Just finished reading 'The Great Ephemeral Skin', the first chapter of Jean-François Lyotard's book Libidinal Economy (Theories of Contemporary Culture), 1974. I adopted the mode of flâneus - ready to be seduced, eager to offer myself up to the experience of navigating new terrain, equipped with the notion (provided by Beornn) that my exhibition of fragmented body parts reminded him of the Lyotard's libidinal skin, I entered the pages, vigilant to the similarities, excited by the prospect of an incendiary to heat my soul. I was not disappointed. Lyotard begins with the words:
Open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces: not only the skin with each of its folds, wrinkles, scars, with its great velvety planes, and contiguous to that, the scalp and its mane of hair, the tender pubic fur, nipples, nails, hard transparent skin under the heel, the light frills of the eyelid, set with lashes — but open and spread, expose the labia majora, so also the labia minora with their blue network bathed in mucus, dilate the diaphragm of the anal sphincter, longitudinally cut and flatten out the black conduit of the rectum, then the colon, then the caecum, now a ribbon with its surface all striated and polluted with shit; as though your dress-maker's scissors were opening the leg of an old pair of trousers, go on, expose the small intestine's alleged interior, the jejunum, the ileum, the duodenum or else, at the other end, undo the mouth at its corners, pull out the tongue at its most distant roots and split it, spread out the bats' wings of the palate and its damp basements, open the trachea and make it the skeleton of a boat under construction; armed with scalpels and tweezers, dismantle and lay out the bundles and bodies of the encephalon; and then the whole network of veins and arteries, intact, on an immense mattress, and then the lymphatic network, and the fine bony pieces of the wrist, the ankle, take them apart and put them end to end with all the layers of nerve tissue which surround the aqueous humours and the cavernous body of the penis, and extract the great muscles, the great dorsal nets, spread them out like smooth sleeping dolphins (1).
The remainder of the chapter is an equal mind-fuck as the first. You stroll along - A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst's couch. ('Anti-Oedipus', Deleuze & Guattari, 1977) seduced by one encounter only to be lead off (or do you lead yourself?) into another. There were many points along the way where I faltered, having to read twice, taking a step backward or forward again, unsteady and still left with the intensity of the reading rather than feeling that I fully understood. So rather than being able to offer anything coherent to you the reader, there are instead nodes, points of interest for me, words and sentences that resonate. It was towards the end of the chapter when Lyotard was speaking about the cry of the woman who sees her husband looking at the face of another and the husbands' declaration that her cry is what I seek most in the world, like death, the only certainty...he needs her suffering to know he is loved, he needs the intensity of his wife's jealously, which produces a circuit one to the other and even beyond them. The relationship between sadist and masochist - an electric shock. And although her cry emanates from her throat, it bursts through her lips - mouth or vulva, they are affixed in the pain of her knowing. Seduced so far, I read the lines: The vulva is jealous of the thoroughly kissed mouth, so is the mistress of the book her lover writes, the man of the young man's future, the sun of the closed shutters behind which your imagination lets itself go in its adventures of reading (41). Even the shriek, which dissipates into the air may be a zone of pleasure as it bounces off another surface, all surfaces are possible planes of intensity. Your hand on the table his hand rests upon although it's not on your shoulder, connectivity acknowledged, the spark possible even through splintered wood. Is this romance?
I'm enjoying this book thus far because it works against the notion of Mommy, Daddy, Me and psychoanalysis, the notion of interiority, to one in which body exterior and inscription of bodily regions is privileged. So, I look again at my moving mouth - five seconds in which I press my tongue hard against the inner lips, move it around, make almost undecipherable sounds and it is not as one might think (and I for a brief second thought myself of the infant prior to language acquisition or the adult wishing to return to a time in order to be inarticulate, to dissolve knowledge to create a pre-human or post-human state) but may be considered instead as Liz Grosz proposes, as a zone continually in the process of being produced, renewed, transformed, through experimentation, practices, innovation...the coming together of surfaces...there is nothing infantile about these regions, insofar as to be effective, to function as the site of orgasmic intensity, they must continually be invested through activity, use. (Sexy Bodies: the strange carnalities of feminism 1995:289). My exhibition Ephemeral Skin is showing at Skin Gallery February - March 2013. Details click here.
