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Arvida Byström, Virgin Birth, 2024 (sculpture detail)

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Fluid flesh: the body, religion and the visual arts (Leuven, 2009)

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Fluid flesh: the body, religion and the visual arts (Leuven, 2009)

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https://archive.org/details/isbn_9789058677167/page/n7/mode/1up

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Princess Carolyn in Bojack Horesman (R. B. Waksberg, 2014-2020)

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A biologist enters mysterious territory on a mission to comprehend the incomprehensible. Together with three colleagues-an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a surveyor-she crosses an imperceptible border into a region known as Area X. They are the twelfth expedition to cross the border. They are all women.

Jeff VanderMeer charts Area X's impossible terrain in his Southern Reach trilogy. The first book of the series, Annihilation, flirts with various genre conventions but warps and refracts them. Most often, VanderMeer is cited as a foremost writer of the New Weird, which, in the tradition of Lovecraftian Old Weird, deals with the wonder and horror at the fringes of human consciousness. Others have called his work "soft" science fiction-the natural world being the primary site of speculation rather than technology-and some talk about it in the context of "cli-fi," or climate fiction: narratives reflecting the transformations of the drastically changing planet.

Annihilation 's narrator is the unnamed biologist. An expert in "transitional ecosystems"-regions where one biosphere meets another-she has trained with her colleagues for months to prepare for their journey into Area X. The region itself is a wide parcel of coastal land "locked behind the border" thirty years prior, following an "ill-defined Event." The exploratory expeditions over decades past, organized by an opaque bureaucracy called the Southern Reach, have failed to bring back comprehensible data. Few groups have even returned. The general public has only been told that an ecological disaster has rendered the area uninhabitable. In fact, the biologist's group quickly discovers the opposite is true: the landscape is, as the characters repeatedly describe it, "pristine."

An unidentifiable agent is transforming the terrain in Area X, somehow reversing or erasing human influence on the landscape. This agent is most readily explained-and is usually interpreted-as an alien life-form. In this regard, Annihilation accords with the classic science fiction premise of First Contact with the alien other. But, as one reviewer writes, "VanderMeer takes this idea to the extreme, suggesting that we may not, on an ontological level, even be able to comprehend an alien form, that it could be so different and vast as to warp our sense of reality and reason." Beyond any specific alien, the subject of Annihilation is a more profound kind of unknowability.

From this perspective, VanderMeer's New Weird is to science fiction what mysticism is to theology. Like mystical texts throughout the ages, his Weird does not explain; it attempts to get at something beyond the explainable. Mystics of the Judeo-Christian tradition-who flourished especially during several centuries of the Middle Ages-were similarly preoccupied with a kind of First Contact; for them, this was contact with divine presence, leading to transcendence of earthly self.

Many foundational mystical texts in this lineage have been written by women. In the Middle Ages in particular, women's access to theological knowledge (the explanation and interpretation of sacred texts) was limited by circumstance. Therefore the knowledge about God they produced was often empirical in the most literal sense: a kind of truth only obtained by firsthand, affective experience. Although not necessarily opposed to the religious theory or conventions of their time, given the radical authority implied by their often intimate communion with God, female mystics have at various points posed political threats to religious institutions; in these cases mystics become martyrs.

Together their writings amount to a lineage of female knowledge outside of dominant epistemologies of both religion and science. Their insistence on the possibility of encounter beyond reason-even beyond what the conscious mind can account for-is, weirdly, comparable to the type of revelation Annihilation proposes. As a literary category, New Weird holds potential to unearth and update mysticism according to contemporary knowledge, much of which points to an existential threat on the species level. In Western mysticism, the transformational (alien) force beyond the limits of human consciousness was God. In Area X, maybe the divine is literally alien, or maybe it's simply nature at its most ecstatic, matter at its most vibrant, the nonhuman at its most alive-so alive it annihilates not only a single human self but the category of human altogether.

2.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James writes that the term "mysticism" is often used synonymously (and derisively) with the vaguely spiritual, the illogical, or the romantic. Yet, although the mystical may be ungraspable and inexpressible, James argues that true mystical experiences are not at all opposed to "facts or logic" and, when taken as a consistent phenomenon throughout history, are not entirely ambiguous or undefinable. He proposes four hallmarks by which to identify a mystical experience:

1) Ineffability: "its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others."

2) Noetic quality: the state may be highly affective, but it is primarily a state of knowledge, whereby one achieves "insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect."

3) Transiency: it is fleeting and impermanent.

4) Passivity: the subject does not have the power to induce it or control its course.

James readily admits that mystical states may be brought on by external agents (alcohol and ether, for example), disorders like epilepsy, or mental illness, yet he refuses to reduce them to delusion, as many rationalists were wont to do. Neither can they be reduced to the religious contexts in which they often take place; religion has historically provided a framework within which to interpret mystical revelation-harnessing mysticism's power when it suits the religious order and denouncing it as heresy when it doesn't-but to James its persistence proves that it extends far beyond what institutionalized religion can account for.

James quotes a variety of literature containing accounts of what he identifies as mystical experiences. Along with saints and theologians, who may be predisposed to accepting divine mystery, he cites psychiatrists reckoning with whether and how to rationalize mystical states. For instance, British psychiatrist Sir James Crichton-Browne observed recurrent "dreamy states" in patients: "the feeling of an enlargement of perception that seems imminent but which never completes itself"-he believed these were a precursor to insanity. Canadian psychiatrist R. M. Bucke, on the other hand, documented his own lapses into "cosmic consciousness," which he did not think required medical intervention, presumably because he had experienced them himself. (James does not examine the gendered aspect of medical evaluations-he does not ask whose mystical states psychiatrists are more likely to pathologize.)

Bucke described his cosmic experiences as an evolutionary process toward a higher state. "Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there occurs an intellectual enlightenment which alone would place the individual on a new plane of existence- would make him almost a member of a new species." These experiences often struck him while he was alone in nature. "I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence."

3.

Soon after crossing the border, the biologist and her companions begin to encounter unexplainable phenomena. A strange tunnel into the ground unmarked on the map. Eerie howls from the forest at dusk. An overgrowth of plants incongruous with the amount of time that has passed since the border was sealed. Gaps in time, amnesia. A pair of otters in the marsh staring at them for a little too long. A dolphin in the river whose eye looks shockingly human. They begin to lose trust in their own perceptions. In the biologist's words: "What can you do when your five senses are not enough?"

The tunnel is particularly confusing and compelling to the four explorers, and the biologist is drawn to enter it. Despite what she sees, she insists on describing the tunnel as a "tower." She admits she can't explain why she thinks of it this way, but she's unable to conceive of it otherwise: to her it is an inverted tower, an entry in the earth that one must, paradoxically, ascend. She says, "I mark it as the first irrational thought I had" in Area X.

As they begin to foray down, the explorers discover a succession of words lining the circular wall of the tunnel/tower. The text itself, which VanderMeer recounts having written in one stream of consciousness after waking from a dream, turns out to be alive. Each letter of each word is composed of a sort of fungus that releases tiny spores into the air-spores that the biologist accidentally inhales. "I leaned in closer," she says, "like a fool, like someone who had not had months of survival training or ever studied biology. Someone tricked into thinking that words should be read" She reads the words, but (until she finds a respirator) the act of reading is also an act of ingestion.

The biologist descends/ascends the stairway several times over the course of the book, each time penetrating deeper/rising further and consuming more of the words. The scripture reads:

Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives ... In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear ... All shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit-and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive ... That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing. And then there shall be a fire that knows the naming of you, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you that remains.

4.

The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls is a mystical text written in the latter half of the thirteenth century by the French-speaking beguine Marguerite Porete. The book, part prose and part poetry, is a meditation on divine love as well as a kind of mystical manual. It describes the seven stages of an "itinerary"-"the steps by which one climbs from the valley to the summit of the mountain, which is so isolated that one sees nothing there but God." These stages, the final of which can only be reached after death, represent various degrees of self-annihilation: the stripping away ( aphairesis) of the will to make way for God. "So one must crush oneself," writes Porete, "hacking and hewing away at oneself to widen the place in which Love will want to be."

Such exponential self-negation entails a host of contradictions. How to will away the will? How to desire away the self that desires? How to author a text on the negation of the self who writes the text? According to the poet-essayist Anne Carson, the fundamental relationship between the mystic and the written word "is more than a contradiction, it is a paradox." Writing a mystical text is an inherently futile practice (as is reading one). The writer has no choice but to use language to express the failure of language. Porete "calls for the annihilation of desire itself, which entails a movement past mediation, contemplation, rapture, and loving union into the abyssal negation of the soul."

Porete's work is a prime example of mystical writing in the apophatic tradition. Apophasis: the rhetorical strategy of approaching a subject by denying its existence, or denying that it can be described. The foundational apophatic writer in the Christian mystical tradition was Dionysius the Areopagite, who stated in the fifth or sixth century that only "by knowing nothing, one knows beyond the mind." Six centuries later, Meister Eckhart, influenced by Dionysius and likely by Porete, described God as the "negation of the negation."

Apophasis, the via negativa, is an all-out confrontation with linguistic futility in the presence of the unknowable. Its rhetorical counterpart is cataphasis, the via positiva: the strategy of endlessly asserting what a subject is, in order to arrive there through sheer (perhaps infinite) accumulation. Whereas the apophatic might say "God is the absence of darkness," the cataphatic might say "God is the sun, the ultimate light."

Eugene Thacker describes the cataphatic as a set of "descending assertions" and the apophatic as a set of "ascending negations." The former strategy builds up to nothing, whereas the latter strips away to nothing. That is, the impossible tower toward the impossible goal can be constructed either by stacking stones forever downward or removing stones forever upward. The tower is the tunnel is the tower. According to Dionysius, "there is no contradiction between the affirmations and the negations, inasmuch as [God is] beyond all positive and negative distinctions."

5.

Soon after inhaling the spores spewed from the "fruiting bodies" of the fungal text, the biologist begins to notice that her senses are heightened. "Even the rough brown bark of the pines or the ordinary lunging swoop of a woodpecker came to me as a kind of minor revelation." Venturing further into the (un)natural landscape, she experiences flashes of the joy of discovery and oneness with nature that she hasn't felt since she was a child. Eventually this intensification of experience becomes manifest in her body, a feeling of phosphorescence, a "brightness" in her chest. Now, when she enters the tower, she feels like the structure is breathing, that the walls are "not made of stone but of living tissue. " She refers to this perception as a kind of "truthful seeing." "Everything was imbued with emotion, awash in it, and I was no longer a biologist but somehow the crest of a wave building and building but never crashing to shore."

As a scientist, she knows that there are plenty of rational explanations for her sensory expansion: "Certain parasites and fruiting bodies could cause not just paranoia but schizophrenia, all-too-realistic hallucinations, and thus promote delusional behavior." She almost hopes to discover that one of these explanations is true; however unfortunate, insanity would be a known quantity, a logical justification for the words and their effect. The narrator says: "Even though I didn't know what the words meant, I wanted them to mean something so that I might more swiftly remove doubt and bring reason back into all of my equations." Attempting to understand, she examines spore samples under a microscope, finding that they are unusual but "within an acceptable range" of abnormality. Area X, it seems, is not entirely opposed to empirical observation, but it can't be explained by it either. More to the point-she realizes that, now contaminated by her subject, she is no longer a reliable observer. She is melding with the ecosystem she observes.

6.

In 1373 the English anchoress, mystic, and theologian Julian of Norwich (c. 1342-1416) received a series of mystical "showings." She had been suffering for days from an illness that she was sure would kill her, when she was suddenly relieved of her pain and God showed her several "nothings." Julian's nothings could be understood as apophatic visions, visions that in their revelation also reveal the futility of sight. In addition to psychedelic-seeming close-up visuals of Christ's wounds and of Mother Mary, she also saw "a little thing, the size of a hazelnut in the palm of my hand, and it was round as a ball." When she asked what the little thing was, God answered: "It is all that is made."

Norwich recorded these visions and others in her book Revelations of Divine Love (1395), the first known book written in English by a woman. Throughout the text she refers to her divine perception as a kind of "bodily sight." At times she contrasts this corporeal vision to "spiritual sight," suggesting a knowledge that can only be acquired through firsthand physical perception-and yet this perception is not solely of the eye or the other senses. It is a kind of seeing that is also a feeling and a knowing.

The Italian Franciscan Catholic mystic Angela of Foligno (1248-1309) had her own series of visions, including several vivid encounters with Christ's dead body. These visions were particularly focused on the wound in his side, the incision left by a lance between his ribs that so many medieval depictions of the Cross fixate on. In her first vision, Angela saw herself pressing her mouth to the wound and drinking blood from it. Next, she envisioned her soul shrinking and actually entering into the side of Jesus's abdomen. Finally, she became his body, melding with his flesh, dissolving into it. Galatians 2:20: "It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives within me."

Angela did not record her divine encounters herself. She related them to her (male) scribe, who attempted to transcribe them to the best of his ability. Apparently Angela often asked him to revise sections she found unsatisfactory or inaccurate, altering the body of the text he produced to more closely resemble the experiences of her own body, in relation to Christ's body.

If mystical encounter entails a sort of spiritual transmission, the body of the mystic is the medium that registers the message. The body is the primary site of inscription, and according to James's first mystical qualifier, this inscription is nontransferrable. The body must be read in order for its knowledge to be translated as best as possible into writing; therefore "bodies-inner and outer, material and spiritual-become text." In turn, the resulting written corpus must be brought alive to become like the body it's meant to resemble. In Christianity, this twin becoming of text and body parallels Christ's incarnation-whereupon God's "Word was made flesh" (John 1:14).

Mystical texts like Julian's and Angela's are often repetitive, contradictory, circular; they breathe and they beat. Reading them is interactive-it requires, as religion scholar Amy Hollywood has suggested, a sort of radical absorption on the part of the reader to mirror the self-annihilation attempted by the author. Medieval mystical texts often include images springing from the words, including figurative drawings of Christ and other bodies. Christ's side wound is sometimes depicted as a separate body part, a (very vaginal) opening into the page, for readers to peer into or imagine entering. A few manuscripts depicting Christ's corpse even represent the slit in his side as a physical tear in the paper, for the devout to fondle and kiss.

7.

"I have not been entirely honest thus far," admits the biologist fifty pages into Annihilation. She has withheld an important fact: her husband, a doctor, served as a medic on the previous mission to Area X. She acknowledges that keeping this secret from both the reader and her companions might seem suspicious-so why has she kept it to herself? Perhaps, she implies, because she doesn't wish her narrative to rest on biography, dismissed as irrational or emotional from the start. Perhaps she doesn't want her choice to risk entering Area X to be pathologized. Her husband has something to do with it all, she insists, but only something. "I have hoped that in reading this account, you might [still] find me a credible, objective witness."

After her husband left for Area X, the biologist heard nothing from him for a year. And then one night, out of the blue, he showed up at their home, wandering into the house unannounced. He couldn't explain how he'd gotten back or what he'd been doing while away. His memories were vague. His body had come home, but his self, it seemed, was not present in the body; "He was a "shell, an automaton," "stripped of what made" him "unique". His body died of inexplicable cancer a few months later.

Finally given the chance to explore the transitional biosphere where her husband left his self, the biologist wonders how her experience compares to his. She discovers by accident that the enveloping "brightness" brought on by the spores can be forestalled momentarily if she injures herself; pain seems to keep it at bay. But does she want to keep it at bay? She begins to see the enveloping nature of Area X as more an invitation than a threat. Perhaps self-dissolution need not be the same as death after all. In Area X, her husband had "been granted a gift that he didn't know what to do with. A gift that was poison to him and eventually killed him. But would it have killed me?"

8.

