130 To what in sharing remains as nothing more than the experience of it

Nuri Paixão The Dip, 2014 Color print Courtesy of the author 130 New Observations is an independantindependant magazinemagazine publishedpublished byby artistsartists forfor artistsartists andand thethe greatergreater community community as as a a work work of of collaborative collaborative art. art.

Copyright 2014, Diane R. Karp Dan Knerr Stephan Balint John Johnston Tracy Smith New Observations Ltd. Joseph Masheck Layman Lee Mark Bartlett Muffet Jones Alan Sondheim and the authors. All Carlo McCormick Herb Leventer Susan Bee Gerald Just Susan Springfield rights reserved. ISSN Richard Milazzo Joaquin Lowe Tiffany Bell Shoshana Kalisch Suzy Sureck #0737-5387. Joseph Nechvatal Claire McConaughy Curt Belshe Susa n Kandel Frederieke Taylor Saul Ostrow Maureen McQuillan Maurice Berger Steven Kane Lynne Tillman Printed in the US Elena Berriolo Diane Karp Mike Topp Joan Pierpoline Richard Milazzo by Tiger Press, Andrew Boardman Alain Kirili Cindy Tower Longmeadow, MA. Lucio Pozzi Saul Ostrow Mark Bobrow Hilary Kliros Bernard Trevisano Mira Schor Tom Otterness Brian Boigon Erika Knerr Frederic Tuten Cover Joshua Selman Manuel Paixão Bruce Brand Sabu Kohso David L. Ulin Pedro A.H. Paixão David Shapiro Maria Luisa Paixão Ginevra Bompiani KK Kozik Marina Urbach n ewObservations P.P., 2014 | from Lynne Tillman Eliza Proctor Bruce Breland Gene Kraig Terence Van Elslander Imagines maiorum Frederic Tuten Robert Parks Martin Bresnick Kim Larsen Stephen Westfall Coulored pencil on Marina Urbach Francisco Casal Eva Buchmuller Linda Levit Christopher Williams paper | 28 x 38,8 cm Ribeiro Ana Busto Daniel Libeskind Martha Wilson Legal Advisors Courtesy of the author Sangeet Michele C. Cone Dacia Maraini Elemire Zolla D.L.A. Piper David Carrier Grazia Marchiano Jody Zellen Guest Editor & Jeffrey Scavron Financial Advisor James Cathcart Bunita Marcus Lisa Zwerling Designer Maggie Scheyer Polakoff & Michaelson, Theresa Chong Carol Martin Pedro A.H. Paixão Aleta Spitaleri Nhi Chung Joseph Masheck Back issues may be CPA Nancy Sachs Charlie Citron Harry Mathews purchased at: Publisher & Printed Matter Inc. Parent Organization Andreas Seegatz Ronny Cohen Carlo McCormick Art Director 195 Tenth Avenue Artist Organized Art Eric Somers Collins & Milazzo Justin Melkmann Erika T. Knerr Sur Rodney Sur Paolo Colombo Alan Moore New York, NY 10011 Benefactors http://newobs.org/ Copy Editor Suzy Sureck David A. Cook Robert Morgan Donavin A. Gratz backissues Leah Poller Catherine Tell Regina Cornwell Joseph Nechvatal Elaine B. Knerr Stanley Turetsky Michael Corris Shirin Neshat To pre-order or Interns Leslie Uyeda Lynn Crawford Bob Nickas support please send Katherine Hamilton Patrons Rui Brito Dorothy Cross Mignon Nixon check or money Yanjanani Kalaya Supporters Peggy Cyphers Valery Oisteanu order to: Miguel Almeida Mary Anne Davis Nina Czegledy Wyatt Osato New Observations New Logo Design Henriques Linda Eckstein Mona Da Vinci Saul Ostrow 90 Linseed Road Betsy Brecht Diane R. Karp Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe Mark Daley Stephen Paul Miller West Hatfield, MA Board of Directors Alison Knowles Stanley W Gregory Ana de Portela Gilberto Perez 01088 Kerry & Paul Sappie Ken Deifik Stephen Perkins Diane R. Karp Bracken Hendricks No part of this Lance Fung & Paul Dickerson Bruno Pinto Erika T. Knerr James Hoff publication may be Claire McConaughy John Talley K P Joughin Sarah Drury Adrian Piper Holger Drees Lucio Pozzi reproduced, stored Lucio Pozzi Samuel Kramer Friends Lloyd Dunn Bradley Rubenstein in a retrieval system Advisory Board Gema Alava Denis Luzuriaga Phillip Evans-Clark Stephen Prina or transmitted in Mina Cheon Paula Albuquerque Shelley Marlow FaGaGaGa: Mark & Lise Prown any form or by any Lori Friedman The Art Alliance, Inc. Maggie Nowinski Mel Corroto Sylvia Reed means, electronic, Lance Fung Pedro Valdez Toni-Lee Sangastiano Frank Fantauzzi Roger Riggins mechanical, Jessica Higgins Cardoso Mira Schor Jim Feast Kevin Riordan photocopying, Leslie Uyeda Mina Cheon Joyce Serra Elizabeth Ferrer Michael Robbins recording or Jane Fire George Waterman Jaime Davidovich T. Baird Soules Tim Rollins & K.O.S. otherwise without Steve Flanagan John Roloff Wendy Downs Karen Kozik the prior written Editorial Consultants Angie Eng Bobbi Van Roland Flexner Michael Roscher Stjepan G. Mestrovic permission of the Susan Bee Laura Feathers Gary Witmer Grace Roselli Serge Gavronsky Frank Rubino authors and publisher. Martin Bresnick Lori Friedman Past Guest Editors Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe Babs Reingold Opinions expressed Tricia Collins Rosanna Giardina Paolo Colombo Keith Adams Guerrilla Girls Steven Schiff herein and the validity Joy Glass Richard Armijo Jim Feast Jennifer Golub Mira Schor of the information Coco Gordon Christine Armstrong Peter Halley Joshua Selman Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe presented are the Klaus Haasis Stafford Ashani Selma Holo David Shapiro responsibility of the Peter Halley Sofia Almeida Karen Atkinson Stuart Horodner John Shaw authors and not of George Herms Henriques Todd Ayoung Gary Indiana Berta Sichel the publishers. Ciri Johnson Duncan Smith www.newobs.org On the Addressee

Guest Edited by Pedro A.H. Paixão

Osip Mandelstam 6-7 On the Addressee (1913) 8-9 Guest editor’s Notes on the addressee 62-63 Notes on the authors

Contributions in Giorgio Agamben 10-11 To Whom is Poetry Addressed? order of appearence 24 On The Book of Shares (1987) Matilde Campilho 12-14 We are wearing sneakers under the storm Emanuele Coccia 16-17 Speaking | Breathing 25 Guardians of an Unrecognizable (2006) Alexandre Conefrey 14, 18-20, 23 Jorge Leandro Rosa 21-22 Understanding the relationship with Judas Jean-Luc Moulène & Yasmil Raymond 26-29 [Jean-Luc Moulène insert] Alexandre Nodari 30-31 I, oblique pronoun Toni Hildebrandt 34-35 “Überbrücken” 35-37 Postcards and Portuguese Windmills Fabián Ludueña Romandini 39-41 Post-locutionary Logos Donna Ferrato & Isabella Rodriguez 42-45 Traversing the dream world Emanuela De Cecco 46-49 Letter to Leonardo Delogu Bernardo Simões Correia 51-52 To someone Alessandro Di Pietro 53-55 REELING RASCO Veronica Stigger 56-57 Damascus’ delirium Jean-Luc Nancy 60-61 Another Time (1990) Joana Escoval 64-IBC [+ flexi-disc (first 500 copies)]

Additional iconography Nuri Paixão IFC-1 in order of appearence Rui Moreira 2, 4, 16 Paulo Brighenti 15 Nan Goldin 15, 60 Bas Jan Ader 17, 24 Rui Moreira L’Air du Matin II, 2012 André Vallias 30-31 Gouache and gel pen on paper Pierre Coquil 32-33 120 x 160 cm Courtesy of Galerie Jaeger Bucher, Paris Berta Ehrlich 38, 41 [Photographed by António Poppe 50 Laura Castro Caldas] Cindy Sherman 59 New Observations issue #75 “The Mood of Our Time”, 1990 Bruce Nauman 59 Guest edited by Ginevra Bompiani * “On the Addressee” (O sobesednike) was originally Osip Mandelstam published in 1913 in the second issue of Apollon, and republished, with few omissons, in 1928, in Mandelstam ‘s On Poetry (O poezii). The translation reproduce folows the original text. The scanned On the Addressee* images are from Osip Mandesltam, The Complete Critical Prose (Ardis, 1997), pp. 43-48, edited by Jane Gary Harris, and translated from the Russian by Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link. Copyright © 1979 Ardis Publishers. It was republished in 2003, as Osip Mandelstam: Critical Prose and Letters, by The Overlook Press/ Ardis Publishers, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc. New York, NY. All rights reserved. www.overlookpress.com

6 NEW OBSERVATIONS # 130 Amur Tiger Panthera | Color print | © Derek Ramsey 1. Osip Mandelstam ends his 1913 this direction. “I’m a man made of body to “understanding” in a mysterious way; in a shared field, made of shared experi- the crossings, I laid down on the wire and generations, or to the Sun above and a soil essay On the Addressee by pointing to a and I don’t understand the spirit if it’s the root at the base of the obscure “art of ences, and that testifying for a plasticity, looked at the sky and I saw a bird above that sustains our feet, upon crossing the simple fact: “If we had no friends, we not a body of spirit. I suspect an aerial producing images” (Einbildungskraft) we flexibility, floatability and a capacity of me; I could see that bird pretty high up threshold to sharing fields. would not write them letters, and we and ineffable «spirit».” To finish the argu- carry within when representing things, adaptation from one being to the other, and saw the eyes were red, and I thought 11. It was the account of a simple man would not take pleasure in the psycho- ment he gave me an example. “In an old without having them in us. The hypoth- but that we build cellular memory during of the myth of Prometheus there. But the that revealed to me, many years ago, the logical freshness and novelty peculiar to film about a submarine, Gene Hackman, esis Kieckers advanced was that noos had a lifetime, which is why many old people bird was sickened and was looking at me importance of what an addressee is. That this occupation.” However, his essay is the commander, is closed in a tiny cabin, derived from the verb neo, “to swim”. In can’t change. To maintain the flux of life, as if I was invading his territory, which man was Dersu Uzala, the Nanai hunter neither about letters nor friends, at least smoking a cigar. When the main charac- a study published in 1908, where he con- and share in it without possession with I was. So, at some point I thought, the who, at the beginning of the twentieth not those found in “our” generation. His ter walks in dazed by the smoke, showing sidered the Indo-Germanic *snous, and all beings, is the first task Mother Earth Gods, the god of the wind, the god of century, became a guide for the explorer essay is about poetry and the unknowable him his discomfort, Hackman responds from it neo, he presumed that the word has left to us, as well as perhaps the last. the tower, the god of the wire, all those Vladimir Arsenyev through the middle reader in posterity. It echoes a call left by promptly, with his big cynical smile: «I originally meant “floating in the waters”. invisible forces that we persist in thinking 7. “When the Kwakiutl wanted to have of the Russian Far East forest. Arsenyev a fellow poet in a poem dated almost a don’t trust air I can’t see».” Not surprised This assumption recalled the very fact don’t exist, but actually that rule our lives, good weather, they painted the bodies of portrays Dersu in his journals with deep century earlier, in 1828: “as I have found by the superciliousness of my neighbor that a child is born into the world from might become impatient, might become twins red, had them dressed in their best respect and friendship for his keen obser- a friend in my generation, I will find a and his noteworthy lines, I contemplated, water, appearing in its light from that annoyed by my persistent vagabondage clothes, and made them parade in public.” vations and compassion for all forms-of- reader in posterity.” Mandelstam was while reflecting on this smoke, the inef- flux. Until a child is about 10, he will not there. So my intuition told me it was [Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Story of Lynx life, something that he gradually came bluntly conscious that for friends of “our” fable “spirit” it produced, perceiving the distinguish thought from sensation. His time for me to close the curtain of this (1991)] to know in their demanding experiences generation we could only write them lack of oxygen that was left for dialogue. “I see” contains it all. He will, instead, very intimate performance.” Not only was together. He was someone who addressed prose, leaving poetry to posthumous read- I thought how transparency becomes vibrate in a transparency fully charged 8. The young funambulist, Philippe he already trespassing the worldly laws, the Sun, the Moon, the wind, the fire, a ers. As a poet, “yes, when I address some- visible. Obviously it wouldn’t be possible with fellow animals, strange forces, Petit, arrived in New York in the winter other worldly matters had placed him even fish, or a man, as equal, calling them all one, I do not know whom I am address- without oxygen for any spirited smile divinities, phantoms, or amazing beings of 1974. He had a little notebook in his beyond his friends, making him touch “persons”. His gesture of repairing an ing; furthermore, I do not care to know, to be expressed. It was not the breath- like he. hands and an exigent dream as a demand. existence itself, the very fact that he exist- abandoned hut and leaving provisions nor do I wish to know him. (…) Only ing out of smoke with which he felt and His first entry was: “It’s old. It’s dirty. It’s ed. While I write these words, I cannot 5. Different from other animals, the for a future visitor he would never meet from a distance do I feel the desire to tell “believed” he was alive that was decisive, full of skyscrapers. I love it.” Later in a stop thinking that forty years have already hippocampus and the olfactory epithe- holds particular significance for our topic. him something important, something I but the fact that they/we were speak- documentary he said: “I remember my passed, and that the 7th of August 1974 is lium, the most important part of the Under his light, I took a fresh look at my could not utter directly seeing his face ing in a submarine, a capsule within the first encounter with the Twin Towers. I a unique memorial for those who, directly brain of the animal we call man, develops questioning while trying to understand before me as a known quantity.” In sum- belly of the Ocean, a massive technologi- got out of the subway, the long subway or indirectly, were awakened by that sad, specifically at an extremely slowly pace. the broader implications of a call left mation, the “unknowable” is the decisive cal apparatus between Earth and Sky. I ride, and out of the darkness I emerged unbelievable disaster many years later. Even if the newborn child has the neuro- by Walter Benjamin in a passage from mark about such crucial, uncertain dis- thought about Leonardo and his studies: at the base of one of the towers, and genesis complete, only 25 percent of the 9. “And if one cannot share everything, the late 1930s, in the second thesis On tance (“speaking to a neighbor is boring”); how for him the water could become looked up, and like a slap in the face, connections in the brain between neurons what is it that remains and will always the Concept of History: “Our coming was even when such distance is our image breathable again, or the air flyable for I saw that my dream was impossible.” (called synaptogenesis) have developed. remain outside sharing? What is it that, expected on earth”. Benjamin was con- reflected in a mirror, the crucial limit to man. Beyond believing or fighting for And yet, somehow this poet of high Fifty percent will develop by the end of at the heart of what belongs to us, will cerned with those voices that found and be detached from ourselves, in a transpar- rights and truth, the artist is primarily wire lines trespassed and snuck to the the first year, and 95 percent by the age of never have been our own?” [Edmond gave their lives for the posthumous, but ency where our particular ideas become the one who brings sensitivity – a sharing top. “I emerged and there were no gates, ten. This protracted process, marked by a Jabès, The Book of Shares (1987)] also in showing how that past could still nothing more than thoughts shared. - to dreams and things, and the poet is nothing to protect you from the devour- synaptic proliferation during infancy and be otherwise. It was not a place for mere the one who sings in the muted voice of ing void. As I stood and I looked to the 10. Giorgio Agamben remarked once 2. “Exchanging signals with the then again in puberty, allows a progres- remembering in historical terms, but a unknowable beings. other tower again, the word «impossible» that “friends do not share something planet Mars (not fantasizing, of course) sive impregnation in the brain tissue of “past” we carry out and within ourselves, etched itself inside.” While back on the (a birth, a law, a place, a taste): they are is a task worthy of a lyric poet.” [Osip 6. “If in a hundred years we have not the physical and also social ambient. Such an open memory waiting to be awakened ground, he realized it again for the third shared by the experience of friendship. Mandelstam, On the Addressee (1913)] established contact with some other planet a disposition to epigenetic impressions and shared by anachronous distances. time (with a “but”): “It’s impossible, but Friendship – he asserted – is the con-divi- (but we will), or, next best, with the earth’s from the ambient shows how important Dersu becomes here the eyes of the Tiger 3. One day, a neighbor to whom I I’ll do it.” These were Petit’s introductory sion that precedes every division, because interior, humanity is finished. […] In a it is for these animals to care, not only for that demanded a certain distance from confessed having a sense of sadness of remarks on one of the most outstanding that which partakes is the very fact that few hundred years, I trust, the world will their social and pedagogically developed him; that equilibrium we need to find in not belonging to any community told moments in art of the past century, one it exists, life itself.” The Addressee shows have breadth. At last! People will com- instincts, but also for the Earthly ones. our Earthly matters and without which me I had done a great deal to feel that capable of dissolving minds of steel. The us this very fact: we exist, undivided, like municate with animals, even speak with Thus, more decisively than fighting for everything is condemned to its end. sensation, like an “intentional distanc- turning from impossible to possible was the breath that travels through all beings. them.” [Henri Michaux, Ecuador (1929)] the “political animal” we naturally are, is If Benjamin thinks of History as “the ing” marked by symptoms or signs, such opened, though, through an experience In reading a letter or in writing, we are to understand how we are made by the subject of a structure whose site is not as the way I dressed. He also pointed to 4. Approximately a century ago, Ernst of friendship, of sharing, starting with a captured by life itself. The contributions accumulation of shared impressions of the homogeneous empty time, but filled by the difficulty of measuring good distanc- Kieckers, a German philologist, tried group of friends without whom he could gathered in this issue are all, in one way natural and artificial ambiences in which the presence of the now (Jetztzeit),” I can’t ing from bad, as well as the difficulty of to recover the etymology of the crucial never have reached the top, and step out or another, a full demonstration of this. we grow. Subtracting each being from see each gesture of Dersu as nothing more discerning the dead ends we run into Greek word noos, a term that had became over the line stretched between the tow- More then trying to understand the terms a mere cultural, genetic or racial destiny, then path-lines in a forest-poem indicat- while searching for a style since no one technical and in many philosophical ers. “The more I got to know them, the of communication, the question of the this very fact shows not only the singu- ing that the Earth is here for us, waiting knows precisely what we are search- schools signified the place of mental more they became an ally. That’s why addressee points therefore to another larity of each human being (even twins for our “all ears” to get her calls, as a Tiger ing for. Turning his gaze within, he said processes in man. He advanced a beauti- when I said «I conquered them», prob- understanding: that which reveals not cannot be equal), but also how important that leaps into a Past. This leap, however, that when we become old it is like being ful hypothesis unaccepted by his fellow ably, it’s more «I married them», certainly. only voices within our age and the calls it is to recognize that we are constitu- can only take place, as Benjamin stressed, trespassed on by the lack of belonging, scholars that considered, contrary to him, But they became my friends.” Crucial, that are hidden in it, but the experience tively made of a sharing field that belongs in an arena where the ruling class still especially if this started at a younger age. for its etymology, as did Kurt von Fritz, though, is the account about the moment of sharing itself, its transparency. To sense to anyone and can’t be possessed in any gives us commands. The task of the art- He recalled that, for him, a community the root snu, derived from “to sniff ”, to before he concluded his almost forty min- it means to be porous to the sparks of way. Experience and living makes beings ist and poet is to work on that arena and could also spiritualize itself, becoming perceive. Noos was a word, as Hannah utes on the wire, between his friends: “I relationships between past and present, unique, while the sharable makes them as eventually, make sensible the wind that more universal. This was where he felt Arendt once wrote in an unpublished had a sense of having stepped into other parents and children, teachers and stu- one. Not only is it important that such a peacefully is capable of blowing it away. he was, walking slowly, even in pain, in course on Kant, that united “sensibility” worldly matters. At some point in one of dents, lovers and friends, of this and other variable part of our memory is partaken

