Af fecting
Knowledge
Severo Sarduy’s
“Simulation” and
the potential of the
af fective dimension
for theory
Media Studies
Cultural Analysis: Literature and Theory Faculty of Humanities
Leiden University Supervisor – Dr. E. Minnaard Second reader – Prof.dr. E.J. van Alphen
July 2019
Loes Verstappen
Master’s Thesis
Severo Sarduy’s “Simulation” and the potential of
the affective dimension for theory
Loes Verstappen
Master’s Thesis
INTRODUCTION 5
CHAPTER 1
SENSATION AND STORY
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1.1 MIMESIS
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1.2 AFFECT AND AFFECT THEORY
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1.3 THE ANXIOUS PERSPECTIVE
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1.4 ANAMORPHOSIS
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1.5 PERFORMATIVITY
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CHAPTER CONCLUSION
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CHAPTER 2
AN ONTOLOGY OF THE HOW AND ITS MODE OF ADDRESS
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2.1 SPLIT
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2.2 BLURRING DIVIDES
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2.3 THE HOW IS THE WHAT
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2.4 IN-CORPORATION
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CHAPTER CONCLUSION
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CHAPTER 3
CATALYSING THE POSTHUMAN
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3.1 THE BAROQUE
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3.2 TRANSFORMATION
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CHAPTER CONCLUSION
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CONCLUSION 40
WORKS CITED
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APPENDIX
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Sarduy, Severo. “Simulation.” Written on a Body,
translated by Carol Maier, New York: Lumen
Books, 1982. pp. 93-115.
ABSTRACT
The main issue that this thesis aims to address is the
marginalised position of the affective dimension in theoretical texts or the academic form. By means of an exploration into Severo Sarduy’s essay “Simulation” (La Simulacíon, 1982), this thesis aims to demonstrate the potential that lies in the employment of the affective dimension in theoretical writing- and reading processes. The analysis focuses on affective strategies in Sarduy’s essay or, in other words, the means in which the reader is incorporated into the text to fulfill an important role in the making of meaning of the text. This thesis aims to emphasise the ways in which the affective dimension is utilised to communicate the ontological perspective of Sarduy’s text as well as it aspires to show how these affective strategies have the ability to criticise and to mobilise change by providing a different kind of knowledge in academic discourses.
INTRODUCTION
In his essay “Simulation” (La Simulacíon) , Severo Sarduy envisions simulation as a connective life 1 force that generates all being. A force that runs across biological, social, psychological and cultural phenomena. With his understanding of the concept of simulation, Sarduy moves away from
connotations that he traces back to Platonic thought. These connotations, according to him, are still deeply engrained in our Western culture and have harmful implications in all dimensions of being.
Severo Sarduy was born in Camagüey in Cuba in 1937. He moved to Havana for Medical School in 1956. After the Cuban regime fell, he worked at newspaper Revolucíon. He was granted a scholarship and in 1960 he travelled to Paris to study. Dissatisfied with Fidel Castro’s government he decided to stay, after which he was never able to return to Cuba. He wrote several novels, collections of poetry, radio plays and multiple essays, he worked for a radio station, he was an art-critic and he painted. Severo Sarduy died in Paris in 1993. Sarduy is often referred to as a “writer’s writer,” so observes Rolando Pérez, and has “never enjoyed the same level of notoriety as … other Latin American writers of his generation like Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and
Gabriel García Márquez” (1). His work, whether fictional or non-fictional foregrounds a large 2 variety of knowledge of history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, astronomy, Eastern religions, literary criticism, and art, “in ways that blur the common divide between theory and literature” (Pérez 1). This incorporation of knowledges, in my opinion must be one of the reasons why Severo Sarduy’s work largely draws the interest of the academic world.
I got acquainted with the English translation of Sarduy’s essay in the Interculturality course I took, a little over a year ago. The text quite literally blew me away. The essay exhibits the whole of the array of topical fields mentioned above, and more. It presented an enormous quantity and diversity of information in a dense and multilayered structure full of analogies, metaphors and repetitions. This vast amount of knowledge was held in a long chain of diverse reflections that were cross-linked throughout the text. The intricate lay-out of the essay and the complexity of its
language, made it far from an easy read. It frustrated me as much as it fascinated me. And it did fascinate me. The essay’s enigmatic character kept luring me back into it and the text became a puzzle to me that needed to be solved. I knew there was something to this text that could truly change certain views upon life, upon being, but I felt that I could not fully get my grip on the text in order to really know. The text said so much and yet it left so much unsaid…
In my notes at the time I wrote: “It is not about the origin, it is all about the effect. We are all creating/simulating/performing a self. We are playing with the codes of the observer in order to
The original text was written in 1982. It was translated and added to the English translation of Sarduy’s bundle of
1
essays Escrito sobre un cuerpo, (Written on a Body), that originally appeared in 1969. This English translation appeared in 1989.
Pérez, Rolando. Severo Sarduy and the Neo-Baroque Image of Thought in the Visual Arts, West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue
2
CHAPTER 1
SENSATION AND STORY
In Platonic thought there is a hierarchical distinction between a copy and a simulacrum. The first of the two attempts to precisely reproduce the original, while the purpose of the latter is to
intentionally distort the object in order to appear truthful to its viewers. Although they were both 3 looked negatively upon by Plato, the copy – the most faithful one of the two – was valued higher than a simulacrum. Sarduy’s focus is directed towards the latter.4 Sarduy contests the Platonic notion of mimesis that, according to him, results in a violent process of dividing the representation from the ‘imposter’ that initiated it. This attitude is “still prevalent in Western thought” (97), so states Sarduy, and it coincides with the idea that an outer form should correspond to an inner essence. A correspondence that brings forth questions of authenticity: “Who simulates? From where? [and] Why?” (97)
The above questions testify of an obsession for the trickster and for what drives this trickster to simulate. Sarduy considers this process of partitioning as a violent operation and he emphasises this judgment by pointing out the terror that is present in the language of Plato’s The Sophist. 5 Platonic dialogue, so says Sarduy, “proceeds by images from falconry or war, as if logic arose only in the realm of aggression, in the interval of violence” (96). The direct quotes from Plato’s text that are incorporated in Sarduy’s essay, reveal a language that is charged with aggression. So does the following quote from Plato that says: “if he [the copyist] should find a hiding place in some part of this mimesis, we must follow hard upon him, relentlessly dividing any section that protects him” (96). This is a sentence that can be read as a declaration that legitimises the chase and the persecution, establishing mimesis as a crime of substance that must be punished with exposure. Sarduy’s text emphasises the harm in this attitude by reinforcing the violence within Plato’s language with his own choice of words, when he imagines the copyist – from a Platonic point of view – as a beast that is to be “trapped [and] enveloped in the nets that argument has devised to snare him” (96).