The extreme nature of the emotional and physical experiences of female mystics is often reflected through accounts of pain: its endurance and its transcendence. The repeated emphasis on the body as a site of encounter-through suffering and/or ecstasy-is simultaneous with, or makes way for, the spiritual encounter. The boundaries of the body are dissolved, and likewise is the boundary of the soul. Hollywood explains: "Throughout pre- and early modern Christianity, women were associated with the body, its porousness, openness, and vulnerability. Female bodies were believed to be more labile and changeable, more subject to affective shifts, and more open to penetration, whether by God, demons, or other human beings." This engendered a "slide, from claims to women's spiritual penetrability to that of her physical penetrability" and vice versa.

The argument that there is biological basis for the female experience of being-in-world as being-with-other is not uncommon. For instance, philosopher Nancy Hartsock writes in her foundational 1980s text on the "Feminist Standpoint": "There are a series of boundary challenges inherent in the female physiology-challenges which make it impossible to maintain rigid separation from the object world. Menstruation, coitus, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation-all represent challenges to bodily boundaries."

Hartsock argues further that these "boundary challenges ... [take] place in such a way that empathy is built into [women's] primary definition of self, and they have a variety of capacities for experiencing another's needs or feelings as their own ... more continuous with and related to the external object world." According to such a theory, the biologically female body predicates a permeability of self and therefore a more intrinsically open and empathic relation with the world.

The body-based essentialisms and biological determinism implied by such feminist frameworks have not come without critique. Is identification with the world, however emblematic of female experience, really premised on binary body basics? Is the capacity for empathy supposedly "natural" to women not also a handy emotional technology to maintain the social class meant to do the majority of affective labor? One could just as easily argue that physical penetrability might make a person extra resistant to boundary challenges rather than inherently susceptible to them.

Hollywood, for one, focuses on deconstructing the epistemological dichotomy between male and female mysticism implied in such distinctions. The notion that women's mystical relationships with the divine are primarily emotional/corporeal, as opposed to theological and intellectual, keeps their insight forever outside of systems of codified rational knowledge. Instead of preserving these as separate epistemological tiers, Hollywood implies, the category of what counts as empirical knowledge should be expanded. This is especially true when it comes to approaching subjects that are intrinsically unknowable, which as James points out, requires affect. The type of affective knowledge of female mystics in the Christian tradition is not counterposed to intellectual knowledge but rather makes way for a "noetic" (weird) knowledge beyond the dialectic.

9.

"What modern readers find most disturbing about medieval discussions," writes contemporary medievalist Caroline Walker Bynum, "is their extreme literalism and materialism." She recounts earnest, high-stakes debates in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries about exactly how bodies might be resurrected after death-could you be brought back from the dead from a sole surviving fingernail, or did you need to be buried whole and intact to be properly resurrected? Would fetuses be resurrected as adults? Once the body is brought back by God, will it see, smell and taste in the same way? "What of 'me' must rise in order for the risen body to be 'me'?" Generally speaking: "Is materiality necessary for personhood?"

However absurd these questions might seem today, Bynum argues that contemporary debates about the relationship between self and materiality spring from the same set of concerns. For instance, organ donors often insist that they feel a "part" of themselves living in the organ's host body, or describe a spiritual connection to that host. Proponents of cryogenics debate whether preserving the brain is enough for future reanimation, or whether resurrection of the whole self will require the whole body. The allure and the terror of the technological Singularity, whereby humans meld with machines, indicate this deep unease. Bynum says these are not so much struggles with "mind/body dichotomies" but rather attempts to understand "integrity versus corruption or partition" when it comes to how much of you is yourself. (Will you be yourself when you come back from Area X?)

That idea of an integral bounded self, uncorrupted and whole, is in fact one prerequisite for what is often called sanity. "Most people feel they begin when their bodies began and that they will end when their bodies die," writes psychologist R. D. Laing in his 1955 book on schizophrenia, The Divided Self. A person who experiences himself as "real, alive, and whole" is a person who Laing calls "ontologically secure," whereas an "ontologically insecure" person possesses no such "firm sense of his own and others' reality and identity" as distinct from one another. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear.

Understood in this way, insanity is the dystopic version of self-annihilation. When the border distinguishing the self-in-body from the environment becomes too porous, the ontologically insecure person encounters nonbeing as pure horror. But for mystics, especially non-male mystics, this kind of willing self-corrosion is exactly the premise for divine contact and transcendence. The mystic finds joy in the dissolution of self-its "corruption or partition" on the way to nothingness. The insane person fights tooth and nail to retain ontological security out of fear. The mystic actively deconstructs the self in the name of love.

10.

What Marguerite Porete called self-annihilation, the twentieth-century mystic Simone Weil called "decreation." For Weil, decreation was the endeavor to "undo the creature in us," that is, to undo oneself, and also the self as such. These are two orders of negation, one specific and one general, which Meister Eckhart also differentiates between in his cataphatic expedition to God: the nothingness of particular creatures versus the nothingess of creaturely being. Or: the cancellation of particular existence versus the cancellation of the existence of existence. Weil, like Porete, aimed for the latter by way of the former.

Weil succeeded in surrendering herself; for most of her life she had trouble eating, and she eventually died from tuberculosis exacerbated by the inability to eat. She desired to decreate herself to the point that she could subsist without eating at all, living on words alone. "Our greatest affliction is that looking and eating are two different operations," she wrote. "Eternal beatitude is a state where to look is to eat." From Weil's writing it appears that, for her, self-starvation was not exactly self-punishment; it was an intense sensitivity toward the suffering of others (during World War II, she reportedly refused to eat any types of food that were not also included in the allotted rations for French soldiers). Her abnegation may have amounted to a political statement, but it was primarily spurred by her pain on behalf of others: an affective and physical aversion to the consumption necessary to sustain the single self. She would not, but also could not, eat.

Chris Kraus writes, "Weil was more a mystic than a theologian. That is, all the things she wrote were field notes for a project she enacted on herself. She was a performative philosopher. Her body was material. 'The body is a lever for salvation,' she thought in Gravity and Grace. 'But in what way? What is the right way to use it?'" As James writes, for mystics the "moral mystery intertwines and combines with the intellectual mystery."

It's tempting to try and "solve" that mystery. Religion, flawed as it is, has at points throughout history offered a language for describing First Contact with the unknowable. In the absence of a mystical framework for dealing with the mystery, contemporary analysis tends to wind up with psychiatry. "Until recently," argues Kraus, "nearly all the secondary texts on Simone Weil treat her philosophical writings as a kind of biographic key." The focus remains on trying to figure out what triggered her psychiatric state rather than on her "active stance" of willful, intellectually engaged decreation and the resultant body of knowledge she produced. "Impossible to conceive a female life that might extend outside itself," Kraus remarks. "Impossible to accept the self-destruction of a woman as strategic." According to Kraus, "Weil's detractors saw her, a female, acting on herself, as masochistic." But Weil was, despite all dismissive diagnoses, "arguing for an alien-state, using subjectivity as a means of breaking down time and space."

Angela of Foligno became a mystic after the sudden death of her husband and children. One could easily interpret her necrophiliac visions in light of that biographical fact. And in historical context her sudden religious conversion could be seen as a practical choice among limited options for a single woman of that era who had lost family status and property. There is plenty to explain away her mystical encounter through the psychology of grief or the demands of her world, just as one could reduce Weil's decreation to trauma or anorexia. Likewise, one could read the biologist's succumbing to Area X as a parable of personal loss-or of the social condition of being a female scientist, who understands that her objective analysis intertwines and combines with her bodily sight.

11.

In an essay called "Weird Ecology," the writer David Tompkins compares Area X to a "hyperobject," a term philosopher Timothy Morton used "to describe events or systems or processes that are too complex, too massively distributed across space and time, for humans to get a grip on." Global warming, black holes, and mass extinction are contemporary examples. For medievals: God. The mind can edge close to the hyperobject, understanding parts of it, but never comprehend its totality. Hyperobjects can certainly be measured and analyzed, but will never be encompassed by measurement and analysis. Media theorist Wendy Chun has said: "You can't see the climate; you can only see the weather." Or, as the biologist says, "When you are too close to the center of a mystery there is no way to pull back and see the shape of it entire." How one longs to see it for a split second as a hazelnut-sized thing in the palm of the hand.

Faced with the possible annihilation of the planet as we know it, certain modes of knowing fall short. Especially insufficient is knowledge that purports humans to be distinct from ecosystems, much less in control of them. Among the "surprises and ironies at the heart of all knowledge production," says Donna Haraway, is the fact that "we are not in charge of the world." A mysticism for the Anthropocene, just like mysticism through the ages, would regard the "object" of knowledge as alive and inseparable from the mind and body that encounters it. That is, rather than fictionalizing science, a mysticism for today would have to Weird it.

Haraway proposes a feminist understanding of objectivity not through any single, monolithic explanation but through an assemblage of "situated knowledges" or "views from somewhere." Somewhere, meaning positioned in location and historical context, and also meaning embodied-entailing a type of bodily sight. "Situated knowledges," Haraway explains, "require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not as a screen or a ground or a resource." This refers to the way women have historically been seen as "objects" of study rather than active knowledge producers, but it is equally applicable in regards to the natural environment, which has so long been conceived as passive or inert. In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote that Simone Weil had "a heart that beat around the world." Chris Kraus described Weil's state of being as a "radical form of empathy." Importantly, for the biologist in Annihilation, this empathy extends to, even prioritizes, the nonhuman. In Leslie Allison's words: "Once the borders have dissolved, empathy is not just feeling others' pain or pleasure. It is granting everything its own subjectivity. It is acknowledging that even non-human entities have a self with which to desire a particular way of living." In Area X, the self dissolves-but self is also everywhere. Even the dolphin has a self now.

Is there a biological basis for self-annihilation? Are sex or gender prerequisites for empathic knowledge or bodily sight? Of course not. Look through a microscope: every body is permeable and porous, host to and hosted by trillions of other life-forms. The body is a transitional ecosystem; it can't survive in a vacuum. And anyway, if we were able to stop projecting contemporary epistemologies onto the past we'd see that medieval mystical writings are too deeply weird to read according to contemporary gender categories. Hollywood writes: "Christ's body is an impenetrable rock and a body full of holes-and both at the same time ... [displacing] any simplistic gender and sexual referentiality, for Christ's body is both masculine and penetrable, both rock and feminized.

That said, non-men, constantly made aware of their physical penetrability, disallowed from forgetting their bodies and bodily boundaries, have been producing empathic knowledge regarding the confrontation with the unknowable for centuries. Female mysticism offers a foundation for non-anthropocentric knowledge that is not at all opposed to other types of knowledge. This is fertile ground for contemporary fiction-as evidenced by VanderMeer, who manages to imagine himself, with radical empathy, into the experience of the female biologist. One role for the New Weird in today's literary landscape may be to grow mystical knowledge, beyond the framework of religion-and also beyond the framework of institutionalized science.

Near the end of her account, the biologist says of the transformation of Area X: "I can no longer say with conviction that this is a bad thing. Not when looking at the pristine nature of Area X and then the world beyond, which we have altered so much" (156). She can no longer see her decreation, nor the decreation of the current human-centric world, as negative. It is, like the divine, beyond all positive and negative distinctions. "Area X is frightening, yes, but what appears to be happening there is not a reversion to Chaos and Old Night," as Old Weird fiction would have it. Here, in the living, sporous world of New Weird fiction, may be "the start of a comprehensive reversal of the Anthropocene Age." Loss of bounded self is only truly horrifying within an anthropocentric framework that prizes human being in its current state over all other forms and ways of being. Active self-annihilation might, paradoxically, offer a path toward ecosystemic preservation.

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Thanks to Eugene Thacker and Simon Critchley for their course on mysticism at the New School for Social Research in Spring 2018. Thanks also to Jess Loudis for the essay title.

Elvia Wilk is a writer and editor living in Berlin and New York. She contributes to publications like Frieze, Artforum, Metropolis, and Mousse, and is currently a contributing editor at Rhizome and at e-flux journal. Her first novel is forthcoming in 2019 from Soft Skull press. For more information see: www.elviapw.com

© 2018 e-flux and the author

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The Word Made Fresh: Mystical Encounter and the New Weird Divine

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A biologist enters mysterious territory on a mission to comprehend the incomprehensible. Together with three colleagues-an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a surveyor-she crosses an imperceptible border into a region known as Area X. They are the twelfth expedition to cross the border. They are all women.

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Read 28 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Poetry. Cross-Genre. Asian American Studies. In INCUBATION: A SPACE FOR MONSTERS, Bhanu Kap...

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Marija Gimbutas ( Lithuanian: Marija Birutė Alseikaitė-Gimbutienė, pronounced ['ɡɪmbutas]; January 23, 1921 - February 2, 1994) was a Lithuanian archaeologist and anthropologist known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of " Old Europe" and for her Kurgan hypothesis, which located the Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Pontic Steppe.

Marija Gimbutas was born as Marija Birutė Alseikaitė to Veronika Janulaitytė-Alseikienė and Danielius Alseika in Vilnius, the capital of the Republic of Central Lithuania; her parents were members of the Lithuanian intelligentsia.[1]

Her mother received a doctorate in ophthalmology at the University of Berlin in 1908, while her father received his medical degree from the University of Tartu in 1910. After Lithuania regained independence in 1918, Gimbutas's parents organized the Lithuanian Association of Sanitary Aid which founded the first Lithuanian hospital in the capital.[1]

During this period, her father also served as the publisher of the newspaper Vilniaus žodis and the cultural magazine Vilniaus šviesa and was an outspoken proponent of Lithuanian independence during the Polish-Lithuanian War.[2]

Gimbutas's parents were connoisseurs of traditional Lithuanian folk arts and frequently invited contemporary musicians, writers, and authors to their home, including Vydūnas, Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas, and Jonas Basanavičius.[3] With regard to her strong cultural upbringing, Gimbutas said:

I had the opportunity to get acquainted with writers and artists such as Vydūnas, Tumas-Vaižgantas, even Basanavičius, who was taken care of by my parents. When I was four or five years old, I would sit in Basanavičius's easy chair and I would feel fine. And later, throughout my entire life, Basanavičius's collected folklore remained extraordinarily important for me.[3]

In 1931, Gimbutas settled with her parents in Kaunas, the temporary capital of Lithuania. After her parents separated that year, she lived with her mother and brother, Vytautas, in Kaunas. Five years later, her father died suddenly. At her father's deathbed, Gimbutas pledged that she would study to become a scholar: "All of a sudden I had to think what I shall be, what I shall do with my life. I had been so reckless in sports-swimming for miles, skating, bicycle riding. I changed completely and began to read."[4][5]

In 1941, she married architect Jurgis Gimbutas. During the Second World War, Gimbutas lived under the Soviet occupation (1940-41) and then the German occupation (1941-43).[6]

Gimbutas' first daughter, Danutė, was born in June 1942. One year after the birth of their daughter, the young Gimbutas family, in the face of an advancing Soviet army, fled the country to areas controlled by Nazi Germany, first to Vienna and then to Innsbruck and Bavaria.[7] In her reflection of this turbulent period, Gimbutas remarked, "Life just twisted me like a little plant, but my work was continuous in one direction."[8]

While holding a postdoctoral fellowship at Tübingen the following year, Gimbutas gave birth to her second daughter, Živilė. In the 1950s, the Gimbutas family left Germany and relocated to the United States, where Gimbutas had a successful academic career.[7][9][10] Her third daughter, Rasa Julija, was born in 1954 in Boston.

Gimbutas died in Los Angeles in 1994, at age 73. Soon afterwards, she was interred in Kaunas's Petrašiūnai Cemetery.

