I have been amazed more than once by a description a woman gave me of a world all her own which she had been secretly haunting since early childhood. […]
I wished that that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst—burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune.
Hélène Cixous, The Laugh Of The Medusa, trans. Keith and Paula Cohen
I wished that that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst—burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune.
Hélène Cixous, The Laugh Of The Medusa, trans. Keith and Paula Cohen
❤2
Francis Ponge, Paroles sur le papier / Words on Paper, 1950, trans. Serge Gavronsky
❤1
Bridget Riley
Uneasy Centre and related studies
Published by Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert
2016
Uneasy Centre and related studies
Published by Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert
2016
❤5
“[O]nly engagement and mix-up with the world, attractions and repulsions, crossings and obstructions, captures and losses, seizures and relinquishments.
My hands, my legs, my throat, my postures, my bearing, my gestures, my expressions, my airs, the timber of my voice, the whole pragmatics of the body, as one might call it, without exception everything on the surface of my skin and of what I can cover or decorate it with, all this exposes, announces, declares, addresses something: ways of coming near or going away, forces of attraction and repulsion, tensions for taking or leaving, for swallowing or rejecting. Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine writes: “This is how my skin becomes its own theatre”, and he continues: “This explains why the actor or the simple speaker is moved by pulsations, the original signification of which is unknown to him or her”. In all its ways of opening and closing, of placing and displacing itself, of disposing and imposing itself, and of fleeing, the body engages a drama which is not at all “personal” or “subjective” but each time a singular dramatization of its singular detachment among other bodies – as it is projected with them in the cosmos.”
Jean-Luc Nancy, Body-Theatre
My hands, my legs, my throat, my postures, my bearing, my gestures, my expressions, my airs, the timber of my voice, the whole pragmatics of the body, as one might call it, without exception everything on the surface of my skin and of what I can cover or decorate it with, all this exposes, announces, declares, addresses something: ways of coming near or going away, forces of attraction and repulsion, tensions for taking or leaving, for swallowing or rejecting. Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine writes: “This is how my skin becomes its own theatre”, and he continues: “This explains why the actor or the simple speaker is moved by pulsations, the original signification of which is unknown to him or her”. In all its ways of opening and closing, of placing and displacing itself, of disposing and imposing itself, and of fleeing, the body engages a drama which is not at all “personal” or “subjective” but each time a singular dramatization of its singular detachment among other bodies – as it is projected with them in the cosmos.”
Jean-Luc Nancy, Body-Theatre
❤4