I experience Sarduy’s language as persuasive in demonstrating this divide as harmful. The physicality of his language triggers the senses and is able to make the reader experience bodily effects of the described violent process of splitting. By doing that the essay immerses the reader physically into the text. The physical engagement of the readers body has an important function in the text. As well does the position of the reader and the reader’s interpretation. These immersive aspects contributed to the enigmatic effect that the essay had on me and its ability – despite its
Ancient Greek large-scale statuary for example were often corrected to create an appearance of correct proportions
3
when seen from a human viewpoint. This is a Simulacrum in Platonic thought.
As phenomena in the physical world are already removed from their ideal or perfect forms, copies and simulacra
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remove themselves even further from those ideal forms. As a copy aims to exactly replicate and a simulacra distorts to appear truthful, the latter is the furthest removed from the ideal forms.
Plato, The Sophist, 234b + 235c.
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be in the world.” Although these notes were meant to concisely summarise the core statement that the text made – which I will further clarify in the course of this thesis – it did not reassure me. I felt there was more to discover. Now I know my curiosity had everything to do with what the text left unsaid. The text conveys a large part of its message on the experiential level or, in other words, by means of affect. And this affective dimension is very much put into strategic use. In my thesis I wish to investigate the essay’s demonstration of the use of this dimension and I will focus particularly on the potential for theory – theoretical writing as well as theoretical reading. I will study this topic within three separate, but interrelated explorations, each of which will highlight a slightly different facet of the innovative quality of the affective dimension in the essay. Because a focus upon the affective force of a text asks for a subjective approach, I will incorporate my own experience of reading into the analysis. When I mention a reader’s response, I refer to my own subjective process of reading.
The first interlocutor and guide for my critical assessment of Sarduy’s essay is Anna Gibbs, whose work in the field of mimetic communication brings together affect theory and mimesis. In my first chapter I will focus on how Sarduy’s text knows to utilise the affective dimension in union with – what I will continue to call – the informative level, in transmitting knowledge as discussed by Gibbs. In my second chapter I will juxtapose the ontological views that are carried out by Sarduy’s essay with a similar ontological line of thought in the work of Giorgio Agamben. I will concentrate my analysis on critically examining their radically different modes of address, in order to argue the benefits – and in this case even the necessity – of the application of the affective dimension for theory. For the last exploration in my third chapter, I will connect Sarduy's transformative philosophy to the contemporary discourses around the posthuman turn and propose to read Sarduy’s essay as a text that could provide a different and creative form of knowledge to the academic discourses in that field.
The complexity of Sarduy’s essay and the absence of a hierarchical structure in it fulfills an important function. The text seems to speak about everything and this conveys an important message that I aim to clarify in the course of this thesis. The complexity of Sarduy’s text will surely reflect in my explorations. I hope therefore, that in my thesis I was able to analyse and interpret with clarity as well as doing Sarduy’s intricate text justice.
aesthetic techniques that the three chapters in the essay are named after for example – “I. Copy/ simulacrum,” “II. Anamorphosis” and “III. Trompe l’Oeil” – are in Sarduy’s text not at all confined to operate within the aesthetic realm, as they appear to suggest. What binds these apparently different fields together is a repetition of a similar simulative mechanism that he observes in all of them, whether it concerns biological, psychological, social or cultural phenomena. These mechanisms manifest themselves in physical appearance, touch upon topics of animal and human behaviour and biology, involve theories of the formation of the self and matters of identity and are to be found within a work of art or a ritual. The wild and diverse range of reflections that Sarduy presents in his essay, share simulation as a common denominator and it manages to blur divides between domains by demonstrating overlap and correlations. Sarduy fleshes out his vision upon simulation as an omnipresent force in all that encompasses (human) being.
All of the mechanisms within the different topics that are dealt with demonstrate the operation of simulation as a strategy. Important to note here is that although the word strategy presumes to pursue a certain purpose, Sarduy emphasises the fact that these strategies do not necessarily carry out a teleological function. To the contrary. Sarduy for example asserts “the uselessness of animal mimesis and the fact that it represents nothing more than an unbridled desire for waste …” (95). He then continues by quoting British zoologist Hugh B. Cott, who states that “in the natural world there exists a law of pure disguise, an indisputable, clearly proven practice that consists in managing to pass for someone else, that cannot be reduced to any biological need derived from competition among the species or from natural selection” (Cott 99)(Sarduy 95).
Translator Carol Maier states in her introduction to the English translation of Escrito sobre
un cuerpo, (Written on a Body), that with Sarduy’s collection of essays in the volume he suggests that
“simulation is an essential biological force” that is “apparently legitimising, even welcoming transgression, and that his definition of simulation seems to contend that the original is the copy, that the simulacrum throbs with life” (i), labeling simulation as a quality that is elemental to being. In her text on mimetic communication, Anna Gibbs like Sarduy emphasises this innate human ability for mimesis and she demonstrates how affect is an integral part of mimesis. She emphasises that mimesis functions at multiple dimensions of experience and at different scopes. It functions at the most immediate physical level, but it also works through human social relations: “parent-child, peer, friendship, and love relations, and, under certain conditions, fleeting fellow-feeling between strangers” (202). Mimesis is present within cultural processes – that “aim to bind spectators into complex forms of sociality, including story, cinematic spectatorship, and audience
membership” (202) and finally, mimesis is a factor within “political orders” (191).
According to Gibbs, mimesis forms “the affective basis for ethical dealings with others” (202). She explains mimetic communication as “the corporeally based forms of imitation, both voluntary and involuntary” (186), processes to which affect is key. She emphasises the central function of affect in mimetic communication by saying that “at their most primitive, these [corporeally based forms of complexity – to keep me closely engaged with it. In this chapter I aim to demonstrate that the
incorporation of the reader into Sarduy’s text holds the means by which a great deal of the essay’s message – or argument even – is conveyed. In my examination in this chapter I will focus on this experiential level, or in other words on the affective force of the text, and demonstrate the means in which the text does what it says. 6
1.1 MIMESIS
Sarduy’s essay in my opinion challenges the Platonic attitude that the text describes to be still very present in our Western culture. By doing that it alters normative notions of the concept of
mimesis and its implications. So too does Anna Gibbs’ text “After Affect - Sympathy, Synchrony and
Mimetic Communication,” that I will soon speak about more in order to gain a deeper understanding of affect and particularly of its interrelatedness with the mimetic.
The first meaning of mimesis in the Oxford English Dictionary holds the classical origin that Sarduy speaks of. It refers to Aristotle and Plato’s uses of the concept that alludes generally to “the representation or imitation of the real world [or nature] in (a work of) art” (OED). In other words this description speaks about art and literature or the domain of the aesthetic. The word mimesis has Greek etymological roots. Mimēsis means imitation, mimeisthai to imitate. Four more meanings follow, in four different fields. The second meaning springs from biology and explains the concept as “the close external resemblance of an animal or plant (or part of one) to another, or to an inanimate object; a similar resemblance between parts or features” or “imitative behaviour of one species by another” (OED). Mimesis in medicine, the third sphere in the dictionary dictates its meaning as “the production of symptoms characteristic of one disease by another” (OED). The fourth field that is invoked is that of sociology and the dictionary describes mimesis here as “the deliberate imitation of the behaviour of one group of people by another (usually less advantaged) as a factor in social change” (OED). Finally, pharmacology and biochemistry hold the last description in the dictionary that presents mimesis as “the reproduction of the action or physiological effects of an enzyme, hormone, etc., esp. by a synthetic compound” (OED).
