A List of Shameful Conditions & Operations

To live alone. To arrive at a social gathering alone. (Desired by no one?) To go outside in clothing not suited to the weather. To say something that can be traced to someone else. To have nowhere to go Saturday night. To have no interest in Jacques Lacan. To have no friend with a summer cottage. To have no family. To be dirty, to smell. To have no interest in people. To be gossiped about. To be sexually betrayed. To be ignorant of current popular music. To be disloyal to a friend. To gossip. To grow fat. To become middle-aged. To lose one’s beauty. To be enraged. To be deserted by a husband or lover. To be inordinately ambitious. To have more money than your friends. To have less money than your friends. To be different from your neighbors. To not understand what is said to you.  To not recognize someone. To forget a name. To lose one’s powers. To go down in the world. To be bored with one’s friends. To be thought of as superior to what one knows oneself to be. To discover what one thought was common knowledge about oneself is not. To discover that closely guarded information about oneself is common knowledge. To have less knowledge than one’s students.

No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformations and magic and make-believe. No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image. No to the heroic. No to the anti-heroic. No to trash imagery. No to involvement of performer or spectator. No to style. No to camp. No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer. No to eccentricity. No to moving or being moved.