subjectless subjectivities

Anne Carson, The Albertine workout

"To seek refuge in silence is to taste it"

On Headaches by Roque Dalton

"use me": an enunciation of vertiginous simplicity that isn't mystical but rather materialist. I'll be your sacrifice and your tissues, you be my orifices, my palms and my membranes. Let's get lost and let's leave the power and the abject justifications of the redemption dialectic behind. "Let's be dead"

The depressing thing about the Christmas season--isn't it?--is that it's the time when all the institutions are speaking with one voice. The Church says what the Church says. But the State says the same thing: maybe not (in some ways it hardly matters) in the language of theology, but in the language the State talks: legal holidays, long school hiatus, special postage stamps and all. And the language of commerce more than chimes in, as consumer purchasing is organized ever more narrowly around the final weeks of the calendar year, the Dow Jones aquiver over Americans' "holiday mood." The media, in turn, fall in triumphally behind the Christmas phalanx: ad-swollen magazines have oozing turkeys on the cover, while for the news industry every question turns into the Christmas question--Will hostages be free for Christmas? What did that flash flood or mass murder (umpty-ump people killed and maimed) do to those families' Christmas? And meanwhile the pairing "families/Christmas" becomes increasingly tautological, as families more and more constitute themselves according to the schedule, and in the endlessly iterated image, of the holiday itself constituted in the image of "the" family.