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 2007
ZONE

Urzone, Inc.
BOOKS

Contents

[226 Prospect Avenue Brooklyn, NY lI218 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, system, or transmitted electronic, or otherwise mechanical, photocopying, stored in a retrieval recording, in any form or by any means, including microfilming, by Sections [07

(except for that copying permitted

and 108 of the U.S. COI)yright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission Originally published as Pr~f(lnaziollj from the Publisher. Nottetempo.

Translator's Genius
9

Note

2005

II
Printed in the United States of America.

Magic and Happiness Judgment Day

23 29

19

III
Distributed Cambridge, by The MIT Press, Massachusetts, and London, England

IV V

The Assistants Parody Desiring

37 53

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Agamben, Giorgio, 1942[Profanazioni Profanations English] / Giorgio Agamben ; translated references. Philosophy. Title.

Data

VI VII
by Jeff Fort.

Special Being

55

p.

em,

VIII IX
I.

The Author as Gesture In Praise of Profanation

61
73

Includes bibliographical ISI3N978-1-890951-82-5

I.

Aesthetics. 2. Art-

I3H39A,2132007 111'.8S-dc22 2007023901

The Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the History of Cinema 93 Notes

95

Traosla tor's Note I would like to thank Kevin Attell for contributing tion, "In Praise of Profanation," which he prepared beri's request for an oral presentation for his helpful suggestions. his translaat Agam-

of this text in English in

January 2005. I would also like to thank TOl11l11asoGiartosio

"-

CHAPTER

ONE

Genius

Now

111)'

charms are all o'erthrown I have's mine own. to the audience ill The Tempest

And what strength - Prospera

In Latin, Genius was the name used for the god who becomes each man's guardian at the moment transparent of birth. The etymology is and remains visible linguistically in the very proxThat Genius is

imity appearing between genius and generation. related to generation in Latin, the "genial" lectus 8enialis, accomplished. object par excellence

is evident in any case due to the Fact that was the bed, the is

because it is in bed that the act of generation (birthday)

Birthdays are sacred to Genius, and for that reain Italian. refrain, the are a Anglo-Saxon

son we still use the adjective 8enetliaco Despite the odious, now-inevitable presents

and parties with which we celebrate

birthdays

memory of the feast and sacrifices offered to Genius by Roman families on birthdays. month-old sprinkled originally Horace speaks of pure wine, of a twolamb, meaning one that is It seems, though, that wine, and delicious honey piglet, of an "immolated" there was only incense,

with sauce for the sacrifice.

cake, because Genius, the god who presides over birth, did not like blood sacrifices.

PROFANATIONS

GENIUS

"He is called my Genius, because he generated meus nominatur, not only the personification manifested

me (Genius

with black paper you just don't see any reason to go on, then there's no point in repeating to yourself that these are no more than little manias, that now is the time to be over and done with them. In Latin, Genium suum difraudare, to defraud one's to cheat oneown genius, means to make one's life miserable, without hesitation to the impetus genial. and personal god is also that which of what,

quia me Ben IIit): , But that is not all. Genius was of sexual energy. Certainly, every and perpetuates life. But

man had his Genius and every woman her Juno, both of which the fertility that generates as the term inBenillm - that is, the sum of physical and moral qualities innate in the one who is born - indicates, Genius was, in a certain way, the divinization that governed of the person, the principle and expressed his entire existence. For this rea-

self, in Latin. But the life that turns away from death and responds of the genius that engendered it is called Benialis, But this most intimate is most impersonal far as it was originated

son, it was not the pubis but the forehead that was associated with Genius; the gesture of bringing the hand to the forehead - which we enact almost without confusion forgotten and disorientation, realizing it in moments of when we seem almost to have of the cult of

in us; it is the personalization

in us, goes beyond and exceeds us. "Genius is our life not insoby us, but rather insofar as we originate with us, it is only in order as more than us, and to Compremeans in Genius afterward from it." If it seems to be identified to reveal itself immediately hending the conception

ourselves - recalls the ritual gesture

Genius (LInde venercnres deum tan8JIllLls fi'ontem ).1 And since this god is, in a sense, what is most intimate and most our own, he must be placated and his favor maintained at every moment of life. A Latin phrase perfectly each person Benio. must maintain One must consent in every aspect and

show us that we are more and less than ourselves. of man implicit understanding

that man is not only an ego and an individual but rather that from birth to death he is accompreindividual element. Man is thus a

expresses the secret relationship with his own Genius: indulBere oneself to to Genius and abandon

consciousness,

panied by an impersonal, complex

single being with two phases; he is a being that results from the dialectic between a part that has yet to be individunonindividual part is ated and lived and another part that is marked by fate and individual experience. eventually But the impersonal, not a past we have left behind once and for all and that we may recall in memory; it is still present in us, still with us, near to us and inseparable from us, for both good and wings signify that

him; one must grant him everything he asks for, for his exigencies are our exigencies, his happiness our happiness. Even if his - our! - requirements seem unreasonable and capricious, it is best to accept them without argument. If in order to write you

need - he needs! - a certain light yellow paper, a certain special pen, a certain dim light shining from the left, it is useless to tell yourself that just any pen will do, that any paper and any light will suffice. If life is not worth living without collar of an office worker!), if without that light blue linen shirt (for goodness' sake, not the white one with the those long cigarettes

ill. Genius' youthful face and long, fluttering

he does not know time, that we feel him quivering as closely within us as he did when we were children, breathing and beating in our feverish temples like an immemorial present. That is

10

11

PROFANATIONS

GEN IUS

why a birthday the epiphany

cannot be the commemoration and presence

of a past day pres-

an everyday mystical doing and, whether dissolution

practice, it's a matter

in which the ego, in a sort of of digesting food or illumi-

but, like every true celebration,

must be an abolition of time-

special, joyous esoterism, nating the mind, testifies does not belong to us.

looks on with a smile at its own unincredulously to its own incessant

of Genius. This inescapable

ence prevents us from enclosing ourselves within a substantial identity and shatters the ego's pretension itself. It has been said that spirituality the individuated contains a certain nonindividuated be not only preserved honored, spirituality customarily is above all an awareness individuated that to be sufficient unto

and disappearance.

Genius is our life insofar as it

We must therefore tensions field is traversed

consider

the subject

as a force field of forces: one and another The two emancipate

being is not completely but also respected

but still

whose antithetical

poles are Genius and Ego. This but opposed to the individual.

share of reality, which must and, in a way, even

by two conjoined

that moves from the individual to the impersonal that moves from the impersonal forces coexist, intersect, themselves completely separate, but can neither

as one honors one's debts. But Genius is not merely and is not just concerned with the things that we in us regard as higher and more noble. Everything

from each other nor identify with each to write this

that is impersonal

is genial. The force that pushes the blood and distributes its

other perfectly. What, then, is the best way for Ego to testify to Genius? Suppose the ego wants to write-not 1 (Ego) feel that somewhere an impersonal power or that work, but simply to write, period. This desire means: Genius exists, that there is in me toward writing. But this a computer) that presses

through our veins or that plunges us into sleep, the unknown power in our body that gently regulates warmth or that relaxes or contracts intimacy of our physiological the fibers of our musclessense in the

that too is genial, It is Genius that we obscurely own is also strange and impersonal, abandon ourselves to Genius,

life, in which what is most one's and in which what is near-

Genius, who has never taken up a pen (mucbless - has no inclination become impersonal, individuate away from Genius, sonal element, the pertinence the avant-garde, in the decreation

to produce a work. One writes in order to to become genial, and yet, in writing, we who can never have the form of an ego, by Ego, by the perGenius, to force him to sign in like those of to

est somehow remains distant and escapes mastery. Ifwe did not if we were only ego and consciousness, we would not even be able to urinate. Living with Genius means, in this sense, living in the intimacy of a strange being, remaining constantly in relation to a zone of nonconis not repression; from consciousness would be sediis sciousness. But this zone of nonconsciousness it does not shift or displace an experience to the unconscious, mented as a troubling where this experience

ourselves as authors of this or that work; we move

much less that of an author. Every attempt to appropriate

one's own name, is necessarily destined to fail. I-Tence we have and success of ironic operations and destruction in which the presence of Genius is attested of the worle. But

past, waiting to resurface in symptoms

if the only

and neuroses. This intimacy with a zone of nonconsciousness

work worthy of Genius is the one been revoked and undone,

12

PROFANATIONS

GENIUS

and if the truly genial artist is the artist without a work, then the Duchamp-Ego the melancholic will never be able to coincide with Genius of all, will pass through the world like like the illThe life proof of its own nonexistence, and, to the admiration

does without

this sordid accomplice,

because he knows that

"the absence of God helps"? Children take a particular pleasure in hiding, not because they

famed bearer of its own unworking. That is why the encounter with Genius is terrible. that maintains the tension between the personal and the impersonal, between Ego and Genius, is called poetic. But the feeling that occurs when Genius exceeds panic - panic at something greater us
011

will be found in the end, but by the very act of hiding, of being concealed in a laundry basket or a cabinet, of curling up in the corner of an attic to the point of almost disappearing. an incomparable joy, a special excitement Walser's willing to renounce There is that children are unpleasure in and This

every side is called

for any reason. This childlike excitement voluptuous of his illegibility (the micrograms) desire to go unrecognized.

that comes over us and is infinitely able to bear. For this to reduce it

is the source of botb Robert securing the conditions Walter Benjamin's revealed to children stubborn

than what we believe ourselves

reason, most people flee in terror before the part of themselves that is impersonal, then, can reappear or else they seek hypocritically in the form of symptoms to their own miniscule stature. What is rejected as impersonal, and tics that are even more impersonal, experiences or grimaces that are even more exceswith Genius as a privilege, the Poet

pleasure and this desire are the guardians brates his triumph in nonrecognition,

of the solitary 810/!

in their secret lairs. For the poet celejust like the child discov-

ers the 8enills loci of his hiding place with trepidation. According to Gilbert Simondon, to the preindividual. the impersonal joy, safety or fear. On the threshold tightrope, stretched of the zone of ncnconsciousness, between us and Genius, Ego must shed its own properties; it must be moved. Passion is the on which our Even before we wonder at the infinitely adolescent, and emotion is the way we relate to be moved, is to feel Genius as anguisb or

sive. But more laughable and fatuous than this is someone who the encounter who strikes a pose and puts on airs or, worse, feigns humility and gives thanks for the grace received. In the face of Genius, no one is great; we are all equally small. But some let themselves be shaken and traversed by Genius to the point of falling apart. Others, more serious but less happy, refuse to impersonate the impersonal, belong to them. The rank of every being can be defined by an ethics of relationships with Genius. The lowest rank comprises sometimes genius as a sort of personal sorcerer ("Everything well for me!" - "If only you, my Genius, those - and turns out so they are very famous authors - who think of their do not abandon to lend their lips to a voice that does not To have emotion,

within us, to experience

Iunambulant

life steps forward.

world outside us, what awes and stuns us is the presence within us of a part that is forever immature, hesitant to cross the threshold of any individuation. the emotion It is this

elusive young boy, this pue!", who stubbornly others, in whom we seek precisely incomprehensible

pushes us toward that remains

me .. ."). How much more amiable and sober is the poet who

in ourselves, hoping that by some miracle it

14

15

PROFANATIONS

GENIUS

will be clarified and elucidated in the mirror of the other. Witnessing the pleasure and the passion of others is the supreme emotion and the first politics because we seek in the other the relationship with Genius which we are incapable of grasping on our own; our secret delight and our proud and loft)' agony. In time, Genius took on a twofold oration. The sources - influenced, aspect and an ethical colperhaps, by the Greek theme genius and a black (ater) evil. Horace is no doubt

perverse,

pushing us into damnation.

But it is Iranian angelolan angel called a

ogy that gives the guardian angel its most limpid and astonishing formulation. According to this doctrine, daena, who has the form of a very beautiful young girl, presides over the birth of each man. The daena is the celestial archetype in whose likeness each individual has been created, as well as the silent witness who accompanies moment. and observes us at every with of And yet the angel's face changes over time. Like the transformed

of the two daimons within each man - speak of a good genius and a bad genius, of a white (a/bus) corrupts us and inclines us toward one. The first pushes and coaxes us toward good; the second right to suggest that there is, in reality, one Genius who changes - by turns candid and shadowy, sometimes relationship wise and sometimes depraved. In other words, what changes is not Genius but our to him, turning from luminous and clear to shadwho it amiable, is then suddenly owy and opaque. Our own vital principle, the companion orients our existence and renders transformed

picture of Dorian Gray, it is imperceptibly

our every gesture, word, and tho~ght. Thus, at the moment

death, the soul is met by its angel, which has been transfigured by the soul's conduct into either a more beautiful creature or a horrendous demon. It then whispers:
"I am your daena,

the

one who has been formed by your thougbts, your deeds." In a vertiginous

your words, and

reversal, our life molds and out-

lines the archetype in whose image we are created. To some extent we all come to terms with Genius, with what resides in us but does not belong to us. Each person's character is engendered ed andlcft An author's depends deprived someone by the way he attempts to tum away from Genius, unexpressed, style -like inscribes a grimace on Ego's face. to flee from him. Genius, to the extent that he has been avoidthe grace displayed by any creatureThat is why when we love of evading both genius and

into a kind of silent, hidden outlaw who follows two genij side by side: one who cara harbinger the paradox of death, who

our every move like a shadow and secretly conspires against us. Roman art thus represents ries a burning overturns it. torch and another, moralization,

In this belated

of Genius fully

less on his genius than on the part of him that is of genius, his character. we actually love neither his genius nor his character between

emerges: if Genius is our life, insofar as it does not belong to us, then we must answer for something sponsible. own ruin both is and is not our face. The analogue guardian angelof Genius in the Christian tradition is the or, more precisely, two angels. One is good for which we are not reThe childlike face of our own salvation and of our

(and even less his ego) but his special manner of these poles, his rapid back-and-forth character.

(For example, the childlike grace with which a cerwould pace the

tain poet in Naples gulped down ice cream in secret, or the awkward, shambling way a certain philosopher

and holy, guiding us to salvation, and the other is wicked and

16

17

PROFANATIONS

room as he spoke, stopping corner of the ceiling.)

suddenly

and staring at a distant

CHAPTER

Two

Magic
But for each person there comes a time when he must be separated from his Genius. It can be at night, unexpectedly, knowing why, that his god has abandoned send Genius away in a moment moment when at the sound of a group of people passing by he feels, without him. Or perhaps we but no longer says to the of great lucidity, an extreme

and

Happiness

in which we know there is salvation

want to be saved - as when in The Tempest, Prospero Ariel: "Be free." This is the moment

when he relinquishes

spirit's charms and knows that the strength he has now is his own; it is the late and final stage when the old artist lays down his pen - and contemplates. What does he contemplate? Gestures: for the first time truly his own, devoid of every charm. No doubt life without Ariel loses its mystery, and yet somehow we know that now it can really belong to us; only now do we begin to live a purely human and earthly life, the life that did not keep its promises and, for that reason, can now give us infinitely more. This is exhausted and suspended penumbra night fulfilled.? long unlearning one, imperiously, time, the sudden in which we begin to forget about Genius; this is Did Ariel ever exist? What is that fading, disis true; only now does the very boy of the self begin - before the gangling his hesitations.

