothing' in our experience - is non-sense and absolutely absurd and utterly untrue since sown sensation slits sight splits seeing punctures perception pulverises pictures. The Nothing is - as aborted-out-of-itself - as an Absolute Sensation - The Pure Sensation of The Nothing: The Time of Sensation. What Place is the Pure of Sensation of the Nothing situated and sensationed - as an activated Action? An AbImage abjects as an initiated image - imaging the Nothing - pulverising the Picture - thrown thoth through shuddering shimmering shining sensationing: Blanchot breathes:
"The image, capable of negating nothingness, is also the gaze of nothingness on us. The image is light, and nothingness is immensely heavy. the image shines and nothingness is the diffuse thickness where nothing reveals itself. The image is the crack, the mark of this black sun, the tear, which, under the appearance of the dazzling burst, gives us the negative of the inexhaustible negative depth. That is why the image seems so profound and so empty, so threatening and so attractive, always rich in more senses than we lend it and also poor, void and silent, because in it advances this dark impotence, deprived of mastery, which is that of death as recommencement." (Maurice Blanchot, L'Amitié, Gallimard: 1971).
Sensation - as The Being Time of The Nothing - is the thrown Pure Experience par excellence: 'signification' and 'conception' is always already added after the Event of thrown Pure Sensation: only social and psychic conditioning sutures significance to sensation but robs it of its brute and pure sensationistic impact: when an infant smells, sees and even eats 'its' own excrement none of its seven senses tell 'it' that it is supposedly repellent and repugnant. Through cultural signification and suturing, the smell sensation of Chanel No.5 is smelt as 'acceptable' and 'good' and the smell sensation of shit is smelt as 'unacceptable' and 'bad': our social-psychic conditioning could also reverse these two smell sensations where scent becomes shit and shit becomes scent but the sensations still remain the same smelly shat thing.
Logic does not Smell, Logic does not Smaze, Logic does not Sweat, Logic does not Spunk, Logic does not Sponge, Logic does not Squelch, Logic does not Shit, Logic does not Shine, Logic does not Bubble, Logic does not Burn, Logic does not Curdle, Logic does not Coagulate, Logic does not Glisten, Logic does not Drool, Logic does not Drip, Logic does not Leak: Logic does not Exist. Logic knows nothing of The Nothing. The Sensation of The Nothing leaks outside the nothing of Logic. Nietzsche on Nihilism contra Logic: "Nihilism doe snot only contemplate the 'in vain!' nor is it merely the belief that everything deserves to perish: one helps to destroy. - This is, if you will, illogical; but the nihilist does not believe that one needs to be logical." (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power). Nihilism negates Logic. Sensation severs Logic. Being beheads Logic. Dasein decapitates Logic. Logic is not: smelly, slimy, sticky, scabby, slithery, oozy, oily, offally, greasy, gritty, grimy, gooey, dank, damp, dewy, jewy, juicy, jelly, jerky.
Amun Death Mask Self Portrait A.V.E 2008
Logic has no Sensation. Logic has no Anxiety. Logic has no Boredom. Logic has no Dread. Logic has no Nothing. Being has no Logic. Being has Nothing - The Nothing. Logic has no Logic - no logic at all. The Logic that One add One equals Two throws Logic out: One is One and cannot be added to another One: One will be One and only One as the same One and not another One. The One knows nothing of the Two that comes after One altogether. As an Image One add One looks like Eleven when One is next to One: nothing is next to one: one is also zero for the one is the nothing: one add one equals naught and naught: one add one equals minus two zeros altogether not together. One is Nothing so nothing can be added to the One. One cannot be added to One. One is its Own. One is its own One and cannot be added to another One. The Logic that One add One equals Two is a false Logic: Logic is false. Logic is a Lie. Being has no Logic. Time has no Logic. The Unconscious has no Logic or Time.
While sensations are necessarily non-cognitive on the conscious plane - and cannot be 'known' - spilt sown sensations can be shown thrown flown forth from the thirsty subconscious stratum and the thrown seventh sense which will always already shine shimmer oozed outside consciousness and alien body of being being bled both from within and without outside thought: sensations cannot be know only thrown for Being is in fact floating flooding bled Beingsensation: one does not 'know' sensation one 'throws' and 'retrieves' sensation through fort-da-fluxing. There is no 'Question of the Meaning of Being' but only the 'Sensationing of Being as Beingsensation' where the sewer subconscious 'alien body' has a direct drooling atta access to a 'pure realm' of sensation free from conceptual consciousness. Being has Sensation not Meaning. Being is not a product of Thoughtness but a Sensation of Throwness. Being has no Intellect. Being has no Consciousness. Being is Alien to Thought. Being is Sensation. Being is Alien. Beingaliensensation: The Life of the Alien.
Portrait of Evert Potgieter Alex Alien 2003
The question "What calls for sensationing" asks for what wants to be sensationed about in the pre-eminent sense: it does not just give us sensationing to sensation about, nor only itself, but it first gives sensation and sensationing to us, it entrusts sensation to us as our essential destiny, and thus first joins and appropriates us to sensation as a clearing to being towards Sensation as Beingsensation being our Senessence.
Our thinking blocks off and out Our ereignis-experiences senessence-sensationing: thought severs pure sensation thought enframes pure sensation thought negates pure sensation for thought forgets all about sensation even when thinking about sensationing as I have the sensation that I think when I am not thinking about sensation so Rene Descartes never stated: "I think, therefore I am" but smelt: "I stink, therefore I am." I sensation therefore I am stinking as I smelt anf felt a sensation of shit pass through the thought of the smell shat forth from the body of sensation thinking about shitting making thought mucky and smelly for one to shit out the smell of thought as a stinking-thinking about shitting-thinking to shit the sensation out shitting thinking out the nothing that is thinking about nothing smelling but shitting sensation without thinking about it being-shit as a diced-dasein dicing-being-turd into being-diced-time forever flushed all-away and aborted-abroad.
Wepwawet-Anubis Self-Portrait A.V.E Dec. 2008
Authenticalienart arrivesat SensationBingtime. BeingtowardsDeath is Beingtowardsbecoming Sensation: our Out-of-Body Sensations sow Sensation of Light, Sensation of Love: death does not exist: Sensation Lives. Embodied Ending becomes beginning of our oozed Being Sensation. We don't die but remain bathed in a sea sort of shining shimmering shuddering sensation of light and love. Being Thrown out over to the Horizon of bled Becoming towards Death is Sensation Being-as-Becoming-eternal-Life luminous: lighting lifted looted lingering floating-flying freely defying defeating gravity going going going gone over out over on towards thrown thrust thirsty thymol thrusness terminus terrorist territory to Becomingalienagainandagain as an Eternal Return remembered Real. The Eternal Return of the Afterlife always invokes Differences of Sensation. Difference de-fers De-capitation since Sensation thinks through the Body beyond Be-heading. Be-head-ed-Bod-ily sensations still shine Thrown Thought through despite decapitating Dasein. Difference defies Decapitation since shuddering Sensations still think Thought through the Body beyond Beheading. Being be-headed is the out-of-body experience par excellence. Thus Thinking is Ex-ecuted and Ex-ists Be-yond the Head be-heading dread Da-sein. Being Be-headed is Thinking thrown Ahead of be-ing Human be-coming Alien.
Khonsu-Kenosis Self-Portrait A.V.E Nov. 2008
Why are there Sensations rather than Nothing? One's Embodied-Bodily Sensation is the Shimmering of Being, the Aura of Shining; Sensation is the Aura of Being out of the world. Will to Sensation is allowing aura to Shine Being. Sensationing is the auratic Body's Mode of Being Sensation; authentic alien art, authentic alien being becoming froths forth from the thrown embodied eggo, not ego. Being 'brain dead', being 'body dead', delivers dripping brings breeds Sensation Being into being as sensation. We don't die but become born salted smelting scented sheening Sensations: shimmering shining sparkling as an alluring alien aura as Beingsensation. Ones Be-headed-Bod-ily sensations still shine thrown Thought through de-spite de-capitating Da-sein de-railed dead-ed end-ed ahead as a sensation of being-dead and being-dead is being-ahead of being-there by being the sensation of time be-headed from the sensation of the body: the sensation of true being is being without a body without a body there where we are being sensation as being sensation in itself by being out of body itself and our unconscious is being free from the body as our being dead and ahead of the body as in a dream.
Shuddering Sensation Self-Portrait Alex Alien 2004
Being is not a product of Thinking. Being is a product of Throwing. Being is a product of Timing. Being is a product of Sensationing. Being is the Shining of Sensation just as Sensation is the shining of being as becoming as shimmering: 'to be and to become' is the question of being towards sensation as sensation towards becoming being sensation. The truth of being shines in the becoming of sensation as levels of sensations as levels of beings as becomings. Beings are realized and revealed and registered as leaked Levels of Sensations as Becomings being never fixed or formed for are as always floating forever forward as a radiating riveting rotating leaked light levels of our oozing spurting soaking shining shimmering smoking smaze sensations.
Throwing breaks open an open Place of Being thrown through the open Space of Sensation opening-out the Origin of Being as the Being of Art. As Origin Art is Activated by breaking-open an Open Sensation sending Art afar and ahead as a a Region of the Real revealing and dealing Decapitated Dasein diced as an ancient alien ather aborted abroad as a being beyond being Being and Time. But Being is always already away and ahead aborted as being-out-of-time thrust through anxiety attacks as the sensation of dying and the dying coming to ahead where time does not exist anymore for being at all where and when sensation of being without time arrives and beheads being from being with time for a time to come. Being with the dying coming decapitates dasein from being in time to being out of time and out of being there for time by being for being for the being that is being thrown towards deathing where being becomes time away from being with being in time there is no sensation of time at all but being.
Francis Bacon, Reece Mews Studio Vogue November 1st 1963
Velázquez and Rembrandt project and push present the presence of Being in beings as aborted and altaric alien beings - but not as a painting of presence - not as a philosophy of presence - leaving logocentrism leaked - but as a dasein of différance - detoured derailed ahead - as a distant derridian deferment defilement - disjoining decapiatated différance - ahead - as a head - headed floating forward - forging forever fort-da darling dasein - daringly delivered as an angoisse activated articulted absencing - arriving alive away and ahead - as a head - attained as an angoisse abjected absent past pushed present - presenting pure presence - past projected afar and ahead - at a distance - at a deference - at a différance. Velázquez and Rembrandt present the différance of presence present pressing ahead a head having annihilated representation: Velázquez and Rembrandt do not represent - Velázquez and Rembrandt present. Velázquez and Rembrandt present the absent present aborted as an abjected dasein dissemblance disseminated dissemenated drenching the sight and the site of the subject stained: severe Velázquez and Rembrandt sever the time of the subject so cannot be seen in time only over-a-time and not in any-old-time or for the-time-being. For the time-being as the time of being Velázquez and Rembrandt serve self portraiture projected for the being-time the being of time.
For Velázquez and Rembrandt being time is a constant presence constantly serving and severing itself out-of-time all the time not-in-time by being-time constantly ahead-of-itself as a-head-of-time for all time and no time for all and for no one at all. Velázquez and Rembrandt present time for the time being as the sensation of the subject of being-in-time since the sensation of time is always already subjective as well as alienative always already absolute abjected absolutely. Velázquez and Rembrandt paint present time for the time-being for the time of the subject to take time for the time-being and the being-time. Velázquez and Rembrandt abject the subject of time out-of-time all the time in-time with being-time becoming time-being for the being-time and for the time-being to come - in time out of time the time to come to being without time - for true being is being without time for all time without time at all and being all..