The multiple examples that form the fabric of Sarduy’s essay can be related to almost all of the contexts presented to us by the dictionary. Sarduy elaborates on artworks and their techniques, he draws analogies between human transvestism and animal mimicry, and he speaks of social
strategies, communication and war tactics. Furthermore, he weaves Lacan’s orders of “the imaginary,” “the symbolic” and “the real” in his psychoanalytic theory through the essay like a red thread. But, rather than presenting his various reflections in a closed off and confined manner like the dictionary does, Sarduy links all of these separate examples that spring from seemingly separate fields. The
Much can be said about the parallels between Severo Sarduy’s understanding of simulation and Baudrillards work
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Simulacra and Simulation (1981). Because my focus lies upon the affective strategies in Sarduy’s text, I deliberately decided not to incorporate Baudrillard’s thought into my explorations.
– forces that manifest between bodies. Those intensities are uncontained and have a presence beyond bodies or entities. Gibbs’ metaphor foregrounds the accumulative function of affect and its even increased force in our globalised world. Furthermore, it emphasises the fact that it requires a certain form of contact or sociality.
Gibbs distinguishes two main dimensions in affect theory and she envisions a task and a potential for creative theoretical writing in bridging the two realms. Sarduy’s text in my opinion demonstrates this potential and before I start to clarify how the essay shows this potential, I will first briefly go into the distinction that Gibbs makes within affect theory. The two dimensions that she distinguishes within the field, correspond with the above named attributes of affect as subjective on the one hand and affect as asubjective on the other. The first line of thought focuses on the way bodies are affected locally. It is a humanist direction of thought, that deals with “understanding formations of the subject” (188). This school of thought focuses on the local, the subjective and the corporeal. The other direction takes up a nonhumanist perspective and, so states Gibbs, places an 10 emphasis on theorising affect as forces that extend beyond bodies or entities. This dimension deals 11 with the “world of “nonlocal," asubjective becomings” (203)and these envisioned becomings are non representational and incorporeal. Gibbs suggests that an oscillating movement between the two dimensions is necessary. And although both dimensions have their own risks , both dimensions, so 12 claims Gibbs, “doubtless begin from very different philosophical assumptions, [but] are both
essential … in the overarching intellectual project of rethinking the human in the wake of a sustained critique of Western rationality” (188).
Gibbs emphasises the need to gain a better understanding of “the role of mimetic communication in social processes” (190, 191), especially since in Western culture it hasn’t been properly understood partially because it has been primarily related to infants and animals. Anna Gibbs pleads for interdisciplinarity in affect theory. She states that within the fields that deal with affect – psychology, the neurosciences, biology, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology – the way that affect as well as mimesis are conceived is much contested. She explains that to understand human mimesis “in its complex imbrication of biological capacities with sociality … a
multidisciplinary approach drawing on the sciences as well as the humanities is required (190).” Gibbs explains that it is not her aim to rethink mimetic communication and frame it
empirically. She foregrounds rather the importance for theory to implement a heuristic function and to engage creatively with different forms of knowledge (189). Questions that she connects to this heuristic attitude are: “What if one conceived the world in this [my italic] way? What then [my
Gibbs describes it as “a certain strategic humanism viewed through the optic of representation that focuses on the
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culturally plastic and historically changing forms of subjectivity” (203).
This is the more abstract nonhumanist perspective in which “the human appears as an envelope of possibilities rather
11
than the finite totality or essence represented by the idea of the individual organism” (188).
For a more detailed explanation of the two dimensions within affect theory I refer to Gibbs’ text.
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imitation] involve the visceral level of affect contagion, the synchrony of facial expressions, vocalisations, postures and movements with those of another person” (Hatfield, Cacioppo and Rapson in Gibbs 186). 7
1.2 AFFECT AND AFFECT THEORY
At this point I think it is time to ask: what is affect exactly? Explanations of affect or affect theory often result in abstract descriptions. Affect is described as forces or intensities (definitions that are coined by Gilles Deleuze) that pass between human or nonhuman bodies. Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg state in their introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, that “affect is in many ways synonymous with force or forces of encounter” (2) and that those forces or intensities extend themselves beyond emotions. They have the ability to drive bodies – and therefore, us – and possess the potential to change (our) bodies. Baruch Spinoza – the philosopher that with his monist ontology from his Ethics influenced many theorists in the field of affect theory – differentiates between affectus – “the force of an affecting body” and affectio – “the impact it leaves on the one affected. Affectio may be fleeting but it may also leave a residue, a lasting impression that produces particular kinds of bodily capacities” (Watkins 269). Gibbs starts her text with a metaphor that 8 bypasses the above abstract theorisations. By doing that she gives a strong sense of how to
understand affect by demonstrating what affect does. In an affective manner, so to say. The metaphor can be seen as the affective tool par excellence, often involving descriptions or expressions of
physical processes, that have the ability to transmit bodily effects upon its receiver. She explains affect by comparing it to contagion:
Contagion is everywhere in the contemporary world. It leaps from body to body, sweeping through mediated populations at the speed of a bushfire. No longer confined to local outbreaks of infectious disease or even of hysteria, contagious epidemic now potentially occur on a global scale and, thanks to electronic media, with incredible rapidity (186). Although diseases and bushfires both have a negative connotation which might be misleading, they do both capture the attributes of affect and its accelerating force. Like a virus, affect possesses the 9 capability to infect and thus to change bodies. It can evolve itself rapidly while it is transmitted between bodies, and it can even expand into an epidemic or pandemic. Gibbs’ metaphor of
contagion demonstrates affect as subjective – forces that affect bodies locally – as well as asubjective
Hatfield, Elaine, John T. Cacioppo and Richard L. Rapson. Emotional Contagion: Studies in Emotion and Social
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Interaction, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 5.
Spinoza, Benedict. “The Ethics.” A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, ed, translated by Edwin Curley,
8
Princeton University Press, pp. 85-265.
Affect is not necessarily negative but is equally capable of spreading positive effects.
quotes the very beginning of the first chapter of the essay . Sarduy commences here with an 17 exploration into human transvestism. This part gives a clear insight into Sarduy’s language and simultaneously introduces some core attributes of Sarduy’s vision upon simulation’s mechanisms:
The transvestite does not imitate woman. For him, à la limite, there is no woman; he knows – and paradoxically he may be the only one who knows this – that she is just
appearance, that her world and the force of her fetish conceal a defect.