Walter Benjamin once said that a child's first experience world is not his realization that he cannot make magic."! The statement the influence of a twenty-milligram

of the

that "adults are stronger but rather was made under dose of mescaline, but that overwhelms children is

does not make it any less salient. It is, in fact, quite likely that the invincible sadness that sometimes born precisely from their awareness that tbey are incapable of magic. Whatever we can achieve through merit and effort, cannot make us truly happy. Only magic can do that. This did not escape the childlike genius of Mozart, Joseph Bullinger: "To Live respectably wbo clearly indicated and to live happily are the secret solidarity between magic and happiness in a letter to two very different things, and the latter will not be possible for me without some kind of magic; for this, something truly supernatural would have to happen,'? Like creatures in fables, children know that in order to be to keep the genie in the boule at one's happy it is necessary

tant music? Only the departure

returns to take up his blushing glances one by one and, one by

side, and have the donkey that craps gold coins or the hen that lays golden eggs in one's house. And no matter what the situation, it is much more important to know the exact place ancl the right words to say than to take the trouble to reach a goal
19

18

PROFANATIONS

MAGIC

AND

HAPPINESS

by honest means. Magic means precisely ness commensurate result of arrogance influencing

that no one can be

chantment

escapes from the hubris implicit in the conscioussince, in a certain sense, the happiness that

worthy of happiness and that, as the ancients knew, any happiwith man is always hubris; it is always the and excess. But if someone succeeds in

ness of happiness,

he knows he possesses is not his. Thus when Zeus assumes the likeness of Amphitryon Amphitryon. and unites with the beautiful Alcmene, as and lies entirely in enchantment, through the crooked he does not enjoy her as Zeus, nor even, despite appearances, His enjoyment only what has been obtained who is enchanted

fortune through trickery, if happiness depends not oneself to be truly and

on what one is but on a magic walnut or an "Open sesame!"then and only then can one consider blessedly happy. This childlike something wisdom, which affirms that happiness is not

paths of

magic can be enjoyed consciously

and purely. Only someone

can say "I" with a smile, and the only happi-

ness that is truly deserved is the one we could never dream of deserving. That is the ultimate reason for the precept that there is only one way to achieve happiness on this earth: to believe in the divine and not to aspire to reach it (there is an ironic variation of this in a conversation
US).4

that can be deserved, has always met with the objecthe difference that which then

tions of official morality. Take the words of Kant, the philosopher who was least capable of understanding between which strives toward happiness is inclination, limits this inclination wouldn't to the condition
."3 But

living with dignity and living happily: "That in you of your first being wor-

between

Franz Kafka and Gustav Janouch, only if is, pre-

thy of happiness is your reason

we (or the child within us)

when Kafka affirms that there is plenty of hope - but not for This apparently ascetic thesis becomes intelligible only for others (happiness we understand that happiness the meaning is reserved of this "not for us." It means not

know what to do with a happiness of which we were

worthy. What a disaster if a woman loved you because you deserved it! And how boring to receive happiness as the reward of work well done. That the bond linking magic and happiness is not simply immoral, that it can indeed testify to a higher ethics, is shown in the ancient maxim that whoever realizes he is happy has already ceased to be so. This means that happiness relationship with its subject. Someone has a paradoxical who is happy cannot or of a con-

cisely, for us) but that it awaits us only at the point where it was not destined for us. That is: happiness can be o L1I"S only through magic. At that point, when we have wrenched it away from fate, happiness coincides entirely with our knowing ourselves to be capable of magic, with the gesture we use to banish that childhood sadness once and for all. If this is so, if there is no other happiness than feeling capable of magic, then Kafka's enigmatic forth, because definition of magic becomes clear. He writes that if we call life by its right name, it comes "that is the essence of magic, which does not

know that he is; the subject of happiness is not a subject per se and does not obtain the form of a consciousness tion, the only one that allows someone know that he is. Whoever enjoys science, not even a good one. Here magic appears as an excepto be happy and to through ensomething

20

21

PROFANATIONS

create but summons." according

This definition

agrees with the ancient a science of secret

CHAPTER

THREE

tradition scrupulously followed by kabbalists and necromancers, to which magic is essentially

Judgment

Day

names. Each thing, each being, has in addition

to its manifest

name another, hidden name to which it cannot fail to respond. To be a magus means to know and evoke these archi-names. Hence the interminable discussions of names (diabolical or angelic) through which the necromancer ensures his mastery

over spiritual powers. For him, the secret name is only the seal of his power oflife and death over the creature that bears it. But according to another, more luminous tradition, the What quality fascinates and entrances captures the Last Judgment; me in the photographs in some way the world as it apIt is, of course, not a I grave, serious, or even like Mario Donwhat that 1 love? I believe it is this: for me, photography it represents pears on the last day, the Day of Wrath. love are ones that represent something secret name is not so much the cipher of the thing's subservience to the magus's sanctions its liberation speech as, rather, from language. the monogram The secret name was

the name by which the creature was called in Eden. When it is pronounced, - is shattered. every manifest name - the entire Babel of names That is why, according to this doctrine, magic is

question of subject matter. I don't mean that the photographs tragic. The photo can show any face, any object, or any event whatever. This is the case with photographers dero and Robert and photographing that happens" Capa, active journalists everything could be called photographicflanerie: who practice

a call to happiness. The secret name is the gesture that restores the creature to the unexpressed. not a knowledge In the final instance, magic is than when of names but a gesture, a breaking free from

the name. That is why a child is never more content

walking without any goal But "everything riding bicycles in

he invents a secret language. I-lis sadness comes less from ignorance of magic names than from his own inability to free himself from the name that has been imposed on him. No sooner does he succeed, no sooner docs he invent a new name, than he holds in his hands the laissez-passel' nameless. Happy, and without that grants him happiness. To have a name is to be guilty. And justice, like magic, is a name, the creature knocks at the gates of the land of the magi, who speak in gestures alone.

that happens.

- the faces of two women Day.

Scotland, a shop window in Paris - is called forth, summoned to appear on Judgment

There is one example that shows with absolute clarity how this has been true ever since the history of photography daguerreotype considered photographed began. The

Boulevard

du Temple is very well known; it is

in which a human figure apthe Boulevard du Temple,

the first photograph by Daguerre

pears. The silver plate represents

from the window of his studio at a

22

23

PROFANATIONS

JUDGMENT

DAY

busy moment be crowded cameras

in the middle of the day. The boulevard with people and carriages, required an extremely

should the

question here is a pagan, not Christian one. In Hades, the shades of the dead repeat the same gesture ad infinitum: on his wheel; the Danaides attempt sieve. But this is not a punishment; of an apokatastasts, Ixion turns in vain to carry water in a the pagan shades cannot be is the cipher of an existence.

and yet, because

of the period

long exposure

time, absolutely

nothing of this moving mass is visible. Nothon the sidewalk in A man stopped

ing, that is, except a small black silhouette

equated with the damned. Here, eternal repetition the infinite recapitulation

the lower left-hand corner of the photograph.

to have his shoes shined, and must have stood still for quite a while, with his leg slightly raised to place his foot on the shoeshiner's stool. I could never have invented a more adequate image of the Last Judgment. The crowd of humans - indeed, all of humanity - is concerns a single life: precisely this one and no other. - who is present, but it cannot be seen, because the judgment a single person, and immortalized A good photographer from the historicity knows how to grasp the eschatological or singularity of the photographed between event. I Dondero nature of the gesture - without, however, taking an ything away am thinking of the wartime correspondence and Capa, or of' the photograph

of East Berlin taken from the that Dondero Sarraute, took of

roof of the Reichstag the day before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Or of the (rightly famous) photograph the
nOllveall roman

And when has that life, that person, been picked out, captured, by the angel of the Last Judgment also the angel of photography? While making the most banal

authors - Nathalie

Samuel Beckcontain

ett, Claude Simon, Alain Robbe-Grillet an unmistakable thanks refers to another chronological historical

- outside the offices of date, and yet, this index now

the Editions de Minuit in 1959. All these photographs index, an indelible of the gesture, to the special power time.

and ordinary gesture, the gesture of having his shoes shined. In the supreme instant, man, each man, is given over forever to his smallest, most everyday gesture. And yet, thanks to the photographic lens, that gesture is now charged with the weight of an entire life; that insignificant or even silly moment collects and condenses in itself the meaning of an entire existence.

time, more actual and more urgent that any

But there is another aspect of the photographs compelled to mention. of exigency and lens subject shown in the photo demands concept tographed is particularly forgotten be confused with factual necessity. is completely because something important

I love that I am from us. The and must not pho-

It has to do with a certain exigency: the

J believe there is a secret relationship

photography.

between

gesture

The power of the gesture to summon and sum up moment, in photography. Walter his char-

entire orders of angelic powers resides in the photographic and has its locus, its opporlune Benjamin once wrote that Julien Green represented in the irrevocability of an infernal beyond.
I

Even if the person

today, even if his or her and that face

name has been erased forever from human memory - or, indeed, precisely of this - that person demand their name; they demand not to be forgotten.

acters with a gesture charged with destiny, that he fixed them 1 believe the hell in

24

2['

PROFANATIONS

JUDGMENT

DAY

Benjamin must have had something referring to the photographs

like this in mind when,

claiming that the resurrection its eidos, rather

concerns

the form of the body, is, in this

of David Octavius Hill, he wrote

than the body itself. Photography

that the image of the fishwife gives rise to an exigency, a demand for the name of that woman who was once alive.? It is perhaps because they could not bear this mute apostrophe the viewers of the first daguerreotypes felt they were being watched by the people portrayed. room where I work, on a piece of furniture there sits a photograph - a rather well-known that

sense, a prophecy of the glorious body. It is well known that Proust was obsessed with photography of the reIn response to his insistent

had to turn away - they (In the next to my desk, one, in factthat she is day.)

and that he went to great lengths to obtain photographs people he loved and admired. quests for a portrait, when he was twenty-two way of dedication

one of the boys he had fallen in love with years old, Edgar Aubel', finally gave Aubel' wrote, by
Illy

that shows the face of a young Brazilian girl, who seems to stare harshly at me. I know with absolute certainty and will be my judge, today as on the final judgment Dondero once expressed reservations

one to Proust. On the back of the photograph,

name is Might Have Been; J am also called No More, Too Late, Farewell. A
pretentious dedication, certainly, but it perfectly expresses the every photograph and grasps the real exigency that animates possible once again. Photography demands that we remember all this, and photo-

(and in English): Look at my face:

about two photograand Sebastiao Salconstruction; He opposed

phers he admired;

Henri Cartier-Bresson

that is always in the process of being lost, in order to render it

gado. In the first he saw an excess of geometrical in the second an excess of aesthetic both of them with his own conception story to be told or a geography way: the photographic ing aesthetic The photograph perfection.

of the human face as a us has noth-

to be explored. I feel the same

graphs testify to all those lost names, like a Book of Life that the new angel of the apocalypse - the angel of photographybolds in his hands at the end of all days, that is, every day.

exigency that interpellates

about it. It is, rather, a demand for redemption. is always more than an image: it is the site of a the sensible and the intelligible,

gap, a sublime breach between

between copy and reality, between a memory and a hope. Christian theologians concerned with the resurrection whether it happened of the

flesh repeatedly be resuscitated moment integrity

asked themselves in the condition

the body would to be in at the

of death (perhaps of its youth,

old, bald, missing a leg) or in the

But they were never able to find a satis-

factory answer. Origen cut short these endless discussions by

26

27

CHAPTER

FOUR

The Assistants

In Kafka's novels, we encounter as Gehiifen, "assistants"

creatures

who are referred to no and

or "helpers." But help seems to be the they never do anything but engage As for their appear-

last thing they are able to give. They have no knowledge, skills, and no "equipment"; in foolish behavior even sometimes and childish games; they are "pests"

"cheeky" and "lecherous:'

ance, they are so similar that they can only be told apart by their names (Arthur, Jeremiah); And yet they are attentive the adult faces, "of students Someone, they are "as alike as snakes." "quick" and "supple"; observers, almost"

they have sparkling eyes and, in contrast to their childish 'Nays, with long, thick beards. it's not clear who, has assigned them to us, and it from the enemy who do not know

isn't easy to get them off our backs. Tn sum, "we don't know who they are" - perhaps they are "emissaries" watch). But they look like angels, messengers the content (which would explain why they do nothing but lie in wait and of the letters they must deliver, but whose smile, whom Walter Bensimilar to the

whose look, whose very posture "seems like a message:' Each of us has known such creatures, jamin defines as "crepuscular"
8andhClrliCls

and incomplete,

of the Indian sages, who are half celestial genie, half

2

PROFANATIONS

THE

ASSISTANTS

demon. "None has a firm place in the world, or firm, inalienable outlines. There is not one that is not either rising or falling, none that is not trading neighbor; its qualities with its enemy or none that has not completed its period of time and

tagonists

go on to live happily

ever after. We learn nothing "crew" to whom, at botTry asking Prospero with the

more about them, this unclassifiable tom, the main characters - after he has abandoned

owe everything.

all his charms and returned

yet is unripe, none that is not deeply exhausted and yet is only at the beginning of a long existence,"! More intelligent and gifted than our other friends, always intent on notions and projects for which they seem to have an the necessary virtues, they still do not succeed in finishing an ything and are generally idle [senz 'opera swindler

other humans to his duchy - what life is like without Ariel. A perfect type of helper is Pinocchio, the marvelous puppet that Geppetto wants to make so that he can travel the world with him and thus earn a "crust of bread and a glass of wine."2 Neither dead nor alive, half golem and half robot, always ready to yield to temptation one moment and then to promise "to be of seriousness and out his legs" at a good from now on," this eternal archetype of the grace of the inhuman simply "stretches

J.

