Public (E-Journal, York University)

Marion, Jean-Luc

English

Distance and Its Icon

Hassan, Narin

Authorizing Access/Sustaining Desire: Monagu's Visible Harem

Santos, John Phillip

In the Land of Exiles, Where Miracles Happen

Contributors 143
Jean-Luc Marion is a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and in the Divinity
School at the University of Chicago. In 1992 he was awarded the Grand Prixe de Philosophie de
I'Academie Fran<;:aise. A first work, God Without Being, appeared in English translation in 1991,
and a second, Questions cartesiennes: Methode et metaphysique, is forthcoming.
John Massey lives in Toronto. He is a photo-based artist presently working on existential themes through
digital photography. His narrative in fifty pictures, The Jack Photographs, was included in Lynne Cooke's
1996 Sydney Biennale. The first chapter (22 pictures) from the same series will be shown at the Centre
Georges Pompidou during the summer of 1997.
Michel Nedjar recently had a retrospective exhibition of his dolls and drawings, Les ongles en deuil, in
Germany and Holland. He has also had a retrospective of his films at the Centre Georges Pompidou in
Paris, where his dolls appear in the exhibition Made in France: 1947-97. He is co-founder of France's
museum of Art Brut, L'aracine.
Andy Payne is an adjunct assistant professor at the School of Architecture, University of Toronto.
He is also currently completing a doctoral dissertation on Shakespeare's tragedies in the English
Department at the University of Toronto. He has published articles on art, architecture and literature.
John Phillip Santos (JPSAztlan@AOL.com) is a writer and television producer living in New York
City. His piece in this issue is excerpted from his forthcoming book, Places Left Unfinished at the
Time of Creation, to be published later this year by Viking.
Allen Weiss is most recently author of Phantasmic Radio (Duke), and editor of The Drama Review
T151, "Experimental Sound and Radio," in conjunction with which he produced the CD Voice Tears
(MIT). The tale that appears in this issue is excerpted from his forthcoming book of "theoretical fic-
tion," The Aphoristic Theatre.
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Contributors