From 1936, Gimbutas participated in ethnographic expeditions to record traditional folklore and studied Lithuanian beliefs and rituals of death.[1] She graduated with honors from Aušra Gymnasium in Kaunas in 1938 and enrolled in the Vytautas Magnus University the same year, where she studied linguistics in the Department of Philology. She then attended the University of Vilnius to pursue graduate studies in archaeology (under Jonas Puzinas), linguistics, ethnology, folklore and literature.[1]

In 1942 she completed her master's thesis, "Modes of Burial in Lithuania in the Iron Age", with honors.[1] She received her Master of Arts degree from the University of Vilnius, Lithuania, in 1942.

In 1946, Gimbutas received a doctorate in archaeology, with minors in ethnology and history of religion, from University of Tübingen with her dissertation "Prehistoric Burial Rites in Lithuania" ("Die Bestattung in Litauen in der vorgeschichtlichen Zeit"), which was published later that year.[7][11] She often said that she had the dissertation under one arm and her child under the other arm when she and her husband fled the city of Kaunas, Lithuania, in the face of an advancing Soviet army in 1944.

From 1947 to 1949 she did postgraduate work at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Munich.

After arriving in the United States in the 1950s, Gimbutas immediately went to work at Harvard University translating Eastern European archaeological texts. She then became a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology. In 1955 she was made a Fellow of Harvard's Peabody Museum.

Gimbutas then taught at UCLA, where she became Professor of European Archaeology and Indo-European Studies in 1964 and Curator of Old World Archaeology in 1965.[12] In 1993, Gimbutas received an honorary doctorate at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania.

In 1956 Gimbutas introduced her Kurgan hypothesis, which combined archaeological study of the distinctive Kurgan burial mounds with linguistics to unravel some problems in the study of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) speaking peoples, whom she dubbed the "Kurgans"; namely, to account for their origin and to trace their migrations into Europe. This hypothesis, and her method of bridging the disciplines, has had a significant impact on Indo-European studies.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, Gimbutas earned a reputation as a world-class specialist on Bronze Age Europe, as well as on Lithuanian folk art and the prehistory of the Balts and Slavs, partly summed up in her definitive opus, Bronze Age Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe (1965). In her work she reinterpreted European prehistory in light of her backgrounds in linguistics, ethnology, and the history of religions, and challenged many traditional assumptions about the beginnings of European civilization.

As a Professor of European Archaeology and Indo-European Studies at UCLA from 1963 to 1989, Gimbutas directed major excavations of Neolithic sites in southeastern Europe between 1967 and 1980, including Anzabegovo, near Štip, Republic of Macedonia, and Sitagroi and Achilleion in Thessaly (Greece). Digging through layers of earth representing a period of time before contemporary estimates for Neolithic habitation in Europe - where other archaeologists would not have expected further finds - she unearthed a great number of artifacts of daily life and religion or spirituality, which she researched and documented throughout her career.

Three genetic studies in 2015 gave support to the Kurgan theory of Gimbutas regarding the Indo-European Urheimat. According to those studies, Y-chromosome haplogroups R1b and R1a, now the most common in Europe (R1a is also common in South Asia) would have expanded from the Russian steppes, along with the Indo European languages; they also detected an autosomal component present in modern Europeans which was not present in Neolithic Europeans, which would have been introduced with paternal lineages R1b and R1a, as well as Indo-European languages.[13][14][15]

Marija Gimbutas by Kerbstone 52, at the back of Newgrange, County Meath, Ireland, in September 1989

Gimbutas gained fame and notoriety in the English-speaking world with her last three English-language books: The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974); The Language of the Goddess (1989), which inspired an exhibition in Wiesbaden, 1993-94; and the last of the three, The Civilization of the Goddess (1991), which, based on her documented archaeological findings, presented an overview of her conclusions about Neolithic cultures across Europe: housing patterns, social structure, art, religion, and the nature of literacy.

The Goddess trilogy articulated what Gimbutas saw as the differences between the Old European system, which she considered goddess- and woman-centered ( gynocentric), and the Bronze Age Indo-European patriarchal ("androcratic") culture which supplanted it.[16] According to her interpretations, gynocentric (or matristic) societies were peaceful, honored women, and espoused economic equality.[citation needed ] The androcratic, or male-dominated, Kurgan peoples, on the other hand, invaded Europe and imposed upon its natives the hierarchical rule of male warriors.

Gimbutas's work, along with that of her colleague, mythologist Joseph Campbell, is housed in the OPUS Archives and Research Center on the campus of the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, California. The library includes Gimbutas's extensive collection on the topics of archaeology, mythology, folklore, art and linguistics. The Gimbutas Archives house over 12,000 images personally taken by Gimbutas of sacred figures, as well as research files on Neolithic cultures of Old Europe.[17][18]

Mary Mackey has written four historical novels based on Gimbutas's research: The Year the Horses Came, The Horses at the Gate, The Fires of Spring, and The Village of Bones.

Marija Gimbutienė commemorative plaque in Kaunas, Mickevičius Street

Marija Gimbutienė on a 2021 stamp of Lithuania

Joseph Campbell and Ashley Montagu[19][20] each compared the importance of Gimbutas's output to the historical importance of the Rosetta Stone in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. Campbell provided a foreword to a new edition of Gimbutas's The Language of the Goddess (1989) before he died, and often said how profoundly he regretted that her research on the Neolithic cultures of Europe had not been available when he was writing The Masks of God. The ecofeminist Charlene Spretnak argued in 2011 that a "backlash" against Gimbutas's work had been orchestrated, starting in the last years of her life and following her death.[21]

Mainstream archaeology dismissed Gimbutas's later works.[22] Anthropologist Bernard Wailes (1934-2012) of the University of Pennsylvania commented to The New York Times that most of Gimbutas's peers[23] believe her to be "immensely knowledgeable but not very good in critical analysis. ... She amasses all the data and then leaps from it to conclusions without any intervening argument." He said that most archaeologists consider her to be an eccentric.[20]

David W. Anthony has praised Gimbutas's insights regarding the Indo-European Urheimat, but also disputed Gimbutas's assertion that there was a widespread peaceful society before the Kurgan incursion, noting that Europe had hillforts and weapons, and presumably warfare, long before the Kurgan.[20] A standard textbook of European prehistory corroborates this point, stating that warfare existed in neolithic Europe and that adult males were given preferential treatment in burial rites.[24]

Peter Ucko and Andrew Fleming were two early critics of the "Goddess" theory, with which Gimbutas later came to be associated. Ucko, in his 1968 monograph Anthropomorphic figurines of predynastic Egypt warned against unwarranted inferences about the meanings of statues. He notes, for example, that early Egyptian figurines of women holding their breasts had been taken as "obviously" significant of maternity or fertility, but the Pyramid Texts revealed that in Egypt this was the female gesture of grief.[25]

Fleming, in his 1969 paper "The Myth of the Mother Goddess", questioned the practice of identifying neolithic figures as female when they weren't clearly distinguished as male and took issue with other aspects of the "Goddess" interpretation of Neolithic stone carvings and burial practices.[26] Cynthia Eller also discusses the place of Gimbutas in inoculating the idea into feminism in her 2000 book The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory.

The 2009 book Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism by Cathy Gere examines the political influence on archaeology more generally. Through the example of Knossos on the island of Crete, which had been represented as the paradigm of a pacifist, matriarchal and sexually free society, Gere claims that archaeology can easily slip into reflecting what people want to see, rather than teaching people about an unfamiliar past.[27][28]

Gimbutas, Marija (1946). Die Bestattung in Litauen in der vorgeschichtlichen Zeit. Tübingen: H. Laupp.

Gimbutas, Marija (1956). The Prehistory of Eastern Europe. Part I: Mesolithic, Neolithic and Copper Age Cultures in Russia and the Baltic Area. American School of Prehistoric Research, Harvard University Bulletin No. 20. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum.

Gimbutas, Marija & R. Ehrich (1957). COWA Survey and Bibliography, Area - Central Europe. Cambridge: Harvard University.

Gimbutas, Marija (1958). Ancient symbolism in Lithuanian folk art. Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, Memoirs of the American Folklore Society 49.

Gimbutas, Marija (1958). Rytprusiu ir Vakaru Lietuvos Priesistorines Kulturos Apzvalga [A Survey of Prehistory of East Prussia and western Lithuania]. New York: Studia Lituaica I.

Gimbutas, Marija & R. Ehrich (1959). COWA Survey and Bibliography, Area 2 - Scandinavia. Cambridge: Harvard University.

Gimbutas, Marija (1963). The Balts. London : Thames and Hudson, Ancient peoples and places 33.

Gimbutas, Marija (1965). Bronze Age cultures in Central and Eastern Europe. The Hague/London: Mouton.

Gimbutas, Marija (1971). The Slavs. London : Thames and Hudson, Ancient peoples and places 74.

Gimbutas, Marija (1974). Obre and Its Place in Old Europe. Sarajevo: Zemalski Museum. Wissenchaftliche Mitteilungen des Bosnisch-Herzogowinischen Landesmuseums, Band 4 Heft A.

Gimbutas, Marija (1974). The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 7000 to 3500 BC: Myths, Legends and Cult Images. London: Thames and Hudson.

Gimbutas, Marija (1981). Grotta Scaloria: Resoconto sulle ricerche del 1980 relative agli scavi del 1979. Manfredonia: Amministrazione comunale.

Gimbutienė, Marija (1985). Baltai priešistoriniais laikais : etnogenezė, materialinė kultūra ir mitologija. Vilnius: Mokslas.

Gimbutas, Marija (1989). The Language of the Goddess: Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

Gimbutas, Marija (1991). The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe. San Francisco: Harper.

Gimbutas, Marija (1992). Die Ethnogenese der europäischen Indogermanen. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck, Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft, Vorträge und kleinere Schriften 54.

Gimbutas, Marija (1994). Das Ende Alteuropas. Der Einfall von Steppennomaden aus Südrussland und die Indogermanisierung Mitteleuropas. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft.

Gimbutas, Marija, edited and supplemented by Miriam Robbins Dexter (1999) The Living Goddesses. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Gimbutas, Marija (ed.) (1974). Obre, Neolithic Sites in Bosnia. Sarajevo: A. Archaeologic.

Gimbutas, Marija (ed.) (1976). Neolithic Macedonia as reflected by excavation at Anza, southeast Yugoslavia. Los Angeles: Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Monumenta archaeologica 1.

Renfrew, Colin, Marija Gimbutas and Ernestine S. Elster (1986). Excavations at Sitagroi, a prehistoric village in northeast Greece. Vol. 1. Los Angeles : Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Monumenta archaeologica 13.

Gimbutas, Marija, Shan Winn and Daniel Shimabuku (1989). Achilleion: a Neolithic settlement in Thessaly, Greece, 6400-5600 B.C. Los Angeles: Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles. Monumenta archaeologica 14.

1960: "Culture Change in Europe at the Start of the Second Millennium B.C. A Contribution to the Indo-European Problem", Selected Papers of the Fifth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. Philadelphia, September 1-9, 1956, ed. A. F. C. Wallace. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1960, pp. 540-552.

1961: "Notes on the chronology and expansion of the Pit-grave culture", L'Europe à la fin de l'Age de la pierre, eds., J. Bohm & S. J. De Laet. Prague: Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, 1961, pp. 193-200.

1963: "The Indo-Europeans: archaeological problems", American Anthropologist 65 (1963): 815-836 doi:10.1525/aa.1963.65.4.02a00030

1970: "Proto-Indo-European Culture: The Kurgan Culture during the Fifth, Fourth, and Third Millennia B.C.", Indo-European and Indo-Europeans. Papers Presented at the Third Indo-European Conference at the University of Pennsylvania, ed. George Cardona, Henry M. Hoenigswald & Alfred Senn. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970, pp. 155-197.

1973: "Old Europe c. 7000-3500 BC: The Earliest European Civilization Before the Infiltration of the Indo-European Peoples", Journal of Indo-European Studies (JIES) 1 (1973): 1-21.

1977: "The First Wave of Eurasian Steppe Pastoralists into Copper Age Europe", JIES 5 (1977): 277-338.

"Gold Treasure at Varna", Archaeology 30, 1 (1977): 44-51.

1979: "The Three Waves of Kurgan People into Old Europe, 4500-2500 BC", Archives suisses d'anthropologie genérale. 43(2) (1979): 113-137.

1980: "The Kurgan wave #2 (c.3400-3200 BC) into Europe and the following transformation of culture", JIES 8 (1980): 273-315.

"The Temples of Old Europe", Archaeology 33(6) (1980): 41-50.

1980-81: "The transformation of European and Anatolian culture c. 4500-2500 B.C. and its legacy", JIES 8 (I-2), 9 (I-2).

1982: "Old Europe in the Fifth Millennium B.C.: The European Situation on the Arrival of Indo-Europeans", The Indo-Europeans in the Fourth and Third Millennia BC, ed. Edgar C. Polomé. Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers, 1982, pp. 1-60.

"Women and Culture in Goddess-oriented Old Europe", The Politics of Women's Spirituality, ed. Charlene Spretnak. New York: Doubleday, 1982, pp. 22-31.

"Vulvas, Breasts, and Buttocks of the Goddess Creatress: Commentary on the Origins of Art", The Shape of the Past: Studies in Honor of Franklin D. Murphy, eds. Giorgio Buccellati & Charles Speroni. Los Angeles: UCLA Institute of Archaeology, 1982.

1985: "Primary and Secondary Homeland of the Indo-Europeans: Comments on Gamkrelidze-Ivanov Articles", JIES 13(1-2) (1985): 185-202.

1986: "Kurgan Culture and the Horse", critique of the article "The 'Kurgan Culture', Indo-European origins and the domestication of the horse: a reconsideration" by David W. Anthony (same issue, pp. 291-313), Current Anthropology 27(4) (1986): 305-307.

"Remarks on the ethnogenesis of the Indo-Europeans in Europe", Ethnogenese europäischer Völker, eds. W. Bernhard & A. Kandler-Palsson. Stuttgart / New York: Gustav Fische Verlag, 1986: 5-19.

1987: "The Pre-Christian Religion of Lithuania", La Cristianizzazione della Lituania. Rome, 1987.

"The Earth Fertility of old Europe", Dialogues d'histoire ancienne, vol. 13, no. 1 (1987): 11-69.

1988: "A Review of Archaeology and Language by Colin Renfrew", Current Anthropology 29(3) (Jul 1988): 453-456.

"Accounting For a Great Change, critique of Archaeology and Language by C. Renfrew", London Times Literary Supplement (Jun 24-30), 1988, p. 714.

1990: "The Social Structure of the Old Europe. Part II", JIES 18 (1990): 225-284.

"The Collision of Two Ideologies", When Worlds Collide: Indo-Europeans and Pre-Indo-Europeans, eds. T. L. Markey & A. C. Greppin. Ann Arbor (MI): Kasoma, 1990, pp. 171-178.

"Wall Paintings of Çatal Hüyük, 8th-7th Millennia B.C.", The Review of Archaeology, 11(2) (1990): 1-5.

1992: "The Chronologies of Eastern Europe: Neolithic through Early Bronze Age", Chronologies in Old World Archaeology, vol. 1, ed. R. W. Ehrich. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 395-406.

1993: "The Indo-Europeanization of Europe: the intrusion of steppe pastoralists from south Russia and the transformation of Old Europe", Word 44 (1993): 205-222 doi:10.1080/00437956.1993.11435900

Dexter, Miriam Robbins and Karlene Jones-Bley (eds) (1997). The Kurgan culture and the Indo-Europeanization of Europe: Selected articles from 1952 to 1993 by M. Gimbutas. Journal of Indo-European Studies monograph 18. Washington DC: Institute for the Study of Man.

Skomal, Susan Nacev & Edgar C. Polomé (eds) (1987). Proto-Indo-European: The Archaeology of a Linguistic Problem. Studies in Honor of Marija Gimbutas. Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph No. 001. Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man.

