Posted by Rain Rien on March 27, 19100 at 00:44:25:
In Reply to: Is this a quotation by Marcel Duchamp - please? posted by alun owen on March 24, 19100 at 13:56:25:
: "The work of Art is always based on these two poles of the maker and the onlooker, and the spark that comes from this bi-polar action gives birth to something like Electricity." mais non CONCERNING THE SPIRAL ADORNING PERE UBU'S BELLY
Cornegidouille ! nous n'aurons point tout demoli si nous ne demolissons meme les ruines ! Or je n'y vois d'autre moyen que
d'en equilibrer de beaux edifices bien ordonnes. [Hornstrumpot! we shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we
demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.]
("Ubu enchaine," Alfred Jarry)
I pause to cast a glance at the belly of Pa Ubu. I thought that I saw a spiral. I must have been wrong, for now I see the speech of
analysis. On one side I see the speech of revelation, and on the other the speech of mediation. Like the toss of the boomerang, my
words fly in ever tightening circles around this smooth, massive venter between these two poles (or rather, against this one Pole).
It is the swerve of speech toward truth, drawn as Jacques Lacan notes, in the whirlpool of transference-resistance
"between/among these two/four poles--subject/ego, other/Other--the interminable spiral...instituted. This swerve, this
clinamen--dans le palais scelle herissant seul la polissure morte, moderne deluge de la Seine universelle, la bete imprevue Clinamen
ejacula aux parois de son univers . . . [in the sealed palace which alone ruffled this dead smoothness, this modern deluge of the
universal Seine, the unforseen beast Clinamen ejaculated onto the walls of its universe . . . ]--these mystical ejaculations that circle
between the "unconscious notion of the ego"(O) and the "specularity of the image"(O') in evertightening binds around that empty
belly that is desire.
This spiral is, as can be inferred, a downward spiral of infernal paradox. It is simultaneously a theory of imaginary solutions and a
theory toward the solution of the imaginary, unwittingly perpetuating, as its support/vortex, "the metaphysical notion that it is
intended to criticize: that of a primary, even if always frustrated, narcissistic quest for identity and totality." Or, as Dr. Lacan
remarked when gazing at the spiral on Pa Ubu's belly:
A little girl . . . one day came up with this pretty phrase--Oh, you mustn't think I'll spend my whole life in O and O'. Poor
thing! Of course you'll spend your life in O and O', the same as everyone else"
To which I can only respond with the punctuation provided by Dr. Faustroll's steadfast assistant, the great dogfaced baboon
Bosse-de-Nage, "lequel ne savait de parole humaine que: {{Ha Ha}}."