If you would like to see the images in the exhibition click here
Open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces: not only the skin with each of its folds, wrinkles, scars, with its great velvety planes, and contiguous to that, the scalp and its mane of hair, the tender pubic fur, nipples, nails, hard transparent skin under the heel, the light frills of the eyelid, set with lashes — but open and spread, expose the labia majora, so also the labia minora with their blue network bathed in mucus, dilate the diaphragm of the anal sphincter, longitudinally cut and flatten out the black conduit of the rectum, then the colon, then the caecum, now a ribbon with its surface all striated and polluted with shit; as though your dress-maker's scissors were opening the leg of an old pair of trousers, go on, expose the small intestine's alleged interior, the jejunum, the ileum, the duodenum or else, at the other end, undo the mouth at its corners, pull out the tongue at its most distant roots and split it, spread out the bats' wings of the palate and its damp basements, open the trachea and make it the skeleton of a boat under construction; armed with scalpels and tweezers, dismantle and lay out the bundles and bodies of the encephalon; and then the whole network of veins and arteries, intact, on an immense mattress, and then the lymphatic network, and the fine bony pieces of the wrist, the ankle, take them apart and put them end to end with all the layers of nerve tissue which surround the aqueous humours and the cavernous body of the penis, and extract the great muscles, the great dorsal nets, spread them out like smooth sleeping dolphins (1).
The remainder of the chapter is an equal mind-fuck as the first. You stroll along - A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst's couch. ('Anti-Oedipus', Deleuze & Guattari, 1977) seduced by one encounter only to be lead off (or do you lead yourself?) into another. There were many points along the way where I faltered, having to read twice, taking a step backward or forward again, unsteady and still left with the intensity of the reading rather than feeling that I fully understood. So rather than being able to offer anything coherent to you the reader, there are instead nodes, points of interest for me, words and sentences that resonate. It was towards the end of the chapter when Lyotard was speaking about the cry of the woman who sees her husband looking at the face of another and the husbands' declaration that her cry is what I seek most in the world, like death, the only certainty...he needs her suffering to know he is loved, he needs the intensity of his wife's jealously, which produces a circuit one to the other and even beyond them. The relationship between sadist and masochist - an electric shock. And although her cry emanates from her throat, it bursts through her lips - mouth or vulva, they are affixed in the pain of her knowing. Seduced so far, I read the lines: The vulva is jealous of the thoroughly kissed mouth, so is the mistress of the book her lover writes, the man of the young man's future, the sun of the closed shutters behind which your imagination lets itself go in its adventures of reading (41). Even the shriek, which dissipates into the air may be a zone of pleasure as it bounces off another surface, all surfaces are possible planes of intensity. Your hand on the table his hand rests upon although it's not on your shoulder, connectivity acknowledged, the spark possible even through splintered wood. Is this romance?
I'm enjoying this book thus far because it works against the notion of Mommy, Daddy, Me and psychoanalysis, the notion of interiority, to one in which body exterior and inscription of bodily regions is privileged. So, I look again at my moving mouth - five seconds in which I press my tongue hard against the inner lips, move it around, make almost undecipherable sounds and it is not as one might think (and I for a brief second thought myself of the infant prior to language acquisition or the adult wishing to return to a time in order to be inarticulate, to dissolve knowledge to create a pre-human or post-human state) but may be considered instead as Liz Grosz proposes, as a zone continually in the process of being produced, renewed, transformed, through experimentation, practices, innovation...the coming together of surfaces...there is nothing infantile about these regions, insofar as to be effective, to function as the site of orgasmic intensity, they must continually be invested through activity, use. (Sexy Bodies: the strange carnalities of feminism 1995:289). My exhibition Ephemeral Skin is showing at Skin Gallery February - March 2013. Details click here.
If you would like to see the images in the exhibition click here
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