Suicide notes from a missing body
March 24, 2006 | 12:00am
0
How does a missing body propose?
1
Listmaking an outline. A lover catalogues his highs and lows. He recounts details and puts them down, although it’s a horizontal discourse. It’s not hierarchical, not transcendental. It’s just a paper/ghost. Theory is a perpetual calendar of names, dates and places winking at serious thought and deep emotion. It’s either a grand or shy attempt to quench a thirst for psychic connection. Hi, my name is John. You look really beautiful. What do you think of Deleuze? How about we meet up in a love motel tomorrow, then we can talk more about Wittgenstein’s sense of time (yeah, what timing) and then f*** specifically in my site?
2
In his compelling drivel on Jackie Onassis, an intellectual-Jackie O fan once argued that if one was willing to abandon everything in order to enter the Jackie space (Jackie’s body?), that is the moment when theory starts. Everything else becomes subservient to it. Even ideology.
3
Barthes describes the lover as a figure – "a scene in language." He writes: "It is to be understood, not in its rhetorical sense, but rather in its gymnastic or choreographic acceptation." It is the performance of language itself that creates the figure, the mis-en-scene of lovers "speaking at last, for the first time, for real." And the other (that’s us) whispers in amazement: Yes! I recognize that scene!
4
That scene is peopled and propelled by the Missing Body and the Missing Body. This schism is further split into another duality:
That of the Artist/Lover’s own body and world, and the Others’ bodies and worlds.
5
Bodies and worlds involve both the real and the symbolic, factual phantasms and critical fictions.
6
Missing is both an adjective (gone) and two verbs (to yearn, and to fail to see).
7
Missing = Disappearing (physical-visual)
8
Missing = Desirous (emotive-libidinal)
9
Missing = Dysfunctional (psychic-social)
10
Could missing something or someone be then attributed to the object’s physical absence or can it be actually there, only the subject is too amiss to see?
11
Lea Vergine talks about the return of the physical body after being absent for almost two decades. "The body did not disappear. It’s (been) missing." It’s as if the body had not been here with us all this time. Or at least not quite there, not in its usual place, lost; there seems to be only a hint, an aura, or the trace of a body. This idea also flirts with Jean Baudrillard’s Seduction (not simulacrum, sorry Matrix geeks) as not simply being pure presence or complete absence but a becoming – an eclipse of presence, a dawning of absence. The body is no longer about: male, female, fat, thin, black, white… but about to… what…? Now that is ze question.
12
What if the body was in a slow fade-out, corporeality in a state of suspension (and suspense)? What if the subject hosting the body was just about gathering enough courage and patience, prior to certainty, to flicker one last time before transforming into a full image? What if the outline of the body was more illustrative of the soul than the soul itself? What if the body was a ghost haunting the real world as much as it was wishing to be part of the social space?
13
"So where eeez ze body?"
– To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything From Julie Newmar
In memoriam:
You are missing – an art of active disappearance
You are missing some body – a story of love and desire
You are missing the point – a failed discourse on life
How does a missing body propose?
1
Listmaking an outline. A lover catalogues his highs and lows. He recounts details and puts them down, although it’s a horizontal discourse. It’s not hierarchical, not transcendental. It’s just a paper/ghost. Theory is a perpetual calendar of names, dates and places winking at serious thought and deep emotion. It’s either a grand or shy attempt to quench a thirst for psychic connection. Hi, my name is John. You look really beautiful. What do you think of Deleuze? How about we meet up in a love motel tomorrow, then we can talk more about Wittgenstein’s sense of time (yeah, what timing) and then f*** specifically in my site?
2
In his compelling drivel on Jackie Onassis, an intellectual-Jackie O fan once argued that if one was willing to abandon everything in order to enter the Jackie space (Jackie’s body?), that is the moment when theory starts. Everything else becomes subservient to it. Even ideology.
3
Barthes describes the lover as a figure – "a scene in language." He writes: "It is to be understood, not in its rhetorical sense, but rather in its gymnastic or choreographic acceptation." It is the performance of language itself that creates the figure, the mis-en-scene of lovers "speaking at last, for the first time, for real." And the other (that’s us) whispers in amazement: Yes! I recognize that scene!
4
That scene is peopled and propelled by the Missing Body and the Missing Body. This schism is further split into another duality:
That of the Artist/Lover’s own body and world, and the Others’ bodies and worlds.
5
Bodies and worlds involve both the real and the symbolic, factual phantasms and critical fictions.
6
Missing is both an adjective (gone) and two verbs (to yearn, and to fail to see).
7
Missing = Disappearing (physical-visual)
8
Missing = Desirous (emotive-libidinal)
9
Missing = Dysfunctional (psychic-social)
10
Could missing something or someone be then attributed to the object’s physical absence or can it be actually there, only the subject is too amiss to see?
11
Lea Vergine talks about the return of the physical body after being absent for almost two decades. "The body did not disappear. It’s (been) missing." It’s as if the body had not been here with us all this time. Or at least not quite there, not in its usual place, lost; there seems to be only a hint, an aura, or the trace of a body. This idea also flirts with Jean Baudrillard’s Seduction (not simulacrum, sorry Matrix geeks) as not simply being pure presence or complete absence but a becoming – an eclipse of presence, a dawning of absence. The body is no longer about: male, female, fat, thin, black, white… but about to… what…? Now that is ze question.
12
What if the body was in a slow fade-out, corporeality in a state of suspension (and suspense)? What if the subject hosting the body was just about gathering enough courage and patience, prior to certainty, to flicker one last time before transforming into a full image? What if the outline of the body was more illustrative of the soul than the soul itself? What if the body was a ghost haunting the real world as much as it was wishing to be part of the social space?
13
"So where eeez ze body?"
– To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything From Julie Newmar
You are missing – an art of active disappearance
You are missing some body – a story of love and desire
You are missing the point – a failed discourse on life
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