Paperback(second edition)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9783956790553 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | MIT Press |
| Publication date: | 09/05/2014 |
| Series: | Sternberg Press / e-flux journal |
| Edition description: | second edition |
| Pages: | 296 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.31(w) x 7.00(h) x 0.93(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Every Name in History Is I
In memoriam William Burroughs
To fight the anonymity with which the war enemy is killed even by precision bombing, the soldier has to receive, from their state of being already dead, the calls of the unknown persons who will soon be murdered by him. Such a call is possible in the non-linear time of undeath. The Jacob Maker of David Blair's Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1992) has to receive the call of the two Iraqi tank soldiers at whom he is shortly going to fire a missile during the Gulf War, and to whom he is invisible (whether because he is flying a Stealth fighter or because the radars of their unit have been blinded). In the state of undeath from which the call is sent, and in the state of death before dying in which it is received, one at times feels: every name in history is I. Every name in history is I is one way to fight the reduction to anonymity and generality. The sacrifice does not reside only in dying before dying to access such a call; but also in one's becoming oblivious and confused in the realm of the dead as to one's initial motives for dying before dying, one's gesture getting entangled in the generalized guilt of that state. As long as I, as dead, have not totally disintegrated into disparate blind shards of thoughts and affects functioning mostly according to displacement and pure association of sounds, figures, etc., I will try, through the most incredible contortions—which are not felt as such since they are allowed by the non-linear time and thenonexclusivedisjunction reigning in the realm of death or death-before-death—to arrive at a semblance of justice, discovering that I, who will shortly kill, was a victim of the dead, was killed by them: it is because I, as Zoltan Abbassid, was murdered by them in 1919 that I, Jacob Maker, will take revenge on them ("being dead, vengeance is my life") in 1991 by firing a missile at their tank. But in turn, and from the undeath realm, those I will kill by firing a missile at them in 1991, over Basra, southern Iraq, take their revenge on me, in the form of the disclosure (whether what is disclosed is historically false or true does not really matter in this context) of a murder inflicted on me in the past: I, as Zoltan Abbassid, was killed in 1919 by the (Iraqi) dead taking the form of (Mesopotamian) bees (some fly their B-52 warplanes and drop bombs on an enemy whose radars have been rendered inoperative, killing a large number of people without feeling the least ethical qualms; having died before dying, some discover how many people since the Garden of Eden they—under different names yet not through transmigration of souls—have killed). Vengeance, the indefinite par excellence, here becomes a circle, therefore contained; with the consequence that guilt is as it were done away with, since we are dealing with a series of reactions with no initial action. Yet guilt is not really addressed and mitigated through recourse to either this perfect circularity where the constitutive injustice in the realm of the dead—due to the blindness of the vengeance of the shards of the minds of the dead—is occulted; or to ignorance, which is the result of self-interest (one is guilty of one's ignorance). Indeed, what most often occurs as a result of the attempt at expunging any trace of guilt through a perfect circularity is the eruption of an unoriginated guilt ("I was guilty, abominably, intolerably guilty, without cause and without motive"), the constitution of a vicious circle of a guilt that "demanded punishment ... [which] consisted, fittingly enough, of being guilty." One can be truly innocent only after confronting the aforementioned two guilts and even if one cannot extricate oneself from them. It is illegitimate and very dangerous to generalize from the realm of life to that of undeath or vice-versa: if within limits, life can be just, then can't and shouldn't death also be just? To answer in the affirmative is to gloss over the aforementioned constitutive injustice in the realm of the dead. Although we have to minimize distress, we should never have as an ideal to totally obliterate perceivable suffering, because that would hide from us the agony of both the dead part of us and the dead. To promote injustice one need not look at nature, with its "survival" of the fittest; one can look at the world of undeath, with its survivors—practically all (certainly the practical among them) unfit in that realm—a world of unmotivated, blind, generalized revenge, and then ask: if death is the realm of the blind vengeance of the shards of thoughts and affects of the decomposed souls of the dead, why shouldn't life also be unjust, allowing, among other things, for the wholesale slaughter in war? This is the wrong way to reason from undeath to life, for what makes it unjustified to treat me in a substitutive manner is precisely that my specificity is founded in a basic way on this every name in history is I of my death and madness.
