At the moment everything was being destroyed she had created that which was most difficult: she had not drawn something out of nothing (a meaningless act), but given to nothing, in its form of nothing, the form of something.

Maurice Blanchot | Thomas the Obscure 

In a brief moment of lucidity, I was sure that we’d all gone crazy. But then that moment of lucidity was displaced by a supersecond of superlucidity (if I can put it that way), in which I realized that this scene was the logical outcome of our ridiculous lives. It wasn’t a punishment but a new wrinkle. It gave us a glimpse of ourselves in our common humanity. It wasn’t proof of our idle guilt but a sign of our miraculous and pointless innocence. But that’s not it. That’s not it. We were still and they were in motion and the sand on the beach was moving, not because of the wind but because of what they were doing and what we were doing, which was nothing, which was watching, and all of that together was the wrinkle, the moment of superlucidity. Then, nothing.

Roberto Bolaño | The Savage Detectives

Photos: Duane Michals | 1968 (Dreaming), 1986 (Parts of the Body)

Mod01

A mix i made today out of boredom and bad weather. Press Mod01 to listen. Featuring the likes of Alva Noto, Pinch, Old Apparatus, Blawan etc. Please consider.

What twisted people we are. How simple we seem, or at least pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes, and the eyes of others…And all for what? To hide what? To make people believe what?

Roberto Bolaño | 2666

Photos: Aaron Siskind | Various 

Prohibition is masked as this kind of universal, objective, knowledge statement. The inherent dimension is that there are hidden prohibitions. Low fat or low cholesterol means you can easily enjoy it, but the form of a command is absent. You can do whatever you want, but… You have a society which is ostensibly oriented toward pure pleasure, but you pay for it through a whole series of “you can’t.” The hidden prohibitions: eat whatever you want, but beware of fat and cholesterol; smoke, but beware of nicotine; sex, but safe sex. Yet the ultimate consequence of this pleasure principle is that everything is prohibited in a way; you can’t smoke: there’s nicotine; you can’t eat: there’s fat; you can’t have sex: you’ll get sick. 

Slavoj Žižek | HIDDEN PROHIBITIONS AND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE

Pictures : Jeff Koons | Made in Heaven

You must be life for me to the very end,” so he writes. “That is the only way in which to sustain my idea of you. Because you have gotten, as you see, tied up with something so vital to me, I do not think I shall ever shake you off. Nor do I wish to. I want you to live more vitally every day, as I am dead. That is why, when I speak of you to others, I am just a bit ashamed. It’s hard to talk of one’s self so intimately

Henry Miller | Tropic of Cancer

Photos: Various Sculptures | Terence Koh

…. Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack. Being attains a sense of self in relation to being as a function of this lack, in the experience of desire.

Jacques Lacan | Seminar II

Photos | Various shots by Duane Michals

Hence everything is production: production of productions, of actions and of passions; productions of recording processes, of distributions and of co-ordinates that serve as points of reference; productions of consumptions, of sensual pleasures, of anxieties of pain. Everything is production, since the recording processes are immediately consumed, immediately consummated, and these consumptions directly reproduced. Schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines.

Deleuze & Guattari | Anti Oedipus

Photos: Dosso Dossi’s ‘Jupiter, Mercury and Virtue’, Coca Cola Advert, two porn snapshots, a page from Vogue

1 The world is all that is the case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.
1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case.
1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.
1.2 The world divides into facts.
1.21 Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same.

7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Ludwig Wittgenstein | Tractatus Logico Philosophicus 

Alejandro Guijarro | Momentum

TO WHOM LIFE IS AN EXPERIENCE TO BE CARRIED AS FAR AS POSSIBLE…
I have not meant to express my thought but to help you clarify what you yourself think…
You are not any more different from me than your right leg is from your left, but what joins us is THE SLEEP OF REASON—WHICH PRODUCES MONSTERS.

George Bataille | Theory of Religion 

Photos: Bill Durgin | Nudes and Still Life