Isolation room

disruption

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HERE THE SHADOW

The franc knows that he is not speaking to the franc knows that he is not speaking to the franc knows that he... We'll stop the novelist's soup there, since you've understood the nature of the landscape. It's good to have a little scenery in your head to put words on, but that's not enough. The action, the main character, is not loneliness in the sense that we often hear it, with its sad, pejorative accent of "I complain about my fate", but the importance of this loneliness; how it is missing everywhere, all the time in this world that doesn't seem to know what to do with it, that denigrates it at length by treating it like a vicious poison, the result of harmful habits.

The isolation of individuals, the interruption of direct 'spontaneous' communication, the suspension of incessant sharing are the remedies for collective hysteria and the dangerous euphoric or violent frenzy that accompanies it. It is not the technology that is to be questioned; it is the words and the thoughts and non-thoughts that are put into it. Few claim to be silent. Obviously, it seems difficult to speak to say that nothing should be said. On the other hand, it would be necessary to speak to generate these periods; in fact, it would be necessary to speak to maintain as much as possible the vague notion that the solitude of each person brings silence to the "world" and that is only beneficial for it.

What is happening in essence:

The marginalized of yesterday (homophiles, trans-machines, sex-trucs ...) are "liberating" themselves and telling themselves that it's good. How do they liberate themselves? With the arguments of the norm (marriage my ass, sex art, LGBTBGTTGBTGV ... ). In fact, there is no integration, no reversal of the trend, no empowerment; no, we just get "accepted".

To be admitted (to go and be admitted) is the opposite of any victory. It implies that another, larger, more decisive entity must deliberate, accept, tolerate, legitimise and finally say "yes, we want to consider you as us". And the others exclaim: "Fantastic. We've earned it after so many years of being ostracised; let's take advantage of it, let's go in through the back door, let's integrate, let's integrate; let's get our values accepted".

For me, the body at that price is no. Free sex under the constraint of being popular and forum-ized, subject to joyful public debate, is no. Nudity, because it would be the natural costume of all, is no. These are not the right reasons and they all undermine the "art" that was the only basic reason for real margins to exist.

And art is the thought that in turn follows and leads to its own path. Art cannot be shared; it must be shared with others; it must be approached cautiously, just as wild species prowl the same savannah, simultaneously, strangely close and brutally distant according to the times and rituals involved in hunting and fleeing.

The body is both the pain of the eye and the surface of things.

Cut a foot off your shadow; you'll see what's left.

The part of oneself that one never quite delivers, one must not pretend that one can deliver it completely. Absolute and complete sincerity is a commercial swindle to be displayed on the front of supermarkets and banks, a phoney ideology that does not suit the constitution of the human psyche. This is the real subject behind all the questions that separate us and worry us, this non-existence of sincere matter. No, we must not pretend that we can say it all. We must not act as if we were free to free ourselves from it in spite of everything. This is an abusive assumption, terribly false and cannot be made true even with the greatest financial and political power in the world. The mistake is to believe that it has to do with class struggle. The other side of the coin of the person who thinks he is totally free to be is simply called imbecility, not emancipation. That of the slave who is unaware of his slavery. Yes, it is relatively easy to free oneself from a fixed reference point; to be a Spartacus of ideology. But human nature is not that, and why perpetually refuse to consider it in its more likely form. That of a shifting swamp, whose fluctuations are elusive as images taken at given moments. One does not photograph the inner being. He refuses to be portrayed in any way, either full-length or in a crowd. And no gesticulation of history has ever modified this postulate, it seems. The waltzing inconsistency of points of view and the constancy of the ulterior motive, which cannot be said and is never said more secretly than when it is displayed, together make the social individual. The 'true' individual who ventures out of his isolation room faints on contact with the air. He refuses to embody himself legibly through his words and deeds. All his words are false simply because of the existence of their strict opposite in the background of his mind. Thus any belief that seeks to reduce and fix man to a discernible pattern is usurped. Some religions are quite right to refuse the iconography of God. They say, in spite of themselves, that it is indeed man who made God in his own image and that this image cannot be exposed or seen; it can only be located on the radar of the artistic approach through the concentric circles of a shock wave delimiting the Zone. We will know no more about it.

The freedom won is not the freedom fought for.