Thursday, February 1, 2007

another victory over death?

And what are the questions we are posing here?
Are I AM/ i am declarations simple affirmations of self-hood in the face of the subordinating and potentially alienating power of the altogether other?
Or are they perhaps examples of the artist submitting to acedia - melancholy - the noon day demon; affirming his will according to that phantasmatic ideology which the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben discusses as "a dialectical leavening capable of reversing privation as possession." And further, "since its desire remains fixed in that which has rendered itself inaccessible, acedia is not only a flight from, but also a flight toward, which communicates with its object in the form of negation and lack." Victory over death ...or a death wish? More on this later...

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