8 New ObservatiONs # 130 [4x] Untitled | 2007-2011 | Coloured pencil on paper | Pedro A.H. Paixão | Notes on the addressee On the Addressee 9 To whom is poetry addressed? Pedro A.H. Paixão It is only possible to answer this Venice, April 20, 2007 question if it is understood that the Color print addressee of a poem is not a real person Courtesy of the author and Giorgio Agamben but an exigency. An exigency coincides with none of the modal categories with which we are familiar; the object of an exigency is neither necessary nor contingent, neither possible nor impossible. Giorgio Agamben One can say, instead, that one thing ‘exacts’ or demands another when, if the first thing is, the other, too, will be, without the first thing’s either logically implying the second To Whom Is Poetry or forcing it to exist in the field of facts. An exigency is, simply, beyond all necessity and all possibility. Like a Addressed? promise that can be fulfilled only by the one who receives it.

Benjamin once wrote that the life of Prince Myshkin demands to remain unforgettable, even if everyone forgets it. In the same way, a poem demands to be read, even if no one reads it.

This can also be expressed by saying that, insofar as it demands to be read, poetry must remain illegible. Properly speaking, there is no reader of poetry.

This is perhaps what César Vallejo had in mind when, defining the final intention and almost the dedicatee of all his poetry, he found no words but por el analfabeto a quien escribo. It is worth considering the seemingly redundant formulation, “for the illiterate to whom I write.” Here por means less “for” than “in place of,” just as Primo Levi said he bore witness for – that is, “in place of ” – those called Muselmänner in the jargon of Auschwitz, who could not in any case have borne witness. The true addressee of poetry is the one who is not in a position to read it. But this also means that the book, which is destined to the one who cannot read it – the illiterate – has been written by a hand that, in a certain sense, does not know how to write, an illiterate hand. Poetry is what gives all writing back to the illegible from which it comes and towards which it remains underway.

[Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen]

ON THE ADDRESSEE 11 One of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s characters Matilde Campilho Postcard 3 said “In Zurich, there was a lot besides CINEMASCOPE Zurich - the roofs pulled the eyes to Maybe it’s just because of this noise over the mornings - it is a bit and even less, the reverberation of the tinkling cow pastures, which in turn Postcard 1 We are wearing tremendous era, a kind of occult one, difficult to span the idea that two red mantle of poetry in almost all the modified hilltops further up - so life FIRST RUNG was a perpendicular starting off to a sometimes appalling and sometimes cities can cohabitate at the same hour plaits of my next day. Because of that postcard heaven”. One of JD Salinger’s January has perfectly shown us the sublime. Maybe it is because of some in the world, it is a bit strange this wrinkled cloth of modern times (these characters said “All we do our whole capacities of this even numbered year: sneakers under sort of consciousness common to all consciousness that in one of the two times in which we are contemporaries of lives is go from one little piece of Holy it did not come softly; it did not at all four generations that cohabitate in this cities, it’s thirty degrees Celsius and in ourselves), the crying of certain people is Ground to the next”. Here today, we are resemble the exhalation of the horse that century that now begins but that is the other, it’s twelve degrees. Celsius. echoing today in certain fissures on the at the beginning of a new century. And sometimes appears breathing outside the storm already known to be a whole different The same goes for bodies and for walls. I see it clearly. Of course, this has suddenly, all cities and places seem to our apartment doors. January came like story, and a story that no one was the distinct body temperatures in the nothing to do with the pseudo-futuristic be somewhere in- between an invented a wallop, only to prove that this year ready to receive. It may be related to world. So many things happening at story that is told over the few hours of Zurich and some kind of Holy Ground. shall be everything we want it to be. But something more intimate, much tinier the same time. It may be because of the that film I saw this afternoon, and even and permanent. Yes, it may as well be multiple occurrences, everything is so less with its editing or photography. Nor In the middle path, there is beauty and the first month also warned us that we Postcard 2 because of the crack on the private wall unstoppable now. Maybe there is some has it anything to do with redemption. terror. The world is changing and a need to be careful about the gale that FISH sort of observational correspondence comes disguised as a breeze. There shall or because of the crack on the world’s sort of irony rising from this tangling There is no sort of redemption in that is needed. An observation of small be no breeze in this story. One foot after Certain animals, even when dead, bed sheet. It can also be that some of of information and it might just be that movie. It is because of the invisible gestures. This series of seven postcards another, a harness to support the chest, never quite lose their shimmer. It is like us are getting old and therefore far less we are becoming more attentive. More story, one of a few savage hearts. Maybe is sent from the wreckages that exist seven coins inside our pocket for good that with fish and with a few people. connected with an aesthetic, cerebral, quiet. Less disturbed by all the yelling. it’s because of that, maybe it’s because somewhere in between the Zurich’s luck, and profound concentration - that’s Those that cross our private streets once, playful and even emotional prejudice. Maybe it is because of some other of nothing. But if it were because of and the holy grounds. It takes infinite how one traverses, they say. From one and then never vanish. Hasta el final. It may be because of the confusion that unknown reason and one that is not nothing, I would send flowers to the patience to survive the world and the building to another, from one heart to Once one finds the animal that shines, happens inside the sensitive area of the entirely integrated in the mysticism of director. And this season is certainly not objects of the world. another, from one country to another. why look further? Dead or alive, now we brain of those who spend their time this era, but I just want to say that the the best season to ship peonies. Anyway, January has shown its feathers, and walk always through the same avenue, transitioning from one hemisphere to main cause for this raid is that I still find how wonderful it is, on Sundays, to kick golden signboards sprout from them. through the same reed. Sacred is right another, and as for that, I must say that a few things to be profoundly moving. I certain prejudices to bloody hell. Now what, February? in front of us, darling. We have had our the disorder of seasons causes great did not at all expect the commotion, Pages 12-13 face on the sacred since minute one. Matilde Campilho Fish came to the world and to kitchen Natural Green and Natural Grey, 2014 Color prints benches to remind us of that. Courtesy of the author

12 NEW OBSERVATIONS # 130 ON THE ADDRESSEE 13 Paulo Brighenti Postcard 4 Imortal, 2009 DESIRE Graphite on paper Postcard 7 Arches/Canson, 300gr., soft grain I would write about death. About the ALL MEN ARE MOUNTAINS 65,5 x 50 cm fascist bus that runs over our heads every Courtesy of the author afternoon after coffee. It gets worse in And the drawing of a mountain the summer. I would write about the - that long and focused process that Nan Goldin Amanda in the sauna, public information bulletins distributed can be made out of a roller ball or Postcard 6 Hotel Savoy, Berlin, 1994 at the department, about Mahler’s “Fifth” a hammer with a rude edge - is the Cibachrome FLASHBACK and the stupid clarity it brings along purest representation of the work of 76,2 x 101,6 cm with it. To live is to sidetrack from the Almost a year and a half has passed, waiting. I’ve learned to wait by sculpting © Nan Goldin, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery fire that leans over one’s bone, always. I etc. My nose was kind of drowsy and the lines of mountains. We are all so would ignore the adagietto. I’d sit in the it was bloody cold out there on the tired. Our newspapers talk only about living room, envisioning Gena Rowlands streets. It was a whole different story. epidemics, wars, and all kinds of race and her face with no connection to All I wanted was to be Finn Bell and decimation. Our friends cry a lot, inside physical time. No connection at all. I’d the rest did not matter. Nothing matters closed rooms and bathrooms. Private forget politics, the politics that bites and during crack-up. A year and a half has countries are in an even far worse chews our feet like some sort of urban passed and the thin knife’s snag has state than public countries. The world cannibal, one month after the other. The turned into the constant scar, one that is terrifying; there is no more use in free exercise of freedom is a complicated we do not ignore but we learn to leave pretending. Who would tell us that, matter. I would organize paper works in still. Integrated. A man grows and learns at the end of all these years, we would such a way that between those electric to outline the landscape by measuring finally discover that what we were light receipts, police notifications, bills unexpected events – that’s how you drawing was actually our own body. of city agitation and old sugar packets, count time in the wall of years. Now After all, we are made of waiting, we are there would always be a piece of carbon that I think of it -everything changed, the mountain that will end up staying paper. I‘d care about a sheet that except for one thing. I still only wanted here to tell the story. Hopefully, in 700 contains in itself the copying chemical. to be Finnegan Bell, but one Finnegan years, some child will draw something Carbon transfers ink by impact. I would Bell that does not will for the fall. If over our crust. Until then, we carry seeds suicide many things, but others I would today I were given the chance to choose inside our pockets. And we do not know inevitably want to keep and reproduce between the little boy that plays with a what to do with them. until the end of days. I’d guard the flock crab on the Gulf Coast or the big boy without ever speaking of those intimate that yells with arms wide open by the hours spent between animals and rocks. door of a New York apartment, I’d surely I would come back home every night, pick the first one. My little bird, my I’d pretend to ignore the infamous sweet guitar: maybe all this was really for artifice that hovers over the streets and the best. disguises the inevitable trench. There is Alexandre Conefrey This girl I know, 2010 always some sort of hoping for a near Gouache, watercolour and future, but my hands do not yet have gold leaf on paper the necessary precision it takes to draw 38 x 56 cm the quiet permanence of things. God Courtesy of the author transfers the world’s chronology by impact, and we are all quite afflicted, just swimming inside this pool of time.

Postcard 5 I can’t sleep. Guard the world out there for me, kid. Truly yours.