Marler, Joan, ed. (1997). From the Realm of the Ancestors: An Anthology in Honor of Marija Gimbutas. Manchester, CT: Knowledge, Ideas & Trends, Inc.

Dexter, Miriam Robbins and Edgar C. Polomé, eds. (1997). Varia on the Indo-European Past: Papers in Memory of Gimbutas, Marija. Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph #19. Washington, DC: The Institute for the Study of Man.

1. ^ Ware & Braukman 2004, p. 234

2. ^ Marler 1998, p. 115.

3. ^ Ware & Braukman 2004, p. 235.

4. ^ [1][permanent dead link ]

5. ^ "Women in Old World Archaeology". Brown.edu.

6. ^ Haak, Wolfgang; Lazaridis, Iosif; Patterson, Nick; Rohland, Nadin; Mallick, Swapan; Llamas, Bastien; Brandt, Guido; Nordenfelt, Susanne; Harney, Eadaoin; Stewardson, Kristin; Fu, Qiaomei; Mittnik, Alissa; Bánffy, Eszter; Economou, Christos; Francken, Michael; Friederich, Susanne; Pena, Rafael Garrido; Hallgren, Fredrik; Khartanovich, Valery; Khokhlov, Aleksandr; Kunst, Michael; Kuznetsov, Pavel; Meller, Harald; Mochalov, Oleg; Moiseyev, Vayacheslav; Nicklisch, Nicole; Pichler, Sandra L.; Risch, Roberto; Guerra, Manuel A. Rojo; Roth, Christina; Szécsényi-Nagy, Anna; Wahl, Joachim; Meyer, Matthias; Krause, Johannes; Brown, Dorcas; Anthony, David; Cooper, Alan; Alt, Kurt Werner; Reich, David (February 10, 2015). "Massive migration from the steppe is a source for Indo-European languages in Europe". bioRxiv. 522 (7555): 207-211. arXiv:1502.02783. Bibcode:2015Natur.522..207H. bioRxiv 10.1101/013433. doi:10.1038/NATURE14317. PMC 5048219. PMID 25731166.

7. ^ Allentoft, Morten E.; Sikora, Martin; Sjögren, Karl-Göran; Rasmussen, Simon; Rasmussen, Morten; Stenderup, Jesper; Damgaard, Peter B.; Schroeder, Hannes; Ahlström, Torbjörn; Vinner, Lasse; Malaspinas, Anna-Sapfo; Margaryan, Ashot; Higham, Tom; Chivall, David; Lynnerup, Niels; Harvig, Lise; Baron, Justyna; Casa, Philippe Della; Dąbrowski, Paweł; Duffy, Paul R.; Ebel, Alexander V.; Epimakhov, Andrey; Frei, Karin; Furmanek, Mirosław; Gralak, Tomasz; Gromov, Andrey; Gronkiewicz, Stanisław; Grupe, Gisela; Hajdu, Tamás; Jarysz, Radosław; Khartanovich, Valeri; Khokhlov, Alexandr; Kiss, Viktória; Kolář, Jan; Kriiska, Aivar; Lasak, Irena; Longhi, Cristina; McGlynn, George; Merkevicius, Algimantas; Merkyte, Inga; Metspalu, Mait; Mkrtchyan, Ruzan; Moiseyev, Vyacheslav; Paja, László; Pálfi, György; Pokutta, Dalia; Pospieszny, Łukasz; Price, T. Douglas; Saag, Lehti; Sablin, Mikhail; Shishlina, Natalia; Smrčka, Václav; Soenov, Vasilii I.; Szeverényi, Vajk; Tóth, Gusztáv; Trifanova, Synaru V.; Varul, Liivi; Vicze, Magdolna; Yepiskoposyan, Levon; Zhitenev, Vladislav; Orlando, Ludovic; Sicheritz-Pontén, Thomas; Brunak, Søren; Nielsen, Rasmus; Kristiansen, Kristian; Willerslev, Eske (June 1, 2015). "Population genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia". Nature. 522 (7555): 167-172. Bibcode:2015Natur.522..167A. doi:10.1038/nature14507. PMID 26062507. S2CID 4399103.

8. ^ Mathieson, Iain; Lazaridis, Iosif; Rohland, Nadin; Mallick, Swapan; Llamas, Bastien; Pickrell, Joseph; Meller, Harald; Guerra, Manuel A. Rojo; Krause, Johannes; Anthony, David; Brown, Dorcas; Fox, Carles Lalueza; Cooper, Alan; Alt, Kurt W.; Haak, Wolfgang; Patterson, Nick; Reich, David (March 14, 2015). "Eight thousand years of natural selection in Europe". bioRxiv: 016477. doi:10.1101/016477 - via biorxiv.org.

9. ^ Hayden, Brian (1987). "Old Europe: Sacred Matriarchy or Complementary Opposition?". In Bonanno, Anthony (ed.). Archaeology and Fertility Cult in the Ancient Mediterranean: Papers Presented at the First International Conference on Archaeology of the Ancient Mediterranean, the University of Malta, 2-5 September 1985. Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner. pp. 17-30. ISBN 9789060322888.

10. ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on June 6, 2010.

11. ^ "The Marija Gimbutas Collection - OPUS Archives and Research Center". Opusarchives.org.

12. "According to anthropologist Ashley Montagu, "Marija Gimbutas has given us a veritable Rosetta Stone of the greatest heuristic value for future work in the hermeneutics of archaeology and anthropology." ^ "Pacifica Graduate Institute | Campbell & Gimbutas Library | Marija Gimbutas - Life and Work". Archived from the original on February 4, 2004.

13. ^ Peter Steinfels (1990) Idyllic Theory Of Goddesses Creates Storm. NY Times, February 13, 1990

14. ^ C. Spretnak (2011). "Anatomy of a Backlash: Concerning the Work of Marija Gimbutas" (PDF). Journal of Archaeomythology. 7: 1-27. ISSN 2162-6871.

15. Paul Kiparsky, "^ New perspectives in historical linguistics", To appear in Claire Bowern (ed.)Handbook of Historical Linguistics.

16. ^ The New York Times book of science literacy: what everyone needs to know from Newton to the knuckleball, page 85, Richard Flaste, 1992

17. S. Milisauskas, ^ European prehistory (Springer, 2002), p.82, 386, etc. See also Colin Renfrew, ed., The Megalithic Monuments of Western Europe: the latest evidence (London : Thames and Hudson, 1983).

18. P. Ucko, ^ Anthropomorphic figurines of predynastic Egypt and neolithic Crete with comparative material from the prehistoric Near East and mainland Greece (London, A. Szmidla, 1968).

19. A. Fleming (1969), ^ "The Myth of the Mother Goddess" Archived 2016-05-31 at the Wayback Machine, World Archaeology 1(2), 247-261.

20. Cathy Gere (2009), ^ Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, University of Chicago Press, pp. 4-16ff.

21. See also Charlotte Allen, ^ "The Scholars and the Goddess.", The Atlantic Monthly, January 1, 2001.

Chapman, John (1998), "The impact of modern invasions and migrations on archaeological explanation: A biographical sketch of Marija Gimbutas", in Díaz-Andreu, Margarita; Sørensen, Marie Louise Stig (eds.), Excavating Women: A History of Women in European Archaeology, New York: Routledge, pp. 295-314, ISBN 978-0-415-15760-5

Elster, Ernestine S. (2007). "Marija Gimbutas: Setting the Agenda", in Archaeology and Women: Ancient and Modern Issues, eds. Sue Hamilton, Ruth D. Whitehouse, and Katherine I. Wright. Left Coast Press (reprint Routledge, 2016)

Häusler, Alexander (1995), "Über Archäologie und den Ursprung der Indogermanen", in Kuna, Martin; Venclová, Natalie (eds.), Whither archaeology? Papers in honour of Evzen Neustupny, Prague: Institute of Archaeology, pp. 211-229, ISBN 978-80-901934-0-6

Iwersen, Julia (2005). "Gimbutas, Marija", in The Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd edn. Ed. by Lindsay Jones. Detroit: Macmillan, vol. 5: 3492-4.

Marler, Joan (1997), Realm of the Ancestors: An Anthology in Honor of Marija Gimbutas, Manchester, Connecticut: Knowledge, Ideas & Trends, ISBN 978-1-879198-25-8

Marler, Joan (1998), "Marija Gimbutas: Tribute to a Lithuanian Legend", in LaFont, Suzanne (ed.), Women in Transition: Voices from Lithuania, Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, ISBN 978-0-7914-3811-4

Meskell, Lynn (1995), "Goddesses, Gimbutas and 'New Age' Archaeology", Antiquity, 69 (262): 74-86, doi:10.1017/S0003598X00064310, S2CID 162614650

Milisauskas, Sarunas (2011). "Marija Gimbutas: Some observations about her early years, 1921-1944", Antiquity 74: 80-4.

Murdock, Maureen (2014). "Gimbutas, Marija, and the Goddess", in Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion, 2nd edn. Ed. by David A. Leeming. NY-Heidelberg-Dordrecht-London: Springer, pp. 705-10.

Ware, Susan; Braukman, Stacy Lorraine (2004), Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary Completing the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, ISBN 978-0-674-01488-6

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Marija Gimbutas ( Lithuanian: Marija Birutė Alseikaitė-Gimbutienė, pronounced ['ɡɪmbutas]; January 23, 1921 - February 2, 1994) was a Lithuanian archaeologist and anthropologist known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of " Old Europe" and for her Kurgan hypothesis, which located the Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Pontic Steppe.

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At Literary Hub, novelist and critic Elvia Wilk sketches a theory of the "New Weird," a genre of fiction that's not quite sci-fi, not quite fantasy. Based on the notion of "weird" offered by Mark Fisher in his book The Weird and the Eerie, Wilk's theory concerns fiction that uses unexplained events and strange occurrences to de-naturalize our sense of reality. These events suggest that there is far more to reality than we can explain or comprehend. To explore this alienating effect, Wilk traces a common motif that appears in multiple New Weird stories: "The fantasy of woman-becoming-plant." Check out an excerpt below.

Weirdness is a confrontation with the nonhuman. Weird knowledge does not deny the capacity of the human mind and body to produce knowledge, but it does not reduce the world to human subject experience either. Unlike science fiction-in which there is a rational explanation for everything-and fantasy-where magic explains it all-weirdness hovers between poles of explainability.

This makes New Weird something of an anti-genre, a genre whose uniting factor is paradoxically in remaining outside categorization. Yet it's been given a semblance of cohesion, according to a shared set of aesthetic sensibilities, by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, in the 2008 anthology The New Weird (and another simply called The Weird in 2012). VanderMeer is also author of the very weird Southern Reach trilogy, the first book of which, Annihilation (2014), involves a woman-becoming-nonhuman. In the book, a team of women enter a mysterious zone known as Area X, where an eerie nonhuman agent seems to be taking over or "infecting" the landscape. The narrator, a biologist, at first tries to examine the plantlife of Area X to explain what is happening around them, but eventually her own sense perception becomes warped by the environment she is herself becoming part of-she inhales the spores of an organism she is studying, which affect her perception. She's forced to admit that she can no longer claim status as a detached observer; she has become an unreliable narrator by dint of becoming part of the ecosystem she is observing.

Image: Rachel Rose, Enclosure (2019). Via Literary Hub.

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At Literary Hub, novelist and critic Elvia Wilk sketches a theory of the "New Weird," a genre of fiction that's not quite sci-fi, not quite fantasy. Based on the notion of "weird" offered by Mark Fisher in his book The Weird and the Eerie, Wilk's theory concerns fiction that uses unexplained events and strange occurrences to de-naturalize our sense of reality.

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Mette Sterre's creations escape fixed definitions.
They exceed performance practice, installation, digital technologies, body masks and sculpture - potentially expanding their territories without limits. By entering her work we are cast into the materialisation of her mind processes: an unpredictable participatory and sensorial experience.

The environments created by the artist are loaded with transformative energetic fields that animate new worlds in which we encounter organic and inorganic living organisms and speculative fictions. The undecipherable glowing matter unfolds in front of us. What is it made of?

Animators in costumes, robots, sounds and visuals unravel in anarchic formalisms and otherworldly movements, acting as a strategy for disorientation, de-centering and trespassing spatial parameters, linear time and human certainties. Creatures that seem to be assembled into hybrid and chimeric formulations - partly machines, monsters or nonhumans - are occupying the same space as us.
​Rather than being ego-centered actors within a system that still oppresses those that are 'less than human', Sterre's creations celebrate our variance through dissonance, in a dimension of both fear and ecstasy.

Text by Giulia Casalini, phd candidate Feminist Live Art at the University of Roehampton, London

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mette sterre portfolio sculptural costume design performance site

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Alja,

We agreed to research your work. Questions like: How it is related to your background? What are the themes you address? And so on. What are your ideas about this substantive matter? For instance, we talked about the way you represent the body, and how it stands in the tradition of beauty. The beautiful bodies of the Renaissance, when the mind had to overcome the sinful body. We also talked about how you may also associate with your work. How it for instance also refers to mythological themes like the desire for immortality while the flesh in the end is mortal ( a lot of struggles are about that, in myths).

We also talked about how (stereotyped) bodily images are created and reproduced and force a kind of expectation on us, while there might be many more possibilities to look at ourselves/transform into something else. We talked about the way Barbie dolls lead - due to this capitalistic system - to this dominant image. What if we would grow up with a new relation to the body, with other identity possibilities? The human cyborg. Next to the associations you could also go into things from your personal life concerning how you experienced identity with your body and surroundings. How your view of the body has changed.

Best regards,

Hille

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Daniel Arsham, Hajime Soroyama,
Holding hands

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Vide Cor Meum - libretto in Italian / Latin with translation.

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MemesteticA – The Eternal September of Art - Aksioma

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MemesteticA – The Eternal September of Art - Aksioma

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► Originally published in Italian language by NERO Editions.► The Slovenian edition is available HERE. In the 21st century, art has become a weird thing, weirder, even, than it was before. The Internet, new technologies and social media have stormed our visual universe with gifs, photoshopping and all kinds of appropriation practices. Trolls, YouTubers and Instagrammers are […]

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Sculptures and drawings | Overview of the work by Miriam Knibbeler

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An overview of the works by artist Miriam Knibbeler. Including sculptures and drawings.

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Hauser & Wirth was founded in 1992 in Zurich by Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth and Ursula Hauser, who were joined in 2000 by Partner and President Marc Payot

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One year ago it was since a very long time i encountered a work by Erzsebet Baerveldt. Searching for more exhibitions, works in public spaces and collections stayed without any results. But during this search i encountered the video she made in the early 90's...REQUIEM. Since this video was made, only a few more works have been made by her and for over a decade now.....total silence. So i inquired with her former gallery and i was told that mrs. Baerveldt possibly had joined a convent. What rests is this moving project. Which consists of this video and 1 gallery sold photograph.

The book on Erzsebeth Baerveldt is available at www.ftn-books.com

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Posts about scuola anatomica written by ftnbooks

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Exploring the Lived Experience of Limerence A Journey toward Aut

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Inside the package, Waldo was so transfixed with excitement that he could barely breathe. His skin felt prickly from the heat, and he could feel his heart beating in his throat. It would be soon. Sheila stood quite upright and walked around to the other side of the package. Then she sank down to her knees, grasped the cutter by both handles, took a deep breath, and plunged the long blade through the middle of the package, through the masking tape, through the cardboard, through the cushioning and (thud) right through the center of Waldo Jeffers' head, which split slightly and caused little rhythmic arcs of red to pulsate gently in the morning sun

#velvetunderground #pain #limerence

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#SimoneWeil #ThePoemOfForce

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The #Neuroscience of #Pain

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Brain imaging is illuminating the neural patterns behind pain's infinite variety.