They embody the type of eternal student

or

who ages badly and who must be left behind in the about gesture, an unforeseen grace, a certain

end, even if it is against our wishes. And yet something them, an inconclusive mathematical nimbleness citizenship boldness in judgment

certain point and dies most shamefully, without ever becoming a boy. (This is in the first version of the story, before the author thought assistant it necessary to add an edifying conclusion.) with his "scrawny who describes Another Funland is Larnpwick, little frame, just when he realizes ears." Robert on If

and taste, a certain air of world and allude to a lost In this sense, they give

in their limbs or words - all these features indicate or an inviolable elsewhere.

that they belong to a complementary

like the new wick of a night-lamp," to his companions that Pinocchio has sprouted

us help, even though we can't quite tell what sort of help it is. It could consist precisely in the fact that they cannot be helped, or in their stubborn insistence that "there is nothing to be done for us." For that very reason, we know, in the end, that we have somehow betrayed them. Perhaps because children are incomplete erature is full of assistants and helpers, beings, children's litparallel and approxi-

and bursts out laughing

a pair of donkey's

Walser's assistants are made of the very same stuff - these figures who are irreparably work that is utterly and stubbornly busy collaborating superfluous, not to say indescribable.

they study - and they seem to study very hard - it is in order to become big fat zeros. And why should they bother to help with anything the world takes seriously? After all, it's nothing but madness. They prefer to take walks. And if they encounter a dog or some living creature on their walks, they whisper: "I have nothing to give you, dear animal; I would gladly give you something, if only I had it." Nevertheless, in the end, they lie down in a meadow to weep bitterly horn's existence:' over their "stupid green-

mate beings who are too small or too large, gnomes, wraiths, good giants, fairies, and capricious genies, talking crickets and snails, donkeys who defecate gold coins, and other enchanted creatures who miraculously forgotten by the narrator appear to whisk away the good litat the end of the story when the protle princess or Jean Sans Peur from danger. These figures are

30

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PROFANATIONS

THE

ASSISTANTS

One also finds assistants and helpers among the world of inanimate things. Everyone keeps certain useless and somewhat shameful objects - half souvenirs, wouldn't childhood, meant renounce could be an old plaything T -shirt that we continue for men's shirts. called Rosebud half talismans - which one the ravages of for anything in the world. Such an object that has survived

Mahdi makes his decisions and judgments

sultation

on the basis of conwho to Thanks

with them, since they are the true Knowers

really know what is there in the divine Reality." his helpers, the Mahcli can understand

the language of the ani-

mals and can extend his justice over both men and jinn. One of the qualities of the helper is, in fact, that he is a "translator"

a pencil box that still retains a lost scent, or a tiny to keep, for no reason, in the drawer For Charles Foster Kane, the sled of this sort. Or,

(mlltaljim)

of the language of God, which he renders into the of the divine language, of an incessant quality of the the "men Another

language of men. According to Ibn al-Arabi, the entire world is in fact nothing other than a translation theophany, a continuous revelation. and the helpers are, in this sense, the operators assistant is his "penetrating of the invisible realm,"

must have been something

think of the Maltese falcon, which for its pursuers turns out to be "the stuff that dreams are made of." Or, there is also the scooter engine that becomes a cream whipper in Alfred SohnRetheJ's magnificent these helper-objects, description of Naples. Where do they, to an unavowed Eden in for them, some ark in like the genizah case the name of these testimonies

vision," which recognizes

that is, the angels and the other mes-

sengers who hide in human and animal forms. But how can one recognize these helpers, these translators? If they hide among the faithful as foreigners, vision capable of distinguishing An intermediate creature memories.s who will have the the visionaries? the wQzir and life"

go in the end? Is there some storehouse which they will be collected God is written in one of them?

for eternity,

which Jews keep old, illegible books, justin

who exists between This "tenant

Chapter

366 of The Meccan

Revelations,

the masterwork of wazir;

of the

Kafka's assistants is the little hunchback in his childhood

that Benjamin evokes of the distorted nor the trickster

the great Sufi Ibn al-'Arabi, is dedicated Messiah."? These helpers vizier we have encountered characteristics of messianic

to "the helpers of the

(wlIzaJ"G " the plural

is not just the cipher of childish clumsiness, prayer from someone attention"

so many times in The Thollsand and time: they already belong to the they are foreigners among the

who steals the glass from someone who wants to drink and the who wants to pray. Rather, his appearis, in ance makes it so that whoever looks at him "can no longer pay to himself or to the little man. The hunchback of the forgotten; fact, the representative he presents himself in to do with the end to redemption. Dis-

One Nights) are men who, in profane time, already possess the
last day. Curiously - but perhaps for this very reason - they are chosen from among non-Arabs; Arabs, even if they speak their language. The MahdJ, the messiah who comes at the end of time, needs his helpers, who are in some ways his guides, even if they are, in truth, only the personifications of the qualities or "stations" of his wisdom. "The

order to lay claim to the aspect of oblivion that resides in every thing. This share of oblivion has something of time, just as carelessness is a precursor tortion,

the hump, and clumsiness are the forms things take in

32

PROFANATIONS

THE

ASSISTANTS

oblivion. What we have always already forgotten messiah comes, the distorted will be straightened,

is the Kingthe obstacle of its

thing that, in both collective forgotten measure at every moment. irrevocably of oblivion of what becomes carry in ourselves,

and individual It concerns

life, comes to be mass our lives, the waste that we

dom, we who live "as if we were not the Kingdom." When the will become easy, and the forgotten will be remembered

the unending

lost. Throughout

and ruin, the ontological

own accord. For it is said, "for them and their kind, the incomplete and the inept, to them hope will be given." The idea that the Kingdom is present in profane time in sinister and distorted forms, that the elements of the final state are to do with glory, that now appears we will have to hidden precisely in what today appears despicable and derisory, that shame, in sum, secretly has something is a profound messianic theme. Everything debased and worthless to us is the currency

far exceeds the small mercy of our memoBut this formless chaos of the forus like a silent golem is neither inert although in a different of the forgotten way. It is a nor accu-

ries and our consciousness. gotten that accompanies nor inefficacious.

On the contrary, it influences us just as much that, al though

as our conscious memories,

force and almost an apostrophe mulated as a patrimony, knowledge be remembered and therefore, forgettable mime's

it can neither be measured in terms of consciousness insistently and all consciousness.

governs the hierarchy of all What is lost demands not to or lost The assis-

redeem on the last day. And we will be guided toward salvation precisely by the companion who has lost his way. It is his face or that we will recognize in the angel who sounds the trumpet

and fulfilled but to remain forgotten for that reason alone, unforgettable.

tan t is at home in all this. He spells out the text of the unand translates it into the language of deaf-mutes. coupled with his impassive ambiguity. For the Hence his obstinate face. Hence, unforgettable preparing gesticulations

who carelessly drops the Book of Life from his hands. The bead of light that emerges from our defects and our Iittle abjections is nothing schoolmates other than redemption. In this sense, the naughty pictures to us who passed the first pornographic

too, his irreducible

is articulated

only in parody. The place of song is

under their school desks, or the sordid closet in which someone showed us his or her nudity assistants. for the first time, were also desires, the ones On the day of judgment, The assistants are our unfulfilled

empty. On every side and all around us, the assistants are busy the Kingdom.

we do not confess even to ourselves. they will come smiling toward That day, someone

us like Arthur and Jeremiah.

will count off our blushes like a collection

notice for paradise. To reign does not mean to fulfill. It means that the unfulfilled is what remains. The assistant relationship is the figure of what is lost. Or, rather, to what is lost. This relationship concerns of our every-

34

35

CHAPTER

FIVE

Parody

In her novel Arturo's Island, Elsa Morante meditation

presents a concealed

on parody that very likely makes a decisive stateas an insulting epithet for one of the Gerace, the idol and it from
I

ment about her poetics. The term. Parody (with a capital P) appears rather unexpectedly central characters of the novel, Wilhelm

father of Arturo, the story's narrator.

When Arturo hears the

word for the first time (or, rather, when he translates with his father), he is uncertain where he consults a dictionary tion: "Imitation This intrusion a literary the term reappears separation revelation of someone

the secret language of whistles that he believes he alone shared of its meaning. In order not to home, and finds the following definicomic, or grotesque."2 of chance. Especially since that leads to Arturo's The forget it, he mentally repeats it to himself as he returns

else's verse in wbich what is seri-

ous in the other becomes ridiculous, text cannot be a matter

of a definition from a manual of rhetoric into shortly before the end of the novel, in an

episode that contains the final revelation

from his father, the island, and his childhood.

is this: "Your father is a Parody!"3 Recalling the dicArturo futilely searches the thin, gracious features that might

tionary definition,

face of his father for the comic or grotesque

justify the epithet. A little later, he realizes that his father is in 37

PROFANATIONS

PARODY

love with the man who insulted

him. The name of a literary involving the object of the serious into the homosexuality voice (which is

and in addition to the serious argument,

they inserted other

genre is here the cipher of an inversion of desire rather than the transposition

ridiculous things. Parody is therefore an inverted Rhapsody that transposes the sense into something ridiculous by changing the words. It was similar to Epirrhema and Parabasis. Scaligero was one of the sharpest minds of his age. His definition contains certain important elements, such as the referthe ences to the Homeric poets (rhapsody) to which we will return in a moment. tent model that is subsequently serious into something elements and to comic parabasis, It also establishes on a preexisof formal are introprovoking. and the into the lit-

comic. It could also be said that the character's the literary obviously accordance genre with which the narrative also the voice of the author) with a specific allegorical intention,

is a cipher that indicates he is nothing other than a symbol for has fallen in love. In for which it is has made a

not difficult to find precedents almost unique in the modern ered from this perspective, of the author's desperate

in medieval texts but which is novel, Elsa Morante

'5

two canonical features of parody: the dependence transformed

literary genre - parody - the protagonist Arturo

of her book. Consid-

from something contents

Island appears as the story in the begin-

comic, and the preservation

and childish Jove for a literary object

into which new and incongruous

that seems highly serious and almost legendary form in the end. The definition

duced. From here it is a short step to modern

manuals' defini-

ning, but that reveals itself to be accessible only in a parodic

tion, such as the one that Arturo finds so thought Medieval sacred parody such as the missa potatowm Coena Cypiiani, which introduce crude contents

of parody that Arturo finds in the dictionary one. It comes from a rhetorical tradition crystallization

is

urgy of the mass or in to the text of the Bible, are in this sense perfect examples of parody. The classical world, however, was familiar with another, more ancient, meaning that situated parody in the sphere of musical technique. and speech, speech. introduce This definition supposed made a distinction to correspond between song of melos and logos. In Greek music, in fact, melody to the rhythm of the Homeric poems,

a relatively modern whose exemplary teenth century

appears at the end of the sixwho

in the work of Giulio Cesare Scaligero,

devotes an entire chapter definition centuries:

of his Poetics to parody. Scaligero's the tradition for

provided the model that dominated

was originally Just as Satire derives from Tragedy and Mime from Comedy, so does Parody derive from Rhapsody. Indeed, when the rhapsodes interrupted their recitation, performers entered who, out of playfulness and in order to spur the souls of the listeners, inverted and overturned everything that had come before .... For that reason, these songs were called paioidous, because alongside

In the case of the recitation discordant melodies,

when this traditional

link is broken and the rhapsodes begin to it is said that they are singing informs

para ten oiden, against (or beside) the song. Aristotle us that the first to introduce was Hegemon

parody into rhapsody in this sense

of Thasos." We know that his mode of recitation

38

39

PROFANATIONS

PARO

DY

provoked irrepressible

fits of laughter among the Athenians.

It

as evident orously

as they are substantial:

the object that she must explanation that she borrowed

is said that the either player Oinopas introduced lyric poetry also by separating split between who composed song and language appears complete

parody into in Callias,

describe - the innocent unnarratable.

life, that is, life outside history - is rigThe precocious

the music from the words. The

gives of it in a fragment from 1950 - an explanation from the Judeo-Christian with the animals, "parodic," myth - is definitive into a history

a song in which words give way to the recita-

for her poetics: that does not is, in this sense,

tion of the alphabet (beta alpha, beta eta, and so on). According to this more ancient meaning of the term, then, parody designates the rupture of the "natural" bond between music and language, the separation odic loosening of the traditional Breaking this link liberates of song from speech. Or,

man was driven from Eden; he lost his own place and, together was thrown belong to him. The very object of narration

that is, out of place, and the writer can only repeat she must necessarily resort to childvices", as the author suggests at must therefore count on well-

conversely, of speech from song. It is, in fact, precisely this parlink between music and logos in which that made possible the birth of the art of prose with Gorgias. a para, a space beside, prose takes its place. This means that literary prose carries in itself the mark of its separation that, according etiam from song. The "obscure song" to Cicero, is felt in a prose speech (est autem of the natural

and mimic the intimate parody of this object. Since she wants to evoke the unnarratable, ish means and to "novelistic over Arturo's informed acters voice. Morante

the end of the book in one of the rare moments when she takes readers to fill in and supplement, and Arturo as it were, the unseem to come are half Cuore

bearably stereotypical from illustrated

and parodic quality of many of her charhimself, books. Her narratives

in dicendo quuiam catitus obscurior) is, in this sense, a

who, like Useppe children's

lament for this lost music, for the disappearance place of song.s The notion that parody constitutes

and half Treasure Island, half fable and half mystery." The notion that life can be presented a mystery," theatrical in literature only in

the stylistic key to Moran-

te's world is certainly nothing new. Reference has been made in this respect to "serious parody." The concept of "serious parody" is obviously contradictory, not because parody is not a serious matter (indeed, at times it is extremely serious) but because it cannot claim to be identiand thus it cannot deny its a direct repfied with the parodied work; it also cannot deny being necessarily beside the song (para-oiden), own not taking place. However, there may be great seriousness in the reasons that drive the parodist to renounce resentation of his or her object. For Morante, these reasons are

terms of a mystery is a theorem that is very fitting for Morante ("Thus life remained departure). the inititated attended mirrors says Arturo before his last toys: We know that in the case of the pagan mysteries events that involved source (an ill-intentioned and on the intimate defines that

tops, pinecones,

them as puerilia 1udicra). aspects of every mystery binds mystery

It is useful to reflect on the childish solidarity a mystery, one can

to parody. In approaching

offer nothing but a parody; any other attempt into bad taste and bombast.

to evoke it falls

In this sense, we can call the

40

4.1

PROFANATIONS

PARODY

liturgy of the mass, the representation modem

par excellence

of the

repeated

struggles

with the enigmatic

old Grinberge.