Weiss, Alan

Deren's Ritual
(A tale from The Aphoristic Theater)
Alan Weiss
The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me.
The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye.
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
It was already too late when she glimpsed the flash of the blade as it silently, and with
nearly invisible quickness, sliced through the air to decapitate her in a single stroke. Her
black hair and ebony flesh dripped with a crimson more red than the sky was blue; her
eyes still held the rapturous image of her illicit lover, whose body continued to be entan-
gled in hers, whose passion was still defined by turgidity, whose fate would be the most
unspeakable. For adultery with a Princess of the Realm of the Upper Kingdom of Egypt
was the most terrible sacrilege. The Divine Pharaoh Mentuhotep hadn't conquered Nubia
and seized its most beautiful woman only to be deceived.
She was not embalmed. Her cremation was an indication of the royal fury, and the
funeral pyre of the Princess flamed with a brilliance sufficient to attract the gods. The
last thing visible was the tattoo of a sacred crocodile emerging from the stylized waters
of the Nile inscribed on the palm of her left hand, which mysteriously arose, signaling
from the flames, as if in a final gesture of longing or despair. Her ashes, mixed with
rose petals as the only sign of the Pharaoh's nostalgia, were to have been sifted through
the hands of her slave girls and let fall, to float into the funerary urn. But just at the
instant her desolate body was completely vaporized by the intense conflagration, the
smoke miraculously took the form of a phantasmagoric being and flowed into the ves-
sel, which was quickly sealed, in fear and trembling, and cast into the tomb. In punish-
ment for her deeds, she was deprived of the customary comfort of being accompanied
by the bodies of her household retinue and domestic animals. Instead, they were sacri-
ficed in mere vengeance, and thrown into unmarked graves. The Princess was destined
to spend eternity alone.
Centuries later, in 1908 to be exact, an American archaeologist would discover the
tomb and unearth the urn, dating from 2040 B.C. When it was inadvertently broken, a
stream of smoke slowly escaped and began to take shape - the form of the Princess her-
self reincarnate, after a respite of nearly 4,000 years.
108 Alan Weiss
That time does not run backwards> that is his wrath. Revenge is the witrs ill will
against time and its "it was." "It was" - that is the name of the will's gnashing of teeth
and most secret melancholy. That the will cannot will backwards> that he cannot break
time and time's covetousness> that is the will's loneliest melancholy. To redeem those
who lived in the past and to recreate all "it was" into a "thus I willed it" - that alone
should I call redemption. All "it was" is a fragment> a riddle> a dreadful accident-until
the creative will says to it> "But thus I willed it."
Thus spoke Zarathustra. Thus wrote Nietzsche. The elimination of temporality is a
manifestation of the revenge of a strong poetic will, a reaction against time itself. Poetic
substitution, replacement by tropes, is the transformation of the "it was" into an "it is,"
with the subsequent transmogrification of this "it is" into an "I am." Thus the rhetori-
cal figure of hysteron proteron determines a reversal of Western metaphysics, hereto-
fore ruled by the ancient dream of temporal reversal and time travel. Of all the arts, it is
cinema, permitting a radical plasticity of time, that most vividly meets these paradoxical
conditions of renewal and creativity.
Maya Deren had seen Billy Bitzer's 1908 film, Princess in the Vase, in the paper print
collection of the Library of Congress. Though she had been somewhat amused by the
fact that the young D.W. Griffith played the role of the Princess' lover, it was not this
that gave rise to her reverie. She had always felt that the photographic enterprise lacked
a temporal dimension, and had intuited that much of the early history of still photogra-
phy entailed the struggle of the art to purge itself of temporality. Photography is the
unlikely art of the annihilation of time, making it a defective art form - and not the
eternal capture of the image, as some critics mistakenly surmise. As a dancer and a film-
maker, she couldn't understand that struggle, and relished the irony of seeing a film
reduced to a series of motionless stills. She felt that photography could be entirely sub-
sumed by cinema. Just as the human being is merely a minuscule part of the infinite and
circular history of humankind, so a still photograph is ultimately nothing more than an
isolated frame in the cinematic unfolding of infinity.
Deren loved the illusionism of film, was captivated by its magic, and wondered at
its loosening of causal bonds. The filmmaker as demiurge. Artists who bothered with
transformations of mere matter were among the weak, for matter is but the most pas-
sive aspect of the cosmos. She, to the contrary, wanted to inflict her will upon the most
inexorable, the most active aspect of existence: time itself. She wanted to become teleol-
ogy incarnate.
Deren had abandoned dance because she hated the spirit of gravity that predeter-
mined the gestural possibilities of her body. If the limitations of the erotic body engaged
in the act of lovemaking were at least phantasmatically shattered by the blessing of
ecstatic oblivion, the shackles of the body in dance obeyed a crueler geometry, already
understood by Pythagorians and Euclidians alike. In opposition to that obeisance, she,