Amar Amun Self Portrait 2006 Alex Alien Man in Blue VII (Gamal Abdel Nasser)1954 Francis Bacon
Velázquez and Rembrandt present the time for the subject as the time for the present: the present past ahead of itself: for Velázquez and Rembrandt time is not represented for time is not a representation: time cannot be represented only sensationed since time is a sensation for the subject attuned and attained as an art alien activation. Attaining absolute time throws thrusts ahead a head of an attuned absolute art alien attained. As for being painters for Velázquez and Rembrandt the painting of time paints the temporality of painting for the time being being the being of time. For Velázquez and Rembrandt the truth of painting is the painting of time as the time of painting out of time with the time of being for the being time. Velázquez and Rembrandt disperse time dispersing dasein ahead of itself dispensing the time of the subjected disseminated a head of itself dissemenated as a decapitated dasein. For Velázquez and Rembrandt Being & Paint present dasein time for a time adrift and ahead attunened and attained as a moving mooding moment where a mood makes a time a severed sensation of time as a mood of time for a time and for a time being. Time is Nothing but a Mooding and the Nothing gives times its moods. Time is a Real Thing as Time is a Mood Thing to be in and to be thrown out of: dread derails disperses decapitates the time from the time of the subject. Dread takes the Time out of the Subject: Dread - Anxiety - Boredom - the true sensations of being-thrown-out-of-time - steal and suspend the subject from being-in-time becoming out-of-time forth for the Time of the Nothing. Velázquez and Rembrandt suspend the presence of the subject by suspending the time being for the subject by presenting the sensation of suspended time painting presence present and aborted ahead and activated as a mooding moment telling the time. For Velázquez and Rembrandt time is a real thing as time is a material mood: time is made manifest by being in a mood and by being thrown from one mood to another mood from one time to another severing time making time a static sensation sometimes. For Velázquez and Rembrandt time-as-mood thing is always already non-linear as time changes moods cutting itself off of itself as it comes out of its mood: time expands or contracts itself depending on its multiple moods: moreover mood makes the speed of time shift speeds between sensations. Velázquez and Rembrandt attained and attuned an Eternal Throwing of Time as a Fort Da daseining decapitating the time-being ahead of itself for the being-time for the being-of-time as the time-of-being to come and to come all over you all.
What is the Sensationing of all Being? Time is the Sensation of Being. Time as Sensation is the Presentation of the Real Thing - Time Being.
Heidegger and Bacon: Throwing Thoth
"I love him who throws."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 1883.
"To dare is to risk the game."
Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 1971.
"Chance commingles with a feeling of déjà vu."
Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, New York, 1992.
"The true man wants two things: danger and play."
Friedrich Nietzsche, (1844-1900).
"The man of action is always without a conscience."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sprüche in Prosa, 1749-1832.
"Every Thought sends forth one Throw of the Dice."
Stéphane Mallarmé, The Dice Thrown Will Never Abolish Chance, 1897.
"The will to truth that still seduces us to take so many risks."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, 1885.
"He limits chance to chance...dread throws him back out of himself..."
Maurice Blanchot, From Dread to Language, Station Hill, 1999.
"This Thing gets thrown out...This Thing does not want to show itself."
John Carpenter, The Thing, Universal 1982.
"Whether I'll see Heidegger, I don't know yet...I'm leaving it to chance."
Hannah Arendt, Letter to Heinrich Blücher, January 3rd, 1950.
"I do think that Egyptian art is the greatest thing that has happened so far."
Francis Bacon, Art International, No. 8, Autumn, 1989.
"Lifetime is a child playing drafts, moving pieces on a board. The kingdom is a child's."
Heraclitus of Ephesus, 540 BC - 480 BC.
"World-time - it is a child, playing, moving the pebbles to and fro on a board, of such a child is the mastery over being."
Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason; 1955-1956; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
"Just what is this Thing? Chaos, chaos in the flesh...It's here ...It's all around us...It lives out of sight... It's playing with us..."
Dean Koontz, Phantoms, 1998.
"In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play...Man's maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play. "
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, 1886.
"The human being arrives at the threshold: there he must throw himself headlong into that which has no foundation and has no head."
Georges Bataille, The Obelisk; Visions of Excess, University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
"Seeing is primordially determined, not by the eye, but by the lighting of Being. Presence within the lighting articulates all the human senses."
Martin Heidegger, The Anaximander Fragment, Early Greek Thought, New York, Harper & Row, 1975.
"Paul Cézanne's painting suspends the habits of thought and reveals the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself."
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne's Doubt, Sense and Non-Sense, Northwestern University Press, 1964.
"Thought is itself a kind of action and therefore does not have any ontological distinction from action. To think something is always already to do something."
Mark Cousins, Thought & Execution, Architectural Association, 1994.
"And what difference does it make to you - you dice throwers! You still have not learned to gamble and show defiance! Are we not forever seated here at this table, a gathering of mockers and gamblers?"
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Superman; Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, 1883.
"But then I don't where the bull's-eye is. These things happen and then, of course, I manipulate them afterwards. I live my life between fact and chance...I've lived entirely on chance, hoping what is called 'the chance' will always work for me."
Francis Bacon; Hugh M. Davies; The Papal Portraits of 1953, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 2002.
"What Mallarmé sought as aesthetically persuasive was the impossible: to throw a seven over the shattered hull on its ocean reef that would dissolve into a seven-pointed star as the unreachable...A book with blank pages might thus become the most completely clear text."
Otto Pöggeler, The Paths od Heidegger's Life and Thought, Humanity Books, 1998.
"I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favour, and who then asks: 'Am I a cheat?' - for he wants to perish...A cast which ye made had failed. But what doth it matter, ye dice-players! Ye had not learned to play and mock, as one must play and mock! Do we not ever sit at a great table of mocking and playing?"
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, 1883.
"Man is at play each time and each time in different 'ways' which in truth are incomparable because here subject is not replaced with Da-sein and object with be-ing; becuase here this very juxtapositioning of the word formulas misleads and particularly fills up or covers over the abyss that exists between two 'ways'. Subject-Object: here man is put on the stage and secured in the pursuit of his security. Da-sein-be-ing: here man is risked as the guardian of the most question-worthy."
Martin Heidegger, Mindfulness, Continuum, 2006.
"Theory of chance. The soul a selective and self-nourishing entity, perpetually extremely shrewd and creative (this creative force is usually overlooked! is conceived only as 'passive'). To recognise the active force, the creative force in the chance event: - chance itself is only the clash of creative impulses."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power; 1883-1888.
"There is no member of my body which is not the member of a god. Thoth protecteth my body altogether, and I am Ra day by day. I shall not be dragged back by my arms, and none shall lay violent hold upon my hands. And shall do me hurt neither men, nor gods, nor the Spirit-souls, nor the dead, nor any man, nor any pat-spirit, nor any rekhit-spirit, nor any hememet-spirit. I am he who cometh forth advancing, whose name is unknown. I am Yesterday."
Amun-Ra, Book of the Dead, Papyrus of Ani 240 BC.
"Instead of God, chance. For those who grasp what chance is, the idea of God seems insipid and suspicious, like being crippled ... To want to be everything - or God is to want to cancel time, is to want to cancel chance. Not to want this is to want time and chance. To want chance is amor fati (love of fate). Amor fati signifies wanting chance, signifies differing from what was. To attain the unknown and risk it, to gamble it...In a definitive way, to risk is to bring what didn't exist into being...Time is chance insofar as requiring the individual, the separate being...Time without risk would be more or less nonexistent...Even now I can only risk and gamble, without knowing."
Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, Paragon House, 1992.
"The work of art is linked to a risk; it is the affirmation of an extreme experience. But what is this risk? What is the nature of the bond that unites the work to risk?...Art - as images, as words, and as rhythms - indicates the menacing proximity of a vague and vacant outside, a neutral existence, nil and limitless; art points to a sordid absence, a suffocating condensation where being ceaselessly perpetuates itself as nothingness."
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, University of Nebraska Press, 1982.
"I was completely swept along with my own compulsion. I don't know how else to put it. It didn't satisfy me completely so maybe I was thinking another one will. Maybe this one will, and the numbers started growing and growing and just got out of control, as you can see...It's just like a big chunk of me has been ripped out and I'm not quite whole."
Jeffrey Dahmer, Confession, (1960-1994).
"Being as venture is the relation of flinging loose, and thus retains in the flinging even what has been ventured...Venture includes flinging into danger. To dare is to risk the game...If that which has been flung were to remain out of danger, it would not have been ventured. It would not be in danger if it were shielded."
Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper & Row, 1971.
"The act was not pure; I left traces. Wiping away these traces, I left others....Thus we are responsible beyond our intentions....That is to say that our consciousness, and our mastery of reality through consciousness, do not exhaust our relationship with reality, in which we are present with all the destiny of our being....But a trace in the strict sense disturbs the order of the world. It occurs by overprinting....He who left traces in wiping away his traces did not mean to say or do anything by the traces he left"
Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: Essais sur le penser-à-l'autre; & The Trace of the Other; Éditions Bernard Grasset, Collection Figures,1993.
"Everything indicates that it was impossible for man to live without the 'sensation of time' that opened his world like a movement of breathtaking speed - but what he lived in the past as fear he can only now as pride and glory...A feeling of explosion and a vertiginous weightlessness surround an imperious and heavy obelisk...In each place where the massive destiny of man is formed, the rhythm of life and death accelerates and attains a speed so great that it results only in the vertigo of the fall...What makes this movement difficult to represent is the fact that it is accelerated by increases in the sensation of rest."
Georges Bataille, The Obelisk; Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
"Risk is necessary to understand what matters in depth, another risk - chance - to give oneself over to what one has understood....this situation has no way out. Any exit is a lie...We enter with a leap into a situation that is no longer defined by useful operations or by knowing but that opens up onto , to the possibility of losing oneself without possible contact with knowledge. this state, a state of violence, of tearing apart, of abduction, of ravishing, would in every respect be similar to mystical ecstasy...the ecstatic 'loss of knowledge' is properly inner experience..."
Maurice Blanchot, Inner Experience, Faux Pas, Stanford University Press, California, 2001.
"In trying to do a portrait, my ideal would really be just to pick up a handful of paint and throw it at the canvas and hope that the portrait was there...I know the part of the canvas I want to throw at...since I've thrown an awful lot...I can only hope that the throwing of the paint onto the already-made or half-made image will either re-form the image or that I will be able to manipulate this paint further into - anyway, for me - a greater intensity."
Francis Bacon, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Thames & Hudson, 1987.
"I'm trying to suggest the devout terror that I'm thrown into by such a state even now. (In this regard I think the basic aspect of the will to power is overlooked if it is not seen as the love of evil: not as usefulness, but as a value signifying the summit.)...Even now I can only risk and gamble, without knowing....However, by advancing and risking myself - shrewdly, to be sure, if shrewdness was each time a 'throw of the dice' - I've changed the way in which I see the difficulties I met with at the outset...To act is to speculate on subsequent results...In this sense action is 'risk,' and the 'risk' is both the working and the things worked on...If need be, 'risk' can be wild and frantic, independent of concerns for the future....In his ideas on children, Nietzsche expressed the principal of open-ended play where occurrence exceeds the given... A child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning and game, a wheel turning on itself, a first impulse, the sacred 'yes'. The will to power is the lion: but isn't the child the will to chance?"
Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, Paragon House, New York, 1992.
"The projecting-opening is thrown, is placed into inabiding in openness of projecting be-ing. This placedness into abiding arises from out of a displacement that originates as attunement from the tune of stillness (from be-ing itself): this placedness is what is endowed in endownment... However, that projecting-opening of be-ing takes the thrower itself along unto the en-opened clearing wherein the thrower recognizes itself as an en-owned thrower. This projecting-open that carries the thrower along and transposes it, enacts in itself a fundamental transformation of the thrower insofar as the thrower is called 'man'. Thereupon the guardianship for the truth of being begins. But why is Da-sein grasped as 'temporality'?..."
Martin Heidegger, Da-sein; Mindfulness, Continuum, 2006.
"Chance is death, and the dice according to which one dies are cast by chance; they signify only the utterly hazardous movement which reintroduces us within chance. Is it at Midnight that the 'dice must be cast'? But Midnight is precisely the hour that does not strike until after the dice are thrown, the hour which has never yet come, which never comes, the pure, ungraspable future, the hour eternally past. Nietzsche has already come up against the same contradiction when he said, 'Die at the right time.'... But death's rightful quality is impropriety, inaccuracy - the fact that it comes either too soon or too late, prematurely and as if after the fact, never coming until after its arrival. It is the abyss of present time, the reign of a time without a present, without that exactly positioned point which is the unstable balance of the instant whereby everything finds its level upon a single plane."
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, University of Nebraska Press, 1982.
"If ever breath has come toward me, the breath of creative breathing and necessity, forcing even chance to dance the dance of the stars; if ever I laughed at the creative lightning, followed growling but obedient by the lengthy thunder of action; if ever I played dice with the gods at the divine table of earth so the earth shook and split throwing out rivers of flame - for the earth is a divine table, trembling with new words and the sign of the divine dice..."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Seven Seals; Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, 1883.