On a foggy February morning in Oxford, England, I arrived at the John Radcliffe Hospital, a shiplike nineteen-seventies complex moored on a hill east of the city center, for the express purpose of being hurt. I had an appointment with a scientist named Irene Tracey, a brisk woman in her early fifties who directs Oxford University's Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences and has become known as the Queen of Pain. "We might have a problem with you being a ginger," she warned when we met. Redheads typically perceive pain differently from those with other hair colors; many also flinch at the use of the G-word. "I'm sorry, a lovely auburn," she quickly said, while a doctoral student used a ruler and a purple Sharpie to draw the outline of a one-inch square on my right shin.

Wearing thick rubber gloves, the student squeezed a dollop of pale-orange cream into the center of the square and delicately spread it to the edges, as if frosting a cake. The cream contained capsaicin, the chemical responsible for the burn of chili peppers. "We love capsaicin," Tracey said. "It does two really nice things: it ramps up gradually to become quite intense, and it activates receptors in your skin that we know a lot about." Thus anointed, I signed my disclaimer forms and was strapped into the scanning bed of a magnetic-resonance-imaging (MRI) machine.

The machine was a 7-Tesla MRI, of which there are fewer than a hundred in the world. The magnetic field it generates (teslas are a unit of magnetic strength) is more than four times as powerful as that of the average hospital MRI machine, resulting in images of much greater detail. As the cryogenic units responsible for cooling the machine's superconducting magnet clicked on and off in a syncopated rhythm, the imaging technician warned me that, once he slid me inside, I might feel dizzy, see flashing lights, or experience a metallic taste in my mouth. "I always feel like I'm turning a corner," Tracey said. She explained that the magnetic field would instantly pull the proton in each of the octillions of hydrogen atoms in my body into alignment. Then she vanished into a control room, where a bank of screens would allow her to watch my brain as it experienced pain.

During the next couple of hours, I had needles repeatedly stuck into my ankle and the fleshy part of my calf. A hot-water bottle applied to my capsaicin patch inflicted the perceptual equivalent of a third-degree burn, after which a cooling pack placed on the same spot brought tear-inducing relief. Each time Tracey and her team prepared to observe a new slice of my brain, the machine beeped, and a small screen in front of my face flashed the word "Ready" in white lettering on a black background. After each assault, I was asked to rate my pain on a scale of 0 to 10.

Initially, I was concerned that I was letting the team down. The capsaicin patch hardly tingled, and I scored the first round of pinpricks as a 3, more out of hope than conviction. I needn't have worried. The patch began to itch, then burn. By the time the hot-water bottle was placed on it, about an hour in, I was surely at an 8. The next set of pinpricks felt as if I were being run through with a hot metal skewer.

"You're a good responder," Tracey told me, rubbing her hands together, when I emerged, dazed. "And you've got a lovely plump brain-all my postdocs want to sign you up." As my data were sent off for analysis, she pressed a large cappuccino into my hands and gently removed the capsaicin with an alcohol wipe.

Tracey didn't need to ask me how it had gone. The imaging-analysis software, designed in her department and now used around the world, employs a color scale that shades from cool to hot, with three-dimensional pixels coded from blue through red to yellow, depending on the level of neural activity in a region. Tracey has analyzed thousands of these "blob maps," as she calls them-scans produced using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Watching a succession of fiery-orange jellyfish flaring up in my skull, she had seen my pain wax and wane, its outlines shifting as mild discomfort became nearly unbearable agony.

For scientists, pain has long presented an intractable problem: it is a physiological process, just like breathing or digestion, and yet it is inherently, stubbornly subjective-only you feel your pain. It is also a notoriously hard experience to convey accurately to others. Virginia Woolf bemoaned the fact that "the merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry." Elaine Scarry, in the 1985 book "The Body in Pain," wrote, "Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it."

The medical profession, too, has often declared itself frustrated at pain's indescribability. "It would be a great thing to understand Pain in all its meanings," Peter Mere Latham, physician extraordinary to Queen Victoria, wrote, before concluding despairingly, "Things which all men know infallibly by their own perceptive experience, cannot be made plainer by words. Therefore, let Pain be spoken of simply as Pain."

But, in the past two decades, a small number of scientists have begun finding ways to capture the experience in quantifiable, objective data, and Tracey has emerged as a formidable figure in the field. By scanning several thousand people, healthy and sick, while subjecting them to burns, pokes, prods, and electric shocks, she has pioneered experimental methods to survey the neural landscape of pain. In the past few years, her work has expanded from the study of "normal" pain-the everyday, passing experience of a stubbed toe or a burned tongue-to the realm of chronic pain. Her findings have already changed our understanding of pain; now they promise to transform its diagnosis and treatment, a shift whose effects will be felt in hospitals, courtrooms, and society at large.

The history of pain research is full of ingenious, largely failed attempts to measure pain. The nineteenth-century French doctor Marc Colombat de l'Isère evaluated the pitch and rhythm of cries of suffering. In the nineteen-forties, doctors at Cornell University used a heat-emitting instrument known as a "dolorimeter" to apply precise increments of pain to the forehead. By noting whenever a person perceived an increase or decrease in sensation, they arrived at a pain scale calibrated in increments of "dols," each of which was a "just-noticeable difference" away from the adjacent dols. Last year, scientists at M.I.T. developed an algorithm called DeepFace LIFT, which attempts to predict pain scores based on facial expressions.

The most widely adopted tools rely on the subjective reports of sufferers. In the nineteen-fifties, a Canadian psychologist named Ronald Melzack treated "an impish, delightful woman in her mid-seventies" who suffered from diabetes and whose legs were both amputated. She was tormented by phantom-limb pain, and Melzack was struck by her linguistic resourcefulness in describing it. He began collecting the words that she and other patients used most frequently, organizing this vocabulary into categories, in an attempt to capture pain's temporal, sensory, and affective dimensions, as well as its intensity. The result, published two decades later, was the McGill Pain Questionnaire, a scale comprising some eighty descriptors-"stabbing," "gnawing," "radiating," "shooting," and so on. The questionnaire is still much used, but there have been few surveys of its efficacy in a clinical setting, and it's easy to see how one person's "agonizing" could be another person's "wretched." Furthermore, a study by the sociologist Cassandra Crawford found that, after the questionnaire's publication, clinical descriptions of phantom-limb pain shifted dramatically, implying that the assessment device was, to some extent, informing the sensations it was intended to measure.

Meanwhile, as the historian Joanna Bourke has shown, in her book "The Story of Pain," attempts to translate the McGill Pain Questionnaire into other languages have revealed the extent to which cultural context shapes language, which, in turn, shapes perception. In mid-century Montreal, Melzack's talkative diabetic might have described a migraine as lacerating or pulsing, but the Sakhalin Ainu traditionally rated the intensity of pounding headaches in terms of the animal whose footsteps they most resembled: a bear headache was worse than a musk-deer headache. (If a headache was accompanied by a chill, it was described with an analogy to sea creatures.)

By far the most common tool used today to measure pain is the one I employed in the scanner: the 0-to-10 numerical scale. Its rudimentary ancestor was introduced in 1948, by Kenneth Keele, a British cardiologist, who asked his patients to choose a score between 0 (no pain) and 3 ("severe" pain). Over the years, the scale has stretched to 10, in order to accommodate more gradations of sensation. In some settings, patients, rather than picking a number, place a mark on a ten-centimetre line, which is sometimes adorned with cheerful and grimacing faces.

In 2000, Congress declared the next ten years the "Decade of Pain Control and Research," after the Supreme Court, rejecting the idea of physician-assisted suicide as a constitutional right, recommended improvements in palliative care. Pain was declared "the fifth vital sign" (alongside blood pressure, pulse rate, respiratory rate, and temperature), and the numerical scoring of pain became a standard feature of U.S. medical records, billing codes, and best-practice guides.

But numerical scales are far from satisfactory. In Tracey's MRI machine, my third-degree burn felt five points more intense than the initial pinpricks, but was it really only two points less than the worst I could imagine? Surely not, but, having never given birth, broken any bones, or undergone serious surgery, how was I to know?

The self-reported nature of pain scores leads, inevitably, to their accuracy being challenged. "To have great pain is to have certainty," Elaine Scarry wrote. "To hear that another person has pain is to have doubt." That doubt opens the door to stereotyping and bias. The 2014 edition of the textbook "Nursing: A Concept-Based Approach to Learning" warned practitioners that Native Americans "may pick a sacred number when asked to rate pain," and that the validity of self-reports will likely be affected by the fact that Jewish people "believe that pain must be shared" and black people "believe suffering and pain are inevitable." Last year, the book's publisher, Pearson, announced that it would remove the offending passage from future editions, but biases remain common, and study after study has shown shocking disparities in pain treatment. A 2016 paper noted that black patients are significantly less likely than white patients to be prescribed medication for the same level of reported pain, and they receive smaller doses. A group of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania found that women are up to twenty-five per cent less likely than men to be given opioids for pain.

In addition, once pain assessment became a standard feature of American medical practice, doctors found themselves confronted with an apparent epidemic of previously unreported agony. In response, they began handing out opioids such as OxyContin. Between 1997 and 2010, the number of times the drug was prescribed annually grew more than eight hundred per cent, to 6.2 million. The disastrous results in terms of addiction and abuse are well known.

Without a reliable measure of pain, physicians are unable to standardize treatment, or accurately assess how successful a treatment has been. And, without a means by which to compare and quantify the dimensions of the phenomenon, pain itself has remained mysterious. The problem is circular: when I asked Tracey why pain has remained so resistant to objective description, she explained that its biology is poorly understood. Other basic sensory perceptions-touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing-have been traced to particular areas of the brain. "We don't have that for pain," she said. "We still don't know exactly how the brain constructs this experience that you absolutely, unarguably know hurts."

Irene Tracey has lived in Oxford almost all her life. She was born at the old Radcliffe Infirmary, went to a local state school, and studied biochemistry at the university. Her husband, Myles Allen, is an Oxford professor, too, in charge of the world's largest climate-modelling experiment, and they live in North Oxford, in a semidetached house comfortably cluttered with their children's sports gear and schoolwork. In 1990, Tracey embarked on her doctorate at Oxford, using MRI technology to study muscle and brain damage in patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. At the time, the fMRI technique that she used to map my brain in action was just being developed. The technique tracks neural activity by measuring local changes associated with the flow of blood as it carries oxygen through the brain. A busy neuron requires more oxygen, and, because oxygenated and deoxygenated blood have different magnetic properties, neural activity creates a detectable disturbance in the magnetic field of an MRI scanner.

In 1991, a team at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, showed its first, grainy video of a human visual cortex "lighting up" as the cortex turned impulses from the optic nerve into images. Captivated, Tracey applied for a postdoctoral fellowship at M.G.H., and began working there in 1994, using the MRI whenever she could. When Allen, at that time her boyfriend, visited from England one Valentine's Day, she cancelled a trip they'd planned to New York to take advantage of an unexpected open slot on the scanner. Allen spent the evening lying inside the machine, bundled up to keep warm, while she gazed into his brain. He told me that he had intended to propose to Tracey that day, but saved the ring for another time.

It was toward the end of her fellowship in Boston that Tracey first began thinking seriously about pain. Playing field hockey in her teens, she'd had her first experience of severe pain-a knee injury that required surgery-but it was a chance conversation with colleagues in a pain clinic that sparked her scientific interest. "It was just one of those serendipitous conversations that you find yourself in, where this whole area is opened up to you," she told me. "It was, like, 'God, this is everything I've been looking for. It's got clinical application, interesting philosophy, and we know absolutely nothing.' I thought, Right, that's it, pain is going to be my thing."

By then, Tracey had been recruited to return home and help found the Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain. Scientists had already largely given up on the idea of finding a single pain cortex: in the handful of fMRI papers that had been published describing brain activity when a person was burned or pricked with needles, the scans seemed to show that pain involved significant activity in many parts of the brain, rather than in a single pocket, as with hearing or sight. Tracey's plan was to design a series of experiments that picked apart this larger pattern of activity, isolating different aspects of pain in order to understand exactly what each region was contributing to the over-all sensation.

In 1998, while her lab was being built, she took her first doctoral student, a Rhodes Scholar named Alexander Ploghaus, to Canada, their scientific equipment packed in their suitcases, to use a collaborator's MRI machine for a week. Their subjects were a group of college students, including several ice-hockey players, who kept bragging about how much pain they could take. While each student was in the scanner, Tracey and Ploghaus used a homemade heating element to apply either burns or pleasant heat to the back of the left hand, as red, green, and blue lights flashed on and off. The lights came on in a seemingly random sequence, but gradually the subjects realized that one color always presaged pain and another was always followed by comfortable warmth. The resulting scans were striking. Throughout the experiment, the subjects' brain-activity patterns remained consistent during moments of pain, but, as they figured out the rules of the game, the ominous light began triggering more and more blood flow to a couple of regions-the anterior insula and the prefrontal cortices. These areas, Tracey and Ploghaus concluded, must be responsible for the anticipation of pain.

Showing that the experience of pain could be created in part by anticipation, rather than by actual sensation, was the first experimental step in breaking the phenomenon down into its constituent elements. "Rather than just seeing that all these blobs are active because it hurts, we wanted to understand, What bit of the hurt are they underpinning?" Tracey said. "Is it the localization, is it the intensity, is it the anticipation or the anxiety?" During the next decade, she designed experiments that revealed the roles played by various brain regions in modulating the experience of pain. She took behavioral researchers' finding that distraction reduces the perception of pain-as when a doctor tells a child to count backward from ten while receiving an injection-and made it the basis of an experiment that showed that concentrating on a numerical task suppressed activity in several regions that normally light up during pain. She examined the effects of depression on pain perception-people suffering from depression commonly report feeling more pain than other people do from the same stimulus-and demonstrated that this, too, could change the distribution and the magnitude of neural activity.

One of her most striking experiments tested the common observation that religious faith helps people cope with pain. Comparing the neurological responses of devout Catholics with those of atheists, she found that the two groups had similar baseline experiences of pain, but that, if the subjects were shown a picture of the Virgin Mary (by Sassoferrato, an Italian Baroque painter) while the pain was administered, the believers rated their discomfort nearly a point lower than the atheists did. When the volunteers were shown a secular painting (Leonardo da Vinci's "Lady with an Ermine"), the two groups' responses were the same. The implications are potentially far-reaching, and not only because they suggest that cultural attitudes may have a neurological imprint. If faith engages a neural mechanism with analgesic benefits-the Catholics showed heightened activity in an area usually associated with the ability to override a physical response-it may be possible to find other, secular ways to engage that circuit.

Tracey's research had begun to explain why people experience the same pain differently and why the same pain can seem worse to a single individual from one day to the next. Many of her findings simply reinforced existing psychological practices and common sense, but her scientific proof had clinical value. "Countless people who work in cognitive behavioral therapy come up at the end of talks or write to me," Tracey told me. "They say how helpful it has been to empower their education of the patient by saying that, if you're more anxious about your pain, or more sad, look, here's a picture telling you it gets worse."

These early experiments repeatedly demonstrated that pain is neurologically complex, involving responses generated throughout the brain. Nonetheless, by identifying regions that control ancillary factors, such as anticipation, Tracey and her team were gradually able to zero in on the regions that are most fundamental. In 2007, Tracey published a survey of existing research and identified what she called "the cerebral signature of pain"-the distinctive patterns produced by a set of brain regions that reliably act in concert during a painful experience. Some of these regions are large, and accommodate many different functions. None are specific to pain. But, as we stared at the orange blobs of an fMRI scan on her laptop screen, Tracey rattled off the names of half a dozen areas of the brain and concluded, "With a decent poke, you'd activate all of that."