14 NEW OBSERVATIONS # 130 Emanuele Coccia no addressee. There is only an infinite animal life on earth. All the superior from amniotic fluid to a more rarefied who stopped, that one could speak of an an infinite expanse of fluid matter luminous plasma that passes through living beings would thus seem to be the fluid environment. Cosmologically, object and thus of a definite thought, of crossed by resistance and permeability us as we pass through it, and it is more result of an adaptive process starting biologically, and ontogenetically, there is a sure vision. For the living whose life gradients, waves that are different by ancient than the world and all of its from a fluid environment. Since Miller a necessary link between life and fluid coincides with being immersed in the degrees of speed and slowness. In the Speaking things. There are no voices, there is no Urey’s well-known and controversial medium. Life seems to be possible only cosmos, the world is not made of actual immersed world, everything aspires to grammar. There is only an ocean of experiment in 1953, the idea that the in fluid environments: what changes is ‘objects’. Everything is fluid, everything penetrate everything and be in turn meaning whose waves will survive the primordial environment of every form only the degree of density, the state of moves together, against or within the penetrated. The movement through Breathing end of everything. of life is the sea – or, as we are used to aggregation of one and the same fluid subject. Everything is a flux that comes which everything permeates everything, saying, a primordial soup – has become body – matter – which can take on close or drifts apart, accompanies or and conversely everything can come out 2. A few years ago on a sedimentary established. The relationship between life different configurations. passes through the living. The universe of itself and the body in which it stayed, To Matteo in memoriam rock on Ellesmere Island, a team of and fluids is no longer mere biological of immersion is not defined by a is called word. Language (water, the light American paleontologists (including evidence, i.e. pertaining to how life tout 3. This realization has two multiplicity of things, but by an infinite plasma which makes the ocean of the 1. Every dialogue is impossible. One Edward B. Daeschler, Farish A. Jenkins, court has come into being, starting from consequences. The first pertains to the field of depths and vectors. Thinking cosmos) is not the space in front of the never speaks to somebody, least of all to and Neil H. Shubin, among others), non-living matter. Yet, it would be wrong nature of the world, i.e. of all things that and acting, operating and breathing, subjects (the fish who live there), but it oneself. The word is not communication, discovered the remains (datable as to simply consider this relationship a surround the living. The matter which moving, creating, feeling, will no longer is the matter and the force that passes it is breath. Pure rhythm: we try to 380-375 million years ago) of a strange phylogenetic hypothesis, i.e. pertaining makes up the inhabited world is one, be distinct activities. An immersed-living through them and permeates all the blend with the air that surrounds us, species of fish in the class of Sarcopterygii. only to the way in which our form of even though it is not homogeneous as has a different relation to the world world. The action of a word is not about and we distinguish ourselves from it, The Tiktaalik rosaeae (its scientific life generated itself, starting from the to density and appearance: its nature is than that which a subject maintains an exchange of information between two after having snatched its most valued appellation) is a hybrid between fish and primordial ones. At heart, the link that of a fluid body, with varying degrees with an object. As immersed-living, we subjects, it is a sudden wave that passes secret. The word is not ostension, it amphibian, combining the anatomical between life and fluid is something all of penetrability. There is no absolutely are jellyfish in the immense sea of the through the light of the world and is digestion: the movement through features of both aquatic animals and individuals experience at the ontogenetic impenetrable body: all bodies can be perceivable. Between the rest and us, strives to touch all of its things. which we ask the world to keep us alive. tetrapods. This discovery seems to level: all humans start living in a fluid penetrated by forces, that is, other fluids. there is no material distinction. There are no interlocutors, there is definitively prove the marine origins of medium, and birth is just the passage The other consequence, instead, refers 7. In the immersed world, nobody to the fundamental posture that each 5. The experience of the word, too addresses anybody. To speak is to of the living either takes, or is forced – like any form of our being in the breathe and breath is at the same time to take up, in the very act of living. world – is a form of immersion. To an individual and cosmic operation. We What we call life, in fact, seems to be speak – just like to live – means always do not speak to the Other. We speak the combination of the forms produced and exclusively to find oneself in a through the light of this plasma in which by bodies defined by the possibility to liquid medium, to influence it, and to we are immersed, the same light that exist only and exclusively in fluid media. be influenced by the forces that pass hits us when others speak or when we A fish is not only one of the infinite through it. The fact that speaking is a perceive the world with our senses. The forms of life of the planet, nor merely a form of breathing proves that the word same light that will stay when we no stage of the phylogenetic process: it is is always a form of immersion. Breathing longer will. the Urtier, the paradigmatic form of all is the first and most fundamental animals and, at the same time, the prism rapport that each animal has with the [Translation by Claudia Chierichini] through which any form of life becomes most substantial fluid in the cosmos, Page 22 comprehensible. In the same way, the the air. The word, language, is not Rui Moreira sea is not one of the environments something individual or psychological: La Nuit (Les Télépathes), 2011 of the planet: it is the form through it is the intelligible fluid in which we Gouache, gel pen and which the world less opaquely reveals are immersed. We do not cease to take coloured pencils on paper 141 x 184,5 cm its nature. The being-in-the-world of light from, and give light back to this Courtesy of Galerie Jaeger Bucher, Paris each of the living is not but a variation fluid. Our mouths are our gills. To of the experience of a fish. Living means speak means to give light back to this This page being in the sea of the perceivable infinite fluid, within which everything Bas Jan Ader In Search of the Miraculous, 1975 world. Literally: to be immersed. All the takes place and everything becomes © Estate of Bas Jan Ader/ activities of the living are footprints and comprehensible. To listen means to sip Mary Sue Ader-Andersen practices of earthly immersion. and digest the light of this plasma that Courtesy of Meliksetian | Briggs, Los Angeles is the remainder as well as the substance 4. If living is being immersed in the of all that took place and ever will in the cosmic fluid, all oppositions between story of all men. stasis and movement must be rejected as false: stasis is a movement that opposes a 6. The state of immersion offers to counter-current. If movement and stasis be known much more often than we coincide, then contemplation and action imagine. Every time we speak, every also can no longer be distinguished. time we read, every time we listen to Contemplation always presupposes an music, we become fish in a perceptible arrest, and it is only by postulating a fixed ocean. In a state of immersion, the and stable world opposed to a subject world permits itself to be known as

16 New Observations # 130 On the Addressee 17 Pages 26-28, 31 | Alexandre Conefrey | Untitled | Watercolour and coloured pencil on paper | 38 x 28 cm | Courtesy of the author Jorge Leandro Rosa have kept him as a friend at his own the mere fact of being alive, except place, locked in the most inner room, for the thematization of oneself that a not disclosing him to anyone, just to be relationship brings. able to be alone with him, talking for We only find life within the world, hours without end, for days and nights, but there is no life that belongs in the Understanding the all the time.’3 This particular man I met world. Stripped of Christianity, all of was a Christian akin to the strangeness the meaning of Jesus’s life lies in that that inhabits his faith. He would prefer very glimpse of living in the world. ‘To relationship with to be among the strangers: Lanza del live one’s life’ is the sort of event that Vasto reached out to Gandhi in the does not depend on the world, even if years of his youth, and when he became it conforms to it. Living in accordance a Christian he opted to start thinking with the Gospels is still barely living, Judas about that condition by writing on Judas. but by carrying with it this unexpected Displacements such as these are actually revelation, it dissolves the ‘barely’ that of the highest value for those who do tended to maximize the world again. not fail to recognize the relationship When the relationship comes into I once met a man1 who said: “If we that shapes their faith. This relationship play, life becomes awareness of such believe in Jesus Christ, we should, by all is indeed an act of belief, but we must an adaptation, and forcing an option, means, believe in Judas.”2 To believe in avoid taking it as an object of faith, a it calls for the other to bypass or someone is to start knowing him. Until very common drift of contemporary outweigh it. In this sense, relationship one day, when we think we know him, discourses. Relationship is what reignites is – immediately – an ethical statement: we start holding his propositions to be the tight bond between rejoice and from that point on, either I project my also true, and allowing ourselves to be despair dwelling on us. Such bond is life in that objectification, or I shall find taken away by them. Indeed, approaching responsible for the apparent inability to in it a crucial metamorphosis, without one human being this way is already relate to religious thought these days. alienating it.4 Hence, relationship is metaphysics. This kind of unfolding of This relationship opens a breach for the also the relapsing revelation of life to its the movement of belief is as subtle as it inhuman - as we shall now make clear. fullest extent. In the relationship, the is dangerous. That man appeared to me Since the very beginning, relationship life that clashes with conscience might as the only believer I have ever met who retrieves for us something substantial that gain access to the experience of the body, ventured not to step back in face of that we were unable to find in ourselves: life. which is, in its turn, the pure presence of danger; instead, he went after it. When Life is what is enough to itself, although life in the world. Lanza, who used to say we believe in those we are familiar with, we never get to know it entirely. It is that we are not our body, opted to be a we should always dare to go back to a the relationship itself approaching us, Christian thanks to the body. However, stage in which they appear to us as the providing us with such a knowledge. the body remains the weakest element stranger we trust. And even though one might walk in the relationship, the most liable Such a proximity drives us immediately out of the blindness in what concerns (strange as it may sound) to be forgotten to the core problem of relationship. First life, relationship can always fall into by life. Opening, by the promise of the and foremost, because any relationship ontological obfuscation. By relating world, a passageway through which that is a gesture of belief. Then, because every to each other we come to realize that substance blends with what comes from form of relationship conforms to its own we have a certain weight, and that this the other, a simulacrum of the body is Judas, and the interest that is conveyed weight must be visibly carried as long formed, an homunculus. Here we have by him. Getting to know Lanza del as our presence in the world lives on. the socialized body, for the body is, by Vasto, to whom to meet Judas was clearly Thanks to the being itself, this weight definition, a private life, in the double more pressing than to know Christ, has is a substance highly likely to combust. sense it encloses: a lifetime deprived of brought our relationship to the utmost The weight of the being casts a light meaning, but also a life of one’s own. painfully alive and exciting level. That on the world. Not through life (always Body is not necessarily the relationship, is probably why I never left him again, a combustion that reabsorbs light), but it dwells in it. There is no commerce either in my readings or my meditations. but by the being itself, everything that of the body outside a desperate attempt This man I met for a moment at a very pertains to the order of relationship to be alive and have evidence of that. This young age introduced me to a certain begins to construct the world. By is why the mystery in Jesus shall be his Judas, one that was not yet Iscariot, but offering its spiritual availability, living mortality. A fact that posed Judas with a that was willing, above all, to get to know matter becomes discrete, or repressed, quite disturbing problem, and one that a certain Jesus, said to be The Christ. or becomes a mask. These are the also accounts for his choice. Getting to know Jesus Christ inside ontological versions of manipulating life For indeed, to retain in the other this relationship is the problem placed and its essential passivity. If relationships that delivery of substance, to make him by Judas: ‘Judas loved Jesus. He used to give us an appearance of life, they also become substantive in order to empty complain about the fact of not having take it away. It may seem that nothing the self and make it transcendent, so that met him before the others did. He would can distinguish the relationship from all the weight of the relationship may be

On the Addressee 21 assigned to the other, that is why Judas and societies of communications. But keeps the relationship alive, enabling it had to come. His desire is to contemplate he does not ignore the circulation of to persist in the flesh, especially when the vision, to privatize such a glance. currency that lies in its origin, and one there is nothing bodily there. This way Judas aspires to numinous things out in which Judas seems to be a visionary the relation to betrayal is a condition of the relationship, and he is not going predecessor. These societies turn for knowledge. By betraying, a certain to admit the numinous to become essentials upside down: relationships are knowledge is made possible, and a fraternal and banal. As Levinas wrote, not the bright side of the world, instead, knowledge is deducted from the spectra ‘the presence of the face that comes from they grow inside the night of the world. of what is conceivable, converging to beyond the world, but that commits me Communication, even if mundane, a space that both of the counterparts to the human fraternity, not smashing ignores the world, as if the world favors acknowledge, but never attend. The me as a numinous would do, but one that such contempt. Relationships follow the relationship I am establishing also makes tremble and is feared.’5 Moreover: winds descending from the mountains addresses the Judas that both the reader can Judas ‘be himself’? Judas is only and rising over the plain, they blow into and I are hiding from each other, and allowed to exist in the relationship as beings a gaseous and tumultuous image who is speaking to each of us. One day, long as he dwells in it, lurking for the of the world. Judas walks toward this we shall visit him, and one of us will greatness. Without it, Judas becomes relationship the same way we are today not be there anymore. That will be the someone we can describe, and that can released into the flow of communication: Golgotha. describe us. At that point, Judas’ name with thirty pieces of silver, a fair amount To be a Christian was, for Lanza, the will not be any different from those we for mediating a world diving into its essential indeterminacy in which the search for in the tradition. Judas feeds on night. In a measurable relation, all the relation is driven out of its meaning. the name, as if that name was originated measures (even the contradicting ones) “Jesus was the one speaking against all in an extraterrestrial order. end up being eminently fair. of the laws and all of the the logics.”8 If I Lanza wrote: “a thing is only a knot But to believe in Judas is to drive, believe one, I shall believe the other. And in the web of relationships, and from as Jesus did, the naivety of belief to its also because the fact of believing drives it, relationships irradiate in every way. core point of truth. The inadequate me from one to the other. To gather all A thing is a star of relationships.”6 relationship between these two provides of the beauty that lies in here, he wrote And he added: “A relationship may the essential disproportion of our a book on Judas. It is a book from his only be understood on its ends, on its world, its impossible measure. That is youth. Before that, he had written about borders, and those are the things that why a world that believes in adequate Gilles de Rais. The relationship that acts are. But only relationships and their mediations between beings, mediations on belief is always the most demanding invisible bodies are real, not things.”7 identifying them reciprocally, is a world and the hardest to entwine. If the reality of the relationship is that denies betrayal, and denies its own indisputable, the reality of things, now truth: in betraying, Judas and Christ [Translated by Pedro Lopes De Almeida] fallen into a terminal understanding, operated all the range of mediations, 1 drives the bonds, hidden and abandoned without ever being restricted by any of Giuseppe Giovanni Luigi Enrico Lanza di Trabia-Branciforte (1901-1981), whose pen-name to their fate, to be erected as the multi them. Every single form of relationship was Lanza del Vasto. shaped project of societies to come. As exists there like bare flesh, insofar as 2 Del Vasto, Judas (Paris: Denoël, 1992), p. 9. it becomes obvious, Lanza is writing something there is calling for betrayal. 3 Ibidem, p. 66. before the rise of mediations, nets This invitation to betrayal is actually what 4 I consider my position here close to what Michel Henry stated in the following paragraph: “Here is the reason why the illusion according to which the access to life is produced in the being-in-the-world of the Dasein implies a ruinous mistake between living one’s life and the external revelation of living beings whose specific feature of being as they are relates to that form of life and presupposes it, un- able as it is to establish or show it”, Phénoménologie de la vie I (Paris: PUF, 2003), p. 129. 5 Levinas, Totalidade e infinito [Totalité et infini], (Lisboa: Edições 70, 1988), p. 192. 6 Del Vasto, Enfances d’une pensée (Paris: Denoël, 1970), p. 74. 7 Ibidem, p. 75. 8 Del Vasto, Judas, op. cit., p. 136.

This page Lanza del Vasto between his brothers Lorenzo and Angelo, 1913 Courtesy of the Association des Amis de Lanza del Vasto