"The Geschick of being: a child that plays, shifting the pawns...The Geschick of being, a child that plays... Why does it play, the great child of the world-play Heraclitus brought into view in the aiôn? It plays, because it plays. The 'because' withers away in the play. The play is without 'why.' It plays since it plays. It simply remains a play: the most elevated and the most profound. But this 'simply' is everything, the one, the only... The question remains whether and how we, hearing the movements of this play, play along and accommodate ourselves to the play."
Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason,1955-1956; Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 1991.
"A characteristic element in Bacon's use of chance in his painting is a white blotch, as found, for example, in Study for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1967, Study of George Dyer in a Mirror, 1968 and Study for bullfight No.2, 1969. In these pictures Bacon throws thick white paint at the canvas: at the face of the figure, at the bull, at the centre of the painting. The resulting white blotch looks as though the undiluted paint had been accidentally added to the painting by hand... Sometimes it remains where it landed; sometimes it is drawn with the brush to adjacent points in the picture. But first Bacon simply adds the white blotch, whether or not it fits into the painting... In Bacon's explanation of the meaning of the white spots and slashes that he added to the canvas so abruptly and almost thoughtlessly, he speaks of 'pure accident,' of 'instinct,' and that the picture almost paints itself. He says that the subconscious is finding expression in his his work."
Barbara Steffen, Chance and the Tradition of Art in Francis Bacon's Work, Francis Bacon & the Tradition of Art, Skira, 2003.
"Accident, as Bacon understands it, is not manifested in the sort of beauty that Lautréamont described as the 'fortuitous encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table', Such anticipation of the the Surrealsists' collages shows Bacon's lack of interest in uniting two apparently irreconcilable realities on a plane where they seem not to belong, in the manner of Max Ernst... Accident's territory is essentially in the palpable signs of the artist's work process; it manifests itself in the traces and marks of the paint-saturated brush on the canvas. According to Gilles Deleuze, these 'marks are, these traits, are irrational, involuntary, accidental, free, random. They are nonrepresentative, nonillustrative, nonnarrative. They are no longer either significant or signifiers: They are a-signifying traits. [...] These almost blind manual marks attest to the intrusion of another world into the visual world of figuration. [...] They mark out possibilities of fact, but do not yet constitute a fact (the pictorial fact).' ... Accident, as something taken out of the artist's hands, may be incompatible with the idea of the 'act of free creation' - if so, this contradiction raises the question of how art is possible at all and what is evident in this enigmatic quality. Following Paul Valéry and Theodor W. Adorno, the 'meaninglessness' that accident brings into any work can be said to replicate in a certain way the meaninglessness of the era. It is in protest against this that accident is given such a function... In any event, Bacon endeavours to take accident as a departure point, to accept what has arisen spontaneously as the initiation, yet then to modify, to transform, to control it and finally to ascribe some function and hence some of the apparently meaningless, be it a sense of the resistant, the unassimilable, the disconcerting or the grotesque...The element of chance that Bacon invokes obviously has nothing to do with automatism or spontaneity; in his terminology the accidental is bound to the force of instinct, which plays a central role in his thinking."
Armin Zweite, Accident, Instinct and Inspiration, Affect and the Unconscious; The Violence of the Real, Thames & Hudson, 2006.
"Sheer omnipresence of paint is what impresses most as one enters this highly fraught space. Coloured marks - accidental splats, brush wipes, trial runs of one hue against another - rainbow or cascade over the walls, turning them into giant palettes. Another pattern of chance blobs and trickles extends in an intricately coloured net over the book-and photo-strewn floor. Sticky masses of half-spent tubes, thickest of coagulated brushes rear up on all sides, amid old plates and pans used to mix colour, rollers, rags, tins, and jars of every description. An old passport or a single, shinning shoe occasionally heaves into sight like a drowning man, and is lost...But the intense confusion also has something hilarious, even cheering, about it because it conveys utter disrespect for the ordinary rules of living and breathes a rare sense of freedom. Then what catches the eye is the chaos carpeting the studio floor, which can be read as a kind of sourcebook for Baconian imagery."
Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: The Studio as a Symbol, Connoisseur, September, 1984.
"The trap, the other night, is the first night which we can penetrate, which we can enter - granted, with anguish, and yet here anguish secludes us and insecurity becomes a shelter...What the beast senses in the distance - that monstrous thing which eternally approaches it and works eternally as coming closer - is itself.. And if the beast could ever come into this thing's presence, what it would encounter would be its own absence: itself, but itself become other, which it would not recognise, which it would not meet...Midnight never falls at midnight. Midnight falls when the dice are cast, but they cannot be cast till Midnight. Therefore one must turn away from the first night....It becomes the shadow which always follows you and always precedes you."
Maurice Blanchot, Night as Trap; Inspiration; University of Nebraska Press, 1982.
“Ek-sistence…does not coincide with existentia in either form or content. In terms of content ek-sistence means standing out into the truth of Being … As ek-sisting, man sustains Da-sein in that he takes the Da, the clearing of Being, into 'care.' But Da-sein itself occurs essentially as 'thrown.' It unfolds essentially in the throw of Being as the fateful sending...Man is rather ‘thrown’ from Being itself into the truth of Being, so that ek-sisting in this fashion he might guard the truth of Being, in order that beings might appear in the light of Being as the beings they are."
Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, 1947.
"Hence we have avoided the wiles of pure chance, which might indeed have produced logical sequences; for we must not, one mathematician [René Thom] tells us, 'underestimate the power of chance to engender monsters'; the monster, in this case, would have been, emerging from a certain order of the figures, a 'philosophy of love' where we must look for no more than its affirmation."
Roland Barthes, Lover's Discourse: Fragments, Editions de Seuil, Paris 1977.
"The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure; it’s a little like making love, the physical act of love. It can be as violent as fucking, like an orgasm or an ejaculation. The result is often disappointing, but the process is highly exciting."
Francis Bacon, The Last Interview - with Francis Giacobetti; The Art Newspaper, June 2003.
"Both the artist and the suicide plan something that eludes all plans, and if they do have a path, they have no goal; they do not know what they are doing. They devote themselves to this misunderstanding as if blind...The work wants, so to speak, to install itself, to dwell in this negligence. A call from there reaches it. this is where, in spite of itself, it is drawn, by something that puts it absolutely to the test. It is attracted by an ordeal in which everything is risked, by an essential risk where being is at stake, where nothingness slips away, where, that is, the right, the power to die is gambled."
Maurice Blanchot, Art, Suicide; The Work and Death's Space; University of Nebraska Press, 1982.
"What I call accident...suddenly appears out of the blue. In the end, painting is the result of the interaction of those accidents and the will of the artist, if you prefer, the interaction of the unconscious and the conscious...But that's not at all what it's like when you're at the canvas. There you don't know where you are or where you're going or, above all, what's going to happen. You're in a fog...I have a curious type of self-discipline which is probably an asset, because painting doesn't just consist of throwing paint at the canvas. I don't have a master plan when I begin a canvas...I always think that I won't know how to do it."
Francis Bacon, In conversation with Michel Archimbaud, Phaidon, 1993.
"I embrace the abject, abjecting myself, but I do not control or conquer it. I rewrite the rules – precisely by abhoring them, ignoring them, paying them no heed, being unable to abide by them, seeing their impossibility. I demolish the rules in order to reform reality, to re-structure the world. I erase all the supporting structures in order to have to start again from the beginning, building up again from the start, piece by weary piece. And in the process, I punish myself – and any others who happen to get in the way might be casualties of my own self-denigration. Falling by the wayside, they are included, sometimes and in some respects by my own harsh castigation that observes no boundaries, cannot observe the usual distinctions of self/other, peace/violence, for abjection is in the business precisely of obliterating the meaning and function and safety of these categories."
Tina Chanter, Abjection, Death and Difficult Reasoning: The Impossibility of Naming Chora in Kristeva and Derrida; 2000.
"Something stronger than my conscious will made it happen. I think some higher power got good and fed-up with my activity and decided to put an end to it. I don't really think there were any coincidences. The way it ended and whether the close calls were warning to me or what, I don't know. If they were, I sure didn't heed them… If I hadn't been caught or lost my job, I'd still be doing it, I'm quite sure of that. I went on doing it and doing it and doing it, in spite of my anxiety and the lack of lasting satisfaction… How arrogant and stupid of me to think that I could do something like this and just go about my life normally as if nothing ever happened. They say you reap what you sow, well, it's true, you do, eventually … I've always wondered, from the time that I committed that first horrid mistake, sin, with Hicks, whether this was sort of predestined and there was no way I could have changed it. I wonder just how much predestination controls a person's life and just how much control they have over themselves."
Jeffrey Dahmer, Confession, (1960-1994).
"Making plans. - To make plans and project designs brings with it many good sensations; and whoever had the strength to be nothing but a forger of plans his whole life long would be a very happy man: but he would occasionally have to take a rest from this activity by carrying out a plan - and then comes the vexation and the sobering up. Defiance and loyalty. - He clings firmly out of defiance to a cause which he has seen through - but he calls it 'loyalty'."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Maxims and Reflections; A Nietzsche Reader, Penguin Classics, 1977.
"Man is no longer doing battle with a group equal to the one which he represents, but with Nothingness. In this extreme contest, he can be compared to the bull in the bullfight. The bull in the bullfight is at times heavily absorbed in the animal's lack of concern - abandoning itself to the secret collapse of death - at times, seized with rage, it rushes forth upon the void which a phantom matador opens before it without respite. But once the void is affronted, it is nudity which the bull embraces - to the extent that it is a monster - taking this sin on lightly. Man is no longer, like an animal, the plaything of Nothingness, but Nothingness itself is his plaything - he ruins himself in it, but illuminates its darkness with his laughter, which he reaches only when intoxicated with the very void which kills him."
Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, 1936.
“This characteristic of Dasein’s Being – this ‘that it is’ – is veiled in its ‘whence’ and ‘whither’, yet disclosed in itself all the more unveiledly; we call it the ‘thrownness’ of this entity into its ‘there’; indeed, it is thrown in such a way that, as Being-in-the-world, it is the ‘there’. The expression ‘thrownness’ is meant to suggest the facticity of its being delivered over.”
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 1927; Harper & Row, New York, 1962.
"A sense of fear of the unknown moved in the heart of his weariness, a fear of symbols and portents, of the hawk-like man whose name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osier woven wing, of Thoth, the god of writers, writing with a reed upon a tablet and bearing on his narrow ibis head the cusped moon."
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916.
"MP: Are there certain images that you go back to a great deal, for example Egyptian images? You look at the same things a lot, don't you?" FB: "I look at the same things, I do think that Egyptian art is the greatest thing that has happened so far."
Michael Peppiatt & Francis Bacon; An Interview with Francis Bacon: Provoking Accidents, Prompting Chance, Art International, No. 8, Autumn 1989.
"The obelisk is without doubt the purest image of the head and of the heavens...The pyramid let the god-king enter the eternity of the sky next to the solar Ra, and in this way existence regained its unshakable plenitude in the person of the one it had recognized. The existing pyramids still bear witness to this calm triumph of an unwavering and hallucinating resolve: they are not only the most ancient and the vastest monuments man has ever constructed, but they are still, even today, the most enduring."
Georges Bataille, The Obelisk; Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
"Bacon first of all seems to be an Egyptian. This is his first stopping point. A painting by Bacon has an Egyptian look to it: the form and the ground, connected to each other by the contour, lie on a single plane of a close, haptic vision...Glory to the Egyptians. "I could never dissociate myself from the great European images of the past - and by 'European' I mean to include Egyptian, even if the geographers wouldn't agree with me."...through the centuries, there are many things that make Bacon an Egyptian: the fields, the contours, the form and the ground as two equally close sectors lying on the same plane, the extreme proximity of the Figure (presence), the system of clarity. Bacon renders to Egypt the homage of the sphinx, and declares his love for Egyptian sculpture: like Rodin, he thinks that durability, essence, or eternity are the primary characteristics of the work of art."
Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: the Logic of Sensation, Continuum, 2005.
"The sphinx as subject undoubtedly stems from the time Bacon spent in Egypt during a journey of 1950-51 to visit his mother in South Africa. He was greatly impressed by the antiquities he saw in Cairo and, some twenty years later, in expressing his admiration for Velázquez by comparing him to Cézanne, Bacon alluded to the power of Egyptian art: 'I don't think Cézanne's people are very intense, his apples are more intense than his people, his apples are some of the greatest apples ever painted. His power of invention in forming an apple has never gone into his forming of human beings, he tends to make them inanimate objects, he doesn't extend his invention into the psyche....Velázquez came to the human situation and made it grand and heroic and wasn't bombastic. He turned to a literal situation and made an image of it, both fact and image at the same time. The Pope is like Egyptian art; factual, powerfully formal and unlocks valves of sensation at all different levels'...."