These sacra-

mystery, parodic. This is supported they have been preserved

by the countless

struggles unfailingly

end in a sort of mock scatalogical like a "true gentleman":

medieval sacred parodies which exhibit such a lack of profanatory intention of the monks. become lucid threshold by the faithful hands can only on the "I am in Faced with mystery, artistic creation in the sense in which Nietzsche,

ment, which Audigier undergoes Grinberge a decouvert

et cul et con

caricature,

et sor le vis Ii ert a estupon; du cul Ii chiet la merde a grant foison. Quans Audigier se siet sor un fumier envers, Et Grinberge
SOl'

of madness, wrote to Jacob Burckhardt:

God, I made this caricature;

I would rather be a professor

Basel than God, but I cannot push my egoism that far,"? It is through a sort of probity that the artist, feeling himself unable to push his egoism to the point of wanting unnarratable, The institution to represent the assumes parody as the very form of mystery. of parody as the form of mystery of the parodic countertexts perhaps of the of

lui qui li froie les ners.

ii. foiz li fist baiser son cul ainz qu'il fust ters. rCrinberge uncovered her ass and cunt and squatted down over his face. Shit fell from her ass in great profusion. While Audigier lay down on a dungheap, Grinberge sat on him and rubbed his ankles. Twice she had him kiss her ass until it was wiped cleaned.]" This is less a return to the womb or an initiate's of which have precedents in folklore, trial, both in-

defines the most extreme chivalric scatology. preserved existence intention

Middle Ages, in which the aura of mystery is converted I am referring to Jludigier,

at the center

into the most unrestrained a poem in Old French and entire wi thin

composed sometime around the end of the twelfth century and in a single manuscript. of its antihero that is resolutely The genealogy and protagonist are inscribed

than an audacious

version of the stakes involved in the chivalric quest and, more generally, of the object of courtly love, which is abruptly taken from the prestigious sphere of the sacred to the profane site of the dunghill. It is even possible that the unknown author of the poem is thus doing nothing other than making crudely explicit a parodic intention that separates already present in chivalric literature and love poetry: to confuse and render indiscernible the sacred and the profane, the sublime and the base. The poetic dedication a correspondence between that opens Arturo's island establishes the "small celestial island" that is the threshold

a constellation

cloacal. His father, Turgibus, / where the people are in through of whom get out again through heir, we know that

is lord of Cocuce, "a soft country a stream Audigier

shit up to their elbows. / I got there by swimming of crap, / and I couldn't any other hole." Concerning this noble gentleman,

shows himself to be a worthy

"when he shit all over his clothes, / he stuck his fingers in the crap, and sucked on them." But the true parodic nucleus of the poem is found in the imitation investiture, of the ceremony of knightly which unfolds in a dung pit, and, above all, in the

love and sexuality,

42

43

PROFANATIONS

PARODY

the setting of the novel (childhood?) spondence in a parodic

and limbo. But this correlimbo there is no E1y-

how parody stituent

(here too a serious

form)

is an essential

con-

has a bitter codicil: "Outside

of Dante's style, which alms to produce a double that But the presence of a parodic strain in Italof their is revealed to them through

sium:'9 Bitter, because it implies that happiness can exist only form (as limbo, not as Elysium - and this is yet treatises on limbo shows, beFathers conceived of the another exchange of places). A reading of the theological yond any doubt,

is almost equal in dignity to the passages of sacred scripture that it reproduces.l'' ian literature language. goes even deeper. All poets are enamored

But usually something

that the Church

the language that enraptures

them and occupies them so comat a certain moment - somewith their lanto them but - of reveals nothing

"first circle" as a parody of both paradise and hell, of beatitude as well as damnation. in themselves It is a parody of paradise insofar as it constain - children who died before hell. of in a tains creatures who, like the blessed, are innocent and yet carry the original being baptized or righteous pagans who could not have known. The most ironically parodic moment, According to the theologians, limbo undergoes for the damned, perpetual constitutes however, concerns an inhabitant the punishment

pletely: the divine, love, the good, the city, nature .... With the Italian poets - at least beginning guage alone, and this language something else that is peculiar, thing peculiar happens: they become enamored

itself. And this is the cause - or perhaps the consequence

namely that the Italian poets

hate their language as much as they love it. That is why, in their case, parody does not simply insert more or less comic content into a serious form, but parodies language itself, so to speak. It thus introduces a split into language - or discovers a split in in love), which amounts bilingualism to the same culture of Italian literary language (and therefore thing. The persistent (the split between

cannot be an afflictive one, like that reserved but must be a privative one, consisting punishments,

inability to perceive God. This lack, though, which the first of the infernal does not of limbo pain, as it does the damned. Since and not the supernatural good of the lack of the highest

cause the residents

they have only natural consciousness one that derives from baptism,

Latin and the vulgate and, later, with the the dead language and the certainly has a constiand the in a poetically grammar language and dialect) between

gradual decline of Latin, between living language, tutive mother literary

does not cause them the sligh test regret. Thus the creatures limbo convert the greatest punishment this joy is certainly Hence, however, an extreme

into a natural joy, and

parodic function in this sense. Whether mode, like the opposition

and special form of parody.

the veil of sadness that covers the inviolate limbo, conorgies of the

tongue in Dan te, in elegiac and pedantic

forms, as in into

island "like some grey thing," as Morante sees it. The "house of the kids," whose very name evokes the children's tains, along with the memory of the homosexual man from Amalfi, a parody of innocence. In a certain sense, the entire tradition stands under the sign of parody. Guglielmo of Italian literature GOIni has shown

the J-fypnerotomachia what is essential

Pohpiuli, or in crude forms, as in Folengo,

in each case is the ability to introduce

language a tension which parody uses to install, as it were, its central power source. It is not difficult to see the results of this tension in twentieth-century literature. Parody goes from being a literary genre

44

45

PROFANATIONS

PARODY

to the very structure ture expresses

of the linguistic medium in which literawho mobilize this dualism as a with writers the nonplace who, in of song and

regard to language, an integral monolinguism cating, and the differences elimination in meter

(Latin and popuplus the into a

itself. Writers

lar language are separate to the point of no longer communiare abolished) the unattainable of the loved object's unattainability (obviously not

sort of "discord" internal to language (Carlo Emilio Gadda and Giorgio Manganelli) (Giovanni Tommaso song. If the presupposition contains an indubitable taneously complicated of the object's unattainability parodic intention. is essential can be contrasted celebrate verse or in prose, parodically Landolfi).

in a realistic sense, but by transforming cadaver - indeed, into a specter).

Pascoli and, in a different

way, Elsa Morante

The dead aura [l'aura mortal

In both cases, however,

it is taken for

becomes the proper object of poetry, and one that it is impossible to parody. Exit parodic. Incipit literatura. Repressed parody reappears, however, in a pathological form. The fact that the first biography of Laura was written It announces by an the ancestor of the Marquis de Sade, who includes her in his genealogy, is not merely an ironic coincidence. of the Canzoniere. Pornography, work of the Divine Marquis as the most implacable revocation which maintains the intangiwith which it to look at - is bility of its own fantasy in the same gesture brings it closer - in a mode that is unbearable the eschatological form of parody.

granted that one sings - or speaks - only alongside language or

to parody, then the poetry of the troubadours and childish character

and the stilnovisti of its formality.

It reflects the simul-

L' amor de lonh is a parody that guarantees the separation of the

object from that with which it seeks to be united. This is also true on the linguistic level. Metrical preciosity and trobat clus establish transform differences signification of level and polarities also emerge in language tensions. It is that into a field of unresolved

The critic Franco Fortini suggests applying the formula "serious parody" not only to Morante recommends oped further. imity with those of Morante. At one point, but to Pasolini as well. He could be develon a that we read Pasolini's late works in close proxThe suggestion Pasolini not only carried

But polar tensions

on the erotic plane.

always aston ishing to find an obscene and burlesque drive alongside a more refined spirituality, often in the same person (the exemplary case is Daniel Arnaut, whose obscene sirvetites never ceases to raise difficult problems for scholars). The poet, obsessively occupied with keeping the Jove object at a distance, lives in a symbiotic Moclernlove parody. Petrarch's from the troubadour relationship with the parodist, who systematisign of cally inverts his intention. poetry is born under the ambiguous Catizonieie, tradition, which resolutely is an attempt turns away with

dialogue with Morante (whom he ironically calls Basilissa in his poetry), but also more or less consciously lian poems, his incongruous footsteps of Morante. parodied her work. Indeed, Pasolini, too, began with a linguistic parody (his Friuuse of the Roman dialect) in the giving it the weight of life bears a split if we consider the With his shift to the cinema, though, h Like language,

displaced the parody onto its contents, a metaphysical signification.

to save poetry

from parody. His formula

is both simple and effective:

within itself (the analogy is not surprising,

46

47

PROFANATIONS

PARODY

theological equation between life and the word that profoundly marks the Christian comforts of religion" world). The poet can live "without the (to quote the title of an unpublished to Pasolini's cult of Sandro to the tril-

Perhaps there is no better well as the distance - between of creation

place to grasp the affinity - as these two symmetrical poles to

than in the passage that leads from Beatrice

novel by Morante) but not without those of parody. Morante's cult of Umberto Saba corresponds Penna; the "long celebration respond to the sanctification something function. unrepresentable And, finally, pornography of vitality in Morante" of Ninetto.

Laura. By allowing the object of his love to die, Dante certainly takes a step beyond the poetry of the troubadours. detaching But his gesture remains parodic: the death of Beatrice is a parody that, by the name from the mortal creature who bears it, is and, in the end, the triumph of love rather than and the stttnoonly to able to gather up its beatific essence. Hence the absolute lack of mourning stitution
visti. flatus

ogy of life. The angelic little boys who must save the world corIn both cases, there is of parody. to in the very foundation

appears here too in its apocalyptic it would not be illegitimate

death. Laura's death, however, is the death of the parodic conof the love object for the troubadours henceforth becomes The object
I'ocis.

From this perspective,

read Pasolini's Solo as a parody of Morante's Parody maintains a special relationship always constituted most beautiful announces poems in Morante's

History,"

only an "aura,"

'with fiction, which has One of the it

In this sense, writers

distinguish

themselves

according

the distinctive trait of literature.

the way in which they inscribe mediate solutions

themselves

into one of two

collection Alibi is devoted

great classes: parody and fiction, Beatrice and Laura. But interare possible as well: one can parody fiction vocation), or one can feign parody of parody further, (which is Elsa Morante's

to fiction (and she knew that she was a master of fiction); and condenses mi cingo, fatua veste" ["With adorn myself"]." to Pasolini, Morante's you, fiction, fatuous

its musical theme: "Di te, finzione, dress, I out that, according

(which is the gesture of Manganelli and Landolfi). If we pursue the metaphysical vocation taking its gesture to an extreme, we can say that it presupposes a dual tension in being. In other words, the parodic split in language would necessarily - ontology correspond to a duplication of being would correspond to a paraontology. Alfred Jarry

And it has been pointed

language itself is pure fiction (it "preits polar opposite. This is the To real for

tends that Italian exists"). In truth, parody not only does not coincide with fiction, but constitutes because, unlike fiction, parody does not call into question reality of its object; indeed, this object is so intolerably parody that it becomes necessary (or "as if not"). erature, between to keep it at a distance.

once defined his beloved child "pataphysics," what is added on to metaphysics.

as the science of

In the same way, one can say

fiction's "as if," parody opposes its drastic "this is too much" Thus, if fiction defines the essence of literaof litsuspended between reality and fiction, ture, parody holds itself, so to speak, on the threshold stubbornly word and thing.

that parody is the theory - and practice - of that in language and in being which is beside itself - or, the being-beside-itself of every being and every discourse. impossible - at least for modern dic opening of a space alongside Just as metaphysics experience is thought - except as the parosensible (but a

48

49

PROFANATIONS

PARODY

space that must remain rigorously ously impracticable terrain,

empty), parody is a notori-

(which is physically represented by the Likewise, in literature, the reader,

1ogeion) and thus becomes

voice turns to

in which the traveler constantly

nothing more than an exchange, simply a human conversation. when the narrative as in the famous apostrophes to reflect, from this perspective, of the poet to the of parody. It will be on the eminent to

knocks against limits and aporias that he cannot avoid but that he also cannot escape. If ontology tween language is the more or less felicitous and world, then parody, relationship beas paraontology,

reader, this is a parabasis, an interruption necessary function Morante. of parabasis in the modern

expresses language's inability to reach the thing and the impossibility of the thing finding its own name. The space of parody - which is literature - is therefore necessarily and theologically marked by mourning and by the distorted grimace Gust as

novel, from Cervantes

Called forth and carried away from his place and his

position, the reader accedes not to the place of the author but to a sort of space between worlds. If parody, the split between song and speech and between in parabasis language and world, commemoatopia becomes, for a morates in reality the absence of a proper place for human speech, this heart-wrenching ment, Jess painful and is canceled out into a homeland

the space of logic is marked by silence). And yet, in this way, parody attests to what seems to be the only possible truth of language. At a certain point in his definition In the technical of parody, Scaligero menlanguage of Greek comedy,

[si can-

cella in pC/tria], as it were. As Arturo says of his island: "l would

rather pretend

tions parabasis.

lflngereJ that it doesn't exist. So I'd better not

when it can't be seen any longer. You has come ?"

parabasis (or parekbasis) deSignates the moment when the actor exits the scene and the chorus turns directly to the spectators. In order to do this, in order to speak to the audience, the chorus moves over (pal'Obaino) to the part of the stage called the lopeion, the place of discourse. In the gesture of parabasis, the representation the tension encounters between is dissolved and and parody actors and spectators, author and audience exchange roles. Here, stage and reality is relaxed what is perhaps its only resolution. of parody - both a transgression Friedrich Parabasis is an

look until the moment

tell me when that moment

Alifhebung

and a completion.

For this reason,

Schlegel, al ways attenti ve to every art, sees parabasis as the The staged dialogue - intiopens a space off to the side

possible way of ironically surpassing the Romantic form par excellence. divided-

point where theater goes beyond itself and approaches the novel, mately and parodically

50

5l

CHAPTER

SIX

Desiring

There is nothing simpler and more human than to desire. Why, then, are om desires unavowable end up hiding them, constructing within ourselves, and waiting. We are unable to put our desires into language because we have imagined them. In reality, the crypt contains only images, like a picture book for children who do not yet know how to read, like the lmagerie d'Epinal of an illiterate image we have made of it for ourselves. To communicate tedious one's desires to someone one's dreams without images is But people. The body of in desire is the desires is an image. And what is unavowable for us? Why is it so difficult a crypt for them somewhere embalmed, suspended for us to put them into words? It is so difficult, in fact, that we where they remain

brutal. To communicate (like recounting

one's images without

one's desires is the imagined

or one's travels).

both of these are easy to do. To communicate

desires and the desired images, on the other hand, is a more difficult task. And that is why we put it off until later. Until the moment when we begin to understand 53 that desire will remain

PROFANATIONS

forever unfulfilled - and that this unavowed desire is ourselves, forever prisoners in the crypt.