In 2013, Tor Wager, a neuroscientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, took the logical next step by creating an algorithm that could recognize pain's distinctive patterns; today, it can pick out brains in pain with more than ninety-five-per-cent accuracy. When the algorithm is asked to sort activation maps by apparent intensity, its ranking matches participants' subjective pain ratings. By analyzing neural activity, it can tell not just whether someone is in pain but also how intense the experience is. "What's remarkable is that basic pain signals seem to look pretty much the same across a wide variety of people," Wager said. "But, within that, different brain systems are more, or less, significant, depending on the individual."

Among the brain's many pain-producing patterns, however, there is only one region that is consistently active at a high level: the dorsal posterior region of the insula. Using a new imaging technique, Tracey and one of her postdoctoral fellows, Andrew Segerdahl, recently discovered that the intensity of a prolonged painful experience corresponds precisely with variations in the blood flow to this particular area of the brain. In other words, activity in this area provides, at last, a biological benchmark for agony. Tracey described the insula, an elongated ridge nestled deep within the Sylvian fissure, with affection. "It's just this lovely island of cortex hidden in the middle, deep in your brain," she said. "And it's got all these amazing different functions. When you say, 'Actually, I feel a bit cold, I need to put a sweater on,' what's driving you to do that? Probably this bit."

The importance of the dorsal posterior insula had previously been highlighted in a somewhat horrifying experiment conducted by Laure Mazzola, a neurologist at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, in France. It is common for surgeons treating patients with drug-resistant epilepsy to disable the portions of the brain in which the seizures are occurring. Before surgery, neurologists often stimulate the area and its surroundings with an electrical probe, to make sure they're on target. Taking advantage of this opportunity, Mazzola stimulated various parts of the posterior insula in pre-surgical patients and recorded their responses. When she reached the dorsal region, Tracey told me, the patients "were leaping off the bed." The presence of a probe in the brain shouldn't in itself hurt, because there are no pain receptors there. Yet activating this area was apparently enough to create a brutally convincing synthetic pain.

The day after my fMRI scan, Tracey took me to her department's Clinical Pain Testing lab, a room that she refers to as her "torture chamber." A red illuminated sign blinked "Do Not Enter," and Tracey removed a retractable belt blocking the door. Inside were all the devices that she and her team use to hurt people scientifically. As I reclined in a blue dentist-style chair under the room's lone fluorescent light, she and a couple of her colleagues burned the back of my hand with a laser. Someone pressed a device about the size of a camera's memory card against my forearm. It was rippled with heating elements, which were covered with a thin layer of gold foil to conduct the heat to the skin. "We can raise the temperature by thirty degrees in under a second," Tracey said.

Each of the methods has a particular use. Lasers and electrodes can deliver precise increments of pain in experiments requiring a quick transition between different levels of stimulation. Capsaicin, because it sensitizes the central nervous system, is best for simulating chronic pain. Inflatable rectal balloons mimic the distinctive pain caused by damage to internal organs. All of them have been designed with the aim of reliably producing in laboratory conditions sensations that hurt enough to mirror real life but don't cause lasting harm, which would be unethical. A scientist hoping to gather publishable data can't just hit someone with a hammer and hope that each blow is as hard as the last one, even if an institutional ethics committee would permit such a thing.

Tracey has developed protocols to inflict the maximum amount of pain with the minimum amount of tissue damage. Using psychological tricks and carefully choreographed shifts in intensity, she has also devised ways of heightening a subject's perception of pain. At the same time, research identifying the regions most crucial to the experience of pain has inadvertently pointed the way to the creation of artificial pain purely through targeted neurostimulation. It does not take much imagination to discern the potential for misuse of this kind of knowledge. For this reason, the International Association for the Study of Pain (I.A.S.P.) has a code of ethics, and its members are pledged not to inflict or increase pain except in an experimental setting.

A more nuanced ethical issue involves the potential use of neuroimaging as a sort of lie detector-to expose malingerers or increase payouts in injury-compensation suits. "Pain is enormously important in law," Henry Greely, the director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences, at Stanford University, told me. "It's the subject of hundreds of thousands of legal disputes every year in the United States." Many are personal-injury cases; others involve Social Security and private-insurance disability. Greely pointed out that the lack of an objective test for pain means not only that people who deserve compensation miss out (and vice versa) but also that millions of billable hours are spent on these suits. With an agreed-upon empirical metric for pain, he estimates, the vast majority of cases would be settled rather than litigated.

Greely believes that the routine use of fMRI evidence in court is likely a decade away, but there are already signs that it is coming. In 2008, a colleague of his, Sean Mackey, was asked to serve as an expert witness in the case of a man who was suing an asphalt manufacturer after suffering first- and second-degree burns. The man's lawyers were planning to use brain-imaging data to show that the injuries had left him in chronic pain. The company's legal team wanted to put Mackey on the stand to argue that the current state of pain science could not justify this as an objective assessment. The case was eventually settled out of court, but the judge ruled that, despite a demurring opinion from Mackey, the scans were admissible as evidence.

All the scientists I spoke to were careful to stress that they think the field is not far enough advanced for an fMRI scan to be used as legal evidence of pain, or to overrule a subjective report. Some are convinced that it will never reach that point. Karen Davis, a researcher at the Krembil Brain Institute, in Toronto, told me, "Pain is, literally by definition, a subjective experience. That makes self-report the only true measure." Greely is less sure: "I'm willing to agree that it's still truly a subjective state, but there are objective things that can give you more or less confidence in the reality of that subjective state."

Davis is sufficiently worried about the legal ramifications of pain neuroimaging that she recently chaired an I.A.S.P. task force to consider the subject. Researchers who have spent their careers investigating the ways that pain is altered by mood, context, and suggestion are naturally skeptical of the idea that personal testimony can be proved or disproved by making someone spend an hour lying horizontal and immobile in a rigidly controlled, socially isolated, loud, boring, and claustrophobic environment. Although fMRI is often taken to be a transparent window into brain function, Davis told me that it would be more accurate to think of it as a low-resolution, somewhat out-of-synch set of stills from a black-and-white movie. While electrical impulses that travel along neurons last only about a millisecond, blood, which fMRI measures as a proxy, arrives on the scene slightly after the fact, and dissipates slowly.

Most brain imaging has been carried out in 3-Tesla MRI scanners, which cannot resolve detail below a scale of two millimetres. Neurons are so tiny that a cube of brain tissue that size will contain tens of thousands of them. Even the 7-Tesla that scanned my brain had only a maximum resolution of one millimetre. Tracey cautions against overestimating how much "blob maps" can explain. "Underneath that blob there's an awful lot of nuance, and there's an awful lot of anatomy," she said. To help validate her findings, she often combines magnetic imaging with other techniques, such as measurements of electrical activity using an EEG.

Relatively few people have had their brains scanned while being hurt, and an algorithm like Wager's, which has correctly predicted pain in the brains of a small cohort of healthy volunteers, cannot be reliably extrapolated to apply to the population as a whole. But Greely believes that overcoming this deficiency is simply a matter of doing more studies. He predicts that, once researchers have collected enough data and developed standardized protocols, neuroimaging will follow in the path of forensic DNA-a scientific breakthrough whose results were eventually considered robust enough to use as evidence in court. Our trust in DNA evidence is increasingly seen as problematic, but Greely is unperturbed. "No evidence is perfect," he said. "The stuff courts rely on most-eyewitness testimony-is known to be awful, but we use it anyway."

When I asked Tracey whether she thought her work could eventually rid the world of pain, she snorted in a polite attempt not to laugh. Most pain, she explained, is "the good kind." Hurting yourself when you touch a hot surface is unpleasant, certainly, but it's also crucial. While in Oxford, I met one of her frequent collaborators, the neurobiologist David Bennett, whose research involves patients who, because of rare genetic mutations, cannot feel pain. "You might wonder, Why are humans born with this system where they have to feel pain?" Bennett said. "And these patients give you the answer to that very quickly, because not feeling pain is a health disaster." Often, he told me, such people die young. Historically, they frequently became circus freaks: the earliest clinically documented example was a Czech immigrant to the United States, whose case was described by a Dr. Dearborn in the Bronx, in 1932. According to Dearborn, the patient earned a living on the vaudeville circuit as Edward H. Gibson, the Human Pincushion, inviting audience members to come up onstage and push pins into him.

Bennett said that patients of his have chewed off the tips of their own tongues and scratched their corneas. They suffer hearing loss from untreated ear infections, unwittingly rest their hands on hot surfaces, and walk on broken legs, which leaves their limbs deformed. In an evolutionary context, Bennett explained, it makes sense that we are built in anticipation of pain: we are soft, and the world is a dangerous place. Undergoing an extremely unpleasant response to harm helps us avoid further injury in the moment and teaches us to reduce its likelihood in the future.

But there's a "bad kind" of pain, too-one that is not the result of any obvious external source. Chronic pain is often defined, somewhat misleadingly, as "pain that extends beyond the expected period of healing." In reality, once you've "gone chronic," as Tracey puts it, pain is the disease, rather than a symptom. That view represents a shift in understanding, brought about in part by her work. Until recently, chronic pain was thought of merely as prolonged "normal" pain. But neuroimaging has shown that, if a chronic-pain sufferer and an unafflicted person are given the same burn or pinprick, their brains manifest activity differently. Chronic pain, Tracey said, is now understood as "something new, with a life of its own, with its own biology and its own mechanisms, most of which we really don't understand at all."

Until a couple of years ago, Tracey, like most researchers in the field, focussed on the good kind of pain; this was crucial to understanding the basic neurobiology involved. Yet the true problem is chronic pain. Estimates suggest that somewhere between ten and thirty per cent of the American population suffers from chronic pain. Its cost to society is some six hundred and thirty-five billion dollars each year-more than that of cancer and heart disease combined. And behind such statistics is the heavy psychic and emotional toll on those who spend every conscious moment suffering. A journalist who was given a diagnosis of fibromyalgia twenty years ago told me that his entire identity is subsumed by his experience of incessant, whole-body agony: "It's who I am now. I'm broken. I need to be fixed, but I can't be fixed."

Tracey's latest research has investigated a key neural mechanism of chronic pain. It is situated in the brain stem, a hard-to-reach, tube-shaped mass of gray matter at the top of the spinal cord, which functions as the conduit for communication between the brain and the body. Experiments on animals had identified two mechanisms within the brain stem that, respectively, muffle and boost pain signals before they reach the rest of the brain. Since Tracey's lab first succeeded in imaging the region, more than a decade ago, she has been able to show how these two mechanisms operate. "It can completely block the signals coming in," she said of one, explaining that it is responsible for situations in which you don't feel pain even though you should-for instance, when your brain is distracted by the euphoria of crossing the finish line of a marathon. Unfortunately, in some people the mechanism that exacerbates pain is dominant. Scanning the brains of patients with diabetic nerve pain, Tracey and Segerdahl found enhanced communication from the brain stem, via the spine, to the parts of the brain known to contribute to the sensation of pain.

Tracey told me that it seems we may all be predisposed by our brain stems to feel pain more acutely or less, but that in chronic-pain patients it's as if the volume knob of pain were turned all the way up and jammed there permanently. No one knows why this hypersensitization occurs. Studies of twins suggest that our pain response is, in part, heritable, but there are close correlations between chronic pain and many other factors-gender, age, stress, poverty, and depression. Tracey has begun to study whether recurrent experiences of acute bodily distress early in life trigger brain-stem changes that make chronic pain likelier later on. With colleagues in Oxford, she is involved in a longitudinal study of extremely premature babies and another of teen-age girls who suffer particularly painful periods.

Although the results of this work won't be known for many years, her brain-stem research is already on its way to a clinical application. A few years ago, in collaboration with the rheumatologist Anushka Soni, Tracey began imaging the brains of osteoarthritis patients before and after knee-replacement surgery. Roughly a fifth of patients who have knee replacements find that the operation doesn't meaningfully reduce their pain, and, again, no one knows why. But when Tracey analyzed the scans she found that the unlucky patients had increased activity in the mechanism of the brain stem known to amplify pain signals. Their brains revealed that they had "gone chronic"; they were not just ordinary people whose knees hurt.

Although it's not feasible to give every prospective patient a brain scan, results from fMRI experiments correlate strongly with responses to a questionnaire called pain DETECT, which was developed to diagnose nerve malfunction. Such a questionnaire could predict the likely outcome of surgery, so that patients could make an informed decision about whether the procedure was worth it. Tracey is also testing, on a group of twenty-four volunteers, a compound that she hopes could dampen activity in the problematic brain-stem region. In time, patients who seem predisposed to less successful surgical outcomes may be given a drug that makes relief likelier by adjusting their brain-stem biochemistry.

Drug development could be the most influential result of Tracey's work. Pain medications have become something of a pharmacological graveyard, she told me; their development is often abandoned after patients report no improvement. "But their pain rating might still be up for all these other reasons-they're anxious, they're depressed, they're expecting to be in pain," Tracey said. "We've thrown out drugs that probably had high efficacy because we had the wrong measure-we relied on the subjective rating." She believes that drug tests will become much more reliable once their efficacy can be measured against an objective target. She is part of an academic consortium that has received a large grant from Europe's Innovative Medicines Initiative to help establish a set of measurable biological signs that can be used to ascertain whether new drugs are effective at disarming known pain mechanisms, regardless of whether the person taking them experiences any relief. Ultimately, she expects that various combinations of therapies will need to be delivered, in order to quiet the particular neural systems responsible for each individual's unique experience of suffering.

A few weeks after my ordeal in the MRI machine, Andrew Segerdahl e-mailed me the resulting images. I looked for the brain regions I'd been told were important, but all I could see was a brain on fire. Everything was orange, particularly in the left hemisphere. (The pain was being inflicted on my right leg.)

Over the phone, Segerdahl talked me through my scans. "That map is actually really difficult to make sense of," he said. "Your brain is really, really, really lit up-there's just a lot going on." But then he showed me a sequence of images that had been processed in such a way that the color coding appeared only in regions that had elevated blood flow while I endured the prolonged pain of the capsaicin cream. The characteristic pattern of pain began to emerge, and Segerdahl recited the names of the active regions like old friends.

Then came a set of maps that showed my brain during the exquisite moment of relief when the cooling pack was applied. There were many regions with activity levels-the images looked almost as busy as the heat maps-but the blobs were subtly different in shape and location. In my brain, pain was shading into pleasure, and, curiously, many of the same regions were involved, activated in a slightly different pattern. "There's quite a lot still to be understood in terms of the relief side of this equation," Segerdahl said. He hesitated. "It's, like, I'm super interested in it, but I almost don't want to touch it yet, because it's the ultimate goal."

Tracey has been looking at pleasure for almost as long as she's been studying pain. "They are two sides of the same coin," she told me. Many signs of their interrelation crop up in her work. Chronic-pain patients typically also suffer from anhedonia-the inability to experience pleasure-and research suggests that their brains' reward systems are wired slightly differently from those in other brains. Pain is naturally a more urgent research priority, given that most of us find it intolerable, but fully understanding it will require a better understanding of its opposite. "There's a Jeremy Bentham quote I like," Tracey said. " 'Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.' These are the two things that drive us, as animals, to do what we do." ♦

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Nicola Twilley on how brain imaging is illuminating the neural patterns behind pain's infinite variety.

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The Human Pincushion: The Story Of #EdwardGibson

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Imagine a life without pain. Sprained ankles and broken bones would be no big deal. Perhaps you'd take up gymnastics or dare-devilish sports like parkour. Or maybe you'd book that overdue dental appointment.

