Monday, March 23, 2009

No Where Woman pt.2

If the idea of the blank (or the empty, or the silent, or the apophatic) is impossible (albeit a necessary impossibility in all its forms, and more, referred to previously) then a closer approximation would be a severing of connections, a cutting off, a jettisoning even as that somehow seems impossible as well. At the very least a disconnection while still connected. (The most extreme instance of such disconnection/connection is explored in an essay by Nicola Masciandaro, Beheading and The Impossible: "Beheading severs the space around it, producing in its before the presence of something that already has/can never happen and in its after the presence of something that did not/never stops happening. [….] One way or another, the severed head keeps speaking to its self-otherness, producing a discourse unlike any other, as a token of the reality perceived only through the transcendence of human discourse."[....] "Inevitably, the severed head stays ahead, bleeding, glowing, calling from within this living dream to play fast and loose with ours, to speak its secret. Beheading is impossible." )

One is also reminded of the Lyotard essay, "Can Thought Go On Without a Body?" significantly enough, in the book entitled The Inhuman, wherein techno-science, that is, thought, creates its own body since the two are inseparable, a paradoxical dance that can only begin (always over again) with a blank-which-is-a clearing, which has been filled and then obliterated (or disremembered) by the body in all its forms: "In what we call thinking the mind isn't 'directed' but suspended. You don’t give it rules. You teach it to receive. You don’t clear the ground to build unobstructed: you make a little clearing where the penumbra of an almost-given will be able to enter and modify its contour. [….] …the suffering of thinking is a suffering of time."

But...how does that temporal suffering manifest itself in the blank? And what pathologies / evolutionary paths does it lead to?

1 comment:

Nicola Masciandaro said...

Unfortunately my severed head is not available to answer! But its potentiality to be severed tells me that the answer may lie in Incognitum's conception of at least two different times, one of which can bridge the exteriority or diachronicity of the absolute time to the exteriority of space.

Also: "Time is not the limitation of being but its relation to infinity. Death is not annihilation but the question that is necessary for this relationship with infinity, or time, to be produced" (Levinas).

Cheers,

Nicola