CHAPTER

SEVEN

Special
The messiah comes for our desires. He separates they have already been fulfilled. Whatever them from images in order to fulfill them. Or rather, in order to show we have imagined, images of we have already had. There remain the (unfulfillable)

Being

what is already fulfilled. With fulfilled desires, he constructs hell; with unfulfillable images, limbo. And with imagined desire, with the pure word, the beatitude of paradise. Medieval philosophers qui red in particular were fascinated by mirrors. the nonbeing, They inof these into the nature of the images that appear substances or accidents? And how does

in them: What is the being, or rather images? Are they bodies or nonbodies, ow? Are they endowed

Should they be identified with colors, with light, or with shadwith local movement? the mirror receive their form? ertainl y, the being of images must be very peculiar. If they were simply body or substance, how could they occupy the space already occupied by the body of the mirror? And if their place is the mirror, would we not also be displacing the images by displacing the mirror? First of all, the image is not a substance but an accident that is found in the mirror, not as in a place but as in a subject (quod est in specula ut in subiecto). substance, For medieval philosophers, being in a subject is the mode of being assumed by what is without that is, what exists not in itself but in something between the image and of love, it is not surprising substance:') 55 that both Dante and other than itself. (Given the proximity the experience dent without 54

Cavalcanti were led to define love in the same way: as an "acci-

PROFANATIONS

SPECIAL

BEING

Two characteristics

are derived from the insubstantial reality and cannot be described

naas

root is also found in speculum pel'spicuus (spectacle). (transparent, ing itself to be seen), specimen In philosophical

(mirror), spectrum

(image, ghost), (beautiful, giv-

ture of the image. Since the image is not a substance, not possess any continuous moving by means of any local movement. ence of the one who contemplates

it does

clearly seen), speciosus terminology,

(example, sign), and spectaculum species was used to

Rather, it is generor the presso

ated at every moment according to the movement created anew according to the presence

translate the Greek eidos (as genus was used to translate genos); hence the sense the term takes on in natural science (animal or plan t species) term signifies and in the language "commodities" of commerce, where the (particularly in the sense of

it: "Just as light is always of the illuminator, each time (semper

do we say that the image in the mirror is generated according to the presence of the one who looks." The being of the image is a continuous nova generatur), stance. Each moment,

drugs and spices) and, later, money (especes). The image is a being whose essence is to be a species, a visibility or an appearance. A being is special if its essence coincides with insubstantial. It does not have a its being given to be seen, with its aspect. Special being is absolutely proper place, but it occurs in a subject and is in this sense like a

generation

a being [essere] of generation

ancl not of sub-

it is created anew, like the angels who,

according to the Talmud, sing the praises of God and immediately sink into nothingness. The second characteristic tennined of the image is that it cannot be deof an

habitus

or a mode of being, like the image in a mirror. of each thing is its visibility, that is, its pure with its own A being is special if it coincides

according to the category of quantity; it is not, propetJormae).

In itself, it can-

The species intelligibility.

erly speaking, a form or an image but rather the "aspect image or of a form" (species imaginis not be described are therefore

becoming visible, with its own revelation. The mirror is the place where we discover that we have an image and, at the same time, that this image can be separate from us, that our species or imago does not belong to us. Between the perception of the image and the recognition of oneself in it, there is a gap, which the medieval poets called love. In this sense, Narcissus's shocking realization mirror is the source of love, the fierce and that the image is and is not our image. if one recognizes oneself in the and loved in it - if

as long or wide, but instead as "having only of the image quantities but merely aspects or vel c!ispositiones). of the expression has the form of a

the aspect of length and width." The dimensions not measurable species, modes of being and "habits" This characteristic ethos - is the most interesting "being in a subject." species, a usage, a gesture. (habitus

- being able to refer on Iy to a "habit" or an signification What is in a subject

It is never a thing, but always and

If the gap is eliminated,

only a "kind of thing" [specie c!i cosa]. The Latin term species, which means "appearance," "aspect," or

image but without also being misrecognized

only for an instant - it means no longer being able to love; it means believing that we are the masters of our own species and that we coincide with it. If the interval between perception "vision," derives from a root signifying "to look, to see:' This

S6

S7

PROFANATIONS

SPECIAL

BEING

and recognition internalized

is indefinitely

prolonged,

the image becomes

established

rules, but the notion

that individuals

constitute

as a fantasy and love falls into psychology. intention. of each the

species and belong together be reassuring. Nothing

in a homogeneous

class tends to

In the Middle Ages, species was also called intentio, The term names the internal tension (intus tensio)

is more instructive

than this double meaning. The itself to the gaze,

species is what presents

and communicates

being, that which pushes it to become an image, to communicate itself. The species is nothing other than the tension, love with which each being desires itself, desires to persevere in its own being. In the image, being and desire, existence and conatus coincide perfect! y. To love another being means to

what renders visible and, at the same time, what can - and must, at all costs - be fixed in a substance and in a specific difference in order to constitute an identity. eminently

Originally, persona meant "mask," that is, something ological, psychological, and social processes

desire its species,

that is, to desire the desire with which it in its being. In this sense, special being is like

"special." Nothing shows more clearly the meaning of the thewith which the linking the The person is invested than the fact that the Christian theologians used this term to translate mask to a substance person is the containment the Greek hypostasis, of the species, anchoring the species). (three persons in a single substance).

desires to persevere

the being that is common or generic, and this is something the image or the face of humanity.

The species does not subdivide the genus; it exposes it. The being that desires and is desired becomes species, makes itself visible, within the genus. And special being does not mean the individual, identified by this or that quality which belongs exclusively and to it. On the contrary, it means a being insofar as it is whatever being [essere qualunque], a being such that it is - generically indifferently out allowing any of them to identify it. "Whatever Specious "untrue, being is desirable" is a tautology. and only later came to mean as that which - each one of its qualities, adhering to them with-

it in a sub-

stance in order to identify it. Identity papers contain a photograph (or some other means of capturing

Everywhere the special must be reduced to the personal and the personal to the substantial. The transformation of the species into a principle of identity and classification inal sin of our culture, its most implacable uvo]. Something is personalized is the orig[disposiapparatus

- is referred to as an identityany other,

at the cost of sacrificing its specialriess. A being - a face, a gesture, an event - is special when, without resembling it resembles

first meant "beautiful" apparent." Species

all the others. Special being is delightful, because

to common use, but it cannot be an use nor enjoyment is and But neither

was first defined

it offers itself eminently

makes visible and only later became the principle of classification and equivalence. "To be special ifar specie]" can mean "to surprise and astonish" (in a negative sense) by not fitting into

object of personal property. jealousy.

possible with the personal; there can be only appropriation

58

r9

PROFANATIONS

The jealous confuse the special with the personal; of herself. The model wife brutalizes herself. Special being communicates and is constituted transformed of jealousy.

the brutal

CHAPTER

EIGHT

confuse the personal with the special. The jeune fille is jealous

The Author

as Gesture

nothing but its own communicabecomes separated from itself sphere. The special is of

bility. But this communicability into spectacle.

in an autonomous

The spectacle is the separation

generic being, that is, the impossibility

of love and the triumph On February

22, 1969, Michel Foucault presented

the lecture

"What Is an Author?" to the members and guests of the Societe Francaise de Philosophie.! of The Order Three years earlier, the publication the lecture,

if Things

had made him a celebrity. In the audiand Jacques Lacan), with excitement who's speaking, as a vvay to forWhat is in

ence (which included Jean Wahl, who introduced Maurice de Gandillac, Lucien Goldmann, it was easy to confuse fashionable curiosity matter

about the topic to be discussed. Foucault began his lecture with a quote from Samuel Beckett ("What someone mulate an indifference question expression in writing, said what matter who's speaking")2

toward the author that would serve as writing. Foucault suggested, is not so much the

the basis of an ethics of contemporary

of a subject as the opening of a space in which the of his absence,"! quote contains someone a to evoke the secret theme said

writing subject does not cease to disappear: "The trace of the writer is found only in the singularity But in its very enunciation contradiction of the lecture. remaining "What matter that seems ironically the Beckett

who's speaking,

what matter who's speaking." There is thus someone who, while anonymous and faceless, proffered this statement, of someone without whom the thesis denying the importance 61

60

PROFANATIONS

THE

AUTHOR

AS

GESTURE

the one who speaks could not have been formulated. nevertheless affirms his irreducible necessity.

The same

ecuting

and punishing

the author of a text; the possibility

of

gesture that deprives the identity of the author of all relevance

distinguishing the possibility

and selecting discourses in literary and scientific of authenticating texts by constituting of determining who occupy them as their

texts, to which various modes of the same function correspond; of his who a canon, or, conversely, apocryphal character; simultaneously the possibility subjects

At this point, Foucault goes on to clarify the meaning operation. It is based on the distinction the author between that are often confused: as a real individual

two notions

the dispersal of the enunciati ve function different a transdiscur-

into several

remains rigorously out of the picture, and the author-function, on which Foucault focuses his analysis. The name of an author is not simply a proper name like any other, neither at the level of description nor at the level of designation. If I learn, for example, that Pierre Dupont for one reason or another, nonetheless does not have blue eyes, or that the proper name Pierre Dupont

places; and finally, the possibility of constructing the author as a "founder of discursivity"

sive function which, beyond the limits of his work, constitutes (Marx is far more than the author of Capital, just as Freud is more than the author of

The Interpretation of Dreams).

he was not born in Paris, or that he is not a doctor as I believed, Two years later, when he presented lecture at the State University cault proposed author-individual an indefinite principle circulation, a modified version of the between the does not cease referring to the same person. But if of New York at Buffalo, Fou"The author is nol

I discover that Shakespeare did not write the tragedies attributed to him and that instead he wrote Francis Bacon's Novum

an even more drastic opposition and the author-function. source of significations

Organllm, then it cannot be said that the function of the name

Shakespeare has not changed. The author's name does not refer simply to civil status; "it does not pass from the interior discourse to the real and exterior instead, and regime of circulation certain number therefore of a individual who produced it";

that fill the work; the one delimits, excludes, de-

author does not precede his works. He is a certain functional by which, in our culture, the free manipulation, selects: in short, the principle by which one impedes the free the free composition,

it is located "at the edges of the text," whose status it defines within a given society. "As a endowed with the 'author funcis

result, we could say that in a civilization like our own there is a of discourses tion' while others are deprived of it .... The author function characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, in by and functioning of certain discourses within a society." of the author-function sanctioned regime of appropriation

composition, and recornposition of fiction:' In this division between the author-subject ments that actualize this subject's function cault's strategy is marked by a profound on subjectivity,

and the arrangein society, FouOn the one

gesture.

hand, he repeats several times that he has never ceased working while on the other hand, the subject as a living that constitute this subject and the of individual is present in his research only through the objective processes of subjectivation apparatuses that inscribe and capture it in the mechanisms

Hence the various characteristics our time: a particular

the author's rights and, at the same time, the possibility of pros-

62

63

PROFANATIONS

THE

AUTHOR

AS

GESTURE

power. This is probably lute indifference Foucault

why hostile

critics have reproached for both an absoand a deindividual

yet he is attested to only through the traces of his absence. But in what way can an absence be singular? And what does it mean fOTan individual to occupy the place of a dead man, to leave his own traces in an empty place? There is perhaps only one text in Foucault's work where this difficulty emerges explicitly and thematically and where the in all its splenillegibility of the subject appears for a moment ceived as the preface to an anthology prison moment records, and lettres de cachet,

Foucault, not without a certain incoherence, to the flesh-and-blood perspective cidedly aestheticizing

with regard to subjectivity. aware of this apparent des phisubin the following

was in any case perfectly

aporia. In the early 1980s, writing in the Dictionnaire

losopbes, he characterized

his own method

way: "Refusing the philosophical making an abstraction an experience

recourse to a constituent

dor. I am referring to "Lives of Infamous Men," originally conof archival documents, in which, at the very with

ject does not amount to acting as if the subject did not exist, of it on behalf of a pure objectivity. This refusal has the aim of eliciting the processes that are peculiar to in which the subject and the object 'are formed in relation to and in terms of one another." to Lucien Goldmann, who, in the discussion to Foucault the and transformed' And in response intention

when they are struck with infamy, the encounter

power pulls from darkness and silence these human existences that would otherwise the atheist, sodomite vagabondage not have left any traces." The grimace of sexton Jean-Antoine Milan (interned Something Touzard (interned obscure on at Charenton

following the lecture on the author, attributed "To define how the author function back our tears."7 From this perspective, process of subjectivation fied and constituted the author-function

in the Bicetre on April 21, 1701) and the obstinate, of Mathurin August 31, 1707) shine for a brief moment cast upon them by power. fulguration opprobrium another exceeds the subjectivation

of effacing the individual subject, he said witb irony: is exercised is not equivaSo let us hold appears as a

in the beam oflight them to of the

lent to saying tbat tbe author does not exist ....

in this instantaneous that condemns

and is marked out in the laconic statements

througb which an individual is identi-

archive - something like the luminous traces of another life and history. To be sure, these infamous lives appear only agents and authors of villainous acts and discourses. from which the distant but excesin this to itself proper name, testifying through quotes in the discourse of power, which fixes them as responsible Still, as in those photographs infam y demands [esige

as the author of a certain COTpUS of texts.

It thus seems that every inquiry into the subject as an individual must give way to the archival record that defines the conditions and forms under which the subject order of discourse. Foucault continually emphasizes, can appear in the is In this order, according to a diagnosis that "the trace of the writer of his absence; he must assume

sively close face of a stranger stares out at us, something

1 its

found only in the singularity

beyond any expression

and beyond any memory.

the role of the dead man in the game of writing." The author is not dead, but to position oneself as an author means occupying the place of a "dead man." An author-subject does exist, and In what way are these lives present in the brief, sinister annctations that have consigned them forever to the pitiless archive of

64

65

PROFANATIONS

THE

AUTHOR

AS

GESTURE

infamy? The anonymous who wrote knowing or representing

scribes, the insignificant

functionaries of either in

death, in any case their fate were actually decided in them, at least in part. These discourses intersected with lives in real, concrete ways; these existences were effectively risked and lost in these words.
10

these notes certainly

had no intention

these men: their only aim was to

stamp them with infamy. And yet, at least for a moment

these pages, these lives shine blindingly with a dark light. Can it be said for that reason that these lives found expression here and that they are somehow communicated to us and given to On the conas if they be known, albeit in the most drastic abbreviation? move them forever from any possible presentation, had appeared absolutely in language only on the condition in it. Where is Mathurin Milan? Where is Jean-Antoine Touzard? Certainly not in the laconic notes that register biographical their presence unexpressed It was therefore taken for granted that these were neither of repportraits nor biographies; resentation or refiguration, what binds the infamous lives to the but something different and more

fleshless writings that record them is not a relationship

trary, the gesture by which they have been fixed seems to reof remaining

essential: they are "played out" or "put into play" in these sentences; their freedom and their disgrace are risked and decided.

