holy crap, d...
Desire
Currently enjoying a hypertext project by Christian Hubert:narcissism and desire: Narcissus expired through his delusory desire "because he could not lay hold of himself, and yet perceived himself as other. (Ovid) Jacques Lacan's theory of the mirror stage follows both Ovid and Freud in stressing the basically narcissistic relation of the subject to his counterpart, the specular ego. In this way Lacan also sets up the erotic attraction or aggressive tension as a relation to a counterpart ("another who is me"), who can only exist because the ego is originally another. (See " Imaginary" in Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis)...
L'Eclisse (The Eclipse)
Excerpts from A Vigilance of Desire: Antonioni's L'eclisse by Jonathan RosenbaumWhy do you think eroticism is so prevalent today in our literature, our theatrical shows, and elsewhere? It is a symptom of the emotional sickness of our time. But this preoccupation with the erotic would not become obsessive if Eros were healthy—that is, if it were kept within human proportions. But Eros is sick; man is uneasy, something is bothering him. And whenever something bothers him, man reacts, but he reacts badly, only on erotic impulse, and he is unhappy.Sexist pronouns and all, this prognosis is tied to the issue of art and business coexisting in the...
Chianti and Red Jalapeno
..the blood red womb that is my new studio is actually painted in "chianti" and "red jalapen...
"The Black Swan" by Nassim Taleb
I'm currently reading a brilliant book that seems to be the logical application of Anti-Foundationalist theory to real life. Taleb seamlessly weaves a discussion of statistics, philosophy, and economics into a defiant statement of anti-truth. What I appreciate most is the pervasive empirical skepticism of narrative fallacy that somehow refrains from resorting to the type of scholarly language that so readily alienates all the Chris Rywalts in our midst. People who have a knee-jerk disgust to all thing "Post-Modern" (you know who you are) might find themselves thoroughly and unwittingly seduced into an anti-Platonic criticism without even realizing...
J.G Ballard on Salvador Dali
The uneasy marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an increasingly surreal world. More and more, we see that the events of our own times make sense in terms of surrealism rather than any other view - whether the grim facts of the death-camps, Hiroshima and Viet Nam, or our far more ambiguous unease at organ transplant surgery and the extra-uterine foetus, the confusions of the media landscape with its emphasis on the glossy, lurid and bizarre, its hunger for the irrational and sensational. The art of Salvador Dali, an extreme metaphor at a time when only the extreme will do, constitutes a body...