22 New ObservatiONs # 130 Giorgio Agamben Emanuele Coccia

On The Book of Guardians of an Shares* unrecognizable*

Paris, February 23, 1987

Dear Edmond, Dear Enrico,

I must tell you how much The Book who set up their encampments around idea of a purely negative sharing (and I’d like to apologize for my silence: use; likewise, it is completely useless to to myself. If anything is alive, it is so of Shares has moved and impressed me. your work, building walls they thought community), you introduce in the I wish you won’t believe that I forgot try to understand what place it is. Once precisely because of this unrecognizable It seems to me that there is in it a new insurmountable. Burnt Pages the motif of what remains the questions you posed months ago. one finds oneself in this non-place, what element, and what we call ego is not only dimension in your work – and certainly I do not yet think it is possible to outside sharing: “And if one cannot share During these months I tried to answer allows survival is the instinct to traverse the atonic mechanism through which all not on account of formal questions. name the new terrain onto which everything, what is it that remains and them several times, without ever being the land, draft maps, and above all strive of us get to coincide with ourselves and The reason for this novelty lies, rather, you have moved. But I do think it is will always remain outside sharing? What able to draft much more than a line. to start living there. It is about making, our own image: it is the guardianship and in what the Italian poets used to call il possible to suggest at least two points of is it that, at the heart of what belongs to us, Not because your questions were out of almost, the opposite effort than the the care of an unrecognizable. Because dettato della poesia, what is “dictated” in orientation: will never have been our own?” place: on the contrary, they stimulated ethnologist: striving to sort out the ways of this the ‘I’ is always the place of a This is an extremely difficult idea, research, unexpected questions, new of human life in this land, not in order to problem, of a wrestling with oneself that what is written, or what, in the poem, 1) The idea of an end of reading but one that has a rich future, because it readings, more writing. Yet any reference describe it though, but to adhere to it as can never be resolved through knowledge lies beyond the poem. (announced in The Dream, but taken up is it is the only idea, I think, on which to the book proved impossible. I do not much as possible. The writing of my book only. The unrecognizable is, instead, that I’ll try to explain to you why it is that again in the last part of the book). You the book seems to me so new. Your book we could found something like a new find myself capable, not yet at least, to has been like this: something inbetween blind spot where we can no longer tell thus break with the idea of an infinite community and a new ethics. That (for example: The Book of Questions) has interpretation and reading, which has seriously face my life experiences – the a map of this land of ideas, thoughts, ourselves apart from what we are not, the which remains outside sharing, and been conceived in isolation and, aside become a commonplace in the thought very thoughts that passed through me and visions (I’d like to write colors, lines, place where we live, the people we meet. which, at the heart of what belongs to from some exceptional readers – who of our time. But in the face of the L.M. – as a knowing subject proper. This is depths, because after all, everything in A book is not a way to find oneself again, us, will never have been our own – is this are more numerous than one might (Livre-Mort, Death-Book, but also Dead because, as a matter of fact, it has never these lands has only the consistence of but rather the decision to lose oneself in think –has remained unappropriable for Book, which is achieved, finished, as not the only good that is truly common? been me the one who thought in them: images), a journal, and at the same time a something that does not belong to us, the people of your generation. A number one says of a dead language), it is not a These are a few thoughts born from I always found myself thrown within final farewell. I am elsewhere now and all nor ever could. And writing is always of years ago already, the generation question of interpreting. In any case, you the reading of a book that will remain them, and I struggled to try and exist in I can learn about that place comes from the attempt to produce a relationship to that came after yours had, so to speak, gesture towards another presence of the with me for a long time – a long time. the medium of their own consistency- those pages. Because the person who this unrecognizable – what is left of that caught up with you. The ideas that you book, which remains to be thought. For even in a book, what remains outside to try and recover a possibility of wrote that book has totally disappeared, which we lived, and what relentlessly brought to fruition in solitude (ideas on sharing is what accompanies us towards existence, a possible world within those sunken in it as in an Atlantis. For that ‘I’ draws us towards what we are not yet and 2) The idea of an unsharable, which the “Dawn” of which you speak. the book, on writing, on Judaism) were remains forever outside sharing and lights so foreign to the place in which who lived and thought in that place – I what we have not lived. taken up, sometimes deepened, less often outside destiny. I think you know I remembered to have originated. Any can give only vague testimonies. I no Please excuse such a long letter, but I Giorgio Agamben also trivialized. Jean-Luc Nancy’s beautiful book, The reading, any linguistic act is at the end longer know anything about him. Of wanted to express my gratitude for what Now, what you accomplish in your Inoperative Community, and Blanchot’s an act of unexpected, sudden exile. (Or course, images and dross still live again you wrote and for your questions, that I must ask you to forgive my barbaric and last books (starting already with The response to it. This book’s central perhaps, everything that lives is in exile: in me, but they do so in the same way led me in my study to a place I would Little Book of Subversion – the repetition idea is that of sharing – but a sharing error-ridden French. I was impatient to tell exile from self, first of all, and from one’s in which, as Warburg said, ‘Salome’s not have reached alone. I only regret not of the accompanying prière d’insérer without there being anything to share. you my impressions. own place. To live always means to be spirit can live again in the gesture of a having been able to give you answers texts being no accident – but also, even I think that Nancy has here grasped out of place). One is suddenly thrown golf-player’ – or just like the gesture with equal to your questions. I hope though more radically, in The Book of Shares) is hold of an essential characteristic of the [Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen] into a world, and a different existence which the Romans invoked their Genius that I will have the possibility to meet political and social experience of our than that which we thought was ours. To can live again in the cursory movement you and get to know you in person, and distinguished by the fact that you have This page once again run ahead of your followers, time, which is one of an Ur-Teilung, an Bas Jan Ader understand, in these instances, is of little of our hands as we touch our heads in I hope that we will be able to continue original partition (to recall Hölderlin’s Please Don’t Leave Me, 1975 our moments of distraction. Neither to write to each other, long intervals of This letter, written in French, was sent by the expression), which has no good to share. © Estate of Bas Jan Ader/ knows anything about the other, and time and small lags between question * This letter stands as an answer to the nineteen author to the writer and poet Edmond Jabès, We are united in an imparticipable Mary Sue Ader-Andersen * questions Enrico De Vivo sent to the author, after if relationship there is, it is something and answer notwithstanding. after having read his book Le livre du partage Courtesy of Meliksetian | sharing, anticipated by a presupposition having read his book La trasparenza delle immagini. closer to a sublime ignorance, to a use [The Book of Shares] (Paris: Gallimard, 1987). Briggs, Los Angeles that is without origin; shared, but Averroè e l’averroismo (The Transparency of Images. It was published in Italy, accompanied by an without knowledge. I do not know what ‘til soon, yours without destiny. Now that is an idea that Averroè and Averroism) (Milano: Paravia Bruno Italian translation, in Metaphorein, IX, 1, 1987, pp. Page 25 really remained. Better yet, only the Mondadori, 2005). The title was proposed by De Emanuele Coccia 43-47; and deposited, in 2013, by Jabés’ heirs, at you know well and that is already present “Non lo so, dormivo” Vivo when he published it in the literary journal unrecognizable remained: that which the Manuscripts and Archives department of the in your books. But here, reformulating (I don’t know, I was sleeping) “Zibaldoni e altre meraviglie” on July 18th 2006: makes that book unrecognizable and Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. it, you take a further step; beyond this Anonymous wall sign in Venice http://www.zibaldoni.it/2006/07/18/irriconoscibile/ that which makes me unrecognizable [Translation by Claudia Chierichini]

24 New ObservatiONs # 130 ON THE ADDRESSEE 25 Jean-Luc Moulène Yasmil Raymond

Voir (profil) | Berlin, 1997 | Black felt pen on paper | 56,3 x 53,5 cm Two Headed Bird | NYC, 2012 | Blue Felt pen on paper | 35 x 28 cm Spectator says: “You are a continent.” Jean-Luc Moulène answers: “No, an archipelago.”

Main rouge | Barneville, 2014 | Watercolor on paper | 24 x 32 cm On the Addressee 29 with one another increasingly, without world alien to me, an other world” in term periculum, is the same that animates and speech. The mouth that speaks is my name. And because I depersonalize necessarily establishing between them which I am an object, in which I am the word experiment, experience, the same that chews: an open mouth myself to the extent of not having my that peculiar transformation which two an other. As Daniel Heller-Roazen expert. (…) [T]he original meaning is always a sign of danger, a dangerous name, I answer every time someone says: interlocutors feel when they encounter. remarks, according to Karl Brugmann’s of the word ‘experiences’ is: to have sign. Such misshaped dentitions create, I” – and, we could add, every one (every This doesn’t mean, however, that there is hypothesis, “the Greek term ego, as well faced dangers [peligros]”. The danger, thereby, an interlacement of bodies and world) answers every time G.H. says “I”. an inversely proportionate relationship as its Indo-European relations, derives here, resides in the conversion of the prevent their total confusion – and it between dialogue and interlocution: on from a neuter noun (*eg[h]om), meaning difference between worlds in hierarchy, is such impossibility that is marked in 6. Attempting to understand the the contrary, maybe the misdirection of simply ‘here-ness’ (Hierhiet): originally, obliquation in subjection. Such danger the sculpture by the difference between permanence of a mutation of homo sapiens a message is a condition for it to find its ‘I’ would signify the insubstantial being appears in those theories, like the one the sexes. In the closer proximity, the which is only occasional among other unexpected addressee; maybe dialogue is of whatever can be indicated as ‘here’, exposed by Gabriel Tarde, according to most intense – even if infinitesimal – primates, the white sclera around the interlocution in potency, waiting for the be it animate or inanimate, human which the origin of language lies on an difference reveals itself. What appears iris of the eye, raised the “cooperative accident to make it pass to action. or inhuman, its expression spoken or order, a commandment, through which to be impossible here is fusion, the eye hypothesis” by researchers: the white written”. Therefore, “I” would be a deictic only one I monopolizes the subject reduction of difference to unity, to sclera could have facilitated eye-reading Alexandre Nodari 2. So, if interlocution can’t be reduced (the deictic of deictics, we could say), an position. Perhaps the most brilliant identity: and such impossibility is between humans, and therefore group- to an exchange of message, in what does ultimate tag of the locutionary position, expression of this can be found in an another condition of interlocution, the hunting. Pat Shipman, observing that it consist? As we see it, interlocution is of the place where each spoken word idea attributed, in “Yzur”, (a strange interstitial space, “almost inexistent”, such mutation also implied a danger I, oblique pronoun characterized above all by the exchange comes from, or even better, of the world short story by Leopoldo Lugones), which opens itself when two worlds (humans, with white sclerae, became of locutionary positions: the medium is from where each word spoken comes to the inhabitants of the Java island: (dis)encounter. more visible, especially in darkness, which the message, the between (and not the from (“The cosmos comes from [or: is monkeys “Wouldn’t speak (…) so that hampered hunting efforts and helped “through”) is the interlocution. Hence, part of ] the self [I]”, Oswald de Andrade they weren’t put to work”. However, isn’t 5. In his “Introduction to the work the actions of predators), took a step “Oblique life? I well know that there interlocution is not a common sphere would say): a perspective, but not a understanding a violence of the same of Marcel Mauss”, Claude Lévi-Strass further, by connecting the hypothesis to is slight disencounter between things, in which two beings can perform perspective about the world (the “world- gender, given that it presupposes the identified two dominions of western another difference of humans in regard they almost hit themselves, there is an immediate exchange, but rather for-a-subject”), instead, a perspective of/ establishment of a common world, a knowledge in which interlocutory to other primates, their association disencounter between the beings that the creation of a zone between-being from a world (“world-of-a-subject”), as unique (although relative) perspective obliquation found its highest expression: with dogs, skillful readers of human lose themselves one another between (latin: interesse), in which there is an Eduardo Viveiros de Castro distinguishes through which “I” (the self) comes to “in a word, it is the same type of eyes: “Another way of looking at this words that almost don’t say anything interchange of the subject position, of the relativism from perspectivism. To recall designate only a point of such shared operation which in psychoanalysis allows phenomenon is that the white sclerae more. But we almost understand “I” (self), a locution-in-between. It is not a beautiful formula of Clarice Lispector, worlds? Thence, the importance of the us to win back our most estranged became universal among humans because ourselves in this slight disencounter, a dialogue, but a translation (a changing in front of an other like I (like myself ), quasi-understanding in dis-encounter self, and in ethnological inquiry gives it enabled them to communicate better in this almost that is the only way of of perspective): equivocation (and the of an alter ego, a zone “so volatile and (or mis-encounter) that Lispector refers us access to the most foreign other not only with each other but also with bearing [enduring] life fully, because resulting transformation), and not almost inexistent which lies between me to; thence, the importance of the “almost as to another self. In both cases, the dogs. (…) Humans love to look into their an abrupt encounter face-to-face with understanding (and the identity which and I” opens itself. Hence, a difference [quase, quasi] that is the only way of same problem is posed; that of a dogs’ eyes to ‘read’ their emotions. Dogs it would scare us, frighten its delicate derives from it), are the inter-locutionary between the subject (I, myself ) and its bearing [enduring] life fully”, that is, of communication sought after, in the one apparently feel the same. Maybe—just spider web threads. We are sideways conditions par excellence. An interlocutor oblique form (me) appears at the same an understanding which is, at the same instance between a subjective and an maybe—this reciprocal communication in order to not compromise what we is not simply another “I” (self) with time as the possibility of passing from time, misunderstanding, error, mistake. objective self, and in the other instance, was instrumental in the survival of our presage of infinitely other in this life whom I dialogue (a “thou”), but someone one to the other, that is, the possibility One of Maria Martins’ most famous between an objective self and a subjective species.” Thus, the current human form, about which I’m telling you.” who temporarily assumes my own “I” of obliquation, a condition of what we sculptures, titled Impossible, seems to other”. Yet, outside (authorized) the human eye as we know it (“window Clarice Lispector (self ) position, the myself-position: an as are here calling interlocution, or, if you stage such an oblique encounter: “two knowledge, literary experience also of the soul”, according to a well-known I (myself ), like I (myself ), qua I (myself ), prefer, com-position of worlds, in which bodies, one female and one male”, takes place by such means. Perhaps formula), may have been configured by 1. If there’s something the current quasi-I (myself ), which, thereby makes me, the encounter of alter egos makes them Veronica Stigger describes, “are impeded the best formulation of this experiment an accident (a mutation) that allowed “semiotic overproduction” teaches us in the same gesture, an as other, like other, transform themselves reciprocally, to fully approach themselves due to comes from a character (a subject – in our inter specific interlocution with about interlocution, it is its irreducibility qua other, quasi-other. In interlocution, exchanging worlds. the strange sharpened forms of their both senses – of the author), Elizabeth dogs. They would have domesticated to a mere exchange of messages. Each only one I (self ) speaks (exists) at a given heads, whilst they seem magnetically Costello: for her, what characterizes us as much as we domesticated them: time we step out of our houses (“actually” moment. 4. Nevertheless, every interlocution – lovingly – connected forever.” These literature is “sympathetic imagination”, co-domestication, co-oikeiosis. Reciprocity, or “virtually”), we are overwhelmed is dangerous. “The other”, continues “strange sharpened forms”, which appear that is, the paradoxical gesture of being com-position of worlds: I am Legion, by a torrent of messages, discourse, 3. Ortega y Gasset specified Ortega, “is formally, constitutively to even take the place of the heads of able to “think my way into the existence Earth is demoniac. information, images, all which make the interlocution’s strange statute in a dangerous [peligroso]. The word is both bodies (therefore, acephalous), are of a being who never existed”. And it world look like a gigantic post office, or splendid way: “What do we mean when wonderful: enunciates exactly the reality like deformed teeth that turn (the lack is another female character, G.H., one more specifically, a Dead Letter office – we say that we have in front of us an to which I refer. The dangerous is not of ) heads into sheer mouths: place of of Lispector’s countless alter egos, who of the same kind Bartleby worked at. As Other, that is, an other as I [as myself ] decidedly bad and adverse; it can be the absorption and emission, of devouring reveals that if the danger of interlocution much as dialogue (and even dialectics, its (…)? This implies that this new being opposite: good and happy. But, while 1 is considerable, the reward for obliquation correspondent in the western world of (…) is an I [self ], ego, but, at the same it’s dangerous, both counter-posed The English term “danger”, on the other hand, is greater: multiplicity. For G.H. derives from the Latin “dominium” (power, knowledge), the talking through in which time, is other, alter, is an alter ego. This contingencies are equally possible. In jurisdiction, etc.): “To face danger is to face associates it with a sort of becoming- the (im)material support is just a mean concept of alter ego – of an I [self ] that I order to get rid of the doubt, we have another power”, as Franz Steiner puts it. That world (“Depersonalization as the great of communication has increased, we feel am not, but is precisely other, therefore: to prove it, test it, experiment it. That is, dangerous is an unknown potency, an other’s objectivation of one’s self. The greatest that what we use to call interlocution not-I – seems to appear as a round – proof, test – is what first meant the potency: to face danger, therefore, is not to face exteriorization that can be reached”), that (only) the possibility of destruction or annihilation, hasn’t increased to the same degree. circle, a contradictory and impossible Latin vocable periculum, from which but the contingency of the unknown, to be in is, also, a subjectivation of the world: “the 1 31), 2014 (p. 30) and Ortego (p. People and entities (companies, virtual prototype”. What the alter ego shows comes (…) our [Spanish term] peligro. It another man’s land (world); in this manner, to face life in me doesn’t have my name. And personas, States, NGOs, etc.) speak me, shows to ego, is the existence of “a should be noted that the root per, of the danger is also to test, to experiment, etc. even I don’t have my name, and that is Vallias André poems by Visual Ego of the author Courtesy

30 NEW OBSERVATIONS # 130 From a photography album | Courtesy of Pierre Coquil II Toni Hildebrandt “Die Brücke”, as Hélène Cixous reminds us in her ingenious reading of Kafka, is a personification of a modern subject both in and as a transition, separating herself from “her” own origin and “her” own past. “I was a bridge” (Ich “Überbrücken”: war eine Brücke).2 With a bridge, it is possible to leave melancholy behind (Ich war eine Brücke), Notes on and only from the other side, it becomes clear that there was never any necessity to project life towards death. Still, Allegory beyond those who already crossed the bridge should not remain in happiness on the side of profanation – at least not unless Melancholy the bridge is still standing. The bridge needs to collapse, the allegory to expire. Think of the bridge as a memorial, as a certain historical necessity that reminds those who already crossed “her” (Ich war eine Brücke) to allegorically build further bridges. Those “letters” can only I be read allegorically if they are already written in the form of allegory – that I remember a lucid observation is, as un-collapsed bridges. Allegorical by Daniel Selden, who told me reading longs for the destruction of – I paraphrase his words – that allegorical writing. Clarice Lispector the recognition of an allegorical wrote: “This is the bridge. This is the predicament, underlining the meaning 3 river. There’s the Penitentiary.” of the forms of life, can produce two separate sensations or moods: one III implies anxiety and desperation, the other favors playfulness with rigor in Crossing a bridge (Überbrückung) a state of “releasement” (Gelassenheit). is the metonymy of translation Now, one can imagine these two moods (Übersetzung); “Übersetzen” (translate) as allegorically separated by a bridge, in German literally means, “to cross with solid pillars throughout modern a river”, for example with a boat, times: melancholy and profanation. and thereby refers to its process, to a This bridge, as Kafka thought, exists movement, as well as to a change of as an allegory insofar as it potentially site. But translation here is not the expires intrinsically. The temporal form famously misleading approximation of allegory is constituted by an intrinsic of any interpretation, but more than day of collapse and exploration. imposition or positing (Über-Setzung) in its subsequent reading. The collapse “Without collapsing, no bridge, once a mere iteration, a way. Any way, however regards the latter; one of the erected, can cease to be a bridge” beyond translation and transposition. best examples might be Benjamin’s (Kafka).1 Hence, is Kafka’s bridge After the collapse of an allegory, a dedication in One-Way Street: “This Postcards necessarily an allegory of an apocalyptic transfigured reader remains. The ethics street is named Asja Lacis Street after 1 Franz Kafka, “The Bridge” (Die Brücke) (1916), in time? and poetics of addressing, as I understand her who as an engineer cut it through Shorter Works, vol. I, translated by Malcolm Pasley 4 Mandelstam’s definition of writing the author.” Am I loosing sight, not (London: 1973). I prefer to render einzustürzen and Portuguese allegories in posteriority, expire only of windmills on postcards, when with “collapsing”, not with “falling”, as Pasley did. I hallucinate that what Benjamin calls 2 Ibidem. the “cut through the author” is followed 3 Clarice Lispector, “A Manifesto of the City” * by the collapse of the bridge? (1974), in Soulstorm, translated by Alexis Levitin Windmills (New York: 1989), p. 141: “Esta é a ponte. Este é o rio. Eis a Penitenciária.” 4 Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: 1979), p. 45.