like Nietzsche, would only believe in a god who could dance. She endlessly sought that
moment when she could proclaim: now a god dances through me.
Alan Weiss 109
The ontology of cinema is a ritual in transfigured time. Time is not measure, but a
dynamic, creative element. Her operations on the cutting room table created the body
of an impossible dance, where pirouettes could repeat to infinity, like the segments of
Brancusi's Endless Column; where bodies could levitate in perfect stillness and silence;
where each floating leap could be transfigured into a palindrome by reversing time and
redoubling space; where the grace of muscular contractions could be held indefinitely in
suspended animation. Her vision traced his motions; her gestures controlled his fate.
Anyway, here, suddenly, is the strange fever and excitement. Is it because in holding
film in one's hands one holds life in one's hands?
The magic of cinema bore the dancer's body into an unstated future, carrying the
filmmaker's soul along with it. Now, for the first time, Maya Deren had vanquished the
immortal laws of causality. As in a voodoo dance - where the supernatural powers of
rhythm lead to possession and inspiration, provoking the apparition of a god, a danc-
ing god within a dancing body - the body of the filmed dancer is no longer his own.
The moment of loss of self, of deposition or depersonalization, arrives swiftly and eso-
terically. It is precisely the "break," the offbeat motion, which forces the voodoo dancers
into improvised confusion, where redoubled energy and agility are needed to return to
stride. At these moments, marked by pirouettes or sudden leaps, the dancer is beset by a
frenzy. Only then do the Loa - variously recognized as mysteries, saints, angels, super-
natural beings - make their appearance.
Willing to sacrifice form for speed, Maya Deren didn't want to create a lyrical suite,
but an art of paroxysm.
In the opening scene of A Study in Choreography for the Camera, the trees tremble
and leap in counterpoint to the body of Talley Beatty, the latter moving with grace
equivocally situated between the stealth of a panther and the furor of Nijinsky. Applied
to movement - whose nature would be changed by a change in the speed of its perfor-
mance - slow motion reveals the hitherto unseen sequence of discrete strains and
stresses that compound it, thus bringing into reality that image ofanguished frustration-
otherwise experienced only in the nightmares of childhood - when our limbs are locked
in terror of that thing that moves ever closer. Was this arboreal trembling, like the
tremolo of his tensed muscles, a sign of Deren's anguish or her volition? The palpitating
greyness grew darker; then - though I was still traveling with prodigious velocity - the
blinking succession of day and night, which was usually indicative of a slower pace,
returned, and grew more and more marked. The effect of the cinematic flicker is a fear
apocalyptic. One need not voyage to the year 802,701 A.D., like the Time Traveler in
H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, in order to find the dark side of existence - it occurs 24
times within every second of every film. So the cinematic flicker induces apocalyptic fear.
The projector, accelerating the advance of successive still photographic frames beyond
the threshold of visibility, transforms the slowness of vision from a defect into the very
precondition of its cinematic representations. The photograph is sacrificed for the film;
the real is conquered and transformed. But there exists a residue, of which that slight,
110 Alan Weiss
nearly imperceptible flicker is the sign. Between each still image on the filmstrip there is
blackness. Every second, proffering its 24 nearly identical images, also manifests 24
moments of the void, a nothingness into which the world disappears - an invisible yet
monstrously present catastrophe. Total amnesia, although less spectacular than many
other forms of mental disorder, has always seemed to me the most terrifying. She was
gripped by a terrifying anguish, akin to Pascal's before the infinite immensity of the
empty, fearful sphere that is the universe. As this nothingness is the very essence of
cinema, Maya Deren knew that she would have to seek another solution to the problem
of causality.
It comes to life out of the energy of my muscles. The immediate physical contact with
the film, the nearness of the image, the automatic muscular control of its speed, my
impulses and reactions towards the film translated themselves into muscular impulses.
Deren's visceral imagination created its own simulacrum in the dance steps of Talley
Beatty, remembered again as the banquet of the manger-mort gave way to the voodoo
ceremony in which a priest intones a psalm for the dead:
He, ahe, he ahe, he he he!
Ti-mun-Ia ya, m'prale whet
Ti mun la-ya la dla!
The lamentations of the spirits who were to be taken from the waters were already
heard as the pitchers, marked with sacred signs, were opened, and the disembodied
souls of the dead were enticed inside, to a chorus of unintelligible mutterings, mum-
blings and scrapings. The pitcher bearers hopped or staggered in a vertiginous proces-
sion, carrying the containers of souls, placing each one on the altar of a particular god.
The ceremony ended with a dance, the banda, to hasten the successful passage of the
shades into the afterworld.
A few days later, the rites of the burning of the pitchers would take place. After-
wards, they would be replaced on the altars, and the dead ancestors would hereafter
take on the existence of tutelary spirits, or of very minor gods.