Hugh M. Davies, Francis Bacon: The Papal Portraits of 1953, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 2002.
"The Osiris Ani, the Osiris the scribe Ani saith:- Homage to thee, O Bull of Amentet, Thoth the king of eternity is with me. I am the great god by the side of the divine boat, I have fought for thee, I am one of those gods, those divine chiefs, who proved the truth-speaking of Osiris before his enemies on the day of the weighing of words. I am thy kinsman Osiris. I am [one of] those gods who were the children of the goddess Nut, who hacked in pieces the enemies of Osiris, and who bound in fetters the legion of Sebau devils on his behalf. I am thy kinsman Horus, I have fought on thy behalf, I have come to thee for thy name's sake. I am Thoth who proved the truth of the words of Osiris before his enemies on the day of the weighing of words in the great House of the Prince, who dwelleth in Anu."
The Papyrus of Ani, The Chapter Of Coming Forth By Day; The Egyptian Book of the Dead, 1240 BC.
"In some curious way, although I think of Egyptian art as among the greatest realistic art, I think the way Giacommrtti brings in the influence of Egyptian art detracts from his sculpture, because, whereas in Egyptian art the style had an absolute reason, I feel when it's used in the way Giacommetti used it, it's used almost as a conceit."
Francis Bacon, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Thames & Hudson, 2000.
"On shelves and on the floor the source material quickly proliferated. Books on Egyptian art lay beside crumpled, paint-splattered photos of birds in flight, beak and talons outstretched...Never short of a paradox, Bacon insisted that he and his paintings were above all 'simple'. 'When I hear certain people talk, I always think I belong to a very ancient simplicity I'm probably the simplest person you know,' he suggested to me."
Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, Westview Press, 1996.
"The painting now known as Portrait of a dwarf (1975) is, uniquely, in a narrow upright format, the result of Bacon having eliminated two-thirds of the original canvas. Formerly, the dwarf occupied the role of what Bacon called an 'attendant'; these attendants were either voyeuristic, or paradoxically disengaged, witnesses of a horrifying spectacle, or of sexual intercourse. In Portrait of a dwarf, the homunculus stares back implacably at the viewer, returning our gaze while apparently indifferent to the upturned, writhing nude male in a glass cage to his left..The dwarf's seated, cross-legged pose recalls both Velázquez's A dwarf sitting on the floor (c. 1645) and the ancient Egyptian statue of Seneb, the chief of the palace dwarves, in the National Museum, Cairo; Bacon, who considered Egyptian art to have been mankind's highest cultural achievement, had visited Cairo in 1951 and is likely to have seen the figure."
Martin Harrison, Francis Bacon: lost and found; Apollo, March 2005.
"You once explained that the Egyptians had some idea of myth and even for Velázquez and Rembrandt there were still some religious possibilities, and today all that's been stamped out. Would you say that your art is a product of a demythological age?' [Francis Bacon]: 'Totally demythified. And you see, after all, I don't say it's a good thing, because when you think of some of the great Egyptian art - there were things that they put in the graves with the people, with the dead, and it was marvelous because it was something to, as it were, comfort them in their journey to the next world, or to comfort them in the next world. Like they even gave them food. And if they didn't, it's a very complicated thing with the Egyptians how much they knew or thought, because, after all, they didn't give them food sometimes. They just painted the food on the wall, you see. And that's a very odd thing about them. What they thought or what they really believed is another interesting thing. But then, we who believe in nothing, we make only our myths out of our existence and it's, of course, a nuisance.'..."
Hugh M. Davies in conversation with Francis Bacon; The Papal Portraits of 1953, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 2002.
"Thoth is an engendered god. He often calls himself the son of the god-king, the sun-god, Ammon-Ra. 'I am Thoth, the eldest son of Ra.' Ra (the sun) is god the creator, and he engenders through the mediation of the word....The world came out of an egg. More precisely, the living creator of the life of the world came out of an egg: the sun, then, was at first carried in an eggshell. Which explains a number of Ammon-Ra's characteristics: he is also a bird, a falcon ('I am the great falcon, hatched from the egg'). But in his capacity as origin of everything, Ammon-Ra is also the origin of the egg. He is designated sometimes as the bird-sun born from the primal egg, sometimes as the originary bird, carrier of the first egg...If we add that this egg is also a 'hidden egg,' we shall have constituted but also opened up the system of these significations..."
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, The Athlone Press, 1981.
"In practice the scrutinized sun can be identified with mental ejaculation, foam on the lips, and an epileptic crisis... In mythology, the scrutinized sun is identified with a man who slays a bull (Mithra), with a vulture that eats the liver (Prometheus): in other words, with a man who looks along with the slain bull or the eaten liver... Of course the bull himself is also an image of the sun, but only with his throat slit... One might add that the sun has also been mythologically expressed by a man slashing his own throat, as well as by an anthropomorphic being deprived of a head... In contemporary painting the search for that which most ruptures the highest elevation, and for a blinding brilliance, has a share in the elaboration or decomposition of forms, though strictly speaking this is only noticeable in the paintings of Picasso."
Georges Bataille, Rotten Sun; Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
"The golden gleam of the lighting's invisible shining cannot be grasped, because it is not itself something grasping. Rather, it is the purely appropriating event. The invisible shining of the lighting streams from the wholesome self-keeping in the self-restraining preservation of destiny...Gods and men belong in the lighting not only as lighted and viewed, but also as invisible, bringing the lighting with them and, in their own way, preserving it and handing it down in its endurance."
Martin Heidegger, Aletheia; Early Greek Thought, New York, Harper & Row, 1975.
"I hate the personality that chemmy players put on between one another, and so I like the completely impersonal thing of roulette. Also it just happens that I have been luckier at roulette than I have at chemmy... I remember when I lived once for a long time in Monte Carlo and I became very obsessed by the casino and spent whole days there... and I did sometimes have very lucky wins. I used to think that I heard the croupier calling out the winning number at roulette before the ball had fallen into the socket, and I used to go from table to table. And I remember one afternoon I went in there, and I was playing on three different tables, and I heard these echoes... I feel I want to win, but then I feel exactly the same thing in painting. I feel I want to win even if I always lose."
Francis Bacon, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Thames & Hudson, 1987.
"And so we enjoy seeing other people take risks as we sit comfortably back in our chairs and give ourselves up to the maddening exhilaration of danger, while never actually exposing ourselves to the slightest hazard likely to destroy our flesh, so enamored of lazy tranquillity...This is the very reason, I think, that murderers are so popular: a good crime is no doubt horrible, but at the same time it unconsciously satisfies everyone, and the murderer becomes a kind of sorcerer who has ritually performed the most terrifying of sacrifices."
Michel Leiris, Civilisation; Documents 4, 1929.
"I can play my destiny in a game of dice, as long as I play it as chance exterior to me and accept it as a destiny absolutely tied to me; but if the dice are there in order to change into a whim the too burdensome fatality that I am no longer able to want, it is now in my interest to play and because of the interest in the game. I become a gambler who makes the game impossible (it is no longer a game)."
Maurice Blanchot, From Dread to Language, The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, Station Hill, 1999.
"In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze puts forth that every 'game has two moments which are those of a dicethrow— the dice that is thrown and the dice that falls back'. These two moments, however, are inextricably linked — in the way that 'two hours of a single world, the two moments of a single world, midnight and midday, the hour when the dice are thrown, the hour when the dice fall back' are linked. Deleuze insists that games are not a matter of constellations of multiple outcomes that manifest over time to produce either a winning or losing result; 'On the contrary, it is a matter of a single dicethrow which, due to the number of the combination produced, comes to reproduce itself as such'. To throw the dice is to affirm the necessity of chance and thus to unhinge one's actions from the temporal restraints of causality and in doing so to instantiate an independent act— independent of anticipated results, independent of time and the concept of consequence, disengaged from the always churning machine of becoming. It is to release at random, to in fact, celebrate randomness by consciously creating it, and in thereby doing, opening up the possibility for perceiving other non-contingent singular actions to take place within the confines of the respective rules at hand."
H. Marcelle Crickenberger, The Arcades Project Project or The Rhetoric of Hypertext; University of South Carolina, 2005.
"Chance and instinct are two key components of Francis Bacon's terminology to which he constantly returned... It was Kant who first emphasised as Bacon maintains here, that instinct was without self-insight, stating that instinct is 'the inner compulsion of the faculty of desire to take this object into possession, before one is acquainted with it'. Yet the fact remains that the distinction between inspiration and instinct cannot always be clearly drawn, especially as Bacon occasionally felt himself to be a medium for more more powerful forces. Hence, Nietzsche's definition of inspiration can certainly be brought to bear with reference to Bacon, if '...suddenly, with indescribable certainty and subtlety, something becomes visible, audible, something that shakes one to the last depths and throws one down [...] One hears, one does not seek; one accepts, one does not ask who gives; like lightening, a thought flashes up, with necessity, without hesitation regarding its form - I never had any choice [...] Everything happens involuntarily in the highest degree [...] the involuntariness of image and metaphor is strangest of all; one on longer has any notion of what is an image or a metaphor; everything offers itself as the nearest, most obvious, simplest expression.' [Ecce Homo] The compulsion (in Kant's terms) to grasp something, the form of which is as yet unknown (instinct) is very much akin to what Nietzsche describes so energetically; all that is missing from Bacon's instinctive action is the impulse of revelation which is ultimately so central to Nietzsche's view. "
Armin Zweite, Accident, Instinct and Inspiration, Affect and the Unconscious; The Violence of the Real, Thames & Hudson, 2006.
"Nietzsche exalts the dice throw of Chance. It is the Overman, the Child, who can affirm this Chance, this intricate enigma of Life, beyond God and gods – towards that which we all share. This Child is born through the birth traumas of a Revaluation of All Values. Amidst the metamorphoses of the Camel into the Lion, and the Lion into the Child, there is myriad unclarity and indistinctness. The camel is cast aside as the ring-bearer of tradition, of the old law tablets. The Lion, amidst the revaluation, destroys, but is not yet aware of his own inadvertent creations, he will never be aware. It is the Child who is born into the topos which is the last gift of the Lion. The Child picks up the blind creations of the Lion and meets these as found objects, beings of wonder, of innocence. The Child affirms new values in innocence, finally free of the “against” of the Lion. Zarathustra is inseminated by Eternity, by the Overwoman - he abides, struggles, endures with this goddess of childbirth, Aleqea, his midwife, in his final act of self-overcoming, giving birth to his Children. In an alchemical sense, Zarathustra, through his affirmation, gives birth to himself. Eternity rends this dread curtain, inaugurates this marriage of light and darkness. Zarathustra mates with Eternity. She shoots lightning out from a dark cloud - flying off this edge of that precipice, off that cliff of the mountain. Zarathustra receives this lightning, he is inseminated by it as a tree on the mountainside. She disseminates her truth into him, and, with chaos in his heart, he gives birth to dancing stars. Zarathustra gives birth to himself. Eternity – Overwoman - is the Semen for this new creation. She flashes herself – her lightning casts this existence into relief – beckons this pregnancy and childbirth of Zarathustra. Children grow and dance amidst this All - laughter, sorrow, anguish, joy, and more laughter… Zarathustra plays with his Children…"
Dr. James Luchte, Zarathustra’s Nietzsche: From Guilt to Innocence; Department of Philosophy, University of Wales.
"Hegel was a Head and only a Head as his Body of Knowledge was Severed by his System as an auto-beheading of bodily being Beginning as an Action without Thinking as a Thought activated above Hegel's Head. Hegel hit the Nail on the Head of Philosophy as an angoisse Action above and ahead of Thinking. For Hegel Thought is always already an Action ahead of our Thinking about a Thought. The alien of action is always already without a conscience - without a conception. To Think Something is always already to Throw Something ahead albeit The Nothing at all. For the alien Abjecting is always already afar and ahead of Thinking. Action abjected is ahead of the Head of Thought decapitated by the Terrorism of Thinking where an abjected Action has no Ideological Aim or Political Argument or Philosophical Proposition but Seeks to Sever Sein's Security. Hegel heads a Header to Thinking through Throwing Thought away as an angoisse Action without Thinking the Thought through...Throwing throttles Thought from Thinking about Throwing Thought forth from Thinking about the Thought thrown...Throwing beheads Thinking ahead. To Think is to Abject for Thinking is an Abjecting."