It is possible, then, that this text from 1977 contains something like the cipher of the lecture on the author: the infamous life somehow constitutes unexpressed the paradigm of the presence-absence what remains act, we can say that, exactly a cenof the author in the work. If we call "gesture" in each expressive

in the archi ve of infamy. Nor are they outside the archive, in a reality of which we know literally nothing. They of the text in which they are put into their eternal turning away, is its their absence, stand on the threshold play, or, rather,

like infamy, the author is present in the text only as a gesture that makes expression possible precisely by establishing tral emptiness within this expression. How should we understand the modality of this singular pres-

marked on the outer edge of the archive, like the gesture that has both rendered intention. "Real lives were 'played out an ambiguous expression, quotation it possible and exceeded and nullified

fJoueesJ''':

in this context, this is

ence, by which a life appears to us only through what silences it and twists it into a grimace? Foucault seems to be aware of this difficul ty. One won't see a collection of verbal portraits here, but traps, weapons, cries, gestures, attitudes, ruses, intrigues for which words were instruments. Real lives were "played out lJouees],,9 in these few sentences; by this I do not mean that they were represented, but that their freedom, their misfortune, often their

which Foucault emphasizes by using

marks. NOl so much because

r= also has a theatri-

cal meaning (the phrase could mean that these lives are staged, or their roles recited), but because the agent, the one who put these lives into play, remains deliberately selves, abandoning sodomite passion? themselves without obscure in the text. reserve - Mathurin Touzard to his Who put these lives into play? Was it the infamous men themMilan to his vagabondage, and Jean-Antoine

Or was it rather - and this seems more

66

PROFANATIONS

THE

AUTHOR

AS

GESTURE

likely - the conspiracy of familiars, the anonymous functionaries, the chancellors internment? pletely to either tionaries and policemen one or the other; who were in charge of their it belongs neither to the The infamous life does not seem to belong com-

stranger everything

to her, decide her response

to Totsky. From there, agrees to choosing

happens very quickly. She unexpectedly only to take it back immediately,

marry the prince, containing

Rogozhin instead. Then, as if possessed, the hundred thousand fire, promising

she grabs the packet

juridical identity that will have to answer for it nor to the funcof power who will judge the infamous men in the end. The infamous never represented, life is only played; it is never possessed, never said - and that is why it is the possi-

rubles and throws it into the

the avid Ganya that the money will be his if he

has the courage to pluck it from the flames. What guides the actions of Nastasya Filippovna? However excessive her gestures may be, they are incomparably to the calculations the exception principle. of Myshkin). And yet it is impossible anything like a rational superior to discern and the attitudes of the others present (with decision or a moral to end,

ble but empty site of an ethics, of a form of life. But what does it mean for a life to put itself - or to be putinto play? In Dostoyevsky's

in these gestures

The Idiot, Nastasya Filippovna enters her

Afanasy Ivanovich Totsky, the man

Nor can one say that she acts in order to seek venFrom beginning as her friends never tire

drawing room on a certain evening that will decide her existence.!' She has promised who has dishonored her and kept her until now, that she will

geance (against Totsky, for example). Nastasya seems gripped by a delirium, attack"; "I don't understand she has allowed Rogozhin,

of saying ("But what are you talking about? You're having an her, she's lost her head"). by Nastasya Filippovna has put her life into play - or perhaps this life to be put into play by Myshkin, and, at bottom, is inexplicable; by Lebedev, by her own caprice. that is why she rein all her

respond to his offer to marry the young Ganya in exchange for seventy-five thousand rubles. All her friends and acquaintances are gathered in her drawing room, including General Yepanchin, the ineffable Lebedev, and the venomous ko. Even Prince Myshkin certain is there, point makes an entrance Ferdischenwho at a

as is Rogozhin, a hundred

That is why her behavior mains perfectly

at the head of an unseemly thousand rubles the evening has something of the house never

inaccessible

and misunderstood

clique, bearing a packet containing for Nastasya. From the beginning, sick and feverish stops repeating: by Ferdischenko,

actions. A life is ethical not when it simply submits to moral laws but when it accepts putting itself into play in its gestures, irrevocably and without reserve - even at the risk that its happiness or its disgrace will be decided once and for all. The author marks the point at which a life is offered played out in the work. unsatisfied Offered up and

about it. The mistress

1 have afever, 1 don't feel well. society game proposed in which each player must confess his own places the entire evening under or a Myshkin, who is practically

By agreeing to play the unpleasant abjection, Nastasya immediately caprice that she makes Prince

up and played out, not ex-

the sign of games and play. And it is out of playfulness

pressed or fulfilled. For this reason, the author can only remain and unsaid in the work. He is the illegible someone

68

69

PROFANATIONS

THE

AUTHOR

AS

GESTURE

who makes reading which writing

possible,

the legendary

emptiness

from is

mean that on a certain day this particular comparable thought

sentiment,

this inthe

and discourse

issue. The author's

gesture

passed for a brief moment

through

attested to as a strange and incongruous to the theorists of the commedia interrupts unravels

presence in the work - the Harlequin's on the stage each time gesture

mind and soul of the individual named Cesar Vallejo? Nothing is less certain. Indeed, it is rather likely that this thought and this sentiment became real for him, and their details and nuances his own, only after - or while - writing became inextricably

it has brought to life, in exactly the same way that - according dell'arte

1azzo incessantly
and continually

the story unfolding

the plot. And yet, just as the 1azzo the author's

owes its name to the fact that, like a lace, it returns to retie the thread that it has loosened, guarantees presence of an inexpressive the life of the work only through

the poem (just as they become such for us only in the moment when we read the poem). Does this mean that the place of thought and feeling is in the poem itself, in the signs that make up the text? How could a passion, a thought be contained nition, feelings and thoughts one must in a piece of paper? By defia subject to experience somewill require

the irreducible

outer edge. Like the mime in his with his 1azzo, the author tirelessly

silence and the Harlequin

returns to enclose himself again within the opening he has created. And just as we seek in vain - in old books that reproduce the portrait decipher threshold or photograph of the author as a frontispiece - to the reasons and the meaning of the work from the exergue that ironi-

and think them. In order for them to become present, take up the book and read. This individual

occupy the empty place in the poem left by the author; he will repeat the same inexpressive to his absence in the work. fore neither gesture the author used to testify

author's enigmatic features, so does his gesture hesitate on the of the work, like an intractable cally claims to hold its unavowable secret. And yet this illegible gesture, this place that remains empty, is what makes reading possible. Consider the poem that begins one day in 1937 by a in Paris, next to

The place of the poem - or, rather, its taking place - is therein the text nor in the author (nor in the reader): through which the author and reader put or it is in the gesture nitely withdrawn guarantor

themselves into play in the text and, at the same time, are infifrom it. The author is only the witness of his own absence in the work in which he is put once of the inexhausfrom the to join

"Padre polvo que subes de Espaiia"

12

We know - or at least we

have been told - that this was written now buried in the Montparnasse his wife, Georgette, responsible, relationship other posthumous

into play, and the reader can only provide this testimony again, making himself in turn the guarantor ing to Averroes, individuals thought is unique

man named Cesar Vallejo, who was born in Peru in 1892 and is Cemetery who survived him by many years and is writings. Let us attempt to pinpoint the

tible game in which he plays at missing himself. Just as, accordand separate and fantasies who use their imaginations

it seems, for the flawed edition of his poetry and that constitutes this poem as a work by Cesar

with it from time to time, so do the author enter into a relationship that they remain unexpressed

and the reader

with the work only on the condition in it. And yet the text has no

Vallejo (or Cesar Vallejo as the author of this poem). Does it

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other light than the opaque one that radiates from the testimony of this absence. But this is precisely beyond why the author also marks the limit can proceed. Reading must of what has the

CHAPTER

NINE

In Praise

of Profanation

which no interpretation

come to an end at the place where the reading been poetized encounters personality was lived. It is just as illegitimate to attempt

in some way the empty place of what to construct

of the author by means of the work as it is to turn

his gesture into the secret cipher of reading. Perhaps Foucault's aporia becomes less enigmatic at this point. The subject -like the author, like the life of the infamous man The Roman jurists knew perfectly well what it meant to "pro- is not something that can be directly attained as a substantial reality present in some place; on the contrary, it is what results from the encounter with the apparatuses of the chancellors the hand-to-hand produced precisely subjectivity and from the hand-to-hand confrontation in which it has been put - and bas put

fane." Sacred or religious were the things that in some way belonged to the gods. As such, they were removed from the free use and commerce of men; they could be neither sold nor held by servitude. this special unavailability, for the celestial gods or for the called "sacred") in lien, neither given for usufruct nor burdened Any act that violated or transgressed which reserved (in which case they were properly gods of the underworld "religious"), was sacrilegious. these things exclusively

itself - into play. For writing (any writing, not only the writing of the archive of infamy) is an apparatus too, confrontation with the apparatuses they have in and the history of human beings is perhaps nothing other than - above all with language. And just as the author presence, so must

(in which case they were simply called And if "to consecrate" the removal

(sacrare)

must remain unexpressed

in the work while still attesting,

was the term that indicated

of things from the thus

this way, to his own irreducible

sphere of human law, "to profane" meant, conversely, to return them to the free use of men. The great jurist Trebatius that was once sacred or religious and is returned property allotted wrote, "In the strict sense, profane is the term for something to the use and sacred, of men:' And "pure" was the place that was no longer to the gods of the dead and was now "neither to the common rather, 73 one arrives

show itself and increase its resistance at the point capture it and put it into play. A subjeclanto a where the living being, encountering of its being reduced and nowhere like an ethical subject,

where its apparatuses tivity is produced

guage and putting itself into play in language without reserve, exhibits in a gesture the impossibility this gesture. All the rest is psychology, anything chology do we encounter form of life. in psy-

nor holy nor religiOUS, freed from all names of this sort,"' The thing that is returned here as something natural: use of men is at it only by pure, profane, free of sacred names. But use does not appear

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means of profanation. ship between

There seems to be a peculiar relationthat we must clarify.

tention

that must be adopted

in relations

with the gods, the before formsReliaio is not

"using" and "profaning"

uneasy hesitation separation tinct. between

(the "rereading

[rileaaere]")

and formulae - that must be observed in order to respect the Religion can be defined as that which removes things, places, animals, or people from common tion, but every separation use and transfers them to a separawithin separate sphere. Not only is there no religion without also con tains or preserves the sacred and the profane. and indifference toward what unites men and gods but what ensures they remain disIt is not disbelief the divine, therefore, that stand in opposition to religion, but "negligence," that is, a behavior before forms that is free and "distracted" and their meaning. (that is to say, To profane use. released from the religio of norms) before things and their use, of separation means to open the possibility of a special form of negligence,

itself a genuinely religious core. The apparatus that effects and regulates the separation is sacrifice: through a series of meticulous rituals, which differ in various cultures and which Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss have patiently inventoried, always sanctions the passage of something sacrifice from. the profane

which ignores separation or, rather, puts it to a particular

to the sacred, from the human sphere to the divine." What is essential is the caesura that divides the two spheres, the threshold that the victim must cross, no matter in which direction. That which has been ritually separated of profanation same sacrifice can be returned from the rite to the profane sphere. Thus one of the simplest forms occurs through contact (contagione) that effects and regulates during the the passage of the The passage from the sacred to the profane can, in fact, also come about by means of an entirely inappropriate LIse (or, Most rather, reuse) of the sacred: namely, play. It is well known that the spheres of play and the sacred are closely connected. sacred ceremonies, once belonged, girotondo by from divinatory a marriage practices of the games with which we are familiar clerive from ancient and rituals that with a ball the spinning In anabroadly speaking, to the religious sphere. The rite; playing

victim from the human to the divine sphere. One part of the victim (the entrails, or exta: the liver, heart, gallbladder,lungs) is reserved for the gods, while the rest can be consumed profane men. The participants for them to become contagion, in the rite need only touch these organs and edible. There is a profane and returns to use what the

was originally

reprod uces the struggle of the gods for possession of the sun; games of chance derive from oracular practices; top and the chessboard were instruments lyzing the relationship between of divination.

a touch that disenchants

games and rites, Emile Benits overturning. The of and

sacred had separated and petrified. The term ielipio does not derive, as an insipid and incorrect etymology unites would have it, from l'eligare (that which binds and and the divine). It comes instead from and atthe stance of scrupulousness the human

ven iste shows that play not only derives from the sphere of the sacred but also in some ways represents power of the sacred act, he writes, lies in the conjunction the myth that tells the story and the rite that reproduces drops the myth and preserves the rite; as
lOCUS,

stages it. Play breaks up this unity: as luclus, or physical play, it or wordplay, it

ieleqere, which indicates

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effaces the rite and allows the myth to survive. "If the sacred can be defined operation through the consubstantial translating unity of myth and rite, we can say that one has play when only half of the sacred is completed, only the myth into words from the or only the rite into actions."3 This means that play frees and distracts humanity sphere of the sacred, without which the sacred is returned play does not solely concern who play with whatever simply abolishing it. The use to is a special one that does not coinIn fact, the "profanation" sphere. of the religious Children,

stubbornly

seeks exactly the opposite

of what he could find to

there: the possibility of reentering monies of the new spectacular provincial part of a new liturgy; gious intention. a political task.

the lost feast, returning

the sacred and its rites, even in the form of the inane cerereligion or a tango lesson in a an unconsciously relidance hall. In this sense, televised game shows are they secularize To return to play its purely profane vocation is between secularization It leaves

cide with utilitarian consumption.

In this sense, we must distinguish and profanation. Secularization

is a form of repression.

old thing falls into their hands, make that we are used to thinking of

intact the forces it deals with by simply moving them from one place to another. Thus the political secularization cal concepts (the transcendence of theologiof God as a paradigm of sover-

toys out of things that also belong to the spheres of' economics, war, law, and other activities becomes as serious. All of a sudden, a car, a firearm, or a legal contract a toy. What is common to these cases and the proas vera religjo. This, can of use, fanation of the sacred is the passage from a reliqio that is now felt to be false or oppressive to negligence however, does not mean neglect (no kind of attention

eign power) does nothing but displace the heavenly monarchy onto an earthly monarchy, leaving its power intact. Profanation, and is returned guarantees however, neutralizes what it profanes. operations: Once profaned, that which was unavailable and separate loses its aura to use. Both are political the first the exercise of power by carrying it back to a sacred the apparatuses of power and

compare to that of a child at play) but a new dimension which children and philosophers

give to humanity. It is the sort

model; the second deactivates

of use that Benjamin must have bad in mind when he wrote of Kafka's The New Attorney that the law that is no longer applied but only studied is the gate to justice." Just as the religjo that is played with but no longer observed the powers opens the gate to use, so law, and politics, deacti-

returns to common use the spaces that power had seized. Philologists never cease to be surprised by the double, contra-

dictory meaning that the verb prrj'anare seems to have in Latin: it means, on the one band, to render profane and, on the other (in only a few cases) to sacrifice. It is an ambiguity inherent sacer means both "august, Freud noted) standing "cursed, consecrated that seems in the vocabulary of tbe sacred as such: the adjective to the gods," and (as The excluded from the community."