For most of us, visualising a life free from headaches, and the agony of stubbed toes is tricky. Not only is pain a lifelong fixture (would childhood have been the same without scraped knees and slow-motion falls from the monkey bars?), but it also serves a vital purpose: it protects us from harm. Pain tells us when to pull back or seek help. Pain comes part and parcel with being alive.

But there are people who don't experience this sensation. There are people who don't feel pain.

Gene Mutations and Pain Tolerance

Take Edward H. Gibson for instance, a vaudeville performer fondly known as ' The Human Pincushion '. He was one of the first well-documented cases of people who appear to feel no pain. In 1932, The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease recorded his pain-defying stunts involving sterilized pins, needles and spikes.

As part of his act, Gibson invited audience members to skewer him with sharpened and gleaming pins and swords "anywhere but the abdomen and groin", regularly being run right through. Ladies shrieked and fainted, men turned green, while Edward Gibson remained upright and smiling like nothing had happened. Physicians confirmed that these performances were real, and Gibson was indeed a pain-free man (besides once having a headache, he recalled).

Though remarkable, The Human Pincushion is not a total oddity.

Researchers discovered a 10-year-old boy in Lahore, Pakistan, who entertained crowds by plunging knives into his arm and walking casually across red-hot coals. A whole family of Italians , the Marsili Family, have been studied for their superhuman ability to break bones, shatter shoulders, meet with bodily trauma - and dust themselves off and keep skiing. There are countless examples throughout history of people who appear to be free from the limiting presence of pain.

Pain Free and Danger Full

But before we envy these real-life Marvel characters, pause to consider that many die young - unable to respond to feedback about what's dangerous and threatening to their bodies and pushing on despite mortal wounds.

In a less extreme scenario, those who ignore twinges, niggles and aches, who continue to run on complaining knees or brush off that shooting pain in their neck, are likely to make matters worse. Even though it's tempting to shout, "No pain, no gain!" and stick valiantly to your exercise regime, we advise our members to take pain seriously. What you gain by ignoring it is vastly outweighed by the risks of wearing out joints beyond repair, or suffering a chronic injury. Pain is there for a reason. Are you listening?

People like The Human Pincushion - now understood to possess gene mutations that switch off pain signalling - can help us better appreciate the role of pain in our lives, and how to find the sweet spot between agony and grateful acknowledgement. How to respect the message of pain without being ruled by it .

Making Pain Your Acquaintance

"We cannot learn without pain." - Aristotle

For 3.37 millions Aussies living with chronic pain, a break - even just for one day - could be life changing. That's why individual approaches to pain management matter, taking into account the whole individual; present experiences, personal attributes and unique aspirations.

Reclaiming pain as a short-lived indicator of something that needs your attention rather than a defining feature of reality, is what safe, holistic therapies like chiropractic are all about. After all, a life free from pain might get you a starring role in the travelling circus, but it won't open up that all-important conversation between mind and body that can lead to true and lasting wellness.

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Why you shouldn't aim for a pain-free existence

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A rare percentage of people can't feel pain. Surprisingly, this gene mutation doesn't help them live longer or healthier lives -- far from it.

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Movie #TheSquare, tension raw energy and the closed art world

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How the most tense, uncomfortable scene of the year was achieved

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Motion capture performer Terry Notary harnessed his CGI ape skills to destroy a room full of stuffy art benefactors

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A site of #AsafWeisman, a #physiotherapist with two decades of clinical experience in orthopedic/musculoskeletal rehabilitation. His studies revolve around #Pain, #ChronicPain, and spinal health. Fascination with pain. His research interests include pain, chronic pain, spinal biomechanics and morphometry, and the philosophy of science

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About #pain and #boredom

A research of Psychologist #TimothyWilson (University of Virginia). He put test subjects in a room and administered an electric shock to them. All participants stated that they were willing to pay so as not to receive a second shock. But when the experimenter left the room and let a few minutes pass… Many candidates gave themselves another shock out of boredom. Apparently, we would rather experience something unpleasant than nothing at all.

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People would rather be electrically shocked than left alone with their thoughts

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Human mind may be wired to find inner reflection unbearable

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#Onfray #Hedonism, #pleasure, ethics #Pain

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ESSAY: The Will to Pleasure: Hedonism, Ethics, and Aesthetics from the Ancient World to the Present Age
by Eryn Holbrook

*

When Christianity and Marxism end their shared reign, we will need visions of new possibilities. There is always one fixed point: the body. Not a body of Platonic ideas, nor a body cut in two, carved out, mutilated, and dualistic, but a body of postmodern science: flesh that is living, amazing, meaningful, rich in potential, bearing forces still unknown, and worked on by still unharnessed powers. - from Michel Onfray, A Hedonist Manifesto

*

Hedonists like Michel Onfray argue that the pursuit of pleasure is the highest good and that all human action should aim towards living a more pleasant life. A study of our attitudes towards pleasure will reveal a long-standing struggle between the soul and the body that parallels a philosophical conflict between formal and material reality. This fight for ideological dominance started in the ancient world and continues to this day. Attitudes towards pleasure have shifted dramatically over the centuries, partly as a result of changes in how we perceive our bodies and value (or reject) our instinctual desires. Tracing this shift can be tricky as the definition of what constitutes 'pleasure' has changed from a state of sensory enjoyment located in the body, to little more than the absence of pain, to a distinction between 'lower-' and 'higher-order' experiences. Understanding the nature of this transition can help us re-evaluate our current attitudes towards pleasure, sensuality, and passion.

The specifics of our modern attitudes to hedonism can be illuminated by an examination of hedonism's historical roots, the classical and Christian arguments for and against it, and the introduction of Utilitarianism and Aestheticism in the 19 th century. Classical and early Christian objections to the hedonist's definition of pleasure as 'the good' can be found in the works of Plato and Boethius. Using the character of Callicles from Plato's Gorgias as a guide, I will examine how different attitudes to pleasure stack up against Callicles' hedonistic imperative - that it is better to have "as much flowing in [of pleasure] as possible" than to cut oneself off from the flow of pleasure in order to live temperately (or ascetically) "like a stone" (Plato, p. 83).

In order to fully appreciate Callicles' arguments for pleasure's supremacy, it is necessary to survey the doctrines held by two of the most influential ancient hedonist schools: the Cyrenaics and the Epicureans. In the 4th century BCE, a school of philosophy was formed in the city of Cyrene on the coast of present-day Libya. The Cyrenaics, as they came to be known, promoted a way of life that was devoted to the pursuit and sustainment of sensual pleasure. They advocated for living in the present moment and were generally indifferent to the source or consequences of the pleasure experience. What mattered to the Cyrenaics was the experience itself, not its cause. The 3 rd century biographer Diogenes Laertius devotes a chapter to the Cyrenaics in his Lives of Eminent Philosophers. He outlines one of the primary doctrines of Cyrenaic philosophy, namely that pleasure is the highest good and is critical to achieving the good life: "And they consider that particular pleasure is desirable for its own sake; but that happiness is desirable not for its own sake, but for that of the particular pleasure" (Diogenes, p. 89).

In his 2015 book, The Birth of Hedonism: The Cyrenaic Philosophers and Pleasure as a Way of Life, Kurt Lampe presents a history of the Cyrenaics from their founder, Aristippus, to the innovative Theodorus 'The Godless'. As Lampe explains, "[t]he Cyrenaics reflectively affirm their intuitive attraction to pleasure and commit themselves to working through this decision's life-shaping consequences" (Lampe, p. 1). While the Cyrenaics and Epicureans were compatible in their belief in materialism over idealism, they differed in a number of ways. The Cyrenaics' approach to hedonism was, according to Lampe, more radical, egoistic, and solipsistic than their ideological successors, the Epicureans. Whereas the early Cyrenaics accepted pleasure in all its forms - be it licentious sexual indulgence or intoxication - Epicureans held that the pleasant life required restraint and sobriety. Quoting from Epicurus' letter to Menaeceus, Diogenes writes:

When, therefore, we say that pleasure is a chief good, we are not speaking of the pleasures of the debauched man, or those which lie in sensual enjoyment, as some think who are ignorant, and who do not entertain our opinions, or else interpret them perversely; but we mean the freedom of the body from pain, and of the soul from confusion (Diogenes, p. 471).

Given this sharp contrast between the two dominant ancient schools, it is clear that a single definition of hedonism will not suffice. The Cyrenaics were primarily concerned with sensual enjoyment and pleasures of the body. Plato's initial characterization of Callicles, as we will see, is more closely aligned with the Cyrenaic hedonists than the Epicureans.

In addition to upholding pleasure as the highest good, two additional doctrines serve as the foundation for Cyrenaic hedonism: sceptical indifference and presentism. With regards to scepticism, Cyrenaics state that it is impossible for us to know anything about the external world with any degree of certainty. While we can know the qualities of our sense experiences, whatever is responsible for producing those sensations is inaccessible and, hence, of little importance to us. Lampe explains that the Cyrenaics "not only want to argue that we are less certain about the external world than about our own experiences, they want to argue that we cannot know external reality at all" (Lampe, p. 39). This is an important point to consider when evaluating Cyrenaic morality. If the only thing I can be certain of is the pleasure or pain I feel myself, how can I be expected to know the quality (or veracity) of the pleasure (or pain) felt by others?

The Cyrenaic uses this argument to justify an indifference to both the source and consequences of each pleasure experience. Pleasure is always choice-worthy for its own sake, "even when, given the circumstances, it ought not to be chosen... In other words, its intrinsic ability to motivate choosing is a matter of its self-evident phenomenal character, which is not altered by prudential circumstances." (Lampe, p. 42) Cyrenaic indifference leads to a morally problematic, but logically consistent, outcome of this solipsistic form of hedonism. Given that I am unable to access anything beyond my own internal experience - including the feelings, motives, or experiences of others - the only thing that should matter is the experience itself. But if I am to remain indifferent to the source or consequences of my pleasure, how do I know if those pleasure-seeking activities are harmful or benign? The Cyrenaic would dismiss this question as irrelevant.

The final key doctrine of Cyrenaic philosophy is their privileging of the present moment. If your mind is fully occupied with the pleasure of the immediate experience, the Cyrenaic contends, concerns of yesterday and tomorrow can be extinguished. This perspective was held by Cyrenaicism's founder, Aristippus, and was practiced by his followers. Lampe calls this 'Aristippean presentism':

Aristippus very clearly says that he only cares about what is present; he does not care about what has already happened or what may happen in the future. Furthermore, he exhorts his listeners to adopt the same position (Lampe, p. 64).

Presentism allows the Cyrenaic to argue for the superiority of pleasure over all other possible experiences. While some may argue that pleasure is imperfect because it is fleeting, the hedonist will claim that the only thing that matters is the present moment. While in that moment, one should be occupied by feelings of pleasure rather than suffering. Both the Cyrenaics and Epicureans used this 'presentist' approach to address the pains of anxiety (worries about the future) and regret (concerns about the past). Epicurus, in his letter to Menaeceus, explains his position with the statement: "the future is not our own, I mean so that we can never altogether await it with a feeling of certainty that it will be, nor altogether despair of it as what will never be" (Diogenes, p. 470).

Both the Cyrenaics and the Epicureans agreed that pleasure is the greatest good. Plato and Boethius, on the other hand, object to equating the good with anything related to the body or earthly experience. For these philosophers, the good must be immaterial. It must transcend corporeal existence in order for it to fit with Plato's concept of the ideal Forms. This debate plays out in the dialogue between Socrates and Callicles in Plato's Gorgias. In this dialogue, Callicles takes a Cyrenaic-like stance on the subject of pleasure:

The truth, Socrates, which you profess to be in search of, is in fact this: luxury and excess and license, provided that they can obtain sufficient backing, are virtue and happiness; all the rest is mere pretense, man-made rules contrary to nature, worthless cant (Plato, p. 81)

Callicles calls on the laws of nature to prove his point. Anyone who claims that licentious indulgence is unlawful has become enslaved by the false, human-made laws of society rather than nature's law. Socrates objects to Calicles' choice to associate "luxury and excess and license" with true well-being and happiness. Socrates argues that pleasure cannot serve this role because the desire for pleasure is painful, and that pain and pleasure come to an end simultaneously when the desire is satiated: "When you speak of someone drinking when thirsty you imply the experience of enjoyment and pain together" (Plato, p. 87). He concludes that pleasure is inferior because "good is not identical with pleasure nor evil with pain. The one pair of contraries comes to an end together and the other does not, because they are different. How then can pleasure possibly be the same as good, or pain as evil?" (Plato, p. 89).

Socrates attempts to denounce Callicles' privileging of pleasure by illustrating the value of temperance metaphorically. Socrates describes two men, both of whom own several casks filled with wine, honey, and milk. The first man's casks are sound; the second man's casks are full of holes. Once the first man fills his casks, he "will not need to draw in any more or give himself any concern about it." (Plato, p. 82) The second man, however, has to continuously fill his casks as their contents will leak out at the same rate as they are filled. Socrates believes that this analogy reveals the attitude of temperance to be superior to licentiousness, but Callicles isn't convinced. "The man who has filled his casks no longer has any pleasure left," Callicles argues, "once his casks are filled he lives like a stone, with no more pleasure and pain. But the pleasure of life consists precisely in this, that there should be as much flowing in as possible." (Plato, p. 83). For Callicles, the continuous "flowing in" of pleasure is all that matters. To live in the present moment is to live in an eternally flowing pleasure-state. To halt the flow is to live ascetically "like a stone," something a hedonist would abhor. Like Aristippus, Callicles holds that pleasure is not only the most desirable choice, it is equivalent to the greatest good.

Plato's Gorgias attempts to expose the hedonists' position to be unfounded and easily dismissible. Over the course of the dialogue, Socrates persuades Callicles to drop his original position - that all pleasures are equally good - and to accept that there are both good and bad pleasures. "What you are now saying, apparently" Socrates states, "is that some pleasures are good and some bad. Is that right?" (Plato, p. 92) Callicles reluctantly accedes this point and abandons his strict Cyrenaic position. This dialogue reveals that both Callicles' position on pleasure and the Cyrenaics' dedication to hedonistic materialism are incompatible with Plato's Idealism. As Lampe points out, Plato was no stranger to Aristippus; they were both students of Socrates: "We do not know when and why Aristippus first left Cyrene for mainland Greece, but it is clear that he became one of Socrates' well-known associates" (Lampe, p. 16). In fact, Plato may have intended Callicles to serve as a stand-in for Aristippus himself. There may have been a rivalry between the two disciples: "all we can say with any degree of confidence is that he got along well with Aeschines and poorly with Xeonophon and Plato" (Lampe, p. 16). In a time when several philosophical schools were competing for dominance, it is not inconceivable that Plato would have had a strong motivation to discredit Aristippean hedonism. What is revealed in a text like Plato's Gorgias is the fact that, in the ancient world, there were many competing interpretations of what constitutes the greatest 'good'. Which activities contribute to living a 'good life' and allow to achieve perfect happiness were still up for debate.

This quest for a definition of the greatest good occupied philosophers and theologians long after Plato's time. For example, Plato's influence can be readily detected in the works of 6 th century Christian philosopher, Boethius. In Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius' narrator - in a moment of spiritual crisis spurred by his seemingly senseless imprisonment - enters into a dialogue with an ethereal manifestation of philosophy called 'Lady Philosophy' in the P.G. Walsh translation. Responding to the prisoner's complaints about his current situation, Lady Philosophy counsels him not to dwell on what he has lost because all earthly possessions are impermanent and, therefore, not worthy of lament. Instead, she insists that the prisoner should focus his efforts on attaining happiness, which is the one and only path to achieving perfection. This divine happiness serves as the 'greatest good' because it is completely self-sufficient; nothing more can possibly be added to it to make it greater than it is:

This is the good which once attained ensures that no one can aspire to anything further. Indeed, it is the highest of all goods, and gathers all goods within itself. If any good were lacking to it, it could not be the highest good, since some desirable thing would be left outside it. Thus it is clear that happiness is the state of perfection achieved by the concentration of all goods within it (Boethius, p. 41).