Deren's Ritual: (A Tale from The Aphoristic Theater)

Baudrillard, Jean

The Destiny of Sexes and the Decline of Sexual Illusion

Bayard, Caroline

Kliffer, Michael

Simeoni, Daniel

The End of Seduction:
A Few Words About Baudrillard's "Sex"
Caroline Bayard, Michael Kliffer & Daniel Simeoni
I fake so real I am beyond fake,
Some day you will ache like I ache.
Courtney Love, Doll Parts
In "The Destiny of the Sexes and the Decline of Sexual Illusion" Jean Baudrillard at
once mourns the loss of the shimmering artifices and alluring indeterminacies of the
seductive gaze, and condemns the emancipatory discourses of sexual identity which for
him amount finally to so much "leering" (Baudrillard's word loucher, bears the conno-
tations of ogling, squinting, and gawking). The depressing social scene that Baudrillard
observes in the wake of these changes in perspective are as lurid as any hyper-reality
that one could imagine. Gaping at each other across a gendered divide, Baudrillard sug-
ests, men and women consolidate their respective fantasies of power, knowledge and
identity, but only as a prelude to a further and more wide-reaching cultural and psycho-
logical disaster, here rather schematically described as "the commutation of sexual
polarities." The ensuing situation is profoundly counter-intuitive, not to say icono-
clastic, like so many of the social landscapes that now bear Baudrillard's name; it is
as if once the sexes get a hard look at each other, abandoning the suspense and the ten-
sion of the playfully seductive glances, they in effect hold each other hostage. Sexual
difference - which for Baudrillard is, properly speaking, the site of seductive gaming
and of illusions that are freed from any nostalgic comparison to a 'reality' - thereby
collapses into a field of indetermination where the subject positions designated "man"
and "woman" threaten to switch uncontrollably like an alternating current. In a strate-
gic move that remains extremely troublesome for many of his readers, Baudrillard
chooses to identify the chief assassin of seduction and the subsequent triumph of sexual
in-difference with something called "feminism." An old hand at decoding the stakes,
displacments, decoys, and deceits of seduction (let us not forget that his initial medita-
tion on the beguiling art, De la seduction, was written in the late 1970s), Baudrillard
has for years warned readers that the positive capacity of each sex to be the bearer of a
radical illusoriness had been irretrievably undermined by the politics and the episte-
mologies of sexual emancipation. For Baudrillard, "feminism" in particular subtly
reproduces certain humanistic and melioristic assumptions about sexual identity and
the subject, committed, as it is, to giving a voice to that subject's imagined "depths," or,
114 Jean Caroline Bayard, Michael Kliffer & Daniel Simeoni
in his words, to be bringing "out 'the real woman' (or the biological or psychological
being, conscious or unconscious, that she is supposed to be)." This "outing" of and
grounding in "sex," he contends, spells the end of its seductive illusions, or, to be more
precise, the end of its existence as seductive illusion; in the supposed name of truth and
freedom, subject positions instead harden to the point that they become interchange-
able, and consequently in-different to the difference that might otherwise keep their
radical illusoriness alive.
That Baudrillard continues to speak this way about sex, notwithstanding wholesale
shifts in his thinking about many other questions, puts to us just how important
"seduction" remains for him as a point of critical leverage on the postmodern condi-
tion. A world devoid of seduction and of the illusion of sexual differentiation is a world
in which "passion" has been evacuated from "the firmanent of concepts," as Baudril-
lard melancholically puts it. Baudrillard writes in an age that has seen the collapse
of utopian desires and the breaking of the greatest ideological icons; the commutation
of sexual difference is not unconnected to these declines, yet it is one about which
Baudrillard is tellingly regretful. It is perhaps worth noting that the single figure who is
perhaps most closely identified with postmodern iconoclam here flirts shamelessly with
making a fetishistic idol out of both "the sexes" and the "sovereign" power of "seduc-
tion" in whose thrall the chimera of the sexes is said to thrive. Hence the passion of his
lament for the end of seductive passion, a lament that it is difficult to read - not to
say unacceptable to a majority of feminist thinkers, several of whom have denounced
Baudrillard as naive at best, and violently sexist at worst.
Baudrillard suggests that sexual difference was reconceived by the bourgeois order of
nineteenth-century Europe as a juridical, political, and ideological construct designed to
ward off the strangeness of one sex vis-a-vis the other. Yet the same century nurtures
the greatest theorist of seduction in the unlikely form of Soren Kierkegaard, some of
whose quasi-autobiographical writings constitute, for Baudrillard, a reflection upon a
world of pure sexual gaming, a world that has given itself over to the "genius" of
appearances and to the interplay of seducer and seduced. But we know from the ironic
narrative of Kierkegaard's Either/Or (which is Baudrillard's pretext) that the scandalous
sexual enticements of this world are always already threatened with more banal possi-
bilities. If the first volume (including the infamous "Diary of a Seducer") affirms the
preternaturally postmodern social life that is composed of "guises and disguises," the
Jean Baudrillard 115
second volume settles out that playfulness with its more sombre insistence on the sanc-
tity of marriage; seduction gives way to the orderliness and productivity of the bour-
geoisie. Baudrillard's point is that in the late twentieth century, seductive gaming has
met an analogously ignominious fate: "sexuality" has un-sexed, if you will, fragmented
into "all its scattered limbs ... its partial objects ... its fractal elements." Baudrillard's
point is that in the late twentieth century, seductive gaming has met an analogously
ignominious fate; "sexuality" has become un-sexed, if you will, scattered into "all its
scattered limbs ... its partial objects ... in its fractal elements." The substanceless and
attractive fantasies of "femininity" and "virility" - as fantasies - are evaporated, and
the play of the pure surfaces of a radically illusory "sexuality" is replaced by a leering
identity politics anchored in apparitions of essential depths that have forgotten them-
selves to be apparitions. In a typically hyperbolic way that can only have the most dis-
turbing resonances for Europeans, Baudrillard describes this catastrophe as la solution
finale [the final solution].
Baudrillard at no point believes in a "natural sexual difference" any more than he
upholds a "natural democratic sexuality;" the concept of an entitled difference (one
could say a politically founded difference) is summarily denounced as a "democratic
platitude," a reference that will not endear Baudrillard to thinkers and activists of
human rights. Yet his sensitivity both to the decline of the extreme figures of an entire
century's sexual mythology (condensed into the social and psychological form of
the hysteric, the femme fatale), and to the "virtual end of liberation" (the "orgy is
over," as he puts it), has other, more ominous consequences. As he pointedly argues in
his recently published Figures de l'alterite, when one erodes difference (whether cultural
or sexual), when one does not give oneself over to alterity and strangeness and seduis-
sance ["seducingness"], one risks inculcating the exclusionary violence whose most
tragic social expression in contemporary Europe is racism. Baudrillard's short essay on
"The Destiny of the Sexes" is perhaps most valuable for its suggestion that difference of
any kind can be eroded precisely when it seems most vociferously to be proclaimed, cel-
ebrated, and idolized. The demise of what might be called - with sufficient care - "the
racial illusion" is thus in some sense parallel to the decline of the sexual illusion that we
see described here, at least insofar as "race" and "sex" are equally vulnerable to the cul-
tural autism and faked altruism that Baudrillard irreverently associates with the politics
of identity, whether that identity is "Europe" or "woman."


