The organs for objective violence

Some times you feel like life is killing you.

That’s life.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

We must take it seriously. Van Gogh, Basquiat, Rimbaud, Wittgenstein, Kafka. They gave their lives for it. Artaud got it, “Suicided by society:”

One can speak of the good mental health of Van Gogh who, in his whole adult life, cooked only one of his hands and did nothing else except once to cut off his left ear, in a world in which every day one eats vagina cooked in green sauce or penis of newborn child whipped and beaten to a pulp, just as it is when plucked from the sex of its mother.

And this is not an image, but a fact abundantly and daily repeated and cultivated throughout the world.

How to understand this? The notion of subjective and objective violence comes handy here: “Today, we are fascinated by what I, following Badiou, call ‘subjective’ violence, with an easily identifiable agent. Balibar has developed the idea, itself found in the Marxist tradition more generally, of a basic, structural violence in the functioning of capitalism itself. It is absolutely necessary to read explosions of subjective violence against this structural or objective violence.”

So, were they serious, retards, genius, neurotics, or simply there was some protein lacking that make them kill themselves in one way or another? My idea is that they had the organs to sense this objective violence that we only can think about.

It is quite difficult to find neutrinos in the world. You need the right apparatus and a theory to understand the signs that neutrinos leave behind. Something similar is with violence. Because of this we should be absolutely serious when we read Basquiat. He “really” felt like life was killing him, cause life was actually killing him. Eventually it did it, August 12, 1988, he was 27 years old.

★

Regarding suicide, absurd and seriousness touch each other. When Bolaño talks about how the young poets walk next to the abyss, there is no metaphor or metonymy there. Next to us there is an abyss, and maybe one or two wrong steps, and we pay it with our lives.

The same with Wittgenstein.

How can we articulate the distance towards suicide in a rational way? How to, on the one hand, relate the work to that life that is always in the border of nihility? And on the other hand, understand how serious is the matter the works speaks about, that we need, literally, to put our lives on it to produce it?

It is not an exaggeration to say that this line is at once saving my life and making me laugh with its naïveté. And the fact that I’m still alive doesn’t prove the value of the previous sentence. But, I must say, I think this is the right position from where to stand.

★

Shall we look at them as the body of sacrifice that founds every social relation? (We could call this Schnabel’s way.) Or the question should rather be, what instruments did they have that I lack? What words did they know that I ignore? How was their love that theirs lives knew how to capsize for a man or a woman, while mine is barely perturbed by the presence of an other? Life is something worth living for, to die for. They had the organs to see this.

★

The quote that opens this text is from Downtown 81, a movie starring Jean Michele. By the end of the movie, after rejecting a model who wants to take care of him for ever, he says: “I thought if I took a walk into a dark alley, maybe I ran into myself.” Instead of that, he finds a homeless woman who asks him for a goodnight kiss, she says she is a fairy and if he kiss her, she will give him everything he desires. After some thinking (the woman is certainly disgusting), he accedes and kiss her in the mouth. “It was such a great kiss I almost thought you were a princess,” he says. She becomes a fairy, kiss him again, and disappears. He finds a suitcase full of money there while asking himself, “Was I dreaming? Maybe I was waking up, waking up to my own luck.” He goes out of the dark alley and buys a used car for a stupidly high price. Then, he drives it until the day comes. In his innocence, Basquiat is moving. He drives all night, till day is there, and he thinks that everything is good, everything is right.

But it is not. He will kill himself a few years later.

★

Wittgenstein:

10.1.17

If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed.

If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed.

This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin.

And when investigating it it is like investigating mercury vapour in order to comprenhend the nature of vapours.

Or is even suicide in itself neither good or evil?

With that question the notebook ends.

★

What is so disturbing about suicide, about copulation? Pornography and psychiatry go by the hand here. On the one hand, suicide is released of its volitive value and reduced to illness. On the other hand, the narrative is taken away of the sexual relation and we have pornography. Both operations take away the serious nature of the act. They subtract the possibility of bet your life for something.

The story goes like this. A young student from the film school in a country of western Europe, for economic reasons, finds himself as assistant director of lesbian porn movies. He has to arrange the set, the lights, the posters in the walls. In one word, set the atmosphere.

One night, in bed, he has an idea. Since he has no money to make his own movies, movies that talk about life, about old buildings in Croatia, about the night, he will order the background of the porn movies to tell a story. He knows that none will see his work, and even if someone realizes, his name is not in the credits of the movie, the film is uploaded to a web server with only the names of the actresses on it.

His first work is to put a painting of Picasso on one of the bedroom’s walls: while one of the girls is on her knees being fisted from behind, we can see in the background a reproduction of the Guitarist. In another movie, two paintings, a dollar and an euro sign are painted red on a green background, blood red, while two blond girls give each other anilingus until ecstasy.

The ordering becomes more and more complex with time: a copy of the savage detectives in Danish, over the bead; an umbrella next to a sewing machine in the kitchen; a close up into one of the girls’ anus, uncanny similar to the one in “Un Chien Andalou,” but instead of a razor, we have here a carrot; a cell phone where one girl sends text messages with the word “HELP” on them. We cannot see the words but we can guess it from the movements of the hands; The arrangement of the dildos in the night table, pointing to a barely visible reproduction of a Malevich in the corner of the room. The movies become intolerably full of meaning, and suddenly, one day he stops. He quits the film school and goes back to his home town to work on his father’s bakery.

Photo by Crestohl