From: Jack Sargeant (email suppressed)
Date: Sat Oct 29 2005 - 03:15:48 PDT
the most considered analysis of Nietzsche's nihilism is probably in
Deleuze's book Nietzsche, where - if memory serves - he engages fully
with the role of negation and affirmation as a joint gesture, of
rejecting yet also affirming vital existence. In an essay M. Blanchot
describes the end result of Nietzschean nihilism as a wide open ocean
of possibility, something that artists affiliated with movements - both
actual and imagined - such as dada, the beats, punk rock, fluxus,
neoists, pataphysics etc all engaged in to some degree.
>
> And of course, as has been suggested, Dada is also a rejection---a
> rejection of the society in which they found themselves, a world, a
> "civilization," that was tearing itself to pieces. If repression is
> the price we pay for civilization, perhaps we had better look into
> anarchy more carefully.
>
>
Cari stated that "anarchy is not anti-civilization or non-civilization
i think you are mischaracterizing anarchy (among other things)
which (interestingly, not at all surprizingly) is a very very common
thing"
I don't think that Madison was saying that anarchy was
anti-civilization, but that civilization was repressive, that therefore
anarchism could be a way to exist without some forms of repression.
there's a separation - according to some marxist / post-Freudians (and
again I am aware of these labels) - between the repression we need to
exist, i.e repressing the basic instincts in order to survive, and the
surplus repression which society demands of us in order that society
can survive, i.e the repression of non-reproductive sexualities, of
course psychoanalysis is only a paradigm, and not necessarily a
satisfactory one.
Also, Cari, I am trying to draw attention to the nature of labels as
part of a naming discourse and to describe 'anarchy' as a fixed thing -
which you appear to be doing - is also a failure to understand the
mutable nature of anarchy. There were big differences, for example,
between 19th century Russian anarchists and the Chicago anarchists of
the 1910/20s. Anarchy, by its very nature, can not be defined, but
depends on the political circumstances, culture and society it emerged
from.
> Or else, although I'm not terribly familiar with Lacan, it is only
> outside of systems of representation that we encounter the real (which
> he defines as that which cannot be represented). What I would like to
> suggest is that by using the systems of representation to locate and
> interrupt the interstices or inherent contradictions--the failings--of
> that system, by disclosing the fissures of the system itself we may
> access the real.
Lacan of course was the swinging dick of phallocentric psychoanalysis
and is indirectly responsible for some of the worst parts of film
theory. The best critique of his work remains Derrida's essay in The
Post Card which certainly deconstructs psychoanalysis as a discourse.
Incidentally, when the dada/ surrealist poet / writer / filmmaker
Antonin Artaud was locked up in an asylum he was treated by Lacan, a
man he described as a "filthy vile bastard". And just to wrap up neatly
Lacan's wife was Bataille's ex. (Incidentally, Artaud wrote the
surrealist film La Coquille et le Clergyman [1927, Dulac]).
>
> Along those lines, I think of the work that Ken Jacobs and Jack Smith
> did together. I know Ken doesn't think of his work as anti-art, but I
> do believe there is a profound desperation in that work, a clawing,
> crying willing that magically comes out as humor, just as in so much
> Dada and Fluxus. A powerful pushing, always tearing, reaching up to
> and through the cracks of the systems they were using---film and
> theater---to get something unnavailable to both those systems. I'm
> sure there are many more examples of this, but they're on my mind
> today.
>
wasn't Jack Smith also involved with the neoist alliance who demanded
the destruction of serious culture? I seem to think I have seen a
picture of him protesting with them.
Jack Sargeant
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