The concept of life in its abstraction…is inseparable from what is repressive and ruthless, truly deadly and destructive…Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also. Its antidote is a sickness aware of what it is, a curbing of life itself. Beauty is such a curative sickness. It arrests life, and therefore its decay. If, however, sickness is rejected for the sake of life, then hypostasized life, in its blind separation from its other moment, becomes the latter, destructiveness and evil, indolence and braggadocio. To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life.
Theodor Adorno, “For Anatole France” from Minima Moralia, pg. 77-78
Theodor Adorno, “For Anatole France” from Minima Moralia, pg. 77-78
Today, the self is the body. Subjectivity has been reduced to the body, to its appearance, its image, its performance, its health, its longevity. The predominance of the bodily dimension in the constitution of identity allows for talk of a bio-identity. We no longer face a body made docile by disciplinary institutions, a body striated by the panoptical machine, the body of the factory, the army, the school. Today in gyms or in cosmetic surgery clinics, everyone voluntarily submits him or herself to an ascesis following the scientific and aesthetic precept. This is also what Francisco Ortega, following Foucault, calls bioascesis. On the one hand, we find the adequation of the body to the norms of show business, according to the celebrity-type format. Given the infinite possibilities to transform the body genetically, chemically, and electronically, the obsession for physical perfection, and the compulsion of the self to arouse the other’s desire, even at the cost of one’s own well-being, ultimately substitutes the promised erotic satisfaction with a self-imposed mortification.
Peter Pal Pelbart, Cartography of Exhaustion: Nihilism Inside Out
Peter Pal Pelbart, Cartography of Exhaustion: Nihilism Inside Out
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