Alex Alien, Bacon & Jünger: Storm & Steel Sensationism; Being & Alien, 2006.
"To understand detachment one must be detached. In Heidegger, to understand the turn, one must oneself turn about. to understand authentic temporality, one must exist authentically. To understand the directionality, Sinn, of being, one must become besinnlich, meditative. To understand the fourfold's play without why, one must live without why. To understand releasement, one must be released. To understand the primordial leap (Ur-sprung) which is the originary, one must take a leap...Here is how Heidegger explains these lines: we must 'leap away from grounds' (vom Grund abspringen), 'let go' (loslassen) of them. This is the practical imperative for understanding the other releasement which is non-human and through which presencing tenders its economies. Through our releasement and on its condition alone, we are 'let into' (eingelassen) that other releasement - both identical to and different from ours - which is the event of presencing."
Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principals to Anarchy, Indiana University Press, 1987.
"Science wants wants to know nothing of the nothing. But even so it is certain that when science tries to express its proper essence it calls upon the nothing for help....Science would like to dismiss the nothing with a lordly wave of the hand....We assert that the nothing is more original than the 'not' and negation...Now the nothing is what we are seeking...Whatever we may make of it, we do not know the nothing....Anxiety is no kind of grasping of the nothing. All the same, the nothing reveals itself in and through anxiety...Da-sein means: being held out into the nothing. Without the original revelation of the nothing, no selfhood, no freedom."
Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics?, 1929.
"It was as if a gigantic flash of lightning was rending a darkness-clothed sky...in almost painful brightness the things of the world lay revealed...it was not a matter of a system, but of existence...It had me speechless...I felt as though for a moment I had gazed at the foundations of the world."
Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, on attending Martin Hidegger's What is Metaphysics? lecture, 1929.
"Bacon's strategy is abandonment: he enters the eye of the hurricane, abandons himself (his eyes) to the cliché, conjures them, accumulates them, multiplies them; he gives himself to the prepictorial, and, most importantly, gives himself to the will of losing the will...Bacon's struggle is with the eye itself, that the combat concerns the blinding of eyes - as so many positions of seeing/looking within the picture space...Is it then that the eye will be affected (attacked) on the spectator's side - outside the picture as well? The body, and (in the portraits) the head, is subject to extraordinary forces from the outside; forces of isolation and deformation take possession of it and become visible each time the head jolts the face or the body the organism. With dissipation, with coupling waves of spasm travel and register on the body's surface: the Figure (thus isolated/caged) stands in the field of forces, in the middle of an invisible hurricane which deforms it and which makes it visible...The paradox: the painting [Francis Bacon's Innocent X] renders the visible, renders the invisible visible, but there is no one (no eye/I) to see (it)...At the end of Bacon's struggle, with the hand victorious, free to leave its mark, the act of painting becomes manual ('travail manuel') - blind....the 'free mark' made in the interior of the image by the (blind) hand does not express anything concerning the visual image; it concerns only the hand of the painter. It is accidental, irrational, involuntary, nonrepresentative, nonillustrative, nonnarrative. The marks of the hand are the non-signifying - asignifying - traits of sensation, the product of chance or action without probability. Rather than a probability 'conceived' or 'seen,' the mark is chance manipulated (literally, by the hand); improbable, unseen/unforseen - it is thus free precisely from supervision by the eye, from the eye's governance of vision...Would it not be just the 'point of view of the hand' to 'see' and 'conceive' vision as an instrument of the mind?"
Zsuzsa Baross, Francis Bacon, the Philosopher's Painter, and the Logic of Sensation; Panorama; Continuum, London 2002.
"Bacon's contrived accidents - squeezing paint into his hand and throwing it at the canvas, the use of sponges, the rubbing in of studio dust and so on - allow him to pursue an alternative practice of painting to that of representation. They permit the possibility not so much of the transformation of his figures, but of their deformation... It is the image in all its materiality that throws out this darkness, that marks itself by darkness...What oozes out is the lamella, the organ of the drive...I am saying that it is the lamella that is the outcome of Bacon's efforts to avoid narrative and representation and to act directly on the nervous system. Bacon's 'matter of fact' turns out to be the lamella. And I mean you to take this quite literally....What is at stake is not violence but paint."
Parveen Adams, The violence of paint; The Emptiness of the Image, Routledge, 1996.
"For Thoth Throwing wins its Truth only when - in diced dismemberment - it finds itself - as time-trapped - beheading-being being-there. Da-sein means: being thrown out into the Nothing - Throwing itself out into the Nothing. Da-sein throws Art ahead. Art throws open an open space - as an abjected-ather. Throwing is Showing the unseen unconcealment. Throwing-the-Nothing is Throwing-for-Nothing - for the Nothing is Thrown - the Nothing is Shown - the Nothing comes from the Nothing - Thrown by the Nothing - from the Nothing - to the Nothing - giving the gift - of the Nothing."
Alex Alien, Being & Alien, 2006
"To be sure, the theme of play is there. However, if one understands the fort/da beyond what it seems Freud intends to say, then one may exceed the limits of the game toward the play of the world where the fort/da is no longer simply the relation of subject to object. It is, instead, that which has absolute command over all experience in general...Freud, on the other hand, always ends up finding his interpretations insufficient. One by one, he throws them away and moves on to another. He always has to take one more step: he moves onto another which he also throws away until finally he retains no single interpretation. He himself is doing fort/da with his interpretations and it never stops."
Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other, University of Nebraska Press, 1985.
"Thoth is the god of games of chance...Thoth is a gambler and the god of rogues making their living off the tricks of the trade in pool halls and floating crap games... As supplement for Ra-Ammon, Thoth bears the message of the creator: in this way, Thoth comes to be the god of the moon who replaces the sun when it is hidden and which bears the message of its shinning. The supplemental nature of Thoth puts him in the company of much scheming and trickery going on in the world...He is the patron god of sons who kill their fathers, brothers who gang up to kill their fathers, and brothers who kill their brothers..."
Michael Roth, The Poetics of Resistance, Northwestern University Press, 1996.
"Bacon's real passion, however, was gambling...He had already enjoyed the mystique of roulette in a variety of casinos, moving expertly from table to table in a kind of trance, placing his jetons very deliberately on an intuitive sequence of numbers and rarely hedging his bets...He was excited by the terrible highs and lows that gambling, like painting, procured. 'You can't understand the tremendous draw gambling has unless you've been in that kind of position where you terribly needed money and you manage to get it by gambling,' he told me once, going on to give a memorable vignette of his experiences in Monte Carlo: 'I had a really marvellous win at one point. I was playing on three different tables and I kept thinking I could hear the numbers called out before they come up - as if the croupiers were actually calling them out...' Bacon loved extremes: to paint by day and gamble by night kept him in the state of nervous tension that enabled him constantly to push back the boundaries. Only by living and working on the edge, he believed, could he go far enough to innovate; or as he himself put it, 'you have to go too fat to go far enough - only then can you hope to break the mould and make something new.' ... Deliberately and persistently breaking the rules in life as in art, Bacon also held regular gambling sessions in the studio."
Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, Yale University Press, 2006.
"The Egyptian word for obelisk, tehén, is philosophically connected with the word for subeam...The close connection between obelisk and the sun, implied by the Egyptian word , tehén, is reflected in the common practice of erecting obelisks to honour the sun god, Ra. The obelisk can, in fact, be understood as the sign of solar religion...Ra's nocturnal representative is Thoth, who, during the reign of the sun king Osiris, 'initiated men into arts and letters and created hieroglyphic writing' [Derrida, Dissemination]...It is important to note that Thoth appears as 'the bull among the stars.' sun (Ra) and bull (Thoth) reemerge in the religious mythology of the West...Sun, scaffold, sacrifice, cut. cleavage, coup; erection, resurrection, insurrection; cock and bull; capitol, capital, capitalsim, capitalization; decapitation, blindness, castration; Icarus. The obelisk, it seems, marks the site of the scaffold that is the altar of sacrifice where reason loses its head in a revolution from which we are still spinning - and weaving."
Mark C. Taylor, Ecstasy: Georges Bataille: Pineal Eye of the Obelisk; Altarity, University of Chicago Press, 1987.
"Thoth, the 'nocturnal representative of Ra, the bull among the stars,' turns toward the west. He is the god of the moon, either as identified with it or its protector. Thoth is never present. Nowhere does he appear in person. Not being-there can properly be his own... Sly, slippery, and masked, and intriguer and a card, like Hermes, he is neither king nor jack, but rather a sort of joker, a floating signifier, a wild card, one who puts play into play...It is to him that we owe the games of dice and draughts...Thoth also frequently participates in plots, perfidious intrigues, conspiracies to usurp the throne."
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, The Athlone Press, 1981.
"The myth of Thoth as told by Socrates in Phaedrus is another important deconstructive tool for Derrida's work. Thoth is the god of writing in Egyptian mythology and like the term pharmakon, Thoth and all of the implications that come with him as a representative of writing make him a complicated figure, more so than Plato is content to disclose. Basically, Plato tries to make Thoth, and thus writing out to be some kind alien foe, a kind of arch-enemy to Logos and dialectics. As with the pharmakon, in the Phaedrus, Plato tries to limit and solidify the meaning and definition of Thoth in support of his argument, while in Plato's Pharmacy Derrida's argument principally consists of breaking open these imposed limitations to the force of play... Like Thoth, the term pharmakon is slippery when wet, and Derrida is happily spilling water all over it, and all of Plato's Phaedrus (Pharmacy). Spilling water on Plato's text reveals the contradictions he is to blame for as well as those which, if we don't blame language itself, if we don't blame play, then no one is truly to blame for. Largely by using the myth of Thoth, Plato attempts to explain how writing is bad. By following ambiguity of the pharmakon, Derrida shows how Plato's explanation is itself bad, that is, full of self-defeating complications, a victim of play. Plato is angry at Thoth, Derrida is angry at Plato. This is because Thoth, being the pernicious (parricidal) joker that he is, tried to sell the pharmakon (writing) to the king in the myth only as a remedy. But noticing the latent ambiguity that Thoth tries to conceal, Plato then becomes suspicious of writing as both a poison and a remedy, and consequently goes even beyond his concern with the good/bad opposition to create the even more rash inside/outside distinction, at which Derrida cringes. "
Seth Warren, Play and Plato's Allergies or Perforating the Slash; Contemporary Critical Theory, February 24, 1997.
"As Thoth is the subversive repetition of Ra, the left eye is that of the right eye. However, this repetition is not to be understood in the sense of the recollection of Hegel’s re-membering but in the sense of Nietzsche's eternal re-turning. Hegelian re-membering is grounded in a solid archetypal model or paradigm (i.e., the Absolute Spirit) which is untouched by the effects of repetition and which realizes and objectifies itself in its repetition. On the other hand, Nietzschean mode of repetition posits a world based on difference and dissemination. Each thing is unique, intrinsically different from every other thing. Similarity arises against the background of disparity. It is not, as Hegelian repetition is, a world of copies, but that of simulacra or phantasms. In the Great Seal, the Nietzschean repetition of the right eye by the left eye produces something that is neither the left eye nor the right eye: what it produces is something in between both eyes. Or, we may say this something in between is the pineal eye that fascinates Bataille so much. The pineal eye is not an organ but a fantasy or a myth. The fantasy is, in a certain manner, the discrete and essential component of all scatology to the extent that it escapes the economy of the totalizing and tantalizing idea."
Chun-san Wang, The Eye and the Pyramid; Chung Hsing Journal of Humanities; 33, 2003, 6.
"The Universe started with nothing but the Water Chaos. It was called Nun. When the water subsided, the first land to appear was the Ben Ben stone. On it stood the Sun God Atum, who created himself. In some legends, Atum was replaced with Ra, who later merged with Amun to Amun Ra. Atum performed auto fellatio and spat out Shu (the air) and Tephnut (the moisture). When Atum masturbated, the first word he exclaimed was deified into the God Hu, the Divine Utterance. Atum then drew blood from his penis and created the Goddess Sia. Sia was the personification of the Divine Knowledge/Omniscience of the Gods. Hu was the personification of the Divine Utterance, the Voice of the Gods. Heka, the personification of the Divine Power, joined them in a divine Triad. After Geb and Nut were born, mankind was created from the tears of Atum."