34 New Observations # 130 Postcard I Postcard VIII 23.06.2013 30.07.2013

Tollis agendo molam de furfure, Paule, Postcard VI To understand the ethical function farinam, | Mosaicae legis intima nota Postcard IV 24.07.2013 of the addressee seems to me more facis, | Fit de tot granis verus sine furfure 09.07.2013 important than any empathy of “the panis, | Perpetuusque cibus noster et Last night I seriously dreamed of other”. The addressee is “the other” angelicus Think about the postcard as the postcards, Rosenzweigs Feldpostkarten, who was able to be also the finder of Abt Suger object of an epistemology of movement. or merely the idea of an image on that message in a bottle addressed to “By working the mill, thou, Paul, The postcard is not changing while their back, probably because Wolfgang him in posteriority. Der Kommende takest the flour out of the bran. | Thou moving from one place to another, D. Herzfeld gave me only a copy of einer Nachwelt als unser Schicksal? makest known the innermost meaning but as a moving object it is changing their text side (Herzfeld edited the Mandelstam: “There is only one thing of the Law of Moses. | From so many a place of departure and the place of Feldpostbriefe in 2013, letters...). that pushes us into the addressee’s grains is made the true bread without arrival, transition of topology, flux of With a postcard, however, one can embrace: the desire to be astonished by bran, | Ours and the angels’ perpetual subjectivities. The postcard as a medium never be sure if there is an image and if our own words, to be captivated by their food.” moves its poles. If A and B is changing, that image is actually more important originality and unexpectedness.” the line between them becomes an than the text. Heimsuchung des Bildes, (Translated in: Jacob Taubes, The allegory: a temporal distance to its own of the image on the double-sided Political Theology of Paul, Stanford 2004, origin, establishing a void that can be postcard, the support of the windmill. p. 39) filled with empathy. To be moved by Peter Handke writes in The Moravian what was said and written. The postcard Night that “all ways lead to the mill” is addressed to this collided polarity Postcard II (p. 106), thinking about the windmills of (event) of being moved by one and the 02.07.2013 Numancia. Postcard IX same gesture. 02.08.2013 The first representation of the mystic mill was a glass painting in Saint-Denis Postcard VII In 1922, nine years after his essay On Postcard V (12th century), which was not conserved. 26.07.2013 the Addressee, Osip Mandelstam wrote 23.07.2013 It depicted prophets from the Old an article on the “Grain of Humanity” Some seldom postcards show in the (Pshenitsa chelovecheskaia), published Testament, carrying bags of grain to a Today in the Basel library: a penumbra of the mills the “peaceable in the Berlin journal Nakanune. In mill, while Saint Paul was turning the conversation with Gerald Wildgruber companion” (Menashe Kadishman), the this essay, Mandelstam seems to recall wheel. Was it just a reference to the on Friedrich Kittler’s last work on donkey. We know that mule had a similar Suger’s inscription, already anticipating sacrament, to transubstantiation, an music and mathematics, Sappho and root in language as mill, in Latin mulus, Taubes’s profane reading: human wheat allegory of the appearance of Christ, the Stockhausen, while searching for an μυχλός in Greek . Once there was a longs to be ground up, transformed into bread of heaven, manna? edition of Rosenzweig’s Feldpostkarten. white donkey, a whiteness that was again flour, baked into bread. Mandelstam’s And was there any place for Maria in Some hours later on youtube, watching repeated by the emptiness of the sails geo-philosophy finds its genuine place this allegory, or did Paul just indicate a a moving commemorative reading on in the wind; event, vento, venting, veil, allegorically in the image of the windmill, new origin of faith – with his vigorous Kittler by Berit Jane Soli-Holt, the événement. but it is not the old millstone of the hands on the wheel listening to its “addressee” of his last notes – leading to – Can we not expect any allegorical catastrophe (anymore), nor the mill constant rattling murmur? the idea of a post card exchange with readings by the addressee? Allegorical of political history, but a new wind her on the addressee. She reminded affirmations or refusals, unexpected and a new care. – On one side of the me of something important that I answers? How do we pursue truth in postcard, however, images of Portuguese Postcard III had forgotten: The figure of the third, response? How to return into a more windmills, verso/recto the text, and the 04.07.2013 the mail carriers reading the text and originary relation to being, to an original addressee somewhere between them seeing the image as well, if they wish… Thoreau thinks of ponds, Heidegger exile, to something like repatriation? being its motivated movement, as the Later the vague daydream of a border of rivers – let us hold our movement of reader, instead of writer, and reminder of official, reading Rosenzweig’s post cards, thought for a while in the balmy breeze its own and alien posteriority. that breathes on the sails. The windmill, scratching the text, erasing the image. the Portuguese windmill, unlike the A Politics of Post Card? And than the “mystical mill” from the Vézelay Abbey epiphany of the windmill like a scissor refers to the elemental, as an economy of cutting the image without a sound. living. It is important, as Taubes recalls, to think about the concept of nature in Paul (Kafka, Thoreau, and Heidegger). The wind touches the sails of the mill… * The postcards reproduced on pages 34-37 were – touching, nature, technique, solitude addressed to New Observations’ guest editor, Pedro (Einsamkeit) A.H. Paixão, and were photographed in his home in Milan, Italy.

On the Addressee 37 Fabián Ludueña collection of references that, in a sense, fostered by the condition of an infinite Romandini are always incomplete but sufficient in universe. However, any diatribe against their own precariousness. statistics should not hide the essential This is not comparable with the fact: the survey’s effectiveness is only gesture of the Ancients who, regarding conceivable in the context of a science of life, also seemed to be inclined to an infinite universe where man develops Post-locutionary narrative brevity. However, this feature a lifestyle that, as diverse as it may was not the result of any property of present itself, is ineluctably absorbed by the narrative matter. It was instead a an underlying law that turns it into a Logos conscious decision from authors like predictable and absolutely dispensable Plutarch, who wished to shed light on entity within the planet as a whole. the shape of a life (bíos) stemming from This effectively modern condition “the small things” (pragma brachú) that of man has condemned him to be a could be hidden either within an epic mere simulacrum in a world where action or a small anecdote. The search appearance, on the other side, is I. The woman who adopts the for a vital constellation demanded a considered as a deceiving surface of semblant of Eve tells the man who restricted economy of words that had Being that must be transcended to reach serves as Oscar´s semblant in Holy to be extracted from a plethora of lived the precise manifestations produced Motors, Leos Carax’s film, “On a vingt experiences and innumerable legends by the science of numbers. The fact minutes pour rattraper 20 ans (We have and tales. that man is just a semblant (in a scale twenty minutes to catch up with twenty The contemporary situation is of numerical adding, the phenomenon years)”. That is the time they have been utterly different because a significant was called, with an equivocal expression, apart. And the phrase turns even more change has been introduced to the “society of the spectacle”) has decisive considering that the fortuitous experience of life itself. The postulation attracted criticism: fair sometimes, and encounter in the streets of Paris will of an infinite universe by modern inconsistent, others. In any case, the never again occur: “Sans doute, on ne se science has substantially transformed understanding of the essential element verra plus jamais (Undoubtedly, we will any conception of individual life. In has been seriously delayed: in the never see each other again)”. consistency with modern science, human modern universe, human beings can be There are few phrases that could beings are nothing but a point in a vast nothing but a simulacrum. Thus, we are so acutely restore the spirit of our universe that makes them, at least at the facing a theorem of existence rather than times. Certainly, the expression must inception, completely identical to each an alienation of Being. not be strictly understood within the other. From the new universe viewpoint, The phenomenon was inevitable relationship described in the film so as no human being is especially important and is implicit in the passage from to be truly intelligible. On the contrary, yet is potentially transformable into a what could be called the “liturgy of the intention is to turn it into the number. Statistics is the science which Being” (the infinite God of medieval existential statement that any inhabitant has most rapidly grasped the gesture: Scholasticism, also object of all the of a 21st century megalopolis could not only because of the fact, repeated ad pious images and laudatory praxis) to pronounce. Neither should the material nauseam, that it treats people as numbers the “infinity in Being” that is reflected circumstances (such as the characters’ (how else could it do?) but, and this in a transference of properties that lack of time due to the assigned is capital, because its effectiveness lies some like to call “secularization”. A missions) be interpreted as a simple within its proven capacity to predict the precious testimony is provided by a circumstantial impediment. Instead, behavior of millions of human beings, renowned scholastic of the 17th century: the scene expresses the structural time taking sample sizes restricted to a few “Dico itaque cum auctoribus secundae necessary for a life to be told in the thousands as its basis. opinionae Deum esse in infinitis spatiis present century. The crucial point then, is not just imaginariis extra coelum in immensum In this sense, in the contingency, the that Individual A equals Individual B, diffusis” (Compton-Carleton, Thomas, film reaches a universal condition: the but rather that the behavior, thoughts, Philosophia universa, Antverpiae: apud biography, during the 21st century, needs actions from A (statistically gathered) Iacobum Meursium, 1649, sectio IV, no more than twenty minutes to retell can predict those of X millions of non- col. 2, p. 337). The attribute of infinity the fundamental events –mostly painful, surveyed individuals. In this sense, the belonging to the extra-cosmic spaces of but unworthy of an extended account– survey does not properly target those the divine majesty is transposed to the of a man’s destiny. In the light of these who are interviewed but, faithfully, the Universe in its wholeness as new habitat new conditions, there is undoubtedly ones who are not. In consequence, as it of a consequently off-center man. no chance to recover the lost time. At has been stated, refusing to participate The mathematization of infinity will the most, it is possible to inscribe other in a survey strictly means becoming the have to wait, however, to Cantor (our biographical remnants in an anonymous real object of statistics. It might be said opinion is affirmative in the discussion continuum of analogous experiences that that, politically, we are dealing with a about his theory changing the nature cannot constitute History but rather a numerical perversion of mathematics, of the problem). Einstein’s relativity,

On the Addressee 39 on the one hand, will turn obsolete any this apparently so precarious remnant, (with the subsequent syntactical and of the indulgent speeches of the present) metaphysical discussion based on the philosophy could aspire to awaken from morphological changes attached to because the last men know that they solar system’s helio-centrism or geo- its real dogmatic slumbers and assume such process), the destruction of the have lost such a possibility together centrism cliché. The position of the all the issues that have been left in the terrestrial biosphere results from the with the end of interlocution. The last Earth is a metaphysical problem that, hands of anti-philosophy: the first of associated condition of denying animals men’s words lack their addressee: nobody only under the Infinity perspective, them, to decipher whether there is a form all “syntactical” capacity (as the Stoics listens to them (no Other, not even a acquires its real meaning and loses, of life, completely new, that may be told formerly stated and nowadays Chomsky’s god, or a poetical object is there for at the same time, all its magnitude as through the grammar of that malaise that linguistics, as well). In the infinite them; not even humans can any longer a theoretical question (we refer the is silently experienced by every inhabitant universe of modern science, when man have a dialogue with themselves). reader to the too often overlooked of the orb. Nevertheless, as a necessary is conceived as a mathematical point, the The last men think that they are writings of Hannah Arendt on the condition to approach that question, “addressee” of any communication is then speaking, but they are not. Their subject). In the same movement in philosophy will have to abandon what indifferent and hence truly superfluous. language can be translated into a kind which images were reserved to the we have called the “anthropic principle” In a certain sense, humans have lost of formalization where the human word glorification of the infinite Being of which underlies the interpretation of the their capacity to transmit the legacy is mixed up with the informational God, its multiplied transference to the old conception of man and the cosmos of a language understood as a voice of language of the physical world in so far Universe as a new “material absolute”, in the history of Western metaphysics. wisdom to the new generation. At the as it is mathematically deducible. With produces the metaphysical transmutation The “addressee” that may then receive the same time, all its syntactical capacity the end of the parlêtre that only speaks of man into a simulacrum. This new forces of thought and language will have becomes information that, constantly a language whose mastery is losing figure of man is inserted in an entirely mutated decisively. retransmitted in a global scale, turns ground every day, and while all words liturgical world that exalts the image into pure communication that lacks turn completely anodyne and dull, the qua image and where human life turns II. Linguistic science, supported significance regarding a shared heritage. ineluctable extinction of the last men structurally indistinguishable from an by modern scientific paradigm, has In the meantime, the secret of the will mark the step towards a radical organized ensemble of pixels. Surely, leaned on two fundamental axioms: a) language of other animals completely subversion of the prime role so far held the process marks a civilizational conditions for the linguistic exchange escapes the human animal. Jointly, this by the Homo sapiens in the access to the mutation (and hence a metaphysical are absent in the animal world event seals the definite death of a world sphere of a Lógos that will survive him. one) of unpredictable reach. As any (Benveniste) and b) interlocution implies where the Voice had a correlation with The coming man may possibly listen mutation in which there is no chance of the existence of a mathematizable or, the transmission of some kind of History to (perhaps spontaneously as in the retrogression, the only possible exercise at least, codifiable communication that had a sense for the perpetuation of Maroccus Extaticus), for the first time, is that of understanding. model ( Jakobson). A corollary of the species. For human discourse there the language of the animals or that of Instead of yielding to complaint, the the second axiom points out the is no longer a human addressee, and stones, together with the secrets hidden new situation must be radically assumed. “danger” of transforming human the other animals’ language drowns in in their folds. Therefore, the coming It may give birth to what some thinkers intercommunication into mere “physical incomprehension. And when man speaks, man will have to become the “addressee” -in an act of bravery- call a singularity. information” (Jakobson inspired by a life needs no more than twenty minutes of a Lógos articulated in a completely However, for this to be possible, the MacKay). At the same time, the second to be told. Any addressee needs nothing unprecedented way. bet of the infinite universe has to be axiom, as will be seen, runs the risk of more than the information of an identity For this to occur, will, as Osip accepted together with the subjectivity saturating the first one. However, from that can be reduced to formalizable Mandelstäm wrote about Sologub’s that is proper to this new space. The fact a philosophical perspective, a serious and predictable features. In this sense, poetry, the passage of still “hundreds of that man is nothing but a mathematical setback must be noticed in the history the “danger” of the second corollary of years” be necessary? point supposes, undoubtedly, the real of thought regarding the first axiom. linguistics becomes a reality: reduced to end of Humanism in all the ways it In fact, Sextus Empiricus (Outlines of information, “human” language becomes was conceived, at least until Modern Pyrrhonism I, 74) already established more and more indistinguishable from Times and beyond. It is surely ironic that the fact that animals speak and the encoding of nature and the physical that the most important astronomers that humans are not able to understand world. Page 38 of Modernity have been, all of them, them is not “unlikely” (apeikòs). This The last men evoked by Nietzsche Berta Ehrlich the last big proponents and, at the same argument will be picked up again by were proud to say: “Wir haben das Glück [2x] Untitled, 2000 Charcoal on paper time, products of Humanism. Montaigne (Essais II, 12) who will add erfunden (we have invented happiness)”. 42,0 x 59,4 cm Before being able to think what type that even though we do not understand The German philosopher made fun Courtesy of the author of singularity can certainly be built by animal language, the inverse situation is of them. However, it is not until today humans when conceived as numerical equally plausible. And Plutarch himself that we are in condition to measure This page Berta Ehrlich entities (which implies re-thinking in his De sollertia animalium (961C) as the accuracy of such words; not only Untitled, 1999 what a number is), under consideration in his Bruta animalia ratione uti (992C) because the happiness of those men may 16 m2 must be the fact that most probably the accepted that animals have language- be small or insignificant (as Nietzsche Expanded polystyrene, canvas, paint, rope, Homo sapiens denomination refers to, reason (lógos) and comprehension thought), but also because it does not foam, wire, Tulips, Anemones, Roses, Hyacinths, Lilacs, Narcissus, Peonies, Ranunculus, Amaryllis, nowadays, an almost –if not subjectively, (súnesis). exist anymore. We are, in a fashion, Camellias, Casa Blanca Lilies, Forget-me-not, fully-extinct species. As Kant already If man’s linguistic life seems to leave going through the last days of the Homo Sweetpeas, Waxflowers, Birds Of Paradise, Fran- glimpsed, the only affection that can all space of direct interlocution empty sapiens species, while its vacant position gipanis, Heliconia, Dasies, Japan Roses, Ladies’ resist being subsumed under the Law in order to dissolve itself into different has not yet been fulfilled. Nobody Ear-drops, Lilies of the Valley (...) (scientific and moral) is pain. From computationally mediated languages pretends happiness any longer (in spite Courtesy of the author

