Art and Magic

― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Helmut Newton, Sophia Loren, 1977 "(…) dime que no me conformarás nunca, ni me darás la felicidad de la resignación, sino la felicidad que duele de los elegidos, los que pueden abarcar el mar y el cielo con sus ojos y llevar el Universo dentro de sus cuerpos…" - Gioconda Belli.

“ There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened. ” — Charles Baudelaire photo Laura Makabresku

“ Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. ” — Rainer Maria Rilke

By Lewis Ink “Basta una pequeña inflexión, una pausa o el cambio de una letra, una mínima reticencia para que una palabra transforme el universo.” — Elena Poniatowska

Marianna Chambard “Jacques Lacan reminds us, that in sex, each individual is to a large extent on their own, if I can put it that way. Naturally, the other’s body has to be mediated, but at the end of the day, the pleasure will be always your pleasure. Sex separates, doesn’t unite. The fact you are naked and pressing against the other is an image, an imaginary representation. What is real is that pleasure takes you a long way away, very far from the other. What is real is narcis­sistic, what binds is imaginary. So there is no such thing as a sexual relationship, concludes Lacan. His proposition shocked people since at the time everybody was talking about nothing else but “sexual relationships”. If there is no sexual relationship in sexuality, love is what fills the absence of a sexual relationship. Lacan doesn’t say that love is a disguise for sexual relationships; he says that sexual relationships don’t exist, that love is what comes to replace that non-relationship. That’s much more interesting. This idea leads him to say that in love the other tries to approach “the being of the other”. In love the individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. In sex, you are really in a relationship with yourself via the mediation of the other. The other helps you to discover the reality of pleasure. In love, on the contrary the mediation of the other is enough in itself. Such is the nature of the amorous encounter: you go to take on the other, to make him or her exist with you, as he or she is. It is a much more profound conception of love than the entirely banal view that love is no more than an imaginary canvas painted over the reality of sex.” — Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love