The End of Seduction: A Few Words About Baudrillard'
				s "Sex"

Contributors 
Erdag Aksel is an internationally recognized sculptor who has exhibited widely in 
Europe, North America and the Middle East. He is chair of the Graphic Design depart- 
ment at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. 
Joseph A Boone is a professor of English at  the University of Southern California, 
where he teaches courses in the novel as a genre, modernism, gender studies, and cul- 
tural studies. His most recent book is Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of 
Modernism, forthcoming from Chicago University Press. He is also the author of Tra- 
dition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (Chicago UP., 1987), and co- 
editor of Engendering Men: The Question of  Male Feminist Criticism (Routledge, 
1990). He is currently working on a project on homosexuality, colonialism, and Ori- 
entalism for which he received a Guggenheim, and which is the basis of the essay in- 
cluded in this issue of Public. 
Ralph Coury is an historian whose research focuses on the political and intellectual 
history of Egypt and the Arab East. He has written extensively on Arab nationalism 
and Orientalism. Coury is associate professor of history at Fairfield University in 
Connecticut. 
Narin Hassan is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at the University of 
Rochester. Her research concentrates on 18th and 19th century travel writing, especially 
on colonial representations of the body. 
Walid Ra'ad is an independent media producer and an Assistant Professor of Video and 
Cultural Studies at Hampshire College. Ra'ad holds a Ph.D. in Cultural and Visual 
Studies from the University of Rochester. Ra'ad's media productions, installations, and 
writings focus on the history and theory of documentary video and photography, 
and on the Lebanese civil war. His works have been exhibited widely in North America, 
Europe, and the Middle East. His video and photography works include Secrets in the 
Open Sea (Ra'ad, 1997, VHSINTSC), Missing Lebanese Wars (Ra'ad, 1996, VHSINTSC), 


