While we're on Burroughs: here's some footage of WSB reading his 'Dr. Benway' sequence from Naked Lunch. It overlays Hiroshima and Titanic references with a vision of a depraved Doctor who wreaks havoc on the (female) body of the patient in his care, all the while telling everyone not to panic. Authority as catstrophe. Go to this page and scroll down to 'Dr. Benway' to download the realplayer file.
http://realitystudio.org/multimedia/
Tom McC
4 comments:
‘Authority as catastrophe’ – but perhaps in the sense that catastrophe (to borrow from Blanchot!) de-scribes authority? On the one hand you could say that catastrophe authorises, in that it apparently calls for action on the part of the ‘authorities’ (or is easily used to sanction that action). For instance, the re-building of Lisbon under Pombal. New Orleans might be interesting in this light, with much of the surrounding commentary pointing to a catastrophe of authority. E.g.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1860865,00.html. But on the other hand, catastrophe as de-scribing authority suggests also the space of the disaster as something outside authority, outside the sense of its sentence as it were. Relating back to what we we’re saying about the zero-point, there’s the idea that catastrophe can’t be authored, that it is absolutely missing. The moment of a wave’s impact is difficult to capture on camera: it floods the screen; we don’t see anything. Also with what Tom said about Blanchot missing his chance of catastrophe in the firing line - perhaps that encapsulates something about catastrophe more generally, the idea that it is ‘always already’ missing. The feeling of missing out. And the disaster’s association, perhaps, with disappointment – is the catastrophe ever catastrophic enough? Maybe this connects to its relation with theatrical plot that Steve points out.
Blanchot’s escape on the firing line….Joan Copjec cites the story of an Italian soldier selected arbitrarily by the SS to be shot, who turns pink - blushes - when he realises his fate. She connects it to the last moments of Antigone: ‘While the Greek heroine and the Italian solider are in these moments stripped completely of all illusions of a future, know themselves to be on the threshold of death, the very stripping away of all life and every illusion exposes a remainder, a kind of surplus of life beyond life or a final barrier between life and their ultimate annihilation […] Or: that which is exposed in these moments is what conceals the nothingness of death’ (From ‘Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation’)
Sorry I forgot to sign off: Alice G.
'remainder' again! i should consult my lawyers - although whether as plaintiff or defendant i don't know... simon critchley and i just gave an INS 'Declaration' in The Drawing Centre in New York in which we imagined a resistance hero facing the firing squad, and experiencing in his final moments not sublime transcendance but rather an angle of the sunlight on the wall of the prison yard, a beetle trying to mount a twig and falling off repeatedly... maybe we should dig up the blanchot text and look at it more closely. it's called 'l'instant de ma mort' - 'the instant of my death'...
Copjec's not so much talking about sublime transcendence as jouissance - or, a pleasure that consciousness can't absorb/bear; in other words, pain. If sublime transcendence is linked to the idea of a 'beyond', what the story of the soldier describes is that there is nothing (death) 'beyond' the blush. Speaking more generally...there is the desire for something beyond, but to go on wanting we have to be exactly that: 'wanting'; desire lacks an object. I think Hiroshima Mon Amour is really interesting in relation to all this. Also the beetle and the twig - in it's repetitive frustration, it's a little image of desire.
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