40 New Observations # 130 But that world soon escaped me when Behind the honey-brown eyes there I slowed down and stumbled. The bunk was a war taking place. The thoughts bed, the makeshift table, and the clutter of a depressed mind battling the child of two kids and a mother were the only and the woman. The memory stains of things surrounding me. The silence of friends lost to HIV, funerals, missed the forest was replaced with the sound of opportunities to shout words of love my mother’s angry voice, ordering me to and gratitude, and maybe a missed take my costume off. opportunity to love myself. Later, I was found crying, as I was The marks and the scars of my forced to walk out into the world in a restraints, and battles fought, run up dark navy suit, a crispy white button and down my arms. But being as I am, down, and a little sailor hat to match. a beauty reminiscent of the sleeping My tears would not stop rolling down beauty, Hermaphrodite, found in Rome, my cheeks, even when my mother gave I too shatter the male gaze. I make me a red lollipop that just hung from him turn around and look to find the my lip, the sweetness barely soothing the feminine within his masculine armor. I bitterness of rejection. send the stranger running off into the I came into this world as a little boy, street in indignation and horror, because but I carried a secret with me for many just as you walk around the marble years. And it is this I want to share with sculpture of Hermaphrodite, every you today. In hopes that when you see viewer is shocked, and fearful of what me in the street or live in the same home they do not know. as me, you can smile, love me, respect My song within these words is me, and hold me in your arms when I transcendence. This is the joy of my cry and whisper in my ear that: I am existence, but for this I am persecuted. beautiful as I am. May this letter serve like an arrow flying Like Prometheus I was bound across lands and piercing hearts. with shackles to gender binaries and Gender comes from deep down within expectations. But, I stole nothing from you. No one can dictate this. These are the gods. I only showed them what violent times, when women like me are freedom looked like to live as one being brutally murdered, dumped in wishes, dancing in pretty frocks of black empty parking lots, set on fire. I call on lace unafraid, proud to wear ornaments to you to sound the horn, and change it like a queen. I did this and will continue around, and tell a different story. A story to do so until the withered hand of of wisdom and courage. mortality comes and takes my hand. But In the days of Hermaphrodite, know that I will leave this earth, smiling. she too was persecuted, but she was Many nights under the stars I found perceived by many as sacred, and she myself pondering about life as I do now, too conquered with her beauty and her but this time I hope to leave a beautiful mind. She aroused the imagination, and vision in your mind of who I am. The dared to question gender. I am doing third gender, trans, two spirits, they that today, but I also dream and conjure are my people. Their experiences, their my witches: journey, and their pain are mine, and my The women before me who laughed Dear reader, of doing what came naturally to her. Photography by Donna Ferrato Donna Ferrato Pages 42-43 pain and joy of my life will be yours. I am in the face of adversity; the women who Isabella Rodriguez Yes, life can do that. Now, I am at this Isabella Rodriguez in TriBeCa, 2014 not “the Other” or any different from you. fought furiously, loved unconditionally, You, whose eyes dance over these crossroad. I am my mother, but I’m Pages 44-45 I am the woman slouched over white and suffered but prevailed. words. breaking the cycle, I’m going to love and Isabella Rodriguez in TriBeCa on the marble, trying to chase a dragon fly. Traversing the dream world, I am I was a child once, my mother’s child, live by what comes naturally to me. way to see “The Maids” by Jean Genet, Summer 2014 I defied gender roles and expectations. in love, I am fearless and occasionally strong of will, of heart and soul. But, One day I twirled round and round © Donna Ferrato It was a battle for freedom of thought I dream of a prince. I am Cleopatra, Traversing the I too cried those many nights when I in little silk red panties, a long red satin Photography and expression. Eleanor of Aquitaine, Helen of Troy, went to sleep hungry or when my school cape, dreaming I was an Amazon warrior I was the woman sitting alone at La I am what love stories and myths are teacher discovered the purple and yellow princess. I twirled until the small, dingy Scala after the audience was long gone. made of. In my dreams I am not the dream world bruise going down my leg, like a body of room that we lived in turned into a I swam in the Mediterranean Sea, and object of sex or possession, in my dreams water, deep of color, and complicated. rain forest, until all I could see was lush I am the beauty that entertains, charms, I am complete. I had a colorful imagination. I went green and my reflection on the patches and controls the room with a flutter of with what came naturally to me, and of water, showing me a beauty, with fair an eyelash, a façade of an aesthetic that I Isabella Rodriguez my mom, well she was past the stage skin and curly brown hair. learned so early in life. July 2014

On the Addressee 43

Emanuela De Cecco your invitation came to me as a call on situations as they are. These are not to a radical challenge on these topics, just options, and least of all are these an individual as well as a collective narrow features influencing the style challenge. of one – these are necessary actions. Landslip: landslip as a subtle We have a lot to do, so let us get going, Open Letter to condition, landscape of the crisis that with no arrogance nor presumptions to asserts itself precisely as we read on the change the world. * newspapers about the unprecedented “On our lakes and on our seas, birds Leonardo Delogu number of those who follow art in all its deploy the wind that erupts from forms. everywhere. We wouldn’t know to count This is mostly perceived as a them, our task is to be faithful to the movement that stays on the surface, passing wind” (Édouard Glissant in The programmed to find completion Lamentin Crowd). in consumption with no additional I took one step, you built the Dear L. consequence. Something has happened conditions for this encounter to carry – is it possible to legitimize public on. In this, I see an opening to which I Lots of miles, lots of trains, early behavior, whatever its realm, merely answered, and I think that searching for rising, up all night sometimes. in terms of viewers’ numbers, as if the a conversation to happen between views Lots of silence, lots of words, sudden quality of the interaction were just an gained through different experiences beauty, steps, gestures, glances. I am here accessory? is a fact that goes beyond personal now. Is it possible that the term ‘experience’, involvement. You ask what sense does it make to with the whole load of unforeseen Signs of space and time. In between be here now. I am not sure but it occurs events, uncertainties, and surprises that the before, the while, the after, of a tale, to me that it might be a consequence. contributed to shape its meaning as I often focus on the afterwards, what I realized this a bit at a time – I start it has been shared through the XXth remains, the effects, the evidence. After seeing an intention beyond an unspoken century, has been domesticated and the rain, after the sea storm, after a surprise. incorporated within the language of protest, after a party, each event leaves I recognized something deeply economy? We need to come back to its traces and they are always different familiar in the motivations around these words, closely and attentively. but they have a recognizable element in which your work grows, something I am not particularly sure as to common: I identify it with a matter that that concerns me closely. I am not only what I know, it is clear to me though by its placing of itself manages to convey thinking about King, but also the series that we met in a place where this a suspended time. of workshops, last year, called Walking question is relevant. This is what I Traces are a particular kind of signs, in the landslip – a title that contains a mean by considering my being here as where neither form nor composition pretty clear indication of poetics. Your a consequence. We did not need to use are aprioristically thought: they both invitation to share a path in staying, a lot of words, try and understand what emerge, come as a result, follow an dancing, happened beforehand, what were the action. walking, inhabiting a place – a path stories, what got broken, what got lost, They tell us something about that would bring us back to ground what our current desires might be. something that happened, they evoke level on each of these aspects (given The most urgent conversation for us presences, movements. the circumstances, what can be done?) to have is about the effects of what there They invite us to be silent, they – encompasses broad questions as to has been, and most importantly about show only one part of a story. The the will of dwelling in a metaphorical how much are we willing to put into responsibility to give that story a voice place where one would re-think their play again now. and grasp its narrative is on the ones own language, whatever it may be, and We are here, now, wishing for other who stumble upon it - and it is fine to their own position. In other words, people too to share this question. even just imagine such a story. Without a doubt, the landslip that you Traces can have a very brief life, or * This letter, addressed to Italian choreographer evoke is not only a wounded landscape, they can permanently shape the identity and performer Leonardo Delogu, responds to his but it calls attention to a broader crisis of a place, as well as a person. The request for a reflection in writing on his current that affects the foundations of our paradox of traces is what contributes work. This epistolary exchange has grown to society – the obsession with numbers, to strengthen their poetic potential; include writings by other members of the collective Strasse from Milan – within which Delogu’s project and the transformation of all aspects of the paradox of traces is its own being was to take place – and others. The epistolary life into a spectacle, are also corollaries. suspended between such distant exchange now stands as one of the various ways If that is the case, we must necessarily possibilities. in which the broad King Project shaped itself. An re-think our tools, the way in which we Traces point to something that really encounter between correspondents was facilitated by the lab Camminare nella frana (Walking in the use them, verify our parameters, and happened and could happen again, and Landslip), and by the end of 2012 it turned into a reconsider our positions; we must not they are not always welcome. But more collaboration with the King project. hide behind our roles or comfortably sit than their menacing features, I find it

On the Addressee 47 elsewhere? Like something that is born stretch of experience that I can claim unexpectedly. A passage from something for myself, categories and boundaries potential to something concrete. A little by little change shape and acquire transforming act. meanings where, subtly, one can catch At the moment, now, I have many sight of intertwined elements leading to doubts as to what is defined ‘the right a confrontation with the dimensions of distance’. Clément, for example, in his power - internal power being the most passage uses his verbs in the infinitive. powerful of all. Thanks to this form, he frees himself from pronouns and opens up the Yours, M. possibility for readers to find their own Milan, April 30, 2013. position. But such a performative text is of reception, often times more open was no joke either. I know that, should – Approach diversity with the result of a process, and if it were to than anything human, animal, vegetable, I have given up, I wouldn’t ask you astonishment. be repeated literally it would no longer mineral, built – stuff that gathers up all afterwards what the outcome was- such – (…) make sense, it would become empty. So, efforts in keeping intact. an hypothesis would only dilute this – Value growth and biological back to the point, for whom is ‘the right This disposition also pertains to encounter. development as opposed to growth and distance’ right? According to what rules? language. Words, images, gestures, The distance between a shared economic development. Can we reconsider these rules from time ways of communication that are experience and an experience narrated – Deal with sites touched by beliefs Pages 50, 52-53 to time? As far as I am concerned, within born from this end, and disprove it. remains a difficult gap to bridge, an as an indispensable territory for the Scenes of King project at this journey, now, this question is work in They transform the end by putting a impossible one to measure. This is always wandering of the spirit.” Santarcangelo Festival 2013, and of itself. possibility back into play. true. In this instance, I asked myself if, photographed by This question makes work within our And so much more, as Gilles Clément Fabio Artese (p. 50) In this condition, even a minimal in that opening of a working space that writes in his Manifesto of the Third Simone Evangelisti (pp. 52-53 top) work and relationship, but also inside [Translation from the Italian by Claudia action becomes necessary, it takes was coming from you and an already Landscape. These words do not cease to Francesca Mautone (pp. 52-53 bottom) and outside of the stage as we see it, as if Chierichini; translation from the French on a strength that goes way beyond established team, one might not see Courtesy of the authors speak to me, and even though I know it were a double movement that makes (citations from Clément and Glissant) by its possibilities. Even just a flower also a different way to call upon the www.casadom.org that you would probably use different roles and positions give way. Within the Leah Poller] blooming on arid grounds is a good audience. Are you opening a working words, it is the same for you. What example. In silence, after all hope seems space in order to get a possible audience about following your directions then? gone, something happens, someone or involved in a different fashion? Are you, What could happen if we transformed something comes back to life. thus, going towards some way to wear each of these sentences into a question? Re-birth more than birth. boundaries thin? I don’t know, maybe a This is a game, it makes sense if we let These thoughts started to take bit of all of the above might be true: but these sentences live in our experience. shape in Genoa- that’s when this story certainly one may also see here a way to But this is not to be taken for granted. begins for me. I remember the days of share your starting questions through This dimension is central to the that workshop as days immersed in a experience, a stage of the journey that construction of this journey- it is about concentrated time, essential and silent. brought us here. being in a time, taking it, snatching it It was about making space, inside of Everything else took shape slowly. away at times, breathing. oneself, by encountering others. There were sufficient cues to figure We would like to find, in the actions Genoa is my city: I left it soon in out that there was only one way to get that brought us to this point, the the attempt to avoid nets that could to know more about all this. As my understanding eyes of those who take become cages. It’s been a successful doubts carried on their conversations, I nothing for granted, who know how maneuver, but for years to each coming focused on a list of items to bring along. rich of possibilities the territory of the back corresponded an escape, to each They went on talking, but I could find in-spite-of-everything, and who are not coming close corresponded the necessity everything downtown, so I left. afraid to inhabit it. of regaining distance. At a certain point “MANIFESTO Can art be thought of as a shelter I sped up and went further. Chance has (Each of the following phrases can be for forms of language that do not brought me back here, like a bungee taken as a question) find a space, nor a right to exist, cord – checkmate, almost. Working on – Instruct spirit to not-do just as one the void, in the void – you couldn’t know instructs it to-do. this – merged with my getting in touch – Raise indecision to a political height. again with a place to which I belong. As Weigh it against power. we spoke about other matters, I tried to – Imagine the project as a space figure out what was happening in the containing reservations and questions meantime. asked. Then I no longer knew what to do. – Consider non-planning as a vital Camping would start in two weeks, and principle by which all planning sees itself even though the biggest effort there transversed by flashes of life. was yours, the idea of just participating

48 NEW OBSERVATIONS # 130 [To Someone]

I have a new phone that allows me to draw. I have drawn every day on the subway or while I’m waiting for my wife. The other day on the subway with a friend, I thought: I can offer this drawing to the people who surround me. I turned on Bluetooth and there were five people [To Someone] connected. These four drawings belong to that I have a new phone that allows me to series.* draw. I have drawn every day on the subway or while I’m waiting for my wife. Bernardo Simões Correia The other day on the subway with a Lisbon, Summer 2014 friend, I thought: I can offer this drawing to the people who surround me. I turned on Bluetooth and there were five people connected. These four drawings belong to that [To Someone] series.*

I have a new phone that allows me to Bernardo Simões Correia draw. I have drawn every day on the Lisbon, Summer 2014 subway or while I’m waiting for my wife. The other day on the subway with a friend, I thought: I can offer this drawing to the people who surround me. I turned António Poppe on Bluetooth and there were five people portuguese women and men: connected. coral diamante, NOW These four drawings belong to that adunada series.* absolutas sem pertença Bernardo Simões Correia Lisbon, Summer 2014

[To Someone]

I have a new phone that allows me to draw. I have drawn every day on the subway or while I’m waiting for my wife. The other day on the subway with a friend, I thought: I can offer this drawing to the people who surround me. I turned on Bluetooth and there were five people connected. These four drawings belong to that series.*

Bernardo Simões Correia Lisbon, Summer 2014

On the Addressee 51 SPHINX OF BLACK QUARTZ JUDGE MY VOW

I introduce you RASCO and the “other one”. He / they will be the protagonist (s) of NEW VOID: The Movie I ‘m choosing him / them as my unique interlocutor while i’m building him / them up.