The transvestite’s cosmetic erection; the glittery aggression of his eyelids, quivering and metallicised like wings on a voracious insect; his voice displaced, as if it belonged to another character always off stage; the mouth drawn over his mouth; his own member, all the more present for being castrated – their only purpose is the stubborn reproduction of that ubiquitous though deceptive icon: the mother who has got it up and is dubbed by her double, albeit only for him to symbolise that the erection is just appearance.
The transvestite does not copy: he simulates, since there is no norm to invite and magnetise his transformation, to determine his metaphor: instead, it is the non-existence of the worshipped being that constitutes the space, the region, or the support of his simulation, of his methodical imposture between laughter and death. (Sarduy, 93)
In the above-cited fragment Sarduy differentiates between imitation and simulation. The paragraph presents a metamorphosis that could never bring about an exact reproduction of a model. Sarduy to the contrary, emphasises the absence of this model – woman – instead. It is only the effect of
“woman” that is produced. What drives this transformation or illusion is the need to disappear or, in other words, the necessity to cover-up a defect, which is the male sex. Sarduy’s language and
wordplay – intermingling male and female qualities – blurs the divide between man and woman. The erection of the artificial facade of woman camouflages the male sex and castrates the penis while simultaneously bringing it to the forefront by saying that it is “all the more present” (93) despite of this ‘cover-up’.
By referring to spaces of the theatre the text presents the transformation as a staged performance. By alluding to a dubbed film, it emphasises the supplementary and the non-diegetic sounds that refer to the spaces outside of the film. These references place an extra emphasis upon the fact that it is a representation that we are dealing with that results in human transvestism to come across as an act that is split into two by the mere looking of the spectator. There are two characters, one that is on and one that is off stage. There are two asynchronous tracks. One that is visual and one that is auditory. In this we can recognise the previously mentioned violent split of form and content. The transvestite – split into he the disguised and she the representation – is the object, that we – the
After the epigraph in which Sarduy quotes a text by Gilles Larrain from his photobook Idols.
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italic] becomes possible in the space opened up … ?” (189). She concludes her text by saying that “passionate fictions of writing,” have the ability to work in both dimensions in the field of affect theory simultaneously. “Contemporary theoretical writing,” she continues, “is increasingly borrowing the techniques and methods of fiction to this end, interlocking sensation with story and in the process recreating the essay as a heuristic for innovation” (203). 13
Gibbs allocates an important task to theoretical writing that adopts affective strategies and techniques that are more likely to be found in fictional texts and it is from this statement that I wish to depart my examination of Sarduy’s essay in this chapter. I will analyse Sarduy’s “Simulation” in an aim to show that the essay exercises a powerful force that – to use Gibbs’ words – interlocks
sensation with story, by transmitting a large part of its message on the level of affect. In my analysis I will focus on two interrelated aspects that I believe largely contribute to this heuristic function. First of all I will concentrate on the ways in which transmission on the level of affect occurs within the essay. Secondly, I will look at the concept of “performativity”, that in my opinion plays an important part in the powerful effect of this text. To this aim I will use Mieke Bal’s theory on performativity, Wolfgang Iser’s reader response theory and Derek Attridges theories on a literal reading. In my examination I will demonstrate what techniques and methods Sarduy employs and how they may serve as a potential for innovation.
1.3THE ANXIOUS PERSPECTIVE
In the first paragraph of this chapter, I briefly spoke about Sarduy’s language that articulates the harm in the process of dividing form from essence and its ability of transmitting bodily effects to a reader. The issue of the harm that the Platonic conception of representation can inflict, is brought up on an informative level as well as on an experiential level. Like in Gibbs’ contagion metaphor, the language is often physical. On the physical effect of metaphors Gibbs writes that they ignite a “sympathetic” response that is automatic and unconscious. This response entails “a form 14 of embodied simulation in much the same way as mirror neurons do” (Raymond W. Gibbs in Gibbs 201). 15
With particular attention to the bodily transmissions of affects, I will take a closer look at Sarduy’s text by close reading the first part of his essay. The following excerpt of “Simulation” 16
Gibbs borrowed Teresa de Lauretis’ term “passionate fiction.” Lauretis, Teresa de. The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality
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and Perverse Desire. Indiana University Press, 1994.
Gallese, Vittorio. “The Manifold Nature of Interpersonal Relations: The Quest for a Common Mechanism.”
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Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 358, 2003, pp. 517-28.
Gibbs, Raymond W. “Metaphor Interpretation as Embodies Simulation.” Mind and Language 21 (3)3, 2006, pp.
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434-58.
Here I wish to add a remark that in the close readings of passages of Sarduy’s text that I include, the quantity and the
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diversity of the content that is presented might be confusing and overwhelming. I see these qualities as aspects that carry out an important function in Sarduy’s text. For this reason I have chosen to include this complexity as such, rather than structuring it in the interest of readability.
“I can see the distraught face of my terrified friend when he was brushed, as if by lethal elytra, by the sharp, starched organzas of pleated skirts, the poisoned flowers clutched in skinny yellowish hands, and also the cheap, sickeningly sweet perfume bought in the Medina …” (94). The teeming
movement of a raving swarm of colourful transvestites high on energy, stirs up a sense of panic in me. The excess of perfume is transferred to the inside of my own nostrils while reading, and I can feel the brushing of the sharp and synthetic fabrics against my skin, after which I am unable to prevent myself from imagining the rash it leaves behind.
It is only after reading Sarduy’s investigations into Platonic dialogue a few pages further – I have mentioned them here in the beginning of this chapter – that I am offered an opportunity to connect this anxious viewpoint to Platonic anxiety that occurs when representation mystifies or hides an essence, which coexists with the urge to unmask the imitator. In my opinion this
observation enables the reader to read the fluctuating perspective as a confrontation with a certain type of view that is ingrained in our Western culture and stems from classical roots. The fluctuating perspective and the inclusion of a marginal viewpoint in Sarduy’s text, destabilises this dominant
frontal perspective on representation within Western thinking. According to Sarduy, this dominant
normative view holds the assumption that all bodies are contained with a generative center, which suggests there exists an origin behind every representation (98). Sarduy counters this notion by alluding to the perspective of “void” present in the great Eastern theogonies – Buddhism, Taoism. Here, he maintains, “we find not a full presence, god, man, logos, but a generative emptiness whose metaphor and simulation is visible reality, and which, when truly experienced and understood, becomes liberation” (98). This void is “generative” rather than empty, as void is mostly understood from a Western viewpoint. In Sarduy’s perspective, emptiness and fullness are not rigid opposites, so writes Rolando Pérez, but “complementary binaries” (Pérez 99). The generative quality of emptiness or absence repeats itself throughout the essay as the source of all manifestations, a “pure
non-presence that, transvestised in pure energy, engenders the visible world with its simulacrum (Sarduy 98).”
