Other Words

 Fulminating over never encountering abandonment in the various arts, Bene proclaims that, “what matters is that we liberate ourselves from language, that we concentrate only on its black holes.”

Through what Deleuze himself called Bene’s ascending and descending variations, Bene bored into such black holes of language, moving to the thresholds of classical linguistic limits, his syntax, his borborygmic shredding of words, of phrases, of sentences, testing the tensility of grammar via bristling litanies of volcanic intensity.

In Beyond Sense, the incendiary Carmelo Bene enacts the role of the Pythia invoking at the Temple of Apollo the lives of Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Artaud as they are in the grips of aphasiac disintegration. 

From Hölderlin’s cryptic utterance Pallaksch! to Baudelaire’s single blasphemous statement and mutism, to Nietzsche’s childish babbling and Artaud’s violent, borborygmic shrieks, after decades of bravura linguistic articulations, the logos in these damned men goes near-silent or berserk.

To read the first sequence, visit the Special Editions section of the journal Ezra.

Written as a burst of epigrammatic sequences, like Molotov cocktails arriving from elsewhere, Dionysos Speed is a series of erupting geysers, comets flashing thru space and dispersing new forces. Akin to a Heraclitean fire machine, this book is an act meant to give birth once again to dissonant desire through the powers of the dice throw, a machine forged to release by way of its ludic freedom the immense forces of the cosmos.

Through intertwining letters written to (and sometimes by) friends, family, & others, Nietzsche and van Gogh are brought into ever-greater proximity as we witness their daily personal and artistic struggles. Woven between and interrupting the letters are a series of intervals, short illuminating blasts, like exploding flash powder, of artistic, scientific, political and other events, drawing the philosopher and artist in and out of the wider expanses of history.

. . . we say to read for difference, for dissonance; read not to identify, or to sympathize, but from a principle of fascination, of terror even, of repulsion. Go to the edge of oblivion; seek the bristling impossibilities; embrace alienation and estrangement.

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— Rainer J. Hanshe, Asymptote (March 2021)

I think that the different modes of expression: pose, gesture, act, sound, word, graphic design, object creation... all result from the same ensemble of psycho-physiological mechanisms, which all obey the same law of birth. — Caesura (April 16, 2021)

In the following interview, which originally appeared in Les cahiers obliques in 1980, Paule Thévenin questions artist André Masson about the founding of Acéphale, the intricacies of its editorial history, eroticism, politics, and the possible close relation between Acéphale’s violent declarations and fascism’s authoritative aims (Masson’s own observation). — Black Sun Lit (Oct 28, 2016)

If, as Nietzsche illustrates in the Genealogy of Morals, certain moral systems or codes of ethics are threatening, impositions that actually inhibit the growth of humanity, obstructing its highest potential power and splendor, then, based as it is on a form of slave morality, Abrahamic hospitality poses a threat that must be neutralized. 

Towards the One & Only Metaphor begins with Szentkuthy stating that he can take nothing else as his introductory precept or desire but “the aim of wild, absolute imitation.” This “mania” from which he says he cannot free himself is also referred to as “a primeval desire,” indicating that imitation originates in our ancient past, that it is something inherently human or primordial. What, then, we are compelled to ask, is being imitated?

We live in a time which is in many ways very severe, and the fetishism that, as in very old times, remains the foundation of human existence only seldom finds the opportunity to satisfy us in an undisguised form. — Caesura (1 January 2021)

Two days prior to his collapse, Nietzsche corrected the proofs of the Dionysus Dithyrambs, which would be his penultimate book, then added this dedication: “Sing to me a new song: The world is transfigured and all the heavens are glad.” Signing it “The Crucified One,” the parodist of world history offered us his last gift, not the tender of redemption, but a final series of Pindaric-inspired songs.

When Prae, Szentkuthy's first novel, appeared in 1934, the book was so startling that András Hevesi deemed him a "monster" and, despite his own misgivings about the term, Szentkuthy essentially inaugurated the Hungarian avant-garde. He would see such "experiments" within a vaster historical continuum, "amply demonstrating" that what were "imagined" as "revolutionary innovations" by surrealists and others "had also played a part, to a greater or lesser extent (better too), in the history of the arts."

In counseling us to develop our synaesthetic potentiality, I propose that Nietzsche is recuperating an ancient praxis and advancing a sense-oriented epistemology in order to refine and intensify our attunement to the world. It is the cultivation of a new mode of “common sense” (sensus communis)