2014

produced by

ALESSANDRO DI PIETRO

* The 4 images were digitally created and deleted after this issue was printed. They exist only in the pages of this edition. Please cut them out, frame each and give them to someone. “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.” (1 Cor. 13:12)

52 NEW OBSERVATIONS # 130 YOU: Is it you? YOU: why are you and the other you laughing? GUEST: Yes it’s us GUEST: we are sorry ahahaah but we ques- YOU: I don’t understand whether you’re one tion ourselves about this every day! or many. GUEST: It depends by what you think of your Once we tried to escape but since this fucking body earth is flat we are easily trackable, because YOU: … we move on a limited surface and any element GUEST: Are you one or many? stands out above the GL. YOU: ONE GUEST: I see Moreover our silhouette is easy to recognize GUEST: hi anyway and technology smells the slag of material on YOU: hi the living beings, if they have being exposed to YOU: hi black mirror RAW particles for a long time. GUEST: ahahahah GUEST: anyway, i don’t like to show up around YOU: shit here.. GUEST: :O YOU: me neither..so many perverts YOU: i can’t really follow you YOU: how are you today? GUEST: we don’t care or better it isn’t impor- GUEST: fine..more or less.. YOU: what do you mean, don’t you agree? tant for you to understand. It is quite some- GUEST: not always thing that we are speaking mas o meno el YOU: what do you mean? mismo langue. GUEST: we’ve got two brains, four hemi- YOU: ?? spheres, two cerebral cortexes and two little GUEST: you see, categories fall and mascu- brains, so :) YOU: Yes, but a single body.. line and feminine are inverted in an instant! GUEST: Yes just one, but each of us owns only ahahahah one part of the body. The sensitivity starts to YOU: i’m out of here be shared in the middle, chest, torso, stom- ach, genitals. GUEST: as you wish..it’s you who started this YOU: so your instincts are shared.. conversation and you will stop it, definitely not GUEST: more or less.. Being us a bilateral but us :D not symmetric being, we have two very YOU: won’t this ever happen? different viewpoints and attitudes to desire YOU: what do you mean? GUEST: never GUEST: I mean that RASCO doesn’t forgive YOU: why? himself the fact of being responsible of his GUEST: The exterminating angel? own life. I behave and sneak into any space YOU: Stop speaking as a fucking oracle! into which I can gain anything precious. YOU: oh is that your name? GUEST: If this is not saying anything to you GUEST: just an infinitesimal part of myself.. it’s just better, you’ll fuck you more easily GUEST: ahahhahahahah! YOU: what’s your job? YOU: I forgot to ask you and the other you a GUEST: we work in a mine YOU: so? question. GUEST: we are the only workers the GUEST: Tell me GOLD:PMINE YOU: how do you extract? YOU: how did you end up working down there? GUEST: we can flatten ourselves to the level of GUEST: I think it happened right after we GL as the earth was once before the spheres. heard speaking about the spheres’ landing points.. YOU: so do you both become 2D? we intercepted the points and started to mine GUEST: yes, we only can YOU: what are the points? YOU: so you would actually have a possibility GUEST: the points in which, in ancient times, to escape the spheres fell on the world, making it tridi- :D mensional, even if not enough. GUEST: ? It’s said that they will come back to complete YOU: you could transform into 2D forever. the job, but if they’ll be back we’ll be kind of GUEST: fucked, cause now we’re able to extract little YOU: aren’t you replying? raw material and people keep remembering... but every time we do it we’re at risk, cause the GUEST: more we mine the more we forget. GUEST: It’s a vicious circle: employed and dealers at GUEST: the same time. If the spheres would not come GUEST: back, the material would not renew itself and would finish, so the demand would fall and GUEST: people would start to live without memories GUEST: again. GUEST: YOU: …and so?… GUEST: GUEST: they could start look to the future. And, who knows, maybe one day people might GUEST: start remembering by themselves, without GUEST: getting high on raw material. GUEST: YOU: I’m confused..basically, both of you YOU: hey!!! would like the resources to be used up so that you shouldn’t keep pushing because the more GUEST: you mine the more you forget? Even though GUEST: you make good money, right? GUEST: GUEST: exactly GUEST: YOU: so what do you hope for? If this mission should finish? you would like to cancel both GUEST: private and collective memory to stop work- GUEST: ing..this is not very kind from you… GUEST: GUEST: lol GUEST: YOU: but then why don’t you go to the GUEST: GOLD:PMINE and destroy it? or why don’t you GUEST: escape? YOU: fuck you GUEST: ahahahahahahaahahahhahahahaha- GUEST: SPHINX OF BLACK QUARTZ: hahahahaahahahahah ARE YOU JUDGING MY VOW ?????? GUEST: :D GUEST: New Observations # 130 54 GUEST: GUEST: GUEST: Veronica Stigger Fome é | meu estado | natural. Me diz uma coisa, | ele é débil mental | ou só feio Hunger is mesmo? my natural YOU TELL ME SOMETHING: condition. IS HE MENTALLY DISABLED OR IS HE JUST UGLY? Damascus’ Ninguém | tem | três pés. O sonho dele era ser | garçom nos Estados Unidos. | NOBODY Foi para a França. * has Delirium Three Feet. HIS DREAM WAS TO BECOME A BARTENDER IN THE UNITED STATES. O ser humano | só toma atitude | quando fere o bolso. HE WENT TO FRANCE. HUMANITY ONLY TAKES ACTION Um dia, todos estarão mortos. | Você vai querer fazer WHEN ITS POCKET um churrasco | e não vai ter ninguém para convidar. IS WOUNDED. ONE DAY EVERYONE WILL BE DEAD. Mataram um | monte de índios | para construir YOU’LL WANT TO THROW A Brasília. BARBECUE THEY KILLED A AND THERE WILL BE NO ONE TO BUNCH OF INDIANS INVITE. IN ORDER TO BUILD BRASÍLIA. Coitados dos índios! | Viviam em paz. | Chegaram A única solução é | dar uma camaçada | de pau. os seres humanos e mataram todos. THE only SOLUTION is POOR INDIANS! to beat THE HELL THEY LIVED IN PEACE. OUT OF IT. HUMANS CAME AND KILLED THEM ALL. Por pior que seja, | não se justifica. | É isso que gera essa violência toda. Não pode. | Por que não pode? | Porque não pode. NO MATTER HOW BAD IT IS, IT’S YOU CAN’T. NOT JUSTIFIABLE. WHY CAN’T I? THAT’S WHAT GENERATES BECAUSE YOU CAN’T. ALL THIS VIOLENCE.

Eu vou morrer. | Mas não vou morrer debaixo da Aqui é bom. | Só tem | homem rico. ponte. | Não vou morrer debaixo da ponte de boca Here is a good place. calada. There are only I AM GOING TO DIE. rich men. BUT I’M NOT GOING TO DIE UNDER THE BRIDGE. Presta atenção: | ela não é bonita, | ela só parece I’M NOT GOING TO DIE UNDER bonita. THE BRIDGE LISTEN CAREFULLY: WITH MY MOUTH SHUT. SHE IS NOT PRETTY SHE ONLY SEEMS PRETTY. Não imagina | o que ficou | de fora. YOU CAN’T IMAGINE As vacas só | existem | para me alimentar. WHAT WAS LEFT Cows OUT. only exist to feed me. Não é o caso. | Mas eu sempre | desconfio. IT’S NOT THE CASE. Os chineses | vêm aqui | e comem tudo. BUT I ALWAYS The Chinese * Walking the streets of our cities, how often do heard here and there, a kind of archeology of the of the Brazilian’ publisher Cultura e Bárbarie, from DISTRUST. come here we eavesdrop, sometimes by chance, sometimes language of the moment in search of unexpected Florianopolis: first, in 2010 with the text absent, and eat everything. out of curiosity, tuning in on fragments of others’ poetry - hard or tender, naive or ironic - that in Sopro, n. 45 (December 2010); then, in 2012, Quando morei na Ásia, | comi muito cachorro. | A conversations that resonate in our memories? could take its place in the midst of our current expanded and regrouped in a book titled Delírio de Those spoken words, precisely because they conversations dealing with the triad of blood, Damasco. The selection presented herein includes carne é boa, bem boa. reach us in fragments, in pieces or flashes, always sex and money. This project was first presented the images for the first time. WHEN I LIVED IN ASIA present something enigmatic, suggesting to the at SESC, in São Paulo, Brazil, as part of its Arts I ATE A LOT OF (HOT)DOGS. imaginative listener a potential story, an embryonic Exhibition Program, from November 18-28, THE MEAT IS GOOD, VERY GOOD. fiction. Here, you will find a group of these phrases 2010. The texts appeared in diverse publications [Translation by Matilde Campilho]

56 New Observations # 130 On the Addressee 57 Cindy Sherman Untitled #425, 2004 Chromogenic color print 179,7 x 227 cm Courtesy of Metro Pictures

Bruce Nauman Use Me, 1988. Hard-ground etching, edition of 35. Published by Brooke Alexander Editions, New York.

ON THE ADDRESSEE 59 Jean-Luc Nancy This page The mood of the time is on the called “our time.” The “we” is merely that to start thinking that our best chances A fretful mood is always a mood of Pedro A.H. Paixão gloomy side. Our time does not believe of desolation, and the time is nothing lie in having done with potential and the the past. It delights in nostalgia – as Ganesh, 2014 in its own possibilities. Which means it but misery marking time. fulfillment of its action. though it were not past times themselves Courtesy of the author believes it has no possibilities. The mood of our times is laughable. This does not mean that our chances that had prepared the disappointment Page 60 This is curious, since our time comes Not only does it attest to the forgetting henceforth lie in impotence and of our time - or else it exhausts itself Another Nan Goldin out of the failure, collapse, or bafflement of our own lesson, but it proves to be inaction. The voices or silences that are in condemning and exorcising a past Amanda on my bed, of those other times, those periods still insensitive to the fact that another claim calling for another time, another “our by which it feels crushed. It bewails a Köpenickerstrasse, Berlin, 1993 so close, that had believed with such by time, by another “our time,” is making time,” call on us to act. But to act to present that slips through its fingers Cibachrome Time* 30 x 40 inches assurance in their own possibilities, and itself heard everywhere. take possession of another “our time.” without filling it with dreams of power. © Nan Goldin, Courtesy had sometimes even believed themselves This may, after all, be the same claim, To take possession of a time that would To be done with this mood does not Matthew Marks Gallery to hold the very possibility for humanity, or one quite close to it, that takes remain beyond our reach, that is to say, consist in recapturing the fine mood of history, knowledge, and happiness. shape through this mood itself. But if that would no longer be conceived as triumphant centuries. It consists in being By its fretful mood, our time shows that is the case, we ought not to take a necessary, methodical, and operative done with mood itself. This is no longer that it has yet to understand its own satisfaction in moods, or savor and stage toward a fulfillment of the time in a time for moods, for longings, for the lesson. indulge them, by continuing to believe which time itself would be reabsorbed vague or forceful wish to feel that one In this time - our time - war, torture, that one can and should believe in into a terrifying immobility. has a destiny. It is a time for exposing slavery, and hunger reign in almost possibilities. For it is not a question of The mood of the time is gloomy ourselves to what does not belong to all those places where it is scarcely a believing, nor of waiting for possibilities precisely because it is the mood of destiny, to what lies beyond destiny: question of “our time.” That is to say, in which to believe – and anyway where a time that still aspires to master all the advent, once again, of time itself, its all those places where people do not would they come from? times, and all time. It is a disappointing specious opening, its freedom. utter the same “we,” the we of Western Perhaps our most suitable possibility time, frustrated by its own difficulty Should we fail to understand this, civilization, but suffer its barbarous is to stop believing in this way in in accepting time. Its own difficulty in others who will soon have no more time effects (along with others). Nor is it “possibilities” (of history, knowledge, accepting the advent of time, in letting whatsoever to wait, and who are scarcely there a question of the mood of the time. humanity, etc.). To stop believing in time spread out to make room for the moved by our mood, will certainly let us * First published in New Observations # 75 (1990), “The Mood of Our Time,” guest edited by Ginevra Rather it would be a question of simply possibility as potential fulfillment, and to surprise of its present and the chances of know it. Bompiani. acceding to something that could be stop waiting for results. On the contrary, its future. [Translated by John Shepley]

