Master and Hysteric (from "Handbook of Inaesthetics" by Alain Badiou)

Art and Philosophy

This link has always been affected by a symptom - that of an oscillation or a pulse.

At its origins there lies the judgment of ostracism that Plato directed against poetry, theater, and music. We must face the fact that in the Republic, the founder of philosophy, clearly a refined connoisseur of all the arts of his time, spares only military music and patriotic song.

At the other extreme, we find a pious devotion to art, a contrite prostration of the concept-regarded as a manifestation of technical nihilism - before the poetic word, which is alone in offering the world up to the latent Openness of its own distress.

But, after all, it is already with the sophist Protagoras that we encounter the designation of artistic apprenticeship as the key to education. An alliance existed between Protagoras and Simonides the poet - a subterfuge that Plato's Socrates tried to thwart, so as to submit its thinkable intensity to his own ends.

An image comes to mind, an analogical matrix of meaning: Historically, philosophy and art are paired up like Lacan's Master and Hysteric. We know that the hysteric comes to the master and says: "Truth speaks through my mouth, I am here. You have knowledge, tell me who I am." Whatever the knowing subtlety of the master's reply, we can also anticipate that the hysteric will let him know that it's not yet it, that her here escapes the master's grasp, that it must all be taken up again and worked through at length in order to please her. In so doing, the hysteric takes charge of the master, "barring" him from mastery and becoming his mistress.  Likewise, art is always already there, addressing the thinker with the mute and scintillating question of its identity while through constant invention and metamorphosis it declares its disappointment about everything that the philosopher may have to say about it.

untitled photograph

Photo by Josef Albers

Untitled (Anahuacalli, Mexico) n.d.

Gelatin silver print, 244 x 160 mm

from "Roman Poems" by Pier Paolo Pasolini

The Presence  
                       to Maria Callas

What was lost was heavenly
and the sick soul saintly.
Nothingness was a wind which inexplicably changed
                                                                                           direction
but was always well aware of its end.
In the nothingness which moved,
inspired on high, capricious as a brook below,
what always mattered was a story
which in some way had started
and had to go on: your story.
Who had called for me there?
Every morning the tragedy of existence began again,
behind the shutters, first closed, then open,
as in a church, as if a divine wind blew in vain
or only for a few witnesses --
Then those habits, sisters to tragedy --
The sea and its wind received all our passionate praises --
Your "being is perceiving" had tremendous obstacles
                                                                                            to overcome

and each victory was a poor victory,
and you had to begin again at once
like a plant that constantly needs water.
I, however, Maria, am not a brother;
I fulfill other functions that I don't know of,
not that of brotherhood




again, to c.m.m. jan 2013

pseudo-oppositional

from "Roman Poems" by Pier Paolo Pasolini

The Lament of the Excavator

I.

It is only loving, only knowing that matters,
not having loved, not having known.
To live for a past love

makes for agony. The soul
doesn't grow any more.
Here, in the enchanted heat of the night

in its depth down here
along the bends of the river with its drowsy
visions of the city strewn with lights

echoing still with a thousand lives,
lacklove, mystery and misery of the senses
make me an enemy of the forms of the world,

which until yesterday were my reason for living.
Bored and weary, I return home,
through dark market places,

sad streets by river docks,
among shacks and warehouses mixed
with the last fields.

There, silence is deadly.
But down along the Viale Marconi,
at Trastevere station, the evening still seems sweet.

To their neighbourhoods, to their suburbs
the young return on light motorbikes --
in overalls and work pants

but spurred on by a festive excitement,
with a friend behind on the saddle,
laughing and dirty. The last customers

stand gossiping loudly
in the night, here and there, at tables
in almost-empty still brightly-lit bars.

Stupendous and miserable city,
you taught me what joyful ferocious men
learn as kids,

the little things in which the greatness
of life is discovered in peace,
how to be tough and ready

in the confusion of the streets,
addressing another man, without trembling,
not ashamed to watch money counted

with lazy fingers by sweaty delivery boys
against facades flashing by
in the eternal color of summer,

to defend myself, to offend,
to have the world before my eyes
and not just in my heart,

to understand that few know the passions
which I've lived through:
they are not brothers to me,

and yet they are true brothers
with passions of men who,
light-hearted, inconscient,

live entire experiences unknown to me.
Stupendous and miserable city,
which made me experience that unknown life

until I discovered what
in each of us
was the world.

A moon dying in the silence that lives on it
pales with a violent glow
which miserably, on the mute earth

with its beautiful boulevards and old lanes,
dazzles them without shedding light,
and a few hot cloud masses

reflect them over the world.
It is the most beautiful summer night.
Trastevere, smelling of straw

from old stables and half-empty wine bars,
isn't asleep yet.
The dark corners and peaceful walls

echo with enchanted noise.
Men and boys returning home
under festoons of lonely lights,

toward their alleys choked with darkness and garbage,
with that soft step
which struck my soul

when I really loved,
when I really longed to understand.
And now as then, they disappear, singing.