the singing knives

“Nous ne croyons pas en général que la sexualité ait le rôle d’une infrastructure dans les agencements du désir, ni qu’elle forme une énergie de transformation, ou bien de neutralisation et sublimation. La sexualité ne peut être pensée que comme un flux parmi d’autres, entrant en conjonction avec d’autres flux, émettant des particules qui entrent elles-mêmes sous tel ou tel rapport de vitesse ou de lenteur dans le voisinage de telles autres particules. Aucun agencement ne peut être qualifié d’après un flux exclusif. Quelle triste idée de l’amour, qu’en faire un rapport entre deux personnes, dont il faudrait au besoin vaincre la monotonie en y ajoutant d’autres personnes encore. Et ce n’est pas mieux quand on pense quitter le domaine des personnes en rabattant la sexualité sur la construction de petites machines perverses ou sadiques qui ferment la sexualité sur un théâtre de fantasmes : quelque chose de sale ou de moisi se dégage de tout cela, trop sentimental en vérité, trop narcissique, comme lorsqu’un flux se met à tourner sur soi-même, et à croupir.”

“More recently, feminist film theorists have turned to the work of one of Lacan’s successors, the French feminist psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. Kristeva’s book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection focuses on literature and not film, but her views have been adapted to the study of visual horror by Barbara Creed, in a 1986 Screen article about Alien, and in her more recent book The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Kristeva locates the sources and origins of horror not in castration anxiety, but in the preoedipal stage of the infant’s ambivalence toward the mother as it struggles to create boundaries and forge its own ego identity. The mother is ‘horrific’ in the sense of being all-engulfing, primitive, and impure or defiled by bodily fluids—particularly breast milk and flowing menstrual blood. Kristeva uses the term ‘abjection’ to designate the psychic condition inspired by this image of the horrific mother. For Kristeva, horror is fundamentally about boundaries—about the threat of transgressing them, and about the need to do so. Hence she emphasizes the duality of our attraction/repulsion to the horrific.”

"One cannot help but notice that in American culture at least, in spite of more than a millennium of the antihonor discourse, revenge retains its allure. It still motivates more of our action than we like to admit, but that is nothing compared to how it motivates the plots of the movies we pay to see. We still hunger for revenge in one way or another. If we can't take it ourselves because the law and other competing internal inhibitions won't let us, we still thrill to fantasies constructed around it. Even the authorities, the guardians and purveyors of the official discourse, are ambivalent about revenge. The very polity that will not allow its citizens to claim revenge as justification in its courts of law sees nothing strange about telling its people that revenge and honor are good reasons for invading another state. When God claimed vengeance to himself-- "vengeance is mine, saith the Lord"-- one senses he is not taking upon himself a burden but rather selfishly reserving to himself a pleasure, too good to share with mere mortals. It was because revenge was so alluring that barriers of sinfulness, criminality, and other forms of taxing it were felt to be necessary."

But afterwards I couldn't stop crying at how close that underworld still is, and how clearly I remember the taste of dirt in my mouth. And how the predilection for sadness is embedded within me, an obsidian arrow lodged in the heart, no matter how tight your good arms are around me, or how much sunlight I stand in, or how far I've travelled away from the dark.

“Leaving or To be left behind–both versions falling out someone’s ash mouth. Leaving is a car unraveling at 90 mph. To be left behind is the color red as in alarm. Stop. Bracket that feeling. A hole the size of yellow. She swore to me on two cities. Two ghosts bright beyond the canyons. I love her even without. Her flesh intervening in the perpetual motion of my days. Laughter comes out hard and pelts the dusk. I laugh to dampen the riot like some people laugh over clowns or accidents. Avoidance or filling a room with noise to erase an absence. The radio sings with such clarity. Omit me here. She has left me.”