Comay, Rebecca

Materialist Mutations of the Bilderverbot

Icons and Idols
How might one undertake a history of the image from within the conceptual field
established by the suturing of the two terms, icon and idol? Their opposition has struc-
tured the history of European art as the history of a quarrel between ancient and mod-
ern, pagan and Christian, citizen and ascetic. But to our age, apparently condemned to
mourn the death not merely of God, but of Art, the appeal to icons and idols might
seem to vacillate between cynical provocation and plain naivete. There can be no deny-
ing that, at the very moment when various cultural materialisms promise to liberate the
image from its elitist incarceration as object of intellectual contemplation or of aesthetic
taste, the icon/idol opposition may seem at once politically regressive and intellectually
misguided. For to speak of idols and icons in Art is invariably to speak of gods, if not of
God, and so to link the admiration of images to the memory, if not the lived reality, of
now disgraced traditions of sacred veneration; it is to insist that there is bound up with
the problem of interpreting images, an exigency to make present the invisible, an opera-
tion that the historical psychologist ].P. Vernant describes as insuring that transcendent
powers become immanent in the mundane world, but not so very immanent as to be
mistaken for that world.
Vernant traces the development of Greek statuary (and more generally of Greek art)
out of an originally ritual practice of "presentification," stressing the extent to which
the gradual aestheticization of sacred ritual marked a growing identification of divine
powers with the human form. It is in the context of this Greek "birth of the image" that
the terms icon and idol would be first deployed. However, it is only later, in a Christian
context, that they hardened into the conceptual opposition with which we are here con-
cerned. What is communicated by that opposition is precisely the transformation of an
aesthetics of the sculpted body (with its cosmically aligned proportions) into an aes-
thetics of the painted face, the latter being characterized by its transformation of eidetic
definition into expressive opticality, the liminal and ultimately indeterminate play of
darkness and light. The essentially contemplative optics that gave birth to the Byzantine
icon broke with the Greek desire that the figure express, through its proportions, the
harmony of the cosmos. The Byzantine icon opened the way for a properly kinematic
figure, a very picture of the contemplative soul's luminous exfoliation in time.
Introduction 3
It is well known that the Art of the Renaissance was in many respects a rapproche-
ment of these two tendencies, a merging of the sublime aesthetics of the Face and the
beauty of the classical body's eidetic erection out of an indifferent earth. Thanks to
Renaissance perspective, which locates the infinite at a vanishing point, the Other no
longer descends from the heavens, but rather greets the viewer at the opposite end of a
horizontal axis. However, as Hubert Damisch reminds us in his discussion of perspec-
tive's ideological applications, these constructive machines for collapsing the infinite
onto the finite invariably found themselves condemned to organize their fields of trans-
parency in relation to a certain blind spot. On this spot we can observe the trace or
stain left by the withdrawal of an Other on the basis of whose Gaze everything that is
given to be seen is seen even as "I" am given as its seer. That the transparency of the
field of social relations is smeared with the traces of the Other's withdrawal is a truth
with which a strictly "materialist" determination of culture seems ill-equipped to reckon.
Many of the pieces in this issue address the becoming transparent of social relations
that the imaging technologies of the Renaissance introduced, and which has continued
apace. In doing so, they urge us to a re-engagement with the image not merely in its
social and cultural contexts, but in its sacred dimensions as well. Why idols and icons?
Because the insomniac eye of modern surveillance still blinks, and in the interval of that
blink there emerges sufficient time for a return of the sacred.
Public invites proposals for articles and artists works for two forthcoming issues
Light and Talk


Introduction

Not a member yet

Distance and Its Icon

Authorizing Access/Sustaining Desire: Monagu's Visible Harem

In the Land of Exiles, Where Miracles Happen

Contributors

Deren's Ritual: (A Tale from The Aphoristic Theater)

The Destiny of Sexes and the Decline of Sexual Illusion

The End of Seduction: A Few Words About Baudrillard' s "Sex"

Contributors

Materialist Mutations of the Bilderverbot

Introduction

289

389