Chapter Two
Gertrude, or Love Dies (a.k.a. Fourth Wall)
This play was written with Richard Foreman in mind as its director. In case he does direct it, he should play the role of the theater director. Once the director walks down and sits among the audience and one performer hits against the invisible fourth wall, some of the performers begin to be addressed by their first names, and sometimes also by their actual surnames. When the play starts, both the theater director and the actor who plays Polonius are already on stage. A tape recorder is visible next to the director. Foreman's characteristic strings span the theater space in several directions.
ACTOR PLAYING POLONIUS
What are you writing about?
THEATER DIRECTOR
Curtains.
ACTOR PLAYING POLONIUS
How original for a theater director to do that when, like the
prompter, curtains are unfortunately out!
THEATER DIRECTOR
If by that you mean that I would be instigating some sort of a
return of the repressed or some kind of postmodern appropriation,
there is nothing original about that. But is the prompter out
in theater? Or has he taken other forms, for example the TAPE in
my theater? Also, have you seen Magritte's painting La Belle
Captive or Lynch's film Fire Walk with Me? I, a theater director,
admire Lynch and Magritte for their curtains.
Fifteen actors enter stage. While fourteen listen to the director's blocking, one, carrying a text of the adaptation, walks unheeding straight toward the prompter's box and disappears in it. Shortly, the playwright and an interviewer, carrying each a tape recorder and a microphone, enter stage. For the rest of the play, the playwright and the interviewer occupy the right side of the stage, the others its left side and center. For the most part, the exchanges between the interviewer and the playwright as well as the playwright's asides into his tape recorder take place when the actors pause to go over their lines.
THEATER DIRECTOR
Let's resume the rehearsals. We'll redo today the scenes or parts
of scenes we had trouble with yesterday.
THE TWO ACTORS PLAYING THE TWO GUARDS
We have seen the spirit of your father.
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET
Did he fix his eyes upon you?
ACTOR PLAYING HORATIO
No.
ACTRESS PLAYING QUEEN GERTRUDE
I still don't understand why this change in this adaptation from
the original Yes to a No?
THEATER DIRECTOR
It is because the ghost is overlaid. Horatio and the two guards
misconstrue the aversion of his look as an indication that none
of them is the person the late king's ghost is seeking, and thus as
an indirect request for someone else: Hamlet. Yet when in the
clear air Hamlet stands before the ghost, the latter's gaze is awry
with respect to him too. In turn, Hamlet's gaze is askew with
regard to the specter even in the absence of the characteristic
mist or fog amidst which fictional ghosts appear.
INTERVIEWER (holding the microphone first to his mouth then
in the direction of the playwright)
Do you believe in ghosts?
PLAYWRIGHT
While not an illusion, the ghost of Hamlet's father is the effect of
the terminal delusion that a symbolic debt relating to mortality
can be settled and thus justice re-established.
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET
It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you.
For your desire to know what is between us,
O'ermaster't as you may. And now, good friends,
As you are friends, scholars, and soldiers,
Give me one poor request.
ACTOR PLAYING HORATIO
What is't, my lord? We will.
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET
Never make known what you have seen tonight.
THE TWO ACTORS PLAYING HORATIO AND MARCELLUS
My lord, we will not.
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET
Nay, but swear't.
ACTOR PLAYING HORATIO
In faith,
My lord, not I.
ACTOR PLAYING MARCELLUS
Nor I, my lord—in faith.
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET
Upon my sword.
ACTOR PLAYING MARCELLUS
We have sworn, my lord, already.
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET
Indeed, upon my sword, indeed.
ACTOR PLAYING THE GHOST (from under the stage)
Swear.
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET
Ha, ha, boy, sayst thou so? Art thou there, truepenny?
Come on. You hear this fellow in the cellarage.
Consent to swear.
ACTOR PLAYING HORATIO
Propose the oath, my lord.
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET
Never to speak of this that you have seen,
...
PROMPTER
Swear by my sword.
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET
Swear by my sword.
ACTOR PLAYING THE GHOST (from beneath the stage)
Swear.
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET
Hic et ubique? Then we'll shift our ground.
Come hither, gentlemen,
And lay your hands again upon my sword.
Swear by my sword
Never to speak of this that you have heard.
ACTOR PLAYING THE GHOST (beneath the stage)
Swear ...
PROMPTER
... by his sword
ACTOR PLAYING THE GHOST (beneath the stage)
... by his sword
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET
Well said, old mole! Canst work i'th'earth so fast?
A worthy pioneer! Once more remove, good friends.