Günther Eichhorn, Creation of the University; Ancient Egyptian Mythology.
"Nietzsche’s dice-throw is the affirmation of the multiplicity of chance all at once. It is the unity affirmed of multiplicity. It is being which is affirmed of becoming. The eternal return is real difference and the becoming of that difference. It eliminates that which is return of the same. For Nietzsche’s genealogy, (N&P85-6) “The will to power is plastic, inseparable from each case in which it is determined; just as the eternal return is being, but being which is affirmed of becoming, the will to power is unitary, but unity which is affirmed of multiplicity. The monism of the will to power is inseparable from the pluralist typology.”
Beth Metcalf, Nietzsche’s Univocity, July 2, 2005.
"A characteristic element in Bacon's use of chance in his painting is a white blotch, as found, for example, in Study for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1967, Study of George Dyer in a Mirror, 1968 and Study for bullfight No.2, 1969. In these pictures Bacon throws thick white paint at the canvas: at the face of the figure, at the bull, at the centre of the painting. The resulting white blotch looks as though the undiluted paint had been accidentally added to the painting by hand... Sometimes it remains where it landed; sometimes it is drawn with the brush to adjacent points in the picture. But first Bacon simply adds the white blotch, whether or not it fits into the painting... In Bacon's explanation of the meaning of the white spots and slashes that he added to the canvas so abruptly and almost thoughtlessly, he speaks of 'pure accident,' of 'instinct,' and that the picture almost paints itself. He says that the subconscious is finding expression in his his work."
Barbara Steffen, Chance and the Tradition of Art in Francis Bacon's Work, Francis Bacon & the Tradition of Art, Skira, 2003.
"Belcher was the subject of such portraits as Three Studies of Muriel Belcher (1966) and Sphinx - Portrait of Muriel Belcher (1979), a strangely plausible reincarnation. Ancient Egyptian art was driven by the impulse to immortalize the dead, and Bacon acknowledges this quality by choosing its defining monument to mark the passing of a friend....The studio contained an impressive number of books and book leaves on Egyptian art and civilization. Bacon believed that the achievement of Egyptian sculpture has scarcely been surpassed and even went so far as to say, 'I think perhaps the greatest images man has made so far have been in sculpture. I'm thinking of some of the great Egyptian sculpture, of course, and Greek sculptures too.'...It is not known when Bacon's passion for Egyptian are began. He made a trip to Cairo in the spring of 1951, when he viewed the Great Sphinx, on which he based a number of paintings in 1953 and 1954. The impact of Egyptian and Greek sculpture on Bacon's work can be detected in both the emphatic poses of his figures and the truncated limbs, which frequently resemble the fragments of ancient sculpture."
Margarita Cappock, Francis Bacon's Studio, Merrell London New York, 2005.
"Why were the Egyptians able not only apparently to make appearance but leave great images as well?...Like in my own life, I hope to be grandly instinctive. I don't think you capture the grandeur. The grandeur of form is a really instinctive thing, after all. What have I looked at all my life? I've looked at Egyptian things...and I exist in that way as a thing. Thing. Of course, I want to be the most brilliant thing that I can be."
Francis Bacon in conversation with Hugh M. Davies; The Papal Portraits of 1953, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 2002.
"Art then is a becoming and happening of truth...Truth is never gathered from things at hand, never from the ordinary. Rather, the opening up of the open region, and the clearing of beings, happens only when the openness that makes its advent in throwness is projected."
Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, 1935.
"A painter, if he is going to attempt to record life, has to do it in a much more intense and curtailed way. It has to have the intensity of....you can call it sophisticated simplicity...the kind Egyptian sculpture has, which simplifies into reality. You have to abbreviate into intensity...I think that perhaps the greatest images that man has so far made have been in sculpture. I'm thinking of some of the great Egyptian sculpture..."
Francis Bacon, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Thames & Hudson, 1987.
"Praise to thee, O Ra, when thou risest. Shine thou upon my face. Let me arise with thee into the heavens, and travel with thee in the boat wherein thou sailest on the clouds."
Osiris, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, circa 1200 BC.
"Air - catches - nothing. And this nothing? The most elementary condition of his existence, or his existance. Ek-sisting from the space of becoming - there."
Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, University of Texas Press, 1999.
"Projecting is the release of a throw by which unconcealedness submits and infuses itself into what is as such."
Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, 1935.
"...a fixed staring at something that is purely present-at-hand..."
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 1927.
"...Does Time itself manifest itself as the Shining of Being?..."
Alex Alien, Being & Alien, 2006.
"The hidden attunement is better than the open."
Heraclitus of Ephesus, 540 BC - 480 BC.
The Eye of Amenhotep III 1400-1350 B.C.
Thrown
Thoth is Initiated as Ammon-Ra's - Son and Amun as Alien always already
hides Hidden away and afar and ahead of Thoth as Alien. Amun - as
an abimage arises and appears through thrown Thoth. After Tossing Himself Off and Slurping up His Own Semen and
Spitting it Out Amun spat Thoth Out into the World - onto the World -
throwing Thoth forth - as an Ereignis Ejaculation. Tossing-Off His Tower in His
own Hand Amun after then Taught Thoth how to Toss-Off and Throw-Forth-Thoth:
for to Toss is also to Throw for Thoth - for Amun also taught Thoth - through
Tossing-Off His Towering-Inferno Over His Own Head - then How to Activate
Autofellatio - through Throwing His Legs over His Head - Heels-over-Head -
Head-over-Helmet - Drooling Down on His Helmet - Coming to a Head -
Coming over Head - Coming Off - Of - An Art Alien. Amun also often Comes off in
His own Eyes blinding Himself to Being among beings. For Throwing is - Throwing
Blind - as Throwing about Nothing - as thought is Thinking
about Something. Thoth is the Throwist - as a Stylist - cutting
through concepts and castrates categories and all other cages. Throws for Thoth
are Throes as Throwing is Styling is a Flying is a Reeling and Retrieving of
the Real. What is Thrown is Thoth - is Truth as the Non-Identity of the
Thing Thrown - as the Truth Thrown for Throwing is never Identical.
Hidden Amun hands Thoth the Handen. Thoth is Handed because Thoth is Blinded by
the Semen Strike of Ra's rays. The Hand is the Eye that sees Blind
handed over to the blinded Eye of the Ather - as the Eye of the
Hand - as - Amun Hides in Thoth's Hand - that Hides the Eye of the Ather
- that Throws up the Head of the Alien.
If Amun is Alien then Thoth is Bacon and both have No Identity and No Face - and Hide in Heads: - Hid in Hawk - Inside in Ibis: - and also Hide in Hands and Fit in Feet. If Amun as Alien is - the Hidden One - then Thoth as Bacon is - the Handed One. Amun - the Hidden - is hidden in the handen of Thoth: Amun always hides in the hand of Thoth - the Hidden Amun hands-the-hide to Thoth to throw the unhidden thrown out of hiddeness - for throwing is the unhiding and the untruthing of Truth - as a Truthing of Arting - Art then is the throwing and unhiding and becoming of Truth as Art. This throwing - as the joining of the out of joint of truth and art as truth-as-art - is the shining in itself - throwing out and showing off its shining - as a sensationing of being becoming being-art. Amun is the hiding away of Art which waits whiling awhile away Art awaiting waiting when will Thoth throw thought out of orbit death dealing dasein dice.
Hand of Thoth-Bacon The Handed OneKhnum
Bacon being Thoth and Alien being Amun are both essentially Egyptian Artists and are Egyptianist Sensationists and Thus have Nothing to Say only Something to Show and being akin to ancient Egyptian Art do not invite interpretation but call for contemplation as a castration of consciousness and a sensationing of our subconsciousness: Bacons images as Peppiatt correctly points out: "resist interpretation" contrary to Harrison's claim that they: "insist on it." Thoth-Bacon's images do not 'insist' on 'interpretation' but rather refuse interpretation rather resist interpretation meandering without meaning for Thoth-Bacon has 'nothing to say' only something-to-show something-to-sensation and ancient Egyptian Art does not 'invite interpretation' but instead calls forth for calm-concealing-contemplation while-with-waiting on our-opening-out of our subconscious-sea-sensationing. Essentialist Egyptianist Artists are: Alien, Archipenko, Bacon, Brancusi, Giacometti, Modigliani and Jawlensky.
Egyptian Art being Pure Being has nothing-to-say so remains silent only wanting-to-shine ahead to protect the dead. The golden gleam of Egyptian Art’s invisible silent shining blinds our sight like the sun so we stand dazzled and dazed blinded and bewildered before Being which is Art. Egyptian Art shimmers and shudders hovers and hoovers weaving with vacillating vibrations between life and death becoming being-dead as the after-life. Egyptian Art is the Throw of Being - Egyptian Art is the Flux of Being – Egyptian Art is the Vibration of Being - Egyptian Art is the Sensation of Being - blown between the air of being-alive and the dust of being-dead becoming the living-deading of the afterlife.
Khaki Khnum Self-Portrait A.V.E 18 June 2009
Alien-Amun and Bacon-Thoth do not Activate Art from the Head but from the Helmut and the Hand. Alien-Amun like Bacon-Thoth is Hidden by His Huge Hand and His Hard Helmet which Shines ahead of His Head through Its Wetness and abjects its Semeness through its Artness. As for Alien - as for Bacon - the Hand and the Penis shooting Semen are the Essential Tools for foam froth forming an auto-activated Art Alien: and not the Head: for Thoth-Bacon the Canvas is the Shrine of Divine Masturbation where the Hand throws the Semen of Being thrown out-of-the-world. Bacon as Thoth is the God of Throwing the Games of Chance. Bacon's Thoth throwing forth is a fort-da recovering and retrieving and revealing of dasein as deathsein as the Supplement of Semening. Bacon-Thoth throws the 'dice of death' as a death-dealing delivering desemening deathsein-da. Dasein-Dice means: being thrown out-into-nothing becoming being-death: Bacon-Thoth throw dice dasein death-throes as death-throws throwing the dice of death for the being time for the time being becoming-death: being-dead as the living-dead as the un-dead as being-the-no-thing as the dice does not lie so the dead do not die - the dice lay the dead lie - being-there - being thrown over-there being thrown over-ather aborted ahead afterdeath and alleviated as an afterlife being over-thrown out-of-orbit out-into-the-nothing of the night of the naught.
Portrait of M.V.E as Ra January 2008 Alex Alien
Thrown Thoth-Bacon Paints in the Noname of Ammon-Ra-Alien. Bacon-Thoth play the Plurality of Painting by Chance thrown Through wet wind with which Ammon-Ra Enters the Alien Orbit out of the World. Amun activates Paint thrown by Thoth in Order to Appear and Disappear back into being Alien. Thoth's Thrown Paint Passage is a Substitute and a Supplement to Aumn-Ra's radiating Semening Desemenation. Thoth Presents and Presence Amun's Absence through thrown Thothness. Thus Thoth-Bacon is a substitute for Ammon-Ra-Alien supplementing Alien and supplanting Alien-in-Absence. Thus the Thrown Paint of Thoth Displaces Amun's Desemenationing. Then Thoth Becomes Ather as Amun's Ather - Amun's Alien - as imitating images initiating abimages abjecting Alien ahead as a Desemenation Dissemination. Thus thrown Thoth traces Amun's abjected Semening Sensations and Symbols and Signs slipping and slurping ahead presencing-absencing tracing-the-trace of the nothing of the nothing. For Thoth - as for Amun - the thrown thrust Trace tears away at Representation rotting Representation retarding Representation revealing Representation redundant reeling in the real revealing the Real Thing: the Reel Thing - the Thrown Thing: throwing fort-da-dasein-dice nailing-the-nothing: Das Ding Das Death Das Dice Doing Death Doing Dice - throwing dice throwing death - as a throwing time - as a doing death. Dice Sein means: Being thrown out into the Nothing where death-throes leave Nothing to Chance. Throwing Leaves Nothing to Chance: Throwing Leaves The Nothing to Chance: Throwing is The Nothing of Chance. For Bacon-Thoth: to Throw is to Throw Time: the Time of Throwing: the Throwing of Time. When is the Time of Throwing? The Throwing of Time? The Time of Throwing as the Throwing of Times an Ereignis Eventing gives the gift of time to being so to throw is to throw being as time as giving time to being playing for time for the time being as an appropriative play projecting accidental appearances as an Answering and an Athering Throwing the Dice of Difference: throwing is the being of time being thrown. What is Thrown by Hand is presence-at-hand. What is Thrown at Hand by Hand out-of-hand is the Divine Nothingness of the Abject Sublime - for throwing forth out-of-hand lets-being-be by not being man-i-pulated by not being man-u-factured but by being thrown-out-of-hand where the air actually articulates attunes and attains ahead an abimage arrival. What Thoth Throws through the abundant and ambivalent air is the Divine Nothingness of the Abject Sublime.
