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, 1998.
"Art is the Time of the Alien."
Alex Alien, Being & Alien, 2006.
"There's an alien on the loose."
Russell T. Davies, Torchwood, 2006.
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.
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.
"I am fully aware that I have never written anything other than fictions... But I believe it is possible to make fictions function within truth."
Michel Foucault, Interview with Lucette Finas; Power/Knowledge, Pantheon 1980.
"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...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.
"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.
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 Man could not Come.
As a Ra radiates itself - an Amun Comes to Rise Up - to tower - to shower. It stands forth - as that which cums to a Head as that which cums over all - and over all time - 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 Open of their Penises. 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 coming apart belong to each other coming all over each other. This coming together of the penises pulls the oozing opponents together in the origin of their oozing 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 together there our out-of-joint jointings - as a serving severing semening sensationing.
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 Noth