[potenzeJ

of economics,

vated in play, can become the gateways to a new happiness. Playas an organ of profanation ern man proves he no longer through the vertiginous Indeed, at parties, is in decline everywhere. Mod-

knows how to play precisely of new and old games. and

proliferation

ambiguity at issue here does not arise solely out of a misunderbut is, so to speak, constitutive of the profanatory

in dances, and at play, he desperately

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operation

- or, inversely, of the consecratory

one. Insofar as

ally return

what had been consecrated

to the gods to men. in Roman sacrifice, victim is profaned is assigned

these operations

refer to a single object that must pass from like a residue of of sacred-

Hence the mingling of the two operations in which one part of the same consecrated by contagion to the gods. From this perspective, and consumed

the profane to the sacred and from the sacred to the profane, they must every time reckon with something profanity in every consecrated ness in every profaned object. The same is true of the term sacer. It indicates that which, through mander the solemn consecrates act of sactatio or devotio (when a comhis life to the gods of the underworld in thing and a remnant

by men, while another

it becomes easier to understand seriousness

why, in had in en-

the Christian religion, theologians,

pontiffs, and emperors

to show such obsessive care and implacable suring, as far as possible, the coherence notions of transubstantiation incarnation

order to ensure victory), has been given over to the gods and belongs exclusively to them. And yet, in the expression been excluded from the community, homo sacer, the adjective seems to indicate an individual who, having can be killed with impunity but cannot be sacrificed to the gods. What exactly has occurred here? A sacred man, one who belongs to the gods, has survived the rite that separated him from other men and continues to lead an apparently Although body an irreducible profane existence among them. in his he lives in the profane world, there inheres

and in telligibility of the

in the sacrifice of the mass and

and homousia in the dogma of the trinity. What was

at stake here was nothing less than the survival of a religious system that had involved God himself as the victim of the sacrifice and, in this way, introduced in paganism concerned idea of the simultaneous presence in him that separation which only human things. That is to say, the of two natures in a single to paralyze the sacrificial guaranenin

person or victim was an effort to cope with confusion between divine and human that threatened machine ambiguity without of Christianity. The doctrine of incarnation

residue of sacredness.

This removes him

from normal commerce

with his kind and exposes him to the

possibility of violent death, which returns him to the gods to whom he truly belongs. As for his fate in the divine sphere, he cannot be sacrificed and is excluded from the cult because his life is already the property of the gods, and yet, insofar as it an incongruous remthe survives itself, so to speak, it introduces in the machine

teed that divine and human nature were both present without in the same person, just as transubstantiation remainder into the body of Christ. Nevertheless, of messianic tendencies sured that the species of bread and wine were transformed Christianity, the distinction with the entrance of God as the victim of sacrifice that put

nant of profanity into the domain of the sacred. That is to say, of sacrifice, sacred and profane represent two poles of a system in which a floating Signifier travels from one domain to the other without ceasing to refer to the same object. This is precisely how the machine ensures the distribution of use among humans and divine beings and can eventu-

and with the strong presence

between sacred and profane into crisis, the reli-

gious machine seems to reach a limit point or zone of undecidability, where the divine sphere is always in the process of collapsing into the human sphere and man always already passes over into the divine.

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"Capitalism penetrating

as Religion" is the title of one of Benjamin's posthumous fragments. According of the Protestant from Christianity.

most faith, As

Nietzsche

defined. This man is the superman,

the first to recof the

to Benjamin,

ognize the religion of capitalism and begin to bring it to fulfillment,"? Freudian theory, too, belongs to the priesthood capitalist cult: "What has been repressed, capital itself, which pays interest of the simple and compound
J ."9

capitalism is not solely a secularization nomenon, which develops parasitically

as it is for Max Weber, but is itself essentially a religious phethe religion of modernity, it is defined by three characteristics: In it, everything has meaning it is

the idea of sin, is

on the hell of the unconthat are functions of

scious:'8 And for Marx, capitalism "becomes socialism by means interest

first, it is a cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme and absolute one that has ever existed. only in reference "the celebration not possible to the fulfillment of a cult, not in relation

Schuld [guilt/debt

to a dogma or an idea. Second, this cult is permanent; to distinguish between workdays

Let us try to carryon tive that interests tianity, generalizes

Benjamin's reflections a tendency

from the perspecin in Chris-

of a cult sans tteve et sans merci."> Here it is and holidays; holiday, in which work from or atonement is probably the .... be-

us here. We could say that capitalism, already present in every domain the structure

pushing to the extreme

rather, there is a single, uninterrupted coincides with the celebration cult is not directed first instance A monstrous toward redemption

of separation

of the cult. Third, the capitalist

that defines religion. Where sacrifice once marked the passage from the profane to the sacred and from the sacred to the profane, there is now a Single, multiform, separation indifferent ceaseless process of that assails every thing, every place, every human to the caesura between sacred and profane, between form, the capitalist religion to the point that there is without re-

for guilt, but toward guilt itself. "Capitalism

of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement sense of guilt that knows no redemption

activity in order to divide it from itself. This process is entirely divine and human. In its extreme nothing left to separate. secration.

comes the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal ... and to once and for all include ofman."6 Precisely because it strives with all its might not toward redemption but toward guilt, not toward hope but toward despair, capitalism as religion does not aim at the transformation world but at its destruction. so complete prophets of modernity of the is And in our time its dominion God in this guilt .... into the destiny [God] is not dead; he has been incorporated

realizes the pure form of separation,

An absolute profanation separation inheres

mainder now coincides with an equally vacuous and total conIn the commodity, in the very form of the object, which splits into use-value and exchangevalue and is transformed into an ungraspable fetish. The same or experiencedis true for everything that is done, produced, now divided from themselves

that, according to Benjamin, even the three great (Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud) conspire of

even the human body, even sexuality, even language. They are and placed in a separate sphere This sphere is consumption. that no longer defines any substantial division and where all use becomes and remains impossible.

with it; they are, in some way, on the side of the religion despair in the absolute loneliness

despair. "This passage of the planet 'Man' through the house of of his path is the ethos that

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If, as has been suggested, we use the term "spectacle" extreme phase of capitalism which everything

for the

before being exercised

nor while being exercised

nor after

in which we are now living, in

having been exercised. In fact, consumption,

even in the act in

is exhibited in its separation from itself, then are the two sides of a single imposexhibition. This means that it

which it is exercised, is always in the past or the future and, as such, cannot be said to exist in nature, but only in memory or anticipation. Therefore, its disappearance,"!" In this way, with provided the paradigm reached its fulfillment ety. This obstinate it cannot be had but in the instant of an unwitting many centuries prophecy, John XXII soci-

spectacle and consumption consumption

sibility of using. What cannot be used is, as such, given over to or to spectacular has become impossible special procedures). the capitalist something to profane (or at least that it requires to the sphere of the sacred, phase aims at creating

If to profane means to return to common in its extreme

of an impossibility

of using that has

use that which has been removed religion absolutely unprofanable.

later in consumer

denial of use, however, captures the nature

of use more radically than could any definition put forth by the Franciscan order. For pure use appears, in the Pope's account, as the impossibility century of not so much as something instant property inexistent - indeed, it exists for an as something possess as

The theological

canon of consumption in the thirteenth

use was established

by the Roman

in the act of consumption (dominium).

- but rather

Curia during its conflict with the Franciscan order. In their call for "highest poverty," the Franciscans of a use entirely other right [diritto] (or use offact). removed asserted the possibility from the sphere of law [diritto], cle facto use Canonum. In

that one could never have, that one could never with something that cannot be appropriated;

That is to say, use is always a relationship it refers to things which is

which, in order to distinguish it from usufruct and from every to use, they called ususiacti, Against them, John

insofar as they cannot become objects of possession. But in this way use also lays bare the true nature nothing separate consumers sphere, where it is converted objects of property, but the device that moves the free use of men into a into a right. If, today, within themin mass society are unhappy, it is not only because that have incorporated

xxrr,

an implacable adver-

sary of the order, issued his bull Ad Conditoretn things that are objects of consumption, proper~y, because this use coincides their consumption, sumption, the impossibility

such as food, clothing, from Conentirely with the act of (abusus).

and so on, there cannot exist, he argues, a use distinct that is, their destruction or the negation

they consume

selves their own inability to be used. It is also, and above all, because they believe they are exercising their right to property on these objects, because they have become incapable of profaning them. The impossibility Museum. plished of using has its emblematic place in the that

which necessarily destroys the thing, is nothing but of use, which presupposes

that the substance of the thing remains intact (salvo rei substantia). That is not all: a simple de facto use, distinct from property, does not exist in nature; it is in no way something that one can "have:' "The act of use itself exists in nature neither The museification of the world is today an accompotentialities

fact. One by one, the spiritual

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defined the people's of nature, Museum. "Museum"

lives - art, religion,

philosophy, withdrawn

the idea into the

television primary

shows. For this reason, insofar as it represents religion, tourism industry in the world,

the is the

even politics - have docilely

cult and central altar of the capitalist

here is not a given physical space or place to which what was once - but is no

involving more than six hun-

but the separate dimension Museum can coincide

dred and fifty million people each year. Nothing is so astonishing as the fact that millions of ordinary people are able to carry out on their own flesh what is perhaps the most desperate perience that one can have: the irrevocable of profaning. on which the capabsolute impossibility exloss of all use, the

longer - felt as true and decisive has moved. In this sense, the with an entire city (such as Evora and World Heritage Venice, which were declared of individuals disappeared).

sites), a region

(when it is declared a park or nature preserve), and even a group (insofar as they represent a form of life that has But more generally, everything today can become of using, of dwelling, of experiencing. capitalism and

It is, however, possible that the unprofanable, are still effective forms of profanation. recall that profanation natural gious, economic,

a Museum, because this term simply designates the exhibition of an impossibility Thus, in the Museum, the analogy between

italist religion is founded, is not truly such, and that today there For this reason, we must like a of play in into the relidoes not simply restore something sphere. As the example

religion becomes clear. The Museum occupies exactly the space and function once reserved for the Temple as the place of sacrifice. To the faithful in the Temple - the pilgrims who would travel across the earth from tern ple to tern ple, from sanctuary to sanctuary - correspond today the tourists who restlessly participated between in a the travel in a world that has been abstracted sacrifice that reestablished into a Museum. But

use that existed before being separated or juridical

clearly shows, this operation is more cunning and complex than that and is not limited to abolishing order to regain an uncontaminated the form of separation use that lies either beyond The cat who that once

or before it. Even in nature there are profanations. plays with teristic ancient religious of predatory symbols activity or objects

while the faithful and the pilgrims ultimately

plays with a ball of yarn as if it were a mouse - just as the child belonged to the economic sphere - knowingly behaviors uses the charac-

the right relationships

divine and the human by moving the vietim into the sacred sphere, the tourists celebrate on themselves a sacrificial act that consists in the anguishing experience of the destruction of all possible use. If the Christians were "pilgri ms," that is, strangers on the earth, because their homeland in the pure form of separation. was in heaven, the adepts they go, they find of dwelling that in malls, and on of the new capitalist cult have no homeland because they dwell Wherever pushed to the extreme the same impossibility use that they experienced in supermarkets,

(or, in the case of the of the deacti-

child, of the religious cult or the world of work) in vain. These behaviors are not effaced, but, thanks to the substitution yarn for the mouse (or the toy for the sacred object), vated and thus opened up to a new, possible use. But what sort of use? For the cat, what is the possible use for the ball of yarn? It consists in freeing a behavior from its genetic inscription hunting). within a given sphere (predatory still reproduces activity, The freed behavior and mimics the

they knew in their houses and their cities, the same inability to

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forms of the activity from which it has been emancipated,

but,

where the dinner party defecates film by Luis Bufiuel."

around a dining table in the

in emptying them of their sense and of any obligatory relationship to an end, it opens them and makes them available for a new use. The game with the yarn liberates being prey and the predatory directed the mouse from

Feces - it is clear - are here only as a symbol of what has

I:

been separated society without

and can be returned separation

to common

use. But is a is perhaps

activity from being necessarily that define hunting. its nature as a to an end; it has

possible? The question

toward the capture and death of the mouse. And yet,

poorly formulated. and erase separations

For to profane means not simply to abolish but to learn to put them to a new use, to

this play stages the very same behaviors

The activity that results from this thus becomes a pure means, that is, a praxis that, while firmly maintaining means, is emancipated joyousl y forgotten means without only by deactivating Separation functions. from its relationship

play with them. The classless society is not a society that has abolished and lost all memory of class differences but a society that has learned to deactivate the apparatuses of those differences in order to make a new use possible, in order to transform them into pure means. N olhing, however, is as fragile and precarious as tbe sphere of pure means. Play, in our society, also has an episodic character, after which normal course life must once again continue its hunt). and disquieting piece of wood; on its

its goal and can now show itself as such, as a of a new use is possible it inoperative. an old use, rendering

an end. The creation

is also and above all exercised in the sphere of tbe and separation of certain physiological which, in our society, is One of these is defecation,

body, as the repression

(and the cat must continue

No one knows a toy can be of liba cold, and the doll on

better than children how terrible eration shameful turns into an awkward

isolated and bidden by means of a series of devices and prohibitions that concern both behavior and language. What could it mean to "profane defecation"? posed naturalness, of archaeologically sions between and common. tion intervened. human production sion (which is still better Certainly not to regain a supRather, it is a matter or simply to enjoy it as a perverse transgresthan nothing). arriving at defecation as a field of polar ten-

once the game it forms a part of is over. The instrument

I:i

which the little girl has showered wax puppet bewitch and use against us.

her love becomes

that an evil magician

can capture

nature and culture, private and public, singular That is: to learn a new use for feces, just as and separaThe forms of this common use can only be
~I

This evil magician is the high priest of the capitalist religion. If the apparatuses of the capitalist cult are so effective, it is not so much because they act on primary behaviors, but because they act on pure means, that is, on behaviors that have been separated from themselves and thus detached from any relationship to an end. In its extreme gigantic apparatus phase, capitalism is nothing but a for capturing pure means, that is, profanathe deactivation

babies tried to do in their way, before repression invented collectively.

As Italo Calvino once noted, feces are a just like any other, only there has never

been a history of them." This is why every individual attempt to profane them can have only a parodic value, as in the scene

Illi

tory behaviors.

Pure means, which represent

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and rupture cial sphere.

of all separation,

are in turn separated into a speTo be sure, power has using

ist dream of producing

an unprofanable:

pornography.