1.4ANAMORPHOSIS
In the above, I connected the perspective of anxiety to a dominant (Western) normative view. My choice to label this perspective as frontal is not arbitrary. In his second chapter (“II Anamorphosis”), Sarduy explains the workings of anamorphosis by three different readings of Hans Holbein the Youngers’s painting The Ambassadors (1533). A frontal, a marginal and a baroque reading. The foreground of the painting presents a strangely unidentifiable object. Seen from one particular close diagonal viewpoint this object in the foreground optically takes the shape of a skull. One can describe Anamorphosis as a technical mechanism that opens up a new layer of meaning that reveals itself when the spectator takes an unconventional viewpoint. Anamorphosis is often described as the opposite of perspective. Perspective, so writes Sarduy, encompasses the “rationalisation of the reader/spectator – are looking at in close proximity, near enough to touch. This paragraph presents a
fragmented body in close-up. Quivering eyelids, a displaced voice, a mouth covering another mouth, a penis and cosmetic supplements (93), sum up a body that is dissected by the look of the spectator. Objectified yet intimidating at once. An object of fear , in a certain sense. This body and its 18
accompanying effects seem to be approaching the spectator with a powerful force in a dense language full of adjectives that express hostility mixed with extravagance. The eyelids possess a “glittery aggression” (93) when compared to insect wings. And the insect is “voracious,” (93) ready to devour its prey.
Sarduy’s language speaks to all the senses. The “quivering and metallicised … wings on a voracious insect” (93), can be seen, heard, felt even. His descriptions are multisensory, physical and physically palpable. The type of language that is highly charged with affect. So too is the earlier mentioned quality of thickness that I related to the text, by which I refer to the density of meaning as well as the large quantity of sensations. This thickness has the ability to transfer an overwhelming and intimidating feeling to a reader. Like in Gibbs’ contagion metaphor, these qualities transmit sensations from the body of text to the body of the reader.
The essay’s narration offers multiple perspectives that allow the reader to identify with various points of view. The epigraph of the chapter “I. Copy/Simulacrum” presents a direct viewpoint of the transvestite. They are the words of photographer Gilles Larain from the text that appeared in his photo book Idols, in which he portrayed transvestites: “We dress for our pleasure and get off on each other … When we put on our clothes we feel free … There’s strength and self-confidence in the way I dress” (93). The first and the last part of the on the previous page quoted paragraph, presents the reader with a fairly ‘neutral’, third person narration that keeps a certain distance. Simultaneously it does offer the reader access to the transvestites inner world by the phrases “for him” and “he knows that” (93). Through these references, identification with the transvestite
becomes possible. In the middle section the perspective tilts slightly towards the point of view of the spectator that is looking at the transvestite. This section presents the perception of the transvestite as an overwhelming and approaching threat. By offering identification with the spectator, this point 19 of view forms a contrast to the first and last paragraphs. This fleeting perspective allows the reader to take position on both sides of the split, so to say. On the active part of doing the splitting and on the undergoing part of being split.
Another shift in perspective occurs a little further on the page. Here the position of looking tilts to a more obviously anxious point of view. The reader identifies with an intimidated spectator at the cabarets of Tangiers in the 60s when “… opulent and oxygenated transvestites spread out over the city like phosphorescent bands of recently opened chrysalises [my italic]” (94). Sarduy continues:
On “the affective politics of fear” see Sara Ahmed, 62-81.
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Idem.
point of view reflects an aesthetic/moral stance” (Pérez 35,36). The subject is implicated in the simulation “and the “frontal gaze” is a position of institutional and micro-power” (Pérez 35,36). Like Lacan’s psychoanalysis already demonstrated, the baroque perspective adds insecurity and discomfort to the proces of analysis. The text demands the reader to take up an attitude that doesn’t depart from premises and therefore the reader has to accept the unstable, multifaceted, fragmented and
ambiguous character of the object.
On the informative level, as well as in its form and structure, this is exactly what Sarduy’s text does. The text urges the spectator/reader to shift his or her position of looking in a back-and-forth movement which allows the reader to experience the simultaneity of multiple perspectives, without privileging a frontal perspective over a marginal one or vice versa. And that is how a new reality can emerge. In this I sense an echo of Gibbs’ question: “What if one conceived the world in this way? What then becomes possible in the space opened up by such a “passionate fiction”?” (189). What happens to our image of the world for example, if our starting point is void instead of essence? If we opt for this starting-point, then everything manifests itself at surface level and becomes performative rather than expressive. 20
1.5 PERFORMATIVITY
In the above one can distinguish the workings of anamorphosis on two levels. First of all there is what I have called the informative level that transmits knowledge through language. This level describes the mechanism of anamorphosis as a distortive technique by means of words, in examples that explain and reflect upon its workings. At another level, the essay performs
anamorphosis by what it does. I see a correspondence between the two levels that I have just
described and Gibbs’ sensation and story (203). Sarduy’s essay in my opinion exemplifies perfectly howboth levels can be “interlocked” and how they can co-operate.
Sarduy’s text doesn’t allow itself to be analysed or summarised into a definite single interpretation. Even if one wishes to grasp the text with its multiple messages and meanings, it surpasses a linear reading and therefore requires analysis. Progressing into the text keeps the reader in insecurity at certain aspects, but allows the reader to draw parallels retrospectively. In my view this resonates with what reader-response theorist Wolfgang Iser calls “an oscillation between the
building and the breaking of illusions” (80). About the process of anticipation and retrospection he
Gender for example, rather than a fixed and essential quality of identity, can be considered as what Judith Butler
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describes as a “corporeal style.” The presupposition of true masculinity or femininity – could be reviewed as a “regulatory fiction” and “performative rather than expressive” (141). Butler explains that the binary relation between nature and culture is at the root of the currently dominant perspective on the body in Western culture. She points out how this dualism reproduces the corresponding binaries of body/mind, feminine/masculine, figuring “nature as female, in need of subordination by a culture that is invariably figured as male, active, and abstract” (37). This, according to Butler, leads to the dominant view of “the body as a passive medium, signified by an inscription from a cultural source figured as external to that body” (129). Butler, Judith. “Subversive Bodily Acts.” Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York/London: Routledge, 1990, pp. 28-142.
gaze” (101). He describes it as the “hierarchical organisation of figures in space (101),” which in my opinion implies a notion of a dominant look that holds objectivity and truth. Sarduy refers to
anamorphosis as “secret perspective” (after Dürer) that since its invention is associated with “the
occult sciences, with hermeticism, and magic (Niceron) (101).” Anamorphosis as a mechanism, or strategy, opposes the implied neutrality of (Western) rationality and logic.
Both the frontal and the marginal reading – as their names already predict – take a static viewpoint as a starting-point for analysis and interpretation. The frontal reading focuses mostly on composition, symbolic analysis and formal analogies. The text describes the object in front of the composition as “a pearly, bone-shaped seashell placed tangentially in the foreground of Holbein’s
The Ambassadors” (99). Its reference to the sea relates to the trips of Manuel I, one of the portrayed
ambassadors. The objects surrounding the men are summed up and labeled “the quadrivium of the liberal arts” (99), among which a celestial and a terrestrial globe, books, a sundial, compasses and a lute. These are all objects that symbolise Western imperial wealth. The lute subsequently, is marked as a formal analogy of the shell.