INTERVIEWER
Did you come to theatre by way of your fascination with death,
or was it the other way round?
PLAYWRIGHT
In the written version of Shakespeare's Hamlet, the figure of the
revenant is localized in the ghost of the prince's dead father. But
in the medium of the performed play, that figure undergoes
refraction and splits into the king's ghost and the prompter. In
this adaptation, at the end of his first appearance to Hamlet, the
ghost exits through the pit of the prompter. These two figures
where amnesia and reminder coexist, the revenant and the
prompter, superimpose at the section in the play where the
ghost orders, from beneath the stage, the companions of Hamlet
to swear not to disclose the events of that night. Come back
from the dead, Lazarus did not become an attraction, but a
prompter. Come back from the dead, Lazarus walked un-looking—people
stepping aside so as not to collide into him—toward
that quasi-grave, the prompter's box, entering it without
bumping against any of its sides. Having barely sat down, he
said: "Come forth." On hearing these words, the actor playing
the prince in Sleeping Beauty, who was on the point of saying
them to the frozen princess lying in front of him, and who had
memorized and internalized the lines of the play almost to the
point of mistaking them for his own, was unintentionally
reminded by the prompter that they were not his, forgetting
them, uttering instead the prompter's words. The princess was
animated by words that have reduced the actor playing the
prince to a marionette. To listen to a prompter who does not
utter the lines only when he senses that the actor has forgotten
them, but does so continuously, is to forget the play's lines. With
every performance, Lazarus, the patron of prompters, comes
back all the way from the grave to this pit.
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET
Should I listen to the prompter before saying the words to be, or
not to be? But why?
DIRECTOR
In his "to be, or not to be—that is the question," Hamlet forgets
the middle term between being and not-being, between life and
death: the revenant. In this play revolving around haunting,
Hamlet's utterance would be so strange as to give the impression
that it is a thought-insertion, were it not that the ghost,
though the effect of a fixation on a suffered historical mortal
injustice and although obsessively enjoining his son to remember,
is a forgetful creature. Any specter who comes back asking
for retribution by invoking and revealing an unknown historical
truth is forgetful of the forgery and substitutions that happen in
his prison house, the realm of undeath. Since Hamlet's line is a
sign of obliviousness, you are advised to play it as if you have
forgotten it: as if there is a delay and you were listening to the
prompter saying it.
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET
Should I then play the lines "death, / The undiscovered country,
from whose bourn / No traveller returns" in the same manner?
THEATER DIRECTOR
No, because this utterance does not necessarily show that
Hamlet has forgotten the specter he encountered, but could
rather indicate that the ghost does not come from that undiscovered
country. One cannot return from both death and the
labyrinth. Who then tells Hamlet about the revenant's prison
house?
ACTOR PLAYING POLONIUS
My lord, I will use them according to their desert.
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET
God's bodkin, man, much better! Use every man after his desert,
and who shall 'scape whipping? Use them after your own honour
and dignity.
PLAYWRIGHT (to the interviewer)
Hamlet suspects that the players are not going to follow his
instructions, yet he intuits that there may be something redeeming
and revelatory about their disregarding them.
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET(addressing the three players who are
going to perform The Murder of Gonzago)
Anything so o'erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose
end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as 'twere, the
mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature,
scorn her own image.
ACTOR WHO IS TO PLAY THE KING IN THE MURDER OF
GONZAGO
I hope we have reformed that indifferently.
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET
And do not look straight at each other.
THE THREE ACTORS WHO ARE TO PERFORM THE MURDER
OF GONZAGO (to the theatre director)
But why shouldn't we?
THEATER DIRECTOR
In this adaptation, Hamlet has been stamped by the mismatch of
the gazes during his encounter with the ghost. (Addressing the
actor who plays Hamlet.) You too should look askew at the
actors as you instruct them not to look straight at each other.
INTERVIEWER
What are you trying to accomplish with this adaptation of
Shakespeare's play?
PLAYWRIGHT
The theoreticians and critics who have offered interpretations of
Hamlet are virtually unanimous about the purport of the play
within the play, reducing it to the manifest one that Hamlet
explicates in a soliloquy: to catch the king's conscience in a mirror.