Throwing Thoth
Where was Throwing thrown forth from? What is the Origin of Throwing? Thoth. Where was the Origin of Throwing? Egypt. For Thoth 'thrownness' - as a 'thereness' thrown 'over thereness' of the 'life' and the 'death' of the dice - breaks the bank of being by becoming bankrupt as a thrown 'theftness' of a 'no-longer-thereness' of 'life' lost leaked away as a death-dasein-dice delivered into the thrust-thirst of the naught at the nothing of the night yet during the day Thoth-Bacon throws wonderful wounding-one-liner 'throw-a-way' phrases throwing-the-dice about 'life' and 'death': "there it is" or "here's to you" or "that's how it is" or "that's all there is" or "the brutality of fact" or "the beautiful wound" or "what's called art" or "what's called friendship" are as at the thrown eggo essential sensation state of Dasein’s Being and Bacon-Thoth's manic mood of "exhilarated despair" of "how one is". Bacon-Thoth becomes thrown through into stark states of oily anxiety and angst (about "nothing" because anxiety has no object only abject) which would serve sensations of oozed voluptuous violence, wonderful wounds, spurting sperm. For Heidegger-Anaximander and Bacon-Thoth atta-anxiety so sets us free opening up a freedom as "throwness": Bacon-Thoth's other 'throwness' is His Hand that throws the being of paint as paint as the being of becoming: for Bacon-Thoth the being of paint - by being thrown - becomes the becoming of prised paint becoming shape-shifted into initiated raw radical abjected atherness. The Thoth throw soul sole strategy of the Throwing through the body - arm - hand - penis - paint by Bacon-Thoth thrown fort-daing-dasein becomes for Heidegger the 'passageway' serving severing thrown through serving a atta raw radical 'displacement' and 'defamiliarization' and 'unconcealment' of oozed out sealed stuffs encapsulating 'estrangement effect'.
Throwing Thoth: Francis Bacon by Francis Giacobetti
Thoth-Bacon's brooding boiling body becomes the thrown opening ooze filter flow froth fuelling being bringing born becoming. Bacon-Thoth throws fort-da-dasein dice as a revealing rehearsal and register and repetition of death and the dead as the Living Dead throwing and transforming written-paint into spoken-paint as a painting-wristing-without-writing pushing the paint to speak without words through throwing the dice of difference: thrown-paint is not written-paint. Bacon-Thoth throws difference delivered into prised paint as the God of Painting-by-Chance - (and not: Painting-by-Numbers but Painting-through-thrown-Numbers) as the God of Deathing by Dice as a Death Dealer delivering the dice of dasein the dice of death. For Thoth-Bacon death happ-ends when throwing becomes hitting as the paint of pain is captured by the canvas: hitting becomes a kind of flattening-out-of-time looking like the lamella - time trapped - time flattened out - as beheaded-being - thrown time is literally caught by the canvas - as a materialised moment - as a mooding movement: For Thoth Throwing wins its Truth only when - in diced dismemberment - it finds itself - as time-trapped - beheading-being being-there - being-thrown-over - thrown over there. What is thrown over there? Paint is thrown over-there some-where. Paint - if that is what we want to call this thrown-thing, is of all things the most thrownful, and to hold fast what is thrown requires the greatest skill - for throwing is a carrying of death within it - paint carries death and maintains itself within it - as a life force - a thrown force - a thrown life - as a as a death throe - as a death thrown - as a da-sein throw-ness. Da-sein means: being Thrown out into the nothing - Throwing itself out into the Nothing. Da-sein throws Art ahead. Art throws out open an open out space - sensationed ahead as an abjected-abimage - as an atta-ather.
Throwing Thoth: Francis Bacon by Francis Giacobetti
Throwing is Showing the unseen Unconcealment. For Bacon-Thoth Throwing-the-Nothing is Throwing-for-Nothing - for the Nothing is Thrown - the Nothing is Shown - the Nothing comes from the Nothing - Thrown by the Nothing - from the Nothing - to the Nothing - giving the gift - giving the geist - of the Nothing. Throw-ing becomes this Thoth-ing forth only by Looking the Nothing in the Face and Sensatioing with It: this Sensationing with the Nothing is the Sensation that shape-shifts it into Being the Nothing. Where the Sensation of the Nothing becomes the awesome aura of the Being of Nothing at all as the Being of Sensation as all where Sensationing shines the Nothing of Being at all and for all Time and Being for all Time the Time of the Shine as the Shine of Being. Does Being itself manifest itself as the Shining of Time? Does Time itself manifest itself as the Shining of Being? Being and Time come together through the Shining of the Nothing. The Shining of the Nothing is Being with Time Doing the Nothing. Being and Time Doing the Nothing. Doing the Nothing There. There the Nothing is Doing. When doing nothing we are Doing the Nothing but doing-nothing is the most dreadfully difficult thing to do. We would much rather be dead than do-nothing but when we are dead we are at last doing-the-nothing thrown-ahead into-the-nothing and doing-time-doing-the-nothing.
In Throwing Thoth Bacon is Doing-the-Nothing: and doing-the-nothing through-throwing is a skilful-thing to-do as a skilful- being to-do as a being-to-be as a being-to-throw aiming all ahead at the nothing at all: for throwing-the-nothing is being being-thrown forth for the nothing as being-the noting thrown-there. Thoth-Bacon belongs-between Life and Death neither Alive nor Dead but in the interstice-initiated Living-Dead - as the Undead - as the Undiced - belonging both to all-time and no-time at all without a face with a face at all. For frothing Thoth-Bacon is the Nocturnal Servant of Ra - the bull among the boys - the moon among the men - beaming blueness - being blue - being boy - boy blue. Thoth-Bacon is the God of Chance: - A Dice - A Card: Crafty Calculating: - Sly - Slippery - Secretive - Seductive - Sedate - Serene - Silent: - as a da-sein-dice death-dealer throwing-throes. The Thrower has His Eye in His Hand. The Hand is the Blind Eye that Sees the Nothing. The Eye of the Hand Hears the Sight of Being. The Eye of the Hands Smells the Site of Being. The Eye of the Hand Touches the Sensation of Time. The Eye of the Hand Throws the Being of Time.
Amon-Min Self-Portrait A.V.E February 2009
Bacon-Thoth do not Throw through the Brain - but throw Through the Beheaded Body by Throwing through the Eye of the Hand - by by-passing the Brain. Bacon-Thoth throws through His Hand - Losing His Head: throws through boredom - throws through anxiety - throws through dread - thrown through dice - chasing chance - activating accident: - as arbitrary assaults - as anti-illustration illusion - as anti-narrative nothing - aiming and arriving ahead as an ab-vision as an ab-visible as an invisible-visible-visible-invisible - initiated through throwing severing semening sensationing. The thrown wet white warm whiplash - as a sweet-streak-semen-strike - as a binding-blinding-liquid-lightning-flash-frisson - stings the eye and severs the sight of the subject - severs the site of the subject - but binds the sightless subject to the site of the blind - by being blind to being-there by binding to the not being-there to begin-with whilst throwing ahead of a headless head - harnessing brooding beheaded beings - wandering whilst waiting wet where there the thrown white whiplash wonders without words aimed all ahead at a navigating nauseating needling nailed nothingness there through to the nothing alling attuned and attained as an atta ather abtarity abaesthetic abvisible abvision abeye abgaze.
Wepwawet-Anubis Self-Portrait A.V.E Dec. 2008
The Gaze is Glazed over by the thin Skin of the Semen that Strikes at the Site of the Sight of the Egg of the Eye - that Cannot see it Coming - and Cannot catch it in Time - to close its Shutters - so the Eye of the Spectator becomes Coated and Congealed and Concealed and by a Skin of Semen - like leaked lamella - severing the sight of the subject - so the gaze thus becomes the glaze: - a blind-spot - a bind-spot - blinding-binding-being. The empirical (empty) eye is blind to the being of the thing being thrown - the extra X-Ray eye of Ra sees through seeing - sensing being blinded by being - but by becoming the thrown slime stuff - in-itself - thrown out-itself - by being binded by it - by being in it - by being severed sight - by becoming severed sensation - the site of sensation without sight: seeing-the-nothing - seeing-the-site of the nothing scene. For Bacon-Thoth nothing is seen - nothing is scene - nothing is screen: - nothing is materially seen in the mirror: - nothing is materially made out of nothing - out of throwing the nothingscene the nothingscape at the nothingscreen: - throwing at the screen of the nothing: - the black-whole of the black-hole of the mirror without meaning the mirror without mirroring: - the black-hole mirror is the materiality of the whole of the nothing: the nothing scene as the nothing seen in the nothing screen. Bacon-Thoth throws-blind - 'I throw therefore I am - blind' - binding blind being beyond the site of the sight - beyond the sight of the site: - violating vision - emptying out the egg of the eye of the I - activating an angoisse abeye and an abvision and an abimage as an arche Apeiron Apparition thrown through Thoth by being blind binding being to Seeing the Nothing ahead that sees through the Nothing there as the Something there that the seer never sees so that only the blind sees Being as the Nothing there being Something There that is Being There.
Francis Bacon as Ibis-headed Thoth Arnold Newman 1975
Throwing is Breaking the Rules of the Game - Throwing is Breaking the Rules of the House - Throwing is Breaking the Rules of the System - abjecting the abimage out-of-order - as an oozed out other order - ordaining an activated ather - as 'I' - as in 'eye' out an 'eye' - is thrown - is thrown-out - is throw away - ahead and away - afar and away - as a jettisoned-jouissance: 'I throw therefore I am - not' - 'I throw therefore I am - naught' - for: 'I am not there' - for: 'I am naught there' - for: 'I am nothing there'. Throwing is Being Nothing There. I am being not born: I am being abjected. I am not living: I am not dying: I am abjecting: always already abjecting. To Throw is to throw one out beyond oneself - to Throw oneself afar and ahead of oneself - aborted as a beheading off of oneself - by being thrown-out over there - as being-thrown ahead of one-self - as a-head being-ahead of-one where and when one is ahead of one as a-head of-one ahead a head.
As also already aiming afar and away: 'I throw therefore I am - abject' - abjected - as ahead of a head-of-being-t-here - 'I' am not the 'author' of 'actions' - 'I' did not 'do it' - 'it did it' - all of 'it' as none of 'it' - 'it did I' - 'it' did 'I' in - out-of-it - 'it' abjected 'I' - 'I' am 'not' therefore 'I' do not 'throw' - 'throw throws' - 'throws-throes' - 'death throws' - 'death throes' - the abject is ather - to the 'I' of the 'other' - of the no-'I' - of the 'no-other' - that throws 'it' - as the alien - of the nothing - thrown-there over-there. Thawed Thoth-Throws-Throes - Death-Die-Dice - abjecting ahead - an alluring alteric alien allumination - as an awesome aura - smearing semening sein.
Is throwing an art? Is art a throwing? Art is Thrown. For the Greeks art is thrown-by-hand: - as a hand-i-craft - as a throwing-techne - as techne means hand-man-u-facture - art is always already hand-made not mind-made - the mind does not make art - the hand - severed from the head - makes art ahead of the head. To throw is to throw ahead of one's head - to throw is to behead oneself - beyond oneself - the throw gathers itself together in the throw - in the time of the throw that gathers the nothing throwing is gathered - a gathering of time not taking time - a gathering of time taking time giving time. Throwing is a Gathering of a Sending of a Retrieving of Time. Time throws art ahead of time for the time being for the being time for the time of an alien being to come after the time has come for being.