The marginal reading is an analysis that departs from the displaced diagonal position that gives “access to the second meaning [in which] the seashell becomes skull” (100).
A “supplementary codification” (102) that according to Sarduy brings forth the symbolisation of the “impermanence and ephemerality of the ambassadors’ mission … [and] the illusory nature of all representation (100).”
The baroque reading is all about “the energy of conversion and the cleverness necessary to decipher the flip side” (100). Instead of a fixed position, analysis is done by an oscillating movement, shifting between the two positions. “Neither seashell nor skull (100).” Sarduy compares this baroque movement to Jacques Lacan’s description of the analyst’s movement in relation to the patient in psychoanalysis. The analyst has to shift his position to assemble the fragmented images the analysand offers him, into an “exact image” (101). He writes:
Anamorphosis and the discourse of the analysand as a kind of hiding: something, which will only be revealed to the subject if he shifts his position, is hidden from him – hence his discomfort. The subject is implicated in the reading of the spectacle, the deciphering of discourse, precisely because the thing he is not at first able to hear or see concerns him directly in his capacity as subject (101).
This oscillating movement in analysis is very much like the fleeting perspective of narration that the essay presents.
Pérez explains the baroque movement as a shift from “our comfortable position to one that actively transforms us” (Pérez 35,36). He states that “ethically and philosophically, Sarduy makes us take note that there is no such thing as an “innocent,” normative position, but that instead every
“the aesthetic,” he also transfers that realm from a metaphysical domain to the vital reality of “the everyday.”
Progressing further into the essay, the text allowed me to revise the views, the assumptions and the expectations the text had generated in me. Here I have to remark that these revisions required rereading, thorough analysis and a constant redefining. Simultaneously new questions kept arising, which meant that the work never led to a resolve. I never fully reached the coherence that I longed for. I had to accept the blockages that prevented me from interpreting the text. Furthermore, I could only constantly agree upon postponing my interpretation and staying in insecurity.
Derek Attridge claims that the “failure to interpret” (48) can be “as important, and quite as emotionally powerful” (48), as a successful interpretation. In his text “Against Allegory: Waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K,” Attridge foregrounds a literal reading, that he 22 sees too often sacrificed for the allegorical reading. Sarduy’s essay does not have an allegorical lure to it – to the contrary. In my view the essay rules out an allegorical reading and rather seduces the reader into a physically powerful literal reading. Attributes that Attridge connects to a literal 23 reading (48) come to the fore in the essay’s narrative temporality and succession, for example (48). The achronical serial connections and the ellipses in Sarduy’s argumentation form an important strategy in the essay. So too do the powerful physical depictions and the unsuccessful attempts at interpretation that according to Attridge also characterise a literal reading (48). By means of these strategies the text seems to play a game by which it escapes systemisation and semantic fixation.
Earlier I described the form of the text itself as anamorphosis. This line of thought shows how the text reduces itself to the technical mechanism it describes. A similar reduction occurs in to the frequent use of the analogy, that as a stylistic device that is inherently mimetic, performs what the text speaks about: Mimesis. In other words, both examples demonstrate the text in actively doing what it says. This brings me to Mieke Bal’s work Traveling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide and her genealogy of the concept of performativity, that finds its roots in speech-act theory. “In speech-act theory,” so writes Bal, “[performativity] is the moment when known words detach themselves from both their sleep in dictionaries and people’s linguistic competence, to be launched as weapons or seductions, exercising their weight, striking force, and charm in the present only, between singular subjects” (Bal 176). In other words, they activate.
With a focus upon the performativity of a text, each read becomes a new singular event and a performative text transforms the reader into a performer. In Sarduy’s text a reader becomes an active agent in the making of meaning and s/he is given a voice within the work. Meaning becomes
Attridge in his text advocates a literal reading that is often sacrificed at the expense of an allegorical reading.
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Especially when it comes to historico-political contexts. In this text he applies a literal reading to the work of John Maxwell Coetzee. For my analysis of the affective in Sarduy I use Attridges ideas to emphasise the working and the force of affect in his essay.
Interesting to note here is that Attridge includes Fredric Jameson’s statement that “interpretation is … an essentially
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allegorical act” (Jameson in Attridge 36).
writes that the reader will always be in search of consistency in the text (79). He continues to say that the reader will strive “even unconsciously, to fit everything together in a consistent pattern” (79).
I continuously experienced this process of anticipation and retrospection in my reading of Sarduy’s text. At first sight, the essay shows a clear formal structure; three chapters that describe aesthetic techniques, each of them numbered in Roman numerals and each of them starting in a parallel manner – with an epigraph. This layout evoked in me the expectation that I was about to read a text that would substantially follow its structural logic. Soon enough this clear-cut
organisation proved to be merely a formal appearance. The content of the essay contrarily presents itself as an untamed series of ideas and reflections in a multi-levelled structure full of analogies, metaphors and repetitions that are cross-referenced throughout the text. Moreover, the titles of the chapters raise the expectation that the essay deals with the visual arts. Yet immediately into the first chapter, that starts with the topic of the analogy between human transvestism and animal mimesis, this assumption too asks to be adjusted. The essay reveals parallels between the three aesthetic techniques in the chapter titles and human and animal forms of mimesis or mimicry. They in turn 21 refer to Lacan’s orders of “the imaginary,” “the symbolic” and “the real.” Threefold divisions like these are of frequent occurrence in the essay, and correspondences exist between all of them. The parallels however, are far from obvious.
Rather than presenting the correspondences between ideas very evidently throughout the essay, Sarduy interweaves them into a complex that hardly follows a structural logic. Pérez argues that Sarduy establishes the serial relations of his elaborations “through analogy and correspondence, something that leaves him free – and this is crucial – to read the history of literature, science, and art, achronically” (Pérez 55). When writing on the visual arts Sarduy doesn’t confine himself to periods, artistic movements and traditions. He easily moves from Holbein’s The Ambassadors to the work of Andy Warhol to Gilbert and Georges’ performances via church dome fresco’s and American hyperrealist sculptors.
