The body-and everything that touches it: diet, climate, and, soil-is the domain of the Herkunft . The body manifests the stigmata of past experience and also gives rise to desires, failings, and errors. These elements may join in a body where they achieve a sudden expression, but as often, their encounter is an engagement in which they efface each other, where the body becomes the pretext of their insurmountable conflict. The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by lan­guage and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body.

For us, eating and being eaten belong to the terrible secret of love. We love only the person we can eat. The person we hate we ‘can’t swallow.’ That one makes us vomit. Even our friends are inedible. If we were asked to dig into our friend’s flesh we would be disgusted. The person we love we dream only of eating. That is, we slide down that razor’s edge of ambivalence. The story of torment itself is a very beautiful one. Because loving is wanting and being able to eat up and yet to stop at the boundary. And there, at the tiniest beat between springing and stopping, in rushes fear. The spring is already in mid-air. The heart stops. The heart takes off again. Everything in love is oriented towards this absorption. At the same time real love is a don’t-touch, yet still an almost-touching. Tact itself: a phantom touching. Eat me up, my love, or else I’m going to eat you up. Fear of eating, fear of the edible, fear on the part of the one of them who feels loved, desired, who wants to be loved, desired, who desires to be desired, who knows there is no greater proof of love than the other’s appetite, who is dying to be eaten up, who says or doesn’t say, but who signifies: I beg you, eat me up. Want me down to the marrow. And yet manage it so as to keep me alive. But I often turn about or compromise, because I know that you won’t eat me up, in the end, and I urge you: bite me. Sign my death with your teeth.

Scanned from YES YOKO ONO by Alexandra Munroe and Jon Hendricks

He began to wonder about the noise that colors make. Roses came roaring across the garden at him. He lay on his bed at night listening to the silver light of stars crashing against the window screen… The last page of his project was a photograph of his mother’s rosebush under the kitchen window. Four of the roses were on fire. They stood up straight and pure on the stalk, gripping the dark like prophets and howling colossal intimacies from the back of their fused throats.

…everytime you disclose your desire, you sentence it to death. This is the bitter feeling of guilt that comes from allowing your intimate thoughts to openly seep into what you say, do, and propose online. But revealing too much about yourself produces a sense of relief. In this sick process of counter- shame, people can’t judge you for the things you disclosed with your own gaping mouth…the more you openly reveal your secrets, the less, you know, you’ll be able to cum- because the less taboo these things have become within you. In jeopardizing your own privacy, you may or may not be jeopardizing your capacity to feel joy, to experience the ecstasy of those who keep secrets

Does every departure recall the first departure, until it doesn’t anymore? I was returned back to womanhood (for now) by the fissure in identity, which is that everything that is itself is also something other than itself. “We hold systematic thinkers responsible for the great humiliation imposed on us by the patriarchal world.” But Carla, I say, speaking this time out of the eye of Hegel’s penis, it was the commodity form, value extraction, domination, all of this that humiliated us into being, not systematic thinking itself, but a system that thinks itself, called capitalism. Is this clear? What was I saying? Thank you God for almost not making me a woman.