Does he need a confirmation for himself of what the specter
proffered? No; "It is an honest ghost." Through the play Hamlet
wants to catch the king's conscience for others. Any successful
play reveals more than the playwright or director intended it to
reveal. To read the play within the play—including the dumb
show that prefaces it—as manifesting to, and accomplishing for,
Hamlet only what he wanted it to manifest and accomplish is to
do a great injustice to Shakespeare's art and even to Hamlet. The
players "'ll tell all": even that which the ghost could not disclose
about his prison house.
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET (to the actor playing Horatio)
I prithee, when thou seest that act afoot,
Even with the very comment of thy soul
Observe my uncle.
The trumpets sound. Dumb show follows. Enter a King and a Queen very lovingly ... During the performance, the three actors playing the queen and her two consecutive husbands wear identical masks (man and wife is one flesh), preferably those of Ralph Eugene Meatyard's Lucybelle Crater. They freeze into positions similar to some of those in the Lucybelle Crater photographs—the music that releases them could be R.E.M.'s "It's the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)."
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET (aside)
Why are they performing a dumb show?
Have I not inveighed in front of them about "inexplicable dumb
shows and noise"?
Within the dumb show, the Queen kneels, and makes show of
protestation unto the King.
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET
Madam, how like you this play?
ACTRESS PLAYING QUEEN GERTRUDE
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET
O, but she'll keep her word.
Within the dumb show, the King lies his head down upon a
bank of flowers. She, seeing him asleep, leaves him. Anon come
in another man; takes off his crown; kisses it.
ACTRESS PLAYING OPHELIA
What means this, my lord?
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET
The players cannot keep counsel. They'll tell all.
ACTOR PLAYING KING CLAUDIUS
Have you heard the argument? Is there no offence in't?
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET
No offence i'th'world.
ACTOR PLAYING KING CLAUDIUS
What do you call the play?
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET
The Mousetrap. Marry, how? Tropically.
The man pours poison in the sleeper's ears, and leaves him.
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET
This play is the image of a murder done in Vienna. Gonzago is
the duke's name; his wife, Baptista. You shall see anon. 'Tis a
knavish piece of work. But what of that? Your majesty, and we
that have free souls, it touches us not.
Enter the Third Player, as Lucianus
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET
This is one Lucianus, nephew to the King.
ACTRESS PLAYING OPHELIA
You are as good as a chores, my lord.
ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET
I could interpret between you and your love, I could see the
puppets dallying.
The poisoner, along with two men, come in again. He, along with the others, seems to discover the dead body. The dead body is carried away. The poisoner comes in again with the queen, and woos her. She seems harsh awhile, but in the end accepts love. The gestures of the two reflect exactly those of the queen and the late king during the earlier entry. Exeunt (to the side) dumb show.
ACTRESS PLAYING OPHELIA
Belike this show imports the argument of the play.
By now entranced, Hamlet does not answer, but moves somnambulistically—in the manner of a puppet—in the direction of Ophelia.
ACTRESS PLAYING OPHELIA
Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other,
And with a look so piteous in purport
As if he had been loosed out of hell
To speak of horrors—he comes before me.
Table of Contents
| Every Name in History Is I | 17 |
| Gertrude: or Love Dies (a.k.a. Fourth Wall) | 19 |
| If You Prick Us Do We Not Bleed? No | 41 |
| Forthcoming | 46 |
| You Said "Stay," So I Stayed | 76 |
| First Aid, Second Growth, Third degree, Fourth World, Fifth | |
| Amendment, Sixth Sense | 98 |
| Radical Closure Artist with Bandaged Sense Organ | 99 |
| Seen Anew | 113 |
| Middle Eastern Films Before Thy Gaze Returns to Thee—in | |
| Less than 1/24 of a Second | 115 |
| Notes Towards Cinematic Biographies of some Qur'anic Prophets | 137 |
| On Being Described by a City: Letter to Trinh T. Minh-ha | 152 |
| Oedipus in Egypt | 153 |
| On Entities Older Than the World: Letter to Frank Auerbach | 164 |
| On Musical Plateaus: Letter to Larry Ochs | 168 |
| Natural Apprehension at Human Burial | 172 |
| The Anamorphic Skull's Aparté | 177 |
| On Names: Letter to Lyn Hejinian | 179 |
| The Dancer's Two Bodies | 194 |
| On Portraits: Letter to Christy Turlington | 209 |
| A Hitherto Unrecognized Sublime Photographer: TheUniverse | 226 |
| Thresholds | 239 |
| Over-turns, continued | 240 |
| Notes | 242 |