Re: <documenta X><blast> home-affect
Bracha Lichtenberg - Ettinger (bracha@easynet.fr)
Thu, 17 Jul 1997 22:26:54 +0200
Jordan, lets contextualize before we go on. The conception of the mirror
image Foucault take on from Lacan, who showed how via the mirror image the
human self condstitutes itself and alienate itself by the same move, or
rather, the self is constituted as alienated. This is the basic line of
"the mirror stage". For that reason, the plan of the Imaginary has a "law"
status in relation to the Symbolic (recognition via language, to say this
briefly) and in relation to the Real - dealing with "existence". You do not
have access to "truth" nor existence via the image. Lacan's "gaze" after
Merleau-Ponti, is a search to get out of the Imaginary plan with its mirror
image while yet still deal with the visible and the invisible. That's why,
brad brace, Lacan tries to speak of space as a purely verbal construction
in the passage I brought forward.
Foucault's invisible, continuing the mirror image in straight line, is
something else: It is what is in principle visible, and what for that
exact reason is pushed away, repressed, opressed (exiled inside) in order
to be better pushed away, so that society can ignore it and make it
invisible.
Now, the notion of an heterotopic site (not to be mixed in any way with
Deleuze's heterogenesis) is Foucault pityless analysis of social cruelty
towards the other. Society encircles the victims in order to better exclude
them, once identified and put together they are ready for execution. The
boat is, not to forget, the boat of the fools, put together and abandoned
to the merciless sea. The crazy is identified, can be idealized like a
saint, feaed of, filled with the good intentions of human heart, "treated",
and is already by the same move, executed. The perfect old phallic
mechanism of Partition ("castration") and by that exclusion is here, only a
bit more sophisticated: between partition and exclusion one is going
through a period of inclusion, idealizing in order to calm the fear and
only in order to better control the others - the ill, the
prisoner.(Attention: This kind of inclusion in order to exclude has nothing
to do with the notion of the "extime", I am not getting into this, just
stating in passing, to avoid terminological confusion).
Technological apparati that are doing both, Jordan, - is such a cyberspace
not, precisely, a new opening of hell?
Bracha