abjection and the scapegoat: some preliminary reflections

abjection: a term from kristeva -- "Our reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other. The primary example is the corpse (which traumatically reminds us of our own materiality); however, other items can elicit the same reaction: the open wound, shit, sewage, even a particularly immoral crime (e.g. Auschwitz)." (http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/psychoanalysis/definitions/abject.html) To Kristeva, an experience of abjection is necessary before we enter into the mirror stage with its formation of the specular I, the fictional agency of the ego, and finally a social I. Abjection is a enecessary experience of a divison of subjet and object, of child and mother, of society and its outside.

Foucault notes that the modern subject is fostered through processes of division, but that these practices are radically altered witht he advent of science. While lepers were ostensibly excluded from the community, lodged in camps outside cities, the plague victim was confined and analyzed. The first was shut out -- abjected, as it were --the second was divided from the nomral subjectivity by way of an intense scrutiny. The plague victim became a potentially rich source of knowledge and a cornerstone in the establishment of a new disciplinary order. Foucault: "The leper was caught up in a practice of rejection, of exile-enclosure; he was left to his doom in a mass among which it was useless to differentiate; those sick of the plague were caught up in a meticulous tactical partitioning in which individual differentiations were the constricting effects of a power that multiplied, articulated and subdivided itself; the great confinement on the one hand; the correct training on the other. The leper and his separation; the plague and its segmentations."

The scapegoat treads an uncertain path between these two states of alienation: it performs the fuction of society's abject as it produces reactions of horror and solicits a necessary instinctual rejection. On the other hand the scapegoat's soccal destiny travels a diachronic path from separation to segmentation, from exile to confinement, from mass to individual. Biopower is precicely the secular capacityto solicit from the subject an affirmation -- whathe religiousregime would refer to as a confession -- of his or her status as abnormal. Modernity no longer shuts the scapegoat out from society, but solicits a consent from the subjet to her or his own confinement and subjection to disciplinary power.

crying at a reading by robert bly

i went to hear robert bly read his poetry
but i was crowded by ghosts
i saw people who are still alive but dead
seated in the audience was an old english teacher
he was as dashing as when he taught composition
his name was john then but maybe not now, i didn't ask
then it was my friend robert.
he used to wear a leather bag over his shoulder
he didn't anymore but the beard was the same
i heard someone whisper there's thomas tranströmer
or someone who's face i've forgotten

olav h. hauge was there. so was rolf jacobsen. and more
old masters hidden in the water under
the frozen lake i remember canooing there in summer
the sickle smiles at all

how fickle is the boundary between the dead and
living how solidly the dead have planted their being in us
to a certain believers men are non-existent
to god
robert bly said
we are dust on the underside of grass

Poor time for poetry

I promised (myself) not to take to translating (again). How feeble
is a heart faced with injustice. From Brecth's Svendborg collection
(http://www.svendborg-bib.dk/biblio/Brecht/brecht_en.asp):

Poor time for poetry

I know: Only the happy is
loved. His voice is heard
gladly. His face pretty.

The yard's mutilated tree
indicates poor soil, but
those who point say rightfully:
It's a criple.

I dont' see
green boats and lusty sails at sea. I only see
fishermen with nets torn.
Why is my only concern that the
fortyyear-old maid has a hump?
The breasts of young girls are
warm as ever.

If my song rhymes it
feels like hubris.

I am torn between
joy over apple trees in bloom and
resentment over Mr Hitler's speeches.
But only the latter
drives me to my desk.

I hold your head

I hold your head
in my hands, as you hold
my heart in your tenderness
as everything holds and is being
held by something other than itself
As the ocean lifts a rock
to the beach, as the tree
holds the mature fruits of Fall, as
our planet is lifted through planetary space
So we are both held by something and lifted
to where riddle holds riddle by the hand

(Stein Mehren, "Jeg holder ditt hode" from _Mot en verden av lys_ (Toward a world of light), 1963)

Fleeing youth

Fleeing youth!
A hind
hunted by a pack of
barking dogs.

The great Hunter
at his guard
cooly observes
his hands.

(Claes Gill, "Flyktende ungdom" from _Ord i jærn_ publ. 1942)

The deep blue sky is drawing
A woollen blanket over itself,

Preparing to dream

London, October 2004

Voluntarism all over again

Dave or Hearts in Atlantis. Hearts in Atlantis or Dave.

---
The more abstract the truth is that you would teach, the more you have to seduce the senses to it.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

http://phatic.blogspot.com

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