60 New Observations # 130 On the Addressee 61 years. He made several site-specific sculptures intended Bruce Nauman is an American artist. Born in Fort Cantos and twelve Songs, as well as an audio recording to survive only in one or two documental photographs. Wayne, Indiana. He is regarded as one of the most with poems recited by himself along and through Ibu Notes on the authors Since the late nineties, he started producing only works innovative artists of his generation and as a catalyst Galissá’s Kora musical instrument. on paper, a chosen medium for translating physical for the shift in international artistic practice toward and mental experiences. Figurative and abstract, conceptual and performative uses of language and Isabella Rodriguez is an American writer. She has his drawings often suggest dense and complex inner the body. Since his first solo gallery show in 1967, a Bachelor of Arts degree in Creative Writing from landscapes. They alternately evoke new divinities Our( Nauman has been the subject of many notable museum Antioch University. She is currently pursuing her Lady of Abortion), specific territories (Occidental Sahara exhibitions. Nauman represented the United States Master of Arts in Literature. She lives in Los Angeles. Bas Jan Ader was a Dutch conceptual and performance movements of body and soul”, in A. Paci, M. Gili and Eagle for Courage in Journalism (1997). Her iconic desert), and geometric constructions (the arabesc or at the 2009 Venice Biennale, and the exhibition artist, filmmaker and photographer. Born in 1942. M. Fraser (edd.), Adrian Paci. Lives In Transit (Paris: book, Living with the Enemy, published by Aperture beehive cells in Islamic architecture), and are conceived was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Fabián Ludueña Romandini is an Argentinean He lived in Los Angeles for the last 10 years of his Jeu de Paume | Milano: PAC | Montreal: Museum of in 1991, is considered the first clear visual journey into with minutia and endurance (lines repeated endlessly, Participation. Nauman had his first solo exhibition at philosopher. He has obtained his PhD at the École life. Ader’s work has been primarily presented as Contemporary Art, 2014). the dark heart of domestic abuse. It has been reprinted like the advent of an handmade rug, the enacting of Sperone Westwater in 1976, where he has exhibited des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales of Paris. He is photographs and film of his performances. He often four times, selling a record number of 40,000 copies mnemonic exercises or the endless repetition of mantras regularly since. currently full researcher (CONICET - Argentina) and worked with performative installation, as he did in Emanuele Coccia is an Italian philosopher. He worldwide. or prayers). The lack of visual frontiers in the drawings, professor of philosophy (University of Buenos Aires). Please Don’t Leave Me (1969). In Ader’s final piece In obtained his PhD in Medieval Philosophy at the allows the spectator within. Almost all are based on Alexandre Nodari is a Brazilian philosopher, writer His latest books are La comunidad de los espectros I. Search of the Miraculous he sailed out to sea from Cape University of Florence (2005). Since 2011 he is Nan Goldin is an American photographer. She was travels done in Morocco, Amazonia, India, but also in and editor. He has a PhD in Literature from the Federal Antropotecnia and H.P. Lovecraft. La disyunción en el Ser. Cod, Massachusetts in a small boat, as part of an Associate Professor at the Ecole de Hautes Etudes born in Washington D.C. in 1953. She was introduced his homeland, Trás-os-Montes, a harsh and still partly University of Santa Catarina (Brazil). His thesis was attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean. He was lost at sea en Sciences Sociales, and Member of the Centre to photography at the age of fifteen, developing since pagan territory in Northwestern Portugal. None of his on the concept of censorship. He is also the publisher Jorge Leandro Rosa is a Portuguese essayist, translator in 1975, and his empty boat was found washed up on d’études des normes juridiques Yan Thomas (EHESS), then a thorough attempt to document what she later works have a chronology or a linear spatialization. Many of Cultura e Barbárie (www.culturaebarbarie.org), and editor. For several years he taught at the University the coast of Ireland. His estate is represented by Mary in Paris. His researches are dedicated to the History called her “extended family”. She photographed are its sources and his influences: Google Earth, Japan and has developed research on Oswald de Andrade’s and collaborated with major national newspapers Sue Ader-Andersen and Meliksetian | Briggs, Los of Philosophy, but, recently, also to the History of her subjects with the raw style of a visual journal, kimonos, ancient ritual, costumes and masks, world Antropophagy. (Público and Independente) for the Book Reviews Angeles. Fashion and Advertising. His work is translated in documenting her life in order to recall her experiences and European antiche and contemporary music, Piero sections. Currently, Leandro Rosa’s research work is many languages, and he has been delivering guest later. They account without artifices the struggle for della Francesca, Edith Clever, Hans Jurgen Syberberg, Pedro A.H. Paixão is a Portuguese artist, scholar and hosted by the Institute of Philosophy of the University Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher. Born lectures and participating in conferences worldwide. intimacy and understanding between friends, family, Andrei Tarkovsky, Werner Herzog, Matthew Barney, editor. Born in Lobito (Angola) in 1971. Lives and of Porto. He is frequently invited to deliver guest in Rome in 1942. Since the late 1960s he has been He has published, Il bene nelle cose (Bologna: il Mulino, and lovers, or what she collectively described as her Roberto Bolaño, Levi-Strauss or Herberto Helder, to works in Milan. He concluded his formal studies in lectures and participate in conferences in Portugal and developing a consistent body of theoretical work that 2014), La vita sensibile (Bologna: il Mulino, 2011) [both “tribe”. Her remarkable work, The Ballad of Sexual name a few. His work is represented by Galerie Jaeger Fine Arts (MFA) and Philosophy (PhD), and developed abroad, and his Curriculum features a large number of touches many fields (poetry, philology, linguistics, forthcoming in English at Fordham University Press, Dependency, was first presented as a slide show of Bucher (Paris). scholarly research on the theory and practice of drawing published books, both individually and co-authored. medieval studies, mysticism, anthropology), and New York], and La trasparenza delle immagini: Averroè circa 900 images and later, in a reduced selection, as in relation to philosophy. Among these he published Jorge Leandro Rosa is also co-editor at Nada, a long- challenges the core of his time. As Jean-Luc Nancy e l’averroismo (Milano: Bruno Mondadori: 2005); and a book (1986). “The belief that a photograph can be Jean-Luc Moulène is a French artist. In the 1970s, Desenho: A Transparência dos Signos (Lisboa: Assírio & standing cultural and theoretical journal based in once said, “[he] transverses the terrain of thought like published also many articles and studies. He has done true has became obsolete”, she recently regretted. Her Jean-Luc Moulène studied Aesthetics and Sciences Alvim 2008), a study on the forgotten relation between Lisbon. a solitary, sharp-eyed flaneur, ready to take all kinds of several translations of philosophical texts, from the mesmerizing work testifies however, that this “old” of Art at the Sorbonne University in Paris. While disegno (drawing) and the Aristotelian tradition; objects, whether they be ideas, words, or names (Aby English, French, German and Latin, and co-edited with belief still has a crucial place today. Her work has been carrying out simultaneous investigations in photography complemented by a forthcoming publication, where Cindy Sherman is an American artist. Born in 1954 Warburg, redemption, the Absolute, gesture).” In his Giorgio Agamben the large anthology Angeli: Ebraismo, shown and published extensively, and she is the recipient and sculpture, he participated in several landmark the relation between “drawing” and “art” is studied and in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Cindy Sherman is counted recent long-term project around a Roman juridical Cristianesimo, Islam (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2009). He’s of numerous awards and grants. She is represented by group exhibitions including De Afstand (Distance) at dismantled. His current research is dedicated to the among the most influential artists of the last half- figure called homo sacer – studies planned to remain a joyful man. Mathew Marks Gallery. She lives and works in New Witte de With, Centre d’Art Contemporain (1990, problem of an “external memory” in drawing, and the century. Upon graduating from the State University open –, he has continued approaching our times with York and Paris. Rotterdam), Lieux communs, figures singulieres at notion of “measure” in Aristotle’s Ethics. He has been of New York at Buffalo in 1976, Sherman relocated to rare sensibility, a tireless gaze and rigor of research. Alexandre Conefrey is a Portuguese artist. Born in Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1991), developing several drawing projects (also in films like New York City where she began making the seminal Departed from the philosophical debate on the idea of Lisbon in 1961. Lives and works in Lisbon. His father, Toni Hildebrandt is a German scholar. He studied and Politics/Poetics: Documenta X (1997). In 2003 the *ar-, Drawing Studies), among which are his large series Untitled Film Stills. She has gone on to photograph community, that project develops, in many different early on, taught him about Europe, Atlantic destiny, Art History, Musicology, Philosophy and Romance Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève, presented of Red drawings. His artwork is represented by Galeria and cast herself in various roles through her masterful publications, a constellation of thought that presents “Civilizing” destiny [For more information read Heart Literature at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, the the first monographic survey of his work followed 111, in Lisbon and Oporto, and he is a Member of the use of costume, setting and pose. In 1995, she was a questions and intends to destroy many roots from were of Darkness by Joseph Conrad]. After drawing for many Liszt School of Music Weimar, the Sapienza University by solo exhibitions at Center for Contemporary Art, Institute of Philosophy of the University of Oporto. He MacArthur Fellowship recipient. She is represented by our certainties in life or politics have grown. Sacred life, years he decided to take a drawing course at Ar.Co of Roma and the Italian Institute for Philosophical Kitakyushu (2004), Musée du Louvre, Paris (2005), founded and directs the editorial project disciplina sem Metro Pictures. Sherman lives and works in New York form-of-life, government, Michel Foucault, dispositive, (Lisbon), from 1993 to 1996. There he learned and Studies in Naples. He was a Research Fellow at eikones Culturgest, Lisbon (2007), Carré d’art-Musée d’art nome, now located at the Lisbon publisher Documenta. Carl Schmitt, state of exception, the anthropological unlearned a lot. The main event of the experience was at the University of Basel and a Resident Fellow contemporain, Nîmes (2009), Modern Art Oxford Veronica Stigger is a Brazilian writer, art critic, and machine, liturgy, office, use, are some of the many the possibility to participate, in 1995, in an Exchange at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome. He is currently (2012), Dia: Beacon (2011) Beirut Art Center (2013), Alessandro Di Pietro is a Italian artist. Lives and university professor. She was born in 1973, in Porto objects that have been, in the last two decades, under his Program between that institution and the Royal Senior Assistant at the Department of Modern and and Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp (2013). Jean-Luc works in Milan. He’s preparing a work for GLITCH Alegre. Since 2001, she lives in São Paulo. She’s attentive eye. College of Art in London, supported by a grant from Contemporary Art History at the University of Bern Moulène currently lives and works in Paris. - Interferenze tra arte e cinema, a forthcoming group the coordinator of Literary Creation course at the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. There, at the Printing and an upcoming Fellow at the Käte Hamburger exhibition at PAC (Milan). He presented recently the Academia International de Cinema, and Professor Paulo Brighenti is a Portuguese artist. Born in Lisbon Department, he developed several projects that became Kolleg “Law as Culture”, Center for Advanced Study, Jean-Luc Nancy is a French philosopher. Born solo exhibition La table basse at the off-site space Bad of the Post-graduate program in History of Art and in 1968. Lives and works in Cascais. In 2002, he essential to his future. University of Bonn, where he will work on a book in Caudéran, near Bordeaux in France, in 1940. New Business of Francesco Pantaleone Gallery (2014, in Photography at the Fundação Armando Álvares received the Drawing Prize of the Foundation Arpad project on Pier Paolo Pasolini. He has an immense body of work, that has been Milan). His recent group exhibitions are: Zodiaco at Penteado (FAAP). She has published, among others, Szenes-Vieira da Silva (Lisbon). He co-founded and Bernardo Simões Correia is a Portuguese artist. Born published since the early 1970s. His philosophic CAR drde (2014, Bologna); Primavera 2 at CNEAI – O trágico e outras comédias (Coimbra: Angelus Novus, is the pedagogical coordinator of Mart-Art School in in Lisbon in 1980, where he lives and works. He studied Osip Mandelstam was a Russian writer. “[He] was field of reference is vast: from books published on Centre National Édition Art Image (2013, Chatou); 2003; Rio de Janeiro: 7Letras, 2004 e 2007 [2ª ed.]), Os Lisbon, where he also teaches Drawing and Painting. Graphic Design at IADE (Lisbon), and Fine Arts at born in 1891, into the same time and destiny as Kant, Hegel, Descartes, Heidegger and Lacan, the On File at Platforma Space – MNAC Annex (2013, anões (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2010), Delírio de His recent solo exhibitions (2013-2014) are: Pó at Ar.Co (Lisbon and Almada). He’s a drawing teacher, a Nikolai Gumilev, Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir deconstruction of Christianity, the sense of the world, Bucharest); Constructional System at VIR – Viafarini Damasco (Florianópolis: Cultura e Barbárie, 2012) and Rooster Gallery (New York); Pó Project at Carmona e husband and a father. Mayakovsky, Sergei Essenin, Marina Tsvetaeva, to influential writings on art and culture. Nancy writes in Residence (2012, Milan). He has published on Opisanie świata (São Paulo: Cosac Naify: 2013), Costa Foundation (Lisboa); Imperfect at Art District poets to whom we can apply Roman Jakobson’s about contemporary art and contributes regularly to OEI Magazine #65 POSTKONST (Stockholm, receiving the Prize Machado de Assis 2013, of the (Cascais); The Great Fire at Appleton Square (Lisbon); Joana Escoval is a Portuguese artist. Born in Lisbon in word that they were «wasted» by their generation - a art catalogues. Besides his interest in literature, film 2014). Selected residencies: Dena Foundation for Fundação Biblioteca Nacional. Ice at TMG (Guarda); Bone at Gallery Fonseca Macedo 1982. Her recent projects and exhibitions are Europe, word whose implications we have not yet begun to and theater, Nancy has written poetry and theatrical Contemporary Art (2013, Paris); Fondazione Spinola (São Miguel [Azores]); Double Flame at Baginski Europe at the Astrup Fearnley Museet (2014, Oslo); fathom. Mandelstam, to a degree unequalled by his texts, not limiting himself to theory and criticism. Banna per l’Arte (2013, Banna, Turin); VIR – Via André Vallias is a Poet and graphic designer. He was Gallery (Lisbon); No Means No at CAV-Visual Arts Outlaws in Language and Destiny at Parkour (2013, contemporaries, made the poem into a place where all Shortly after publishing his first book Le titre de la Farini in Residence (2012, Milano). born in 1963. He has published poems and translations Center of Coimbra (Coimbra). His work is present Lisbon); Le petit Lenormand at Vera Cortês Art Agency we can perceive and attain through language is gathered lettre (1973), co-written with the philosopher and close in several Brazilian and international magazines, in private collections worldwide (Portugal, Spain, (2013, Lisbon); BesRevelação at Serralves Museum around a centre which provides form and truth, around friend Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, whom he never Yasmil Raymond is an American curator. She was and curated major exhibitions of visual poetry. In German, UK, USA, and Brazil). (2012, Oporto). In 2013 she published Beings that accept the existence of an individual who challenges the hour, stopped collaborating with, he was enrolled as maître de appointed curator of Dia Art Foundation in New York 2011, he released Heine, hein? (Perspectiva), the most and embrace the growth of other beings with ATLAS his own and the world’s, the heartbeat of the aeon. This conférences at the Université des Sciences Humaines in in 2009. Raymond received a B.F.A. from The School of comprehensive anthology of the work of Heinrich Heine Matilde Campilho is a Portuguese poet. Born in Projectos and Palmario Recordings (a record label she is to show how much Mandelstam’s poems, risen out of Strasbourg in 1973; the institution where he still teaches the Art Institute of Chicago and M.A. from the Center in Portuguese. In 2014, he published the book-album Lisbon in 1982. She majored in Portuguese and runs together with Portuguese artist Nuno da Luz). the ruin of a ruined man, are relevant to us today. (...) today. He was responsible for one of the most crucial for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. Totem (Cultura e Barbárie), with an introduction by the English Literature, and has a minor in History of Art. What marked the poems most deeply, their profound debates in political philosophy of the last three decades, anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Since 2010 she lives between Brazil and Portugal, and Berta Ehrlich (1970). Lives in Lisbon, Portugal. and tragic agreement with their time, also marked the developed, since 1983, around his notion of “inoperative António Poppe is a Portuguese poet meditator and her poems have been published in several Brazilian “I was raw, I was cooked, I was burned” (Mevlânâ poet’s own path: in the course of Stalin’s «purges», in the community” (communauté desoeuvrée); a philosophical artist. He has developed his studies at Ar.Co in Lisbon, newspapers, such as O Globo and A Folha de São Paulo. Celâleddîn-î Rûmî) nineteen-thirties, he was deported to Siberia. Whether attempt to understand the creation of the European participating in exchange programs with the Royal Her poetry book Jóquei (Portuguese for “Jockey”) was he died there or, as the Times Literary Supplement Community and the failure of Communism, as well as a College of Art in London and with The School of the published in Portugal in April 2014, by the publisher Donna Ferrato is a Documentary photographer. Her claimed, returned to share the fate of other Jews in debate intended to comment on Georges Bataille’s idea Art Institute of Chicago. In this last institution he Tinta da China (Lisbon). gifts for exploration, illumination, and documentation those parts of Russia occupied by Hitler’s armies, is a of a “negative community”, that engaged philosophers obtained his MFA in Performing Arts and Cinema. coupled with a commitment to revealing the darker question impossible to answer at this point...” [in Paul like Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Currently he writes and reads poetry publicly, exhibits Emanuela De Cecco is an Italian Art critic. She is sides of humanity, have made her a giant in the medium. Celan, Collected Prose, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop. Agamben. Nancy remains a remarkably active his artwork, and teaches drawing and meditation. He Ass. Prof. of Contemporary Art History, University Through exhibitions of her work and lectures across Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1986, pp. 63-64] philosopher, with publications like L’Équivalence des has published the book of poetry Torre de Juan Abad of Bolzano/Bozen, Italy. Among her most recent the globe, Ferrato has brought widespread attention to Catastrophes (Après Fukushima) (Paris: Gallilée, 2012), (Lisbon: Assirio & Alvim), as well as a long poem- publications: Arte-mondo. storia dell’arte, storie dell’arte violence against women and girls. Ferrato has received Rui Moreira is a Portuguese artist. Born in 1971 in where he tries to understand, from a philosophical meditation-drawing-song dedicated to his father and (Milano: Postmedia, 2010); Anna Valeria Borsari: Two numerous awards for her work, including the W. Eugene Oporto. Lives and works in Lisbon. Studied Drawing point of view, the implications of one of the major to his daughter Luz (Light), entitled precisely Livro da paintings, Two frames, The Wall and Other Questions, Smith Grant (1986), the Robert F. Kennedy Award for and Fine Arts at Ar.Co, in Lisbon, and at The School of catastrophes today regarding the use of nuclear energy. Luz (Lisbon: Documenta) — a book that reproduces (Milano: Postmedia, 2012); “Notes on Electric Blue, Humanistic Photography (1987), the Kodak Crystal the Art Institute of Chicago. Taught Drawing for many his manuscripts, with images and drawings of three

62 New Observations # 130 On the Addressee 63 “According to this way of telling it, there was a garden and in the middle of the garden was a tree. There was a platform under the tree made of trunks and slabs; and there those two girls sat to watch the garden and sing watch- garden songs. They did this to make the garden grow, just like people sing to a baby to make it quiet and feel good. In old times we sang to a garden for a like reason, to make the garden feel good and grow. This custom was one used in every garden. Sometimes one or two women sang.”

“The singing was begun in the spring and continued until the corn was ripe.” *

https://soundcloud.com/palmariorecordings/palm004 [This web address links to a freely down- loadable audio track that accompanies pages 64 and 65. Produced by palmario recordings, PALM004, 2014.]

* Quotes from Buffalobird-Woman in Gilbert L. Wilson, Native American Gardening: Buffalobird-Woman’s Guide to Traditional Methods” (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2005). Reprint of Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians: An Indian Interpretation (Minneapolis: Bulletin of the University of Minnesota, 1917). Joana Escoval | Pages 64-IBC | Untitled | 2014 64 New Observations # 130 $15.00 • Annual $15.00 • Annual