Sarduy does not explain, embed or introduce any of his separate reflections in a larger context of argumentation or meaning. He rather intertwines one exploration into the next,
challenging the reader who constantly has to reread, distillate, connect and systemise.“These serial, analogical connections,” Pérez writes, “are made because the world presents itself without beginning or end, without a predetermined order or sense – in a word, as chaos. We in turn respond by creating a “cosmos” (cosmologies, as it were) outside of this chaos …” (Pérez 54). Sarduy’s text objects to this artificially constructed order by incorporating the reader directly into its turbulent structure,
allowing him or her no position outside of it. By interweaving the examples from different spheres so tightly, drawing analogies across domains not only does Sarduy deny mimesis’ confinement to
“I Copy/Simulacrum,” “II Anamorphosis” and “III Trompe l’Oeil” correspond respectively with metamorphosis,
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One could say that in Sarduy’s essay knowledge is equally transmitted on the level of affect – Gibbs’ levels of sensation – as it is on the informative level – Gibbs’ level of story. One can also conclude that both of these levels co-operate. This co-operation presents itself in the form of a text that does what it says. Sarduy’s text in my opinion fully utilises these two dimensions and this is precisely where I think Sarduy’s essay shows innovative potential for theoretical writing. In a field where rationality and logic dominate, I believe the marginalised place for the affective dimension might be tantamount to underutilised capacity and I think that Sarduy’s text shows the potential for the utilisation of that affective dimension. Sarduy’s text demonstrates a form in which an equal proportion between ratio and logic on the one hand and affect on the other, work together and reinforce each other, to create a powerful message. In the following chapter I will continue to examine how “arguing on the level of affect” can fortify the message. In doing this I will focus specifically on the text's mode of address.
dependent upon this particular reader – on his or her context and specific history, his or her response, but also upon the reader’s willingness to “stay and perform (Bal 192).” This activating quality resonates with Attridges “meaning as verb” (40), which seeks to “preserve the event as an event, to sustain and prolong the experience of otherness [and] to resist the temptation to close down the uncertain meanings and feelings that are being evoked” (40). This active “meaning as verb” (40) which Attridge also calls “reading as an event” (39) is opposed to “meaning as noun” (40) that according to him deploys “reading techniques that will lessen or annul the experience of singularity and alterity” (40), which in my opinion describes exactly what Sarduy’s essay seems to resist against. Sarduy’s text rather foregrounds a multiplicity of perspectives and alterity and resists any form of fixation while furthermore attributing an active role to the reader with regards to the making of meaning. Every read of Sarduy’s essay – whether it is a different reader or the second read by the same reader – will result in a different experience and a different relation towards the text, which keeps the meaning of the text in flux.
CHAPTER CONCLUSION
In this chapter I aimed to demonstrate that a large part of the message that Sarduy’s essay conveys occurs on an affective level. The affective in Sarduy’s essay is demonstrated in the physicality of the language and the multisensory depictions. It is also in the thickness and overwhelming quality of the language and in the fleeting baroque perspective. Furthermore, it is in the untamed serial structure and finally in the way the text incorporates the reader and forecloses the possibility of a fixed interpretation. All know to transmit bodily affects to the reader and immerse the reader physically into the text.
Sarduy as well as Gibbs complicate the concept of mimesis and advocate a revaluation of the concept as a phenomenon that is far from marginal, but deep-seated in and central to (human)
being. Mimesis and affect are closely related and, like the analogy in Sarduy’s text, possess connective
qualities. This binding quality that is so present in the essay, opposites the Platonic movement of splitting, by literally presenting a structure that is inseparable by analysis. This created in me, as a reader, a paradoxical attitude towards the essay. On the one hand the essay lured me into analysis and I felt very much driven by the need to understand, yet on the other hand the essay frustrated me by the complexity of its language and its turbulent and inseparable structure in which my reading process was disturbed, information was withheld, hierarchy as well as linearity lacked. It is this paradox in the process of analysis in my opinion, that shows the critical message of the text and the role that the affective dimension has in that critique. The criticism is enclosed in the practice of analysing Sarduy’s text. It confronted me directly with the artificiality of categorisation and analysis and moreover, it made me experience the harm one can inflict in trying to untangle an inseparable structure.
their ontological visions are carried out by their texts. I have to remark here that Agamben’s form-of-life is a concluding direction within a large body of work. I realise that I am working with just a small part, offering only a very general treatment of his theory. It is surely not my goal here to give a complete overview of Agamben’s theory leading up to his form-of-life, as well as it is not my aim to make an extensive and detailed comparative analysis of both Agamenben’s and Sarduy’s ontological views. Rather, I will juxtapose both ontologies – that roughly share a similar starting point, a related vision as well as a comparable goal – examining closely and viewing critically their modes of address, that radically differ from each other. My focus is on the how in their presentation of an ontology of the how. What I wish to demonstrate in this chapter by the juxtaposition between Agamben’s form-of-life and Sarduy’s essay, is the ways in which Sarduy’s text shows the potential of the affective and experiential dimensions of reading for theory, based on its mode of address.
2.1 SPLIT
Those familiar with the work of Giorgio Agamben know that in his Homo Sacer series, he exposes and opposes various “apparatuses of western culture, from the most abstract (ontology, ethics) to the more concrete (law, government)” (Prozorov 146). These apparatuses characterise themselves by a scission or a split that relies on a dialectic that is always structured in a similar manner: one part of the split functions as an essential founding element for the other part, but is simultaneously excluded from it. The city for example, “is founded on the division of life into bare life and politically qualified life [and] the human is defined by the exclusion–inclusion of the animal” (Prozorov 146). Or in Aristotelian and Platonist apparatuses of ontology in which either existence serves as a condition of essence (Aristotle) or essence as a condition of existense (Plato). Agamben calls this problematic double logic “presuppositional.”
Agamben’s project departs from “the observation that the Greeks did not have a single term to express what we understand by the word life (207).” Instead, they used two distinct terms, zoè and
bios. Zoè “expressed the simple fact of living common to all living things (animals, human beings or
gods)” (207), bios signified “the form or manner of life proper to an individual or group” (207). Agamben states that in modern languages, this opposition hardly occurs anymore and the sole term of life has become very opaque. The problem that Agamben observes lies in the paradox that has come to be tied to the distinction. This paradox entails that Bios is dependent upon zoè, and simultaneously can exclude or isolate zoè due to the fact that the political is now interfering in the private. Agamben theorises and argues the processes of splitting in relation to the complex 25
The risk that Giorgio Agamben continuously points to is that this paradox can easily start producing very vulnerable
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subjects, the figure that Agamben calls Homo sacer. Agamben’s figure of the Homo Sacer represents a subject that is sacred yet sacrificable. This subject is simultaneously in- and excluded from the polis and is reduced to zoè or bare life. In other words one could say that, zoè enters into the sphere of the polis” (Agamben “Homo Sacer” 6).
CHAPTER 2
AN ONTOLOGY OF THE HOW AND ITS MODE OF ADDRESS
“Western ontology,” so writes Giorgio Agamben in his The Use of Bodies, “is from the very beginning articulated and run through by scissions and caesurae, which divide and coordinate in being subject (hypokeimenon) and essence (ousia), primary substances and secondary substances, essence and existence, potential and act …” (105). Agamben here contests the same operation of splitting that Sarduy opposes in his essay. Both Sarduy and Agamben, each in their own manner, consider this operation harmful and aim to emancipate from those processes of separation. And both men’s ideas take shape in a processual ontology that strives to move away from a binary and anthropocentric worldview. An “ontology of the how,” as Agamben defines it.