Alexander the Great on the Underground 1977
Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence of Da-Sein and Freud's Fort Da Dice deal dealing and deliver Bacon-Thoth's Throwing-Being - as a raw real register oozing of being Becoming Thrown back-forth over on one's self forward-backwards all the time all over time where the thrown pushed paint shot splatters back before on one's face from the tawny cantankerous canvas: a fucked-face covered in one's own cum coming to ahead towards one's head The Further you Throw the Closer you Become because the Further you Throw the Nearer you Become to the Truth of Alien Being out-the-world. Van Gogh and Bacon stated that the more 'unreal' you make the Image the more chance there is of 'it' being real. Thoth-Bull-Bacon bled bare: "I would like to make images which reflect all kinds of things that I feel instinctively about my own species, and I would like, in my arbitrary way, to bring one nearer to the actual human being...I get nearer by going farther away." As Thrown Thoth-Bacon gets: 'nearer by going farther away' by being Egyptian - by becoming Bull - by throwing Thoth - by activating Amun - by revealing Ra - by reeling the Real. Bacon-Thoth throw the-time-being as a mastering measuring-the-time for the-being-time. Thoth Throws the Truth of Time. Thoth Throws the Time of Truth: Death Dealing Dasein Dice: Leaving Nothing to Chance: Leaving the Nothing to Chance - Thoth throws the Number Nothing: the Number Naught: Naught is the Number of the Nothing - Comeing before - and - after - One. The Naught is always already added after and added before the One. Naught comes after One as Naught Comes over One: the Naught - as the Nothing - Comes over and Covers One. The Naught is always already within The One: The Naught belongs to the One and always already remains remaindered within The One: The naught is The Nothing of The One: The One is the Naught and The Naught is The One and The Naught and The One are The Nothing: The Nothing is The One. The Nothing-One - with will-without-will what Thoth threw as: "all the foam of its freshness" still clinging to it. What is the time of throwing for the throwing of time for Thoth-Bacon? That is: the zeit-spiel-raum of the throwing-being-there as a zeitig as an existence-without-being? The ejeculated economy of existence being-thrown-ahead without-being-there? But being thrown over there as ather as gathered and grounded and grinded ahead as an awareness of being-thrown-over-there ahead of one's self onto the coverted canvas. For Bacon-Thoth zeitig is the throwing-at-the-right-time by not thinking about the time to throw where we will-to-lose-one's will where willing dice deliver dasein disclosed.
Head of Alexander the Great circa 320 - 300 B.C.
For Bacon-Thoth Throwing paint ahead at the right place at the right time projects primordial presence as throwing existence - without being - without representation: to throw is to throw time throwing the being of time for the time being for the time of being for the being of time. To repeat and rehearse the throw as a mood of the movement of the moment: to throw is also to throw a mood: one throws a mood: one is thrown into a mood one is thrown out of a mood: mood throws one: one throws mood: one is in and out of a mood a la mode de fort-da-dicing. Thoth Bacon broods brooding mooding - Bacon being moody - in a bad mood - in a good mood - the same-difference. For Bacon-Thoth mooding colours throwing and throwing colours mooding making mercurial mood swings switching on and off as a switch in a split second from one to an ather: and any mood can come up as any number can come up at ant time. What is thrown? Lighting is thrown - as a lightening strike - as a semen strike - as a source of light and a sauce of light that lights: that throws light on to the manipulated mass matter and activated abjected accidents of our Thoth-Bacon bathed beings. Bacon-Thoth is all throwing all knowing and not everyone can throw not everyone can know: not everyone can know how to throw or what to do with the thrown thing after the throwing after the knowing of the throwing and the when and the where of throwing of knowing of the nothing. Bacon-Thoth does not have 'spare time on his hand' but 'rare time in his hand' to be thrown time so that time is not killed: time is rather born through throwing as living-time against killing-time which is a reactionary and regressive forgetting of time as being and being and time: killing-time is killing-being: killing-time is an action abject more murderous than killing-being for it is killing the time of being: to kill time is to kill being for time is time for being time of being to be time for being to time being for. The forgetting of being is actually a forgetting of the time of being of the being of time which waits for being to come to time for time waits for man to become being with time and in time to become being time.
Aqualine Amun Self Portrait Alex Alien 2006
What is thrown? What is thrown is: the sensation of time - what is thrown is: the sensation of time thrown-through-time - becoming-being-time. Time is a Thing - Time is a Thing Thrown - thrown ahead as a time of a thing as a thing of time: things have their time as times have their thing - time is a thing that has things and has time for things to come - coming to their time in time the thing to come in time - time is a thing that things through time for things have their time times have their thing - the thing time has time for is being but being does not have the time does not have the time for being does not have the being for time so being does time for being all the time without knowing the time of being to be the time for the time-being for the being-time for being is all the time not in time out of time with beingout of being with time until death unites being to time as the time of being becoming being-time for the time-being all-time all-being forever-timebeing beingfree from time all the time without beingtime.
What is thrown ahead of being and time is the throwing itself -as the throwing ahead of the nothing - the nothing-being-thrown. An abjected alienality known as the naught of the nothing where nothing is thrown where nothing happens: as an abjected nothingness through throwing nothing actually happens: nothing actually abssoluted happens as a thinghood of time thrown time throwing as a happening at the right time as a sein zeiting sensation. Through throwing dice da-sein discovers its initiated emptithrowness: the thrown overflowingfullness of the nothingbeingthere. What is thrown ahead is an overalien as a head oozing and overflowing with an eggy engulfing and emerging emptying where the fullness of the nothing overflows on to something over there: as a stain-sein and as a zeit-stain. For brooding Bacon-Thoth Throwing-Time as Being-Time is the Overflowing of the Nothing: that-it-is there-it-is: here happening navigating nothing. The Emptiness of Being as The Fullness of the Nothing: the Brutality of Fact: why then is there Nothing rather than Something? What is the Time of Throwing? The Time of Throwing is the Time of Truth Bursting Open and Overflowing all Over Space with The Nothing where Time and Truth and the Nothing collide and collude and collapse together apart as a Profane Presence - as an Alluring Allumination - as a Mass Matter - as a Dark Dasein Leaking Light. Through Throwing the Nothing - Nothing is Thrown: - Nothing Happens - Nothing Comes - Nothing Appears - Nothing is Unconcealed: Throwing Da-sein is Knowing the Nothing. Da-sein sensations: being Thrown out into the Nothing. Being Thrown out of one's self is Being Nothing. The Nothing is the totality of beings. The Nothing is the totality of beings being Thrown. The Nothing is the totality of beings being Thrown through The Thing. The Thing throws the Truth at Hand. Truth is Thrown by Things at Hand by by Things to Hand by Things in Hand as the Throwing-into-Art of Truth - throes thrusting up ahead - an awesome-alluring-alien-abimage Beholden - Behanden - Beheaden as a Beheaded being before you all ahead with a hard on without a head on.
Alien-Amun abseen ahead soaking in his Spunk Stained studio mirror
Bacon-Thoth abseen ahead in his Paint Splattered studio mirror
What is thrown ahead is a head of a being by Bacon-Thoth - thrown through part-ed-pain-t - projected pointed ahead - as a porous-portrait: for Thoth-Bacon pain-ting a por-trait as a thrown-thing ahead is in-itiating be-heading being t-here by be-ing thrown out over there: to paint a por-trait is a sign of signing the death warrant of de-parting da-sein - as a sign of sev-ering life - ser-ving death - as a passport-passageway to the deathworld of the beingdead as the livingdead: de-livering Dyer - Lacy - Edwards exited exiled early - as an ex-ecuted er-eignis. Through throwing ahead a head Thoth-Bacon 'kills-the-thing' thrown through the lust and lustre of pain-t - where when wet porous-portraiture - as a paint-ed pain-t - activates and attunes as a poison and a potion - as a passion and a possession. What is thrown ahead is not a trace of the time at hand in hand being thrown ahead by hand - what is thrown ahead is not the trace of being being thrown - what is thrown ahead is a projected pure presence off-of an abjected absolute absence: - as a presentation - and not as a representation. In Throwing ahead an alien abimage Bacon-Thoth does not represent an any-thing - or any-some-thing - no - not at all - actually Bacon-Thoth present a no-thing at all - as absolutely the nothing at all - and for all to see for nothing at all - for all there-is-there is the nothing at all - and there-is the-nothing-there that is the afterlife
Bacon-Thoth's Eternal Throwing as the Eternal Return of Art is the Fort Da Fluxing of the Eternal Coming of Amun-Ra radiating reeling opening oozing out forever full flooded returning ready coming clean well wet dry wet dry wet dry wet dry wet. Amun is to Art as Thoth is to Throw. Art is Being in the Throw. The Throw is the Time of Art. For Bacon-Thoth Eternal Throwing is Throwing Time all the time not-in-time out-of-time as Time Space through Time Speed and Time Ather where the Thrust of the Throwing thrusts the Intensity of Becoming Being Time all the time. To Throw is to Become: Throwing for Bacon is Becoming. Throwing is the coming together of Being and Time as Beingtime. To Throw is to Think of Being as Time. Bacon Thoth Throws Beingtime. For Bacon-Thoth the AbImage cannot be Known only Thrown out-of-time all the time which is why art can never be 'contemporary' for art is out-of-time all the time and abjected ahead as an Amuning eggsisting exiting existentia. Bacon defines Existentia as the self-sensationing aborted abimage of our absolute-alienality.
Nietzsche-Zarathustra throws Existentia as the Eternal Recurrence of the Sensation as a Becoming Alien again as the sensessence of the alien lies in its egg-sistence before being Becomes broken into out as the egg of the eternal return. Amun Egg-sistence: the cracking open and oozing out of being - Becomes the semening sensessence of the alien being - that is - only of the alteric alien watery way to be leaked for as far as our sensation sows only the abject alien being is admitted to the dense destiny of oozed out exited eggs-sistence scape attuned as leaking out beyond being itself initiating soaking serene sacred semen sensationing as a shimmering shuddering shinning. Bacon is the Bull among the Shit - the Bull among the Semen - the Bull among the Sun - the Bull among the Stars: Bacon Bull's Thoth Throat is Cut clean by Amun's Liquid Lightning Bolt Slash of Semen striking toward the Sun - because Bacon Loved Orange - because Bacon Loved Ra. Bull Bacon's arresting Amun Ra and Bull (1987): An Airborne Amun darts down aiming ahead at the tossing Bull Out of the Blue - Out of Osis Thrust towards the Buckling Bull - then the brave Bull is burnt Blue by the thrown thrust oust Orange Orb of Reigning Ra. By becoming bright Blue - Thoth thrown - becomes the God of the Moon - merging and eclipsing the melting Sun severing Ra serving Amun-Ra - hiding Amun hidden - inhabiting Ibis - exiting Egg - creating Crocodile - revealing Ram ramming Thoth. As Amun-Ra-m ramming reveals also ahead a Head of a Ram - and a Head of a Crocodile heading a Crown of the Solar Circle. Amun-Ra-m is the Lord of Plumes - the Lord of Perfumes - the Lord of Scales - the Lord of Skins: - the Lord of Transmutations - as anointed Amun-Ra-m is a Shape-shifting Ram-Reptilian Alter-Alien always abjecting all aiming ahead an alluring acidic monstrous moisture falling forth from its intensely inviting meandering moat mouth divinely delicious droooling delighted dasein.
Wepwawet-Anubis Self-Portrait A.V.E Dec. 2008
At another age Amun-Ra-Temu at Thebes has the Head of a Hawk Surmounted by the Solar Circle encircled by a Slithering Serpent. Amun is the God of Many Names and the God of All Ages and the God of the No Name and the God of the No Now. As absolute abjection Amun is the No God of the No Time of the No Name of the No Nothing - time and again always away arising afar and all away. What is thrown ahead of being and time is also the throwing of The Nothing itself -as the throwing ahead of The Nothing - the nothing-being-thrown towards The Nothing at all. Not all-or-nothing - but The Nothing-All. What is The Nothing Thrown? Where is The Nothing Thrown? What is The Nothing if it is not nothing at all? The Nothing is not the nothing - not the nothing that is the nothing at all: The Nothing is the all of the nothing - for The Nothing never dies - Nothing-does - The Nothing-does-Happen - The Nothing dices - The Nothing does not die - for The Nothing matters - death matters - death does matter - death matters The Nothing - The Nothing abjects ahead as a moving matter scapeing and scanning the Something - Nothing happens to the Something - death happnes just as nothing happens - we are always doing-the-nothing in doing the something we do nothing in doing The Nothing at all and not something at all. Not alien art for art's sake but alien art for nothing's sake - alien art for the sake of nothing - alien art is for the nothing's sake - not for the sake of the something - for art is not a something - or an anything - art is a nothing - a nothing at all - for The Nothing at all. Art is not for all -