Thursday, 19 January 2012

Pain as a wakening of consciousness in erotic response

K. Kieslowski, A short film about Love
[It is banal to devote oneself to an end when that end is clearly only a means. The quest for wealth - sometimes the wealth of egoistic individuals, sometimes wealth held in common - is obviously only a means. Work is only a means. 
The response to erotic desire - and to perhaps more human (least physical) desire of poetry, and of ecstasy ( but is so decisively easy to grasp the difference between eroticism and poetry, and between eroticism and ecstasy?) - the response to erotic desire is, on the contrary, an end.]  
G.Bataille, The tears of Eros 

Screenshots from A. Resnais' Hiroshima mon Amour and Kieslowski's A short film about Love.
To remember/To forget: opposite states of consciousness are pursued by means of superimposition of a self-inflicted pain on erotic response.


That is precisely what we do not know!
It is a word
that we use
to indicate
the opening of our consciousness to ward possibility beyond measure, 
tireless and beyond measure.
And precisely what is consciousness?
That is precisely what we do not know.
It is nothingness.
A nothingness
that we use
to indicate
when we do not know something
from what side
we do not know it
and so
we say
consciousness,
from the side of consciousness,
but there are a hundred thousand other sides.
Well?
It seems that consciousness
in us is
linked
to sexual desire
and to hunger;
but it could
just as well
not be linked
to them.
One says,
one can say,
there are those who say
that consciousness
is an appetite,
the appetite for living;
and immediately
alongside the appetite for living,
it is the appetite for food
that comes immediately to mind;
as if there were not people who eat
without any sort of appetite;
and who are hungry.
For this too
exists
to be hungry
without appetite [...]

A. Artaud , To have done with the Judgement of God