The whole of Agamben’s Homo Sacer series – of which The Use of Bodies is the final volume (IV, 2) – is dedicated to exposing the in his opinion inoperable structures that lie at the base of the apparatuses of Western culture. And like Sarduy, he traces those structures back to classical thought. In his concluding volume, Agamben does not offer a practical purpose or solution to the
problematic architecture that he observes within Western metaphysics, politics and the ramifications that this makeup has upon our society. Instead, he develops the ontological concept of form-of-life that sees manners of being as inseperable from the living thing, without defining that living thing (Agamben 224). Although Sarduy and Agamben come from different backgrounds and write 24 within different contexts – Giorgio Agamben is a political philosopher with a background in linguistics, language and aesthetics, strongly influenced by Heidegger, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault – many parallels can be drawn between Agamben’s form-of-life and the ontological vision that Sarduy’s essay brings forth.
Even though the works of Agamben and Sarduy appeared in disciplinary contexts that strongly influenced or even defined their modes of address – Agamben’s work is strictly academic while Sarduy’s work celebrates the freedom of an autonomous essay – I claim both works address a similar audience of academic readers. As already described in my introduction, Sarduy has interested the academic world with his work. In my introduction I have referred to Severo Sarduy as a “writer’s writer” (Pérez 1) who has always attracted the interest of the academic world. Moreover, Sarduy’s non-fictional texts require a certain perseverance as well as knowledge and therefore direct themselves to a certain type of reader.
In the previous chapter I have discussed Sarduy’s essay as a performative text that does what it says, transmitting a large part of its message on the experiential level, on how it says what it says. In this chapter I aim to focus on the ontological ideas of Sarduy and Agamben, in particular on how
Agamben’s concept of form-of-life leads up to what Agamben calls an “ontology of style”. Both concepts are closely
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interrelated. I choose to focus on the concept of form-of-life here because it is more extensively developed in Agamben’s work and therefore better suitable for comparison.
merely recalls the simulative nature of all being – when manifested as that being” (97, 98). In my opinion Sarduy suggests here that knowledge is as much a body to encounter in the world as another person, a dog or a cup of coffee is. In my view he claims that one should not approach a body of knowledge with the intention to master or to own it. Instead, one should meet it with curiosity and allow it to affect ones own body, and to affect it in return. This reciprocity eliminates hierarchy and any form of control. Sarduy continues with a description that holds his proposed alternative attitude towards knowledge:
knowledge neither occurs as a binary function nor arises in the interstice, the magnetism or antagonism of opposing pairs, but where the calm, prepared body receives rather than conquers it, without pillaging something external. (98)
The attitude that Sarduy proposes and the reciprocity of the relation between the two bodies in the encounter, dissolves the factor of a search for a responsible actor, someone to hold accountable or even blame. Instead, it allows knowledge to occur and develop through being and one quietly observes and receives it rather than grasps or resists it.
This attitude of equality comes to the fore in the dissolved hierarchy between reader and author. By attributing the reader autonomy, the text becomes a co-creation between the two. Agamben to the contrary, outlines and develops his ontology clearly following a very conventional, traditional mode of argumentation that I connect to the attitude that Sarduy described as
“knowledge as a possession” (98) or an attitude of mastering knowledge, to put it in other words. Agamben takes up a position of authority by presenting a body of work that leaves the reader no other choice but to absorb. One could argue that Sarduy’s text too takes up an authoritative position by addressing a limited, well-read group of potential readers. However, I would like to argue against objecting that as a negative, because addressing this particular group and applying direct criticism in my view forms a strategy for change and therefore fills an important function. The hierarchy of power that this elite group embodies is what the text confronts and it is particularly through this group that a change in attitude towards knowledge can and should occur, in order to break down these hierarchies.
2.2 BLURRING DIVIDES
Both Agamben and Sarduy know to blur nature/culture, mind/body dichotomies and the divide between self and other. In this section I will take a look at the differentways in which their re-imagining of the human body serves in obscuring those dichotomies. As I have already discussed in the previous chapter, the stylistic device of the analogy plays an important role in Sarduy’s essay. Envisioning the mechanisms of simulation across biological, social, psychological and cultural phenomena dissolves the boundaries of domains.
structures in which life becomes politicised. 26
In Sarduy’s essay the operation of splitting occurs in the act of looking. The attitude that comes with this dominant look has the ability to dissect the marginal body that this look marks as other – the transvestite for example. The text demonstrates the dominance and the force of this look by showing that it is capable of penetrating subjects. In the various reflections within the essay, hierarchies and positions of power are laid bare. As already discussed in the previous chapter, every position represents a moral stance. One could say that in the frontal point of view, institutional power is embedded (Pérez 35, 36). The different readings of Holbein’s painting in the text, mark the static frontal reading as both limited and harmful. The oscillation between those different readings, undermines the claim of the frontal reading, in offering a neutral position of truth. By integrating the marginal position of looking into the narration and by directing the reader into an oscillating movement past different positions of looking, the reader can experience the power of the look that dissects, but also is lead to identify with the subject that is dissected.
Sarduy connects the dominant look that dissects, to the speakers in Plato’s dialogues who “inaugurate[d] an attitude still prevalent in Western thought” (97). Although he sees the origin in Classical thought, he simultaneously places it in the midst of the contemporary by marking it as a tradition that ‘we’ in the West still honour. Sarduy characterises this mindset as a limited one by describing the speakers – and simultaneously confronting a Western reader (me) – as “trapped in compulsive classification” (97). He considers this as a narrowed perspective of control that has the implicit goal to maintain power over the other. “In hopes of reducing, manage to dismiss or suppress” (97) the body that it encounters. Sarduy describes this attitude as “too immediate, too assertive and too anxious to assure presence” (97), thus defining the encounter as one that becomes hierarchical because the attitude behind it is fear-driven. The counter-attitude that Sarduy develops with respect to the encounter, in my view resonates with Buddhist thought about how fear or fear-based questions may easily lead to harmful action. Reactive action that snatches us out of the present moment and away from the other in the encounter. This reactivity that maintains or creates separation builds in a threshold between ourselves and the ‘feared’ other.
Sarduy applies the same counter-attitude to the way we approach knowledge. He calls knowledge itself a simulative being and by doing so, he undermines the Western idea of “knowledge as a possession” (98). “In the East,” so he writes, “you could say that knowledge is itself a state of body, in other words, a being composed, a simulation of being – of being that knowledge – which
Agamben states that “the political power that we are familiar with is … always ultimately founded upon the
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separation of a sphere of bare life from the context of forms of life” (208, 209). Antony Downey explains: “as a form of life common to humans and other animals, Zoè was usually confined to the oikos, or privacy of the home, and was considered to be largely beyond political interference. To this day, the privacy of the home and what we do in it is central to discussions of state power and laws protecting privacy. Bios, on the other hand, denoted the form a life could assume in the public realm and suggested entry into the polis or a politicised form of life” (Downey 112). In a large part of his work, Giorgio Agamben is addressing modern State power and biopolitics in particular. Focusing on the ways in which (modern) state power is penetrating subjects (citizens). But as I have already mentioned, the same logic of dependency and a simultaneity of in- and exclusion, binds apparently different fields – ontology, ethics, metaphysics – together.