Those

Language is one example.

who have some familiarity with the history of erotic photography know that in its beginnings almost dreamy expression, the intimacy of their boudoirs. the models put on a romantic, Sometimes, lazily stretched on as if the camera had caught them in

always sought to secure control of social communication, ing voluntary obedience. But today this instrumental

language as a means for diffusing its own ideology and inducfunction - which is still effective at the margins of the system, when situations of danger or exception different procedure of control, potential. into the spectacular possible profanatory tion of propaganda, arise - has ceded its place to a which, in separating language

canapes, they pretend to sleep or even read, as in certain nudes by Bruno Braquehais and Louis-Camille it seems that the indiscreet alone, looking at themselves the capitalist absolutization photographer in the mirror d'Olivier. Other times, has caught them all (this is the scene and exchange-

sphere, assails it in its idling, that is, in its More essential than the funcas an instrument of the which views language

preferred by Auguste Belloc). Quite soon, however, in step with of the commodity value, their expressions poses more complicated intentionally awareness exaggerating changed and became more brazen; the and animated, as if the models were thus showing their their indecency,

directed toward an end, is the capture and neutralization pure means par excellence, available for a new use. The apparatuses this profanatory experience centuries word pated itself from its communicative

that is, language that has emanciends and thus makes itself

of being exposed

to the lens. But it is only in our novelty the sequence in Summer

of the media aim precisely at neutralizing

time that this process arrives at its extreme stage. Film historians record as a disconcerting with Monika (1952) when the protagonist, Harriet Andersson,

power of language as pure means, at prevent-

ing language from disclosing the possibility of a new use, a new of the word. Already the church, after the first two of hoping and waiting, conceived of its function of the of the messianic one of neutralizing the new experience

suddenly fixes her gaze for a few seconds on the camera ("Here for the first time in the history of cinema," the director Ingmar Bergman commented, "there is established a shameless and direct contact has rendered with the spectator"). this procedure caresses, Since then, pornography

as essentially announcement, suspended

that Paul, placing

it at the center

had called pistis, faith. The same thing occurs

banal: in the very act of executing porn stars now look resolutely in the

in the system of the spectacular religion, where the pure means, and exhibited in the sphere of the media, shows its speaks only its own nothingness, as if no new of the word were own emptiness, possible. This nullification of pure means is most clear in the apparatus

their most intimate spectator

into the camera, showing that they are more interested than in their partners.

use were possible, as if no other experience

Thus is fully realized the principle that Benjamin articulated in 1936 while writing "Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian." "If there is anything sexually arousing here," he writes, itself'!3 "it is more the idea that a naked body is being exhibited camera than the sight of nakedness before the

that, more than any other, appears to have realized the capital-

One year earlier,

88

89

PROFANATIONS

IN

PRAISE

OF

PROFANATION

Benjamin had created the concept of "exhibition-value"

(Aus-

fully visible in the foreground. displays -like

But instead of simulating pleasof the genre, she affects and

stellun8swert) to characterize
of art undergoes Nothing better characterizes the Marxian be reduced is exhibited opposition

the transformation the new condition use-value

that the work reproducibility. of objects and and exchange-

ure, as dictated by the conventions

in the era of its technological

fashion models - the most absolute indifference, certainly. But also to the spectators, who

the most stoic ataraxy. To whom is Chloe des Lysses indifferent? To her partner, are surprised to find that the star, although she is aware of be-

even of the human body in the era of fulfilled capitalism. Into between introduces value, exhibition-value a third term, which cannot from the sphere of use; it is any labor

being exposed to the gaze, hasn't even the slightest complicity with them. Her impassive tween lived experience expression, face breaks every connection and the expressive sphere; it no longer

to the first two. It is not use-value, because what is, as such, removed because it in no way measures

not exchange-value,

expresses anything but shows itself as a place without a hint of as a pure means. potential that the apparatus of pornogWhat it captures is the human capacends. But while these behaviors possible use, which conintervenes intention. at this point to The solitary and image thus reIt is this profanatory raphy seeks to neutralize.

power. But it is perhaps only in the sphere of the human face that the mechanism of exhibition-value finds its proper place. It is a That is, the awareness of processes that usually it is to show but the In this Yet, common experience that the face of a woman who feels she is

ity to let erotic behaviors idle, to profane them, by detaching them from their immediate thus open themselves to a different

being looked at becomes inexpressive. and powerfully disrupts the expressive

being exposed to the gaze creates a vacuum in consciousness animate the face. It is this brazen -faced ind i fference that fashion models, porn stars, and others whose profession themselves must learn to acquire: they show nothing

cerns not so much the pleasure of the partner as a new collective use of sexuality, pornography block and divert the profanatory desperate consumption places the promise of a new use. All apparatuses of power are always double: they arise, on subjectivizing behavior and, behavior in in a separate sphere. There is intent; it is repreitself be captured gesture of the porn both politically and the one hand, from an individual n the other, from its capture often nothing reprehensible hensible

of the pornographic

showing itself (that is, one's own absolute mediality). way, the face is loaded until it bursts with exhibition-value. precisely penetrates through this nullification of expressivity,

eroticism

where it could have no place: the human face, which

does not know nudity, for it is always already bare. Shown as a pure means beyond any concrete expressivity, it becomes available for a new use, a new form of erotic communication. One porn star, who passes off her efforts as artistic formances, has recently pushed this procedure She has herself photographed in the act of performing perto the extreme. or sub-

about the individual

itself, and it can, indeed, express a liberatory only if the behavior - when strained by circumstances in the apparatus. be blamed. or by force -lets

it has not been con-

Neither the brazen-faced

star nor the impassive face of the fashion model is, as such, to Instead, what is disgraceful-

mitting to the most obscene acts, but always so that her face is

90

PROFANATIONS

morally - are the apparatus of pornography sible use. The unprofanable thentically possibility profanatory of pornography intention.

and the apparatus

CHAPTER

TEN

of the fashion show, which have diverted them from their pos-

The Six Most

- everything For this reason, that is unof an auwe must of on the arrest and diversion

Beautiful

Minutes

In

profanable - is founded

the

History

of Cinema

always 'wrest from the apparatuses - from all apparatuses - the of use that they have captured. The profanation the unprofanable is the political task of the coming generation.

Sancho Panza enters a cinema in a provincial city. He is looking for Don Quixote and finds him sitting off to the side, staring at the screen. The theater is almost full; the balcony - which is a sort of giant terrace - is packed with raucous children. several unsuccessful reluctantly girl (Dulcinea?), attempts to reach Don Quixote, After Sancho

sits down in one of the lower seats, next to a little who offers him a lollipop. The screening has

begun; it is a costume film: on the screen, knights in armor are riding along. Suddenly, a woman appears; she is in danger. Don Quixote abruptly rises, unsheaths his sword, rushes toward the screen, and, with several lunges, begins to shred the cloth. The woman and the knights are still visible on the screen, but the black slash opened by Don Quixote's implacably devouring the screen, and only the wooden sword grows ever larger, supporting it rethe images. In the end, nothing is left of structure

mains visible. The outraged audience leaves the theater, but the children on the balcony continue Quixote. disapproval, What are we to do with our imaginations? Love them and and falsify believe in them to the point of having to destroy their fanatical cheers for Don Only the little girl down on the floor stares at him in

92

PROFANATIONS

them (this is perhaps the meaning

of Orson Welles's

films).

But when, in the end, they reveal themselves to be empty and unfulfilled, when they show the nullity of which they are made, only then can we pay the price for their truth and understand that Dulcinea - whom we have saved - cannot love us.

Notes

CHi\PTER

ONE:

GENlllS

I. Literally: Hence in respect to the god we touch our forehead.

2. See Friedrich Holderlin, "Dichterberuf" licbe Werke, ed. Friedrich Beissner (Frankfurt:

(The Poet's Vocation), Siimtlnsel, 1961), p. 262.

3. See Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attcll (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), ch. 18, which referes to

Benjamin's notion of "the saved night [die gerettete NaclnJ."

CHAPTER

Two:

MAGIC

AND

HAPPINESS

I. See Walter Experiment

Benjamin,

"Fritz

Frankel:

Protocol

or the Mescaline

of May 22, 1934," On Hashish, ed. Howard Eiland (Cambridge,

MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 87. 2. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to Joseph Bullinger, Aug. 17, 1778, The Letters ~IMozart and His Family, ed. Emily Anderson, 2nd ed., ed. A. Hyatt

King and Monica Carolan (London: Macmillan,

1966), vol. 2, p. 594.

3. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 269-70.

4. Quoted in Walter Benjamin, "Franz Kafka," Selected Writings, Volume 2, /927-1934, trans. Rodney 1999), p. 798. ed. Michael W. Jennings, Livingstone (Cambridge, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, MA: Harvard University Press,

94

PROFANATIONS

NOTES

5. Franz Kafka, Diary entry for October

18, 1921, The Diaries of Franz 1948-49), P: 393.

2. Morante, emended). 3. Morante,

L'isola di Arturo, p. 317; Arturo's Island, p. 309 (translation

Kcifka, 1910-1923, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken,

L'isola di Arturo, P: 339; Arturo's Island, P: 332 (here the

CHAPTER

THREE:

JUDGMENT

DAY

translation Green," Howard

also uses "Grotesque").

1. Walter 1927-1934, Rodney 333. 2. Walter

Benjamin,

"[ulicn W. jennings.

Selected

Writin8s,

Volume 2,

4. Aristotle, 5. Cicero,

Poetics ch. 2. Orator ad M. Brutum 17. 54.

de Amicis, Heart: A School-Boy'sJournal

ed. Michael

Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. University Press, 1999),

Livingstone

(Cambridge,

MA: Harvard

P:

6. Edmondo
Crowell, 1901).

(1886; New York:

Benjamin,

"Little

History

of Photography."

Selected Writings,

7. Friedrich

Nietzsche

to jacob

Burkhardt,

Jan. 6, 1889, The Portable 1954), pp. 685 and 687.

Volume 2, p. 510.

Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann

8. Audigier,

(New York: Viking,

in Paul Brians (ed.), Bawdy TalesJrom the Courts of Medieval and Row, 1972), pp. 57 and 66. Translated

CHAPTER

FOUR:

THE

ASSISTANTS

France (New York: Harper Writ.iIl8s, Volume 2, 1927emended in accordance

1. Walter

Benjamin,

"Franz

Kafka," Selected Howard

with Agamben's

Italian version.

1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, ney Livingstone (Cambridge,

Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. RodPress, 1999),

9. Morante, emended).

L'isola di Arturo,

P: 7; Arturo's

Island, P: v (translation

MA: Harvard University

P:

799.

2. Carlo Collodi,

The Ac/i'entures of Pinocchio: Story

University

r:I a Puppet,
Press,

ed. and 1986), P:

10. See, for example, in Giovanni 323-40. Barbian (ed.),

Guglielmo

Gorni,

"Parodia

e scrittura Olschki,

in Dante," 1988), pp.

trans. Nicolas J. Perella (Berkeley: 89.

of California

Dante e la Bibbia (Florence:

3. lbid., p. 347. 4. lbn al-Arabi,

Sindbard,

II. See Elsa Morante,

I-listoty: II NOI'el, trans. William

Weaver

(New

The Meccos: Bevetations, cd. Michel Chodkiewicz

(Paris:

York: Knopf, (1975).

1977), and Pier Paolo Pasolini,

SaID, or The 120 Days of Sodom

1989), pp. 119-47.

5. Ibid., p. 120.
6. Walter Benjamin, "Berlin Childhood around 1900," Selected WritiIl8s, W. Jennings, trans. pp.

12. Elsa Morante, 13. Morante, emended).

"Alia favela," Alibi (Turin: Einaudi,

2004).

L'isoia di Arturo, P: 379; Jlrturo's Island, p. 372 (translation

Volume 3, 1935-1938, ed. Howard

Edmond 384-85. Jephcott (Cambridge,

Eiland and Michael University

MA: Harvard

Press, 2002),

CHAPTER

EIGHT:

THE AUTHOR

AS GESTURE

I. Michel Foucault,
CHAPTER FIVE: PARODY

"What

Is an Author?"

in Aesthetics,

Method and Epis-

temol08.Y' ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert HurJey (New York: New Press,
1957), P: 316, trans1959), P: 308 1998), pp. 205-22. 2. Samuel Beckett, 1989, ed. S.E. Gontarski "Texts for Nothing,"

1. Elsa Morante, lated as Arturo's (this translation

L'isola di Jlrturo (Turin: Einaudi,

Island by Isabel Quigly

(New York: Knopf, in this passage).

The Complete Short Prose, 1929-

gives Parodic as "Grotesque"

(New York: Grove Press, 1995), p. 109.

96

PROFANATIONS

NOTES

3. Foucault, "What Is an Author?" p. 207. 4. Ibid., P: 211 (translation 5. emended).

6.

iu. pp.

288-89 (translated

emended).

7. lbid., p. 289 (translated 8. Ibid. 9. tbid., p. 289.

emended).

tu, p. 217.
ilesthel:ics, Method and Epistemoloay, P: article that Foucault wrote in the third person

6. Michel Foucault, "Foucault," 462. This is an encyclopedia about himself - TRANS.

10. John XXII, Ad Conditorem Canonum (1322), in Corpus luris Canonici, cd. Emil Ludwig Richter and Emil Friedberg 1881), vol. 2, pp. 1227-28. 11. Italo Calvi no, "llinguaggi del sogno" Conference,
Fondazione

(Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz,

7. Michel Foucault, Dits et ecrits, 1954-1988, Volume I (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 817.
8. Michel

Cini,

Foucault,

"Lives of Infamous

Men," Power, ed. James D.

Venice, Aug. 20-Sept.

18, 1982.

Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: New Press, 2000). 9. The ambiguity and by Foucault's of this French worcl (intcrpolated both by Agamben

12. Luis Bufiucl, LeJantome de 10 liberte (1974). 13. Walter Benjamin, "Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian," Selected

English translator)

is explained below - TRANS. emended). Oxford

Writinas, Volume 3, 1935-1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W Jennings, trans. Edmond Jcphcott 71. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), p. 300, n.

10. Foucault, "Lives of Infamous Men," p. 160 (translation 11. Fyodor Dostoevsky,

The Idiot, trans. Alan Myers (Oxford:

University Press, 1992), pp. 143-86. 12. "Father dust who rises from Spain." Cesar Vallejo, The Complete Posthumous Poetry, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Jose Rubia Barcia (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1978), p. 262.

CHAPTEI<-

NINE:

IN

PRAISE

0['

PROI'ANATION

I. Justinian, DiaestCl 11.7. 2. Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, SacrifIce: Its Nature and Function, trans. WO. Halls (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). 3. Emile Benveniste, "Le jeu
cornmc

structure," Deucalion 2 (1947), P: 165. Volume 2, 1927-

4. Walter Benjamin, "Franz Kafka," Selected Writinns,

1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 815. 5. Walter Benjamin, "Capitalism as Religion," Selected Writinas, Volume MA:

1, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W Jennings (Cambridge,

Belknap Press, 1999), P: 288. Translated emended in accordance with Agam. beri's ltalian version - TRANS.

98

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