Any object or state of being that claims to be perfect must be lacking in nothing. For Boethius, the hedonist's pleasure state does not qualify because the experience is fleeting and can always be improved upon. Lady Philosophy commands the prisoner to accept his state and abandon the "ephemeral happiness" that was previously bestowed on him by fickle fortune (Boethius 20). By rejecting earth-bound pleasures such as wealth, fame, and honour, she assures him that he will be free from suffering:

If on the other hand the mind is happily self-aware, is loosed from its earthly prison, and in freedom makes for heaven, it surely scorns all earthly business, and in the enjoyment of heaven rejoices at having been removed from things of earth (Boethius, p. 36).

It is not surprising that Boethius would reject the comforts of a hedonistic way of life given his lack of access to anything physically pleasurable during the Consolation's composition. As Lady Philosophy points out, the pursuit of bodily pleasures is, in her estimation, so worthless that it is hardly worth mentioning:

Need I speak of bodily pleasures, when the pursuit of them is full of anxiety, and over-indulgence in them brings remorse? How grievous are the illnesses, and how hard to bear the pains which they frequently inflict on the body as reward, so to say, for the wickedness of those who enjoy them! I boast no knowledge of the delight which their impact brings, but whoever is willing to recall his low inclinations will know that the outcome of pleasure is melancholy (Boethius, pp. 50-51).

A belief that the pursuit of bodily pleasures will lead to anxiety, melancholy, and remorse, anticipates the Christian doctrine that pleasures derived from bodily experiences (e.g., food and sex) are cardinal sins (e.g., gluttony and lust) and must be avoided. Once a contender for the greatest good in the ancient world, bodily pleasures were transformed into the vilest sins. This revaluation of pleasure as 'evil' serves as an example of what Nietzsche calls the triumph of 'slave morality' in On the Genealogy of Morals:

The "masters" have been done away with, and with them their aristocratic morality has vanished; the morality of the low classes has triumphed... everything is obviously becoming Judaized, or Christianized, or vulgarized (what do the words matter?) (Nietzsche, p. 24).

The hedonist's privileging of the corporeal body over the incorporeal spirit is incompatible with Boethius' Christian values, just as it was shown to be antithetical to Plato's transcendental idealism. For Nietzsche, this denial of the body intensifies with Christianity's rise and manifests as an extreme, life-denying ideology that manifests as religious asceticism: "...hatred of anything human, animal or material; abhorrence of the senses, of reason itself; fear of happiness and beauty; the desire to escape from all illusion, change, growth, death, wishing, even from desiring itself... a wish for oblivion, an aversion to life, a repudiation of everything vital to existence..." (Nietzsche, p. 145). Ideologically, asceticism stands in direct opposition to hedonism. Using Socrates' analogy of the casks, the ascetic has not only stopped the flow of pleasure but has upended the vessel and emptied it of its contents.

An echo of Nietzsche's critique of asceticism can be found in the works of 19 th century philosopher John Stuart Mill. In his 1863 treatise, Utilitarianism, Mill criticizes the martyr who sacrifices his happiness in the name of idealism: "...but he who does it, or professes to do it, for any other purpose, is no more deserving of admiration than the ascetic mounted on his pillar. He may be an inspiriting proof of what men can do, but assuredly not an example of what they should " (Mill, p. 23). Mill builds on a familiar hedonist doctrine in his belief that "the ultimate end... is an existence exempt as far as possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments, both in point of quantity and quality" (Mill, p. 17). Mill claims that the concept of utility, as defined by philosophers like Epicurus and Bentham, is "pleasure itself, together with the exemption of pain" (Mill, p. 8). He recognizes that there are many who reject the core tenets of hedonism on moral grounds. Mill believes these objections are unfounded because both Utilitarianism and hedonism aim to reduce suffering and bring happiness and pleasure to the greatest number of people. They provide a similar moral framework to guide human actions. Unlike the Cyrenaics, however, Mill believes that we can both understand and measure how our pleasure-seeking activities impact others, and that we should consider the consequences before acting on our desires:

I must again repeat, what the assailants of utilitarianism seldom have the justice to acknowledge, that the happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent's own happiness, but that of all concerned (Mill, p. 24).

Mill further attempts to placate his objectors by categorizing particular pleasures as 'higher' or 'lower' - the higher-order pleasures being more virtuous and choice-worthy than the lower:

The comparison of the Epicurean life to that of beasts is felt as degrading, precisely because a beast's pleasures do not satisfy a human being's conceptions of happiness. Human beings have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, and when once made conscious of them, do not regard anything as happiness which does not include their gratification (Mill, p. 11).

For Mill, pleasures that reside primarily in the mind, and require engagement with the intellect, should be exalted; pleasures of the body should be devalued. He claims that anyone who is 'cultured' enough to appreciate higher-order pleasures would choose them over pleasures of the body:

Now it is an unquestionable fact that those who are equally acquainted with, and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying, both, do give a most marked preference to the manner of existence which employs their higher faculties (Mill, p. 12).

In contrast to Mill's Epicurean-influenced Utilitarianism, the Cyrenaics held bodily pleasures in high esteem. While generally indifferent to the source of a given pleasure, the Cyrenaics acknowledged that bodily pleasures are, on the whole, more pleasurable than those situated in the mind. As Lampe explains, for the Cyrenaics "only bodily pleasure and pain are the ends... bodily pleasure and pain are more completely good or bad than their mental analogues" (Lampe, p. 55). Given this, the Cyrenaics would certainly take issue with Mill's famous proverb, "[i]t is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied" (Mill p. 14).

The aesthetic appreciation of beauty - one of Mill's higher-order pleasures - became a common theme in visual art, music, poetry, and prose in the 19 th century. The aesthetic experience begins at the senses but requires engagement with the mind's faculties. Examples of this abound in the works of the century's most celebrated artists and writers. Feelings of sensuality are vividly evoked by works of the Pre-Raphaelite painters.

The tension wrought by delighting in - and ultimately being consumed by - sensual excess is artfully illustrated in Christina Rossetti's poem "Goblin Market". Similarly, Baudelaire wrestled with pleasure's duplicitous nature (and its inseparable partner, pain) in poems like "The Mask" and "Meditation".

Perhaps the most explicit celebration of 19 th century aesthetic hedonism can be found in the works of Walter Pater. He identifies the rebirth of hedonistic values in the Middle Ages in his 1853 book, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry:

One of the strongest characteristics of that outbreak of the reason and the imagination, of that assertion of the liberty of the heart, in the middle age, which I have termed a medieval Renaissance, was its antinomianism, its spirit of rebellion and revolt against the moral and religious ideas of the time. In their search after the pleasures of the senses and the imagination, in the care for beauty, in their worship of the body, people were impelled [sic] beyond the bounds of the Christian ideal and their love became sometimes a strange idolatry, a strange rival religion (Pater, pp. 19-20).

Pater recognized that the desire for sensual pleasure - what he refers to as a "rival religion" - was never fully quelled by the rise of Christian asceticism. Echoing the Cyrenaics, Pater declares, "[n]ot the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end... to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life" (p. 197). Lampe notes the profound influence ancient hedonism had on Pater's writing:

[For Pater] the study of literature, art, and philosophy all pertain not only to transforming individual lives, but also to lifting Victorian culture out of what he saw as a spider's web of conflicting impulses. It was for these purposes that he, like many of his contemporaries, reassessed the educational value of the works of Greco-Roman antiquity, medieval Europe, and the Renaissance (Lampe, p. 169).

Elevating aesthetic pleasure to a faculty of the intellect - and distancing it from the body - helped to defend it from puritanical censure. The aesthete acknowledges that beauty enters through the senses but quietly jettisons that experience out of the body and into the mind, where it can be sheltered from moral judgment. Mill redeems pleasure's reputation by narrowing the definition of 'good' pleasures to include only those that are of a higher order and do not cause harm to others; Pater elevates pleasure so that it becomes nothing short of sublime. In so doing, they provide a counter-argument for Socrates' insistence that some pleasures are 'good' while others are 'bad'. Higher-order pleasures are always good and, therefore, always choice-worthy. They should be the ultimate pursuit and aim for all human actions.

In the centuries following Mill, pleasure became a popular topic for psychological study. In How Pleasure Works, psychologist Paul Bloom argues that the pleasure we derive from experiencing a work of art is a result of the object's non-corporeal 'essence' rather than any particular sensation experienced in the body. "Much of the pleasure we get from art is rooted in an appreciation of the human history underlying its creation. This is its essence" (p. 122).

Bloom goes on to describe how, for humans, these higher-order mental pleasures are stimulating because they connect us with our history and culture; to appreciate them fully requires engagement with our mind. "For something such as a hunk of meat the essence is material," he explains, "[but] for a human artifact such as a painting, the essence is the inferred performance underlying its creation" (Bloom, p. 138). Whereas the desire to satiate hunger is basic and universal, the ability to derive pleasure from the 'essence' of a cultural artifact must be learned. Bloom's characterization of the experience's 'essence' suggests an allegiance with Plato's theory of Forms. A purely mental pleasure experience brings us closer to Plato's transcendent realm and further from our corporeal bodies.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud refers to a similar dichotomy between mind and body when he describes the difference between the vivid satisfaction of our 'wild' as opposed to our 'tame' instincts. Like the Cyrenaics, he recognizes the superior intensity of satiating an untamed desire: "The feeling of happiness derived from a satisfaction of wild instinctual impulse untamed by the ego is incomparably more intense than that derived from sating an instinct that has been tamed" (Freud, p. 26). He cautions that directly indulging in the satisfaction of these wild desires "means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own punishment" (Freud, p. 24). Freud warns of the psychological repercussions caused by the eternal "flowing in" of pleasure championed by Callicles. Is the "punishment" he refers to an unavoidable consequence of the pleasure experience itself, or does it result from societal restrictions that form the foundation of our civilization? In A Hedonist Manifesto, Onfray acknowledges that a fear of punishment seems to be linked with pleasure. "Pleasure scares people," he explains:

They are scared of the word and the actions, reality, and discourses around it. It either scares people or makes them hysterical. There are too many private and personal issues, too many alienating, intimate, painful, wretched, and miserable details. There are secret and hidden deficiencies. There are too many things in the way of just being, living, and enjoying. Hence, people reject the word. They produce spiteful critique that is aggressive and in bad faith or that is simply evasive. Disrespect, discredit, contempt, and disdain are all means for avoiding the subject of pleasure (Onfray, p. 83).

Why does the mere mention of pleasure evoke such paroxysms? This attitude is common but by no means universal. The ancient Cyrenaics were seemingly immune to such hysteria, while Boethius describes the experience of bodily pleasures as "full of anxiety" and a cause for remorse. For the Epicureans, the act of conflating pleasure with anxiety is counterintuitive - they used the pursuit of pleasure as a method for diffusing fear, anxiety, and suffering that seemed to plague much of human existence. In a strange twist, the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure is charged with producing anxiety rather than resolving it. Where did this idea of punishment for pleasure originate? Onfray points to a host of suspects: "dualism, the immaterial soul, reincarnation, the denigration of the material body, antipathy for life, and the ascetic ideal" are at the top of his philosophical hit list (p. 64). Like Nietzsche, Onfray insists that we must abandon our commitment to these ideas because they inevitably lead to suffering. Like Callicles, he asks us to choose pleasure over pain. Like Mill, he insists that following the hedonist path will lead to an Epicurean-like "serenity" and "tranquility":

We should always have more pleasure than pain. In all hedonist ethics, suffering - the suffering that we undergo and that is inflicted upon us - is the absolute evil. Consequently, absolute good corresponds to pleasure, defined as the absence of troubles, a serenity that's acquired, conquered, and maintained, a tranquility of soul and spirit (Onfray, pp. 104-5).

In order to set the groundwork for an ethical hedonism, it is necessary to confront the most common objections. These include worries about privation - by indulging in a pleasure I run the risk of depriving someone else of their own pleasure experience, or even causing suffering. Objectification is another concern of the anti-hedonist - the pleasure I derive from others may require me to treat them as a means rather than an end. Echoing Mill, Onfray declares that "pleasure is never justified if the pain of another must pay for it" (p. 106). Bloom is equally unequivocal in his assessment:

There is plenty of room to be judgmental. The issue isn't true or false, rational or irrational. It is right and wrong. Some pleasures are immoral ones. Some of them lead to human suffering (p. 209).

When Socrates leads Callicles to admit that some pleasures are good, while others are bad, he is offering his interlocutor a chance to refine his position: pleasure is always choice-worthy so long as it doesn't cause pain or suffering in another person. Therefore, there are no 'bad' pleasures, just bad consequences.

Setting aside the fact that achieving a truly ethical - let alone sustainable - state of pleasure may be impractical, the question of whether this state is even desirable must also be addressed. Libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick argues that, given the option to live a life of unlimited 'virtual' pleasure in exchange for your current life, we would choose to remain with the status quo. He attempts to prove this theory in his 1974 book, Anarchy, State and Utopia. Nozick invites his readers to participate in a thought experiment: "[s]uppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired," he muses. Any joy, any dream, any pleasure would be yours. By connecting your brain to this device, you can become whomever you want, and lead any life you can imagine, so long as you are willing to 'plug in' to the machine and leave your current life behind. "All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain," he explains - "[w]ould you plug in?" (Nozick, pp. 42-43).

In a brief analysis of possible common objections, Nozick's concludes that, given the choice, we would not 'plug in', thus proving that humans are not hedonists. He gives three reasons for our choice to reject the hedonist option: 1. as human beings, we want to do certain things; 2. we want to be a certain way; 3. We want to be connected to what's " real" (Nozick, p. 43). Nozick's argument brings to light a key objection to hedonism: specifically, that living a life of pure pleasure is somehow inauthentic or counter to humanity's telos. For example, imagine if you were to modify Nozick's 'Experience Machine' hypothesis so that it always produces the most profound, heightened, and sustained pleasure possible. Not only are you able to live the life you want, but the life you are given is guaranteed to be devoid of suffering. In fact, it will offer something even better - that elusive, mythical, eternal pleasure-state. " What else can matter to us," Nozick asks, " other than how our lives feel from the inside? "

Nozick set up this thought experiment in order to disprove the utilitarian-hedonist proposition that we can determine the choice-worthiness of an action based on the quantity of pleasure it produces - i.e., the best action is that which produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number, and that happiness is pleasure's direct correlate. For Nozick, our decision not to 'plug in' proves that the fulfillment of dreams and the attainment of pleasure do not outweigh our desire to remain embedded in our current life, no matter how painful or disappointing it is. "We learn that something matters to us in addition to experience," Nozick explains, "by imagining an experience machine and then realizing that we would not use it" (Nozick, p. 44).

Unlike previous anti-hedonist arguments, Nozick's response has little to do with traditional moral values. It is a primarily teleological argument. Your choice to enter the machine or not depends on what you believe to be the purpose of life - what gives it meaning. The choice you make is extremely personal and subjective; for this reason, it is a difficult argument to prove or refute. If your primary concern is leaving your loved ones behind, modifying the experiment may alleviate those concerns - envisioning an immersive virtual world that includes friends and family members, for instance. Or, to take another example, the advent of mood-enhancing drugs that allow the participant to remain in "this" world while experiencing a sustained pleasure-state addresses a reluctance to dive into the unknown. Nozick assumes that there is still plenty of meaning left to discover in this world and that a manufactured or pharmaceutically-induced alternate reality would cut us off from accessing that deeper meaning. He also acknowledges that we are uncertain about the implications of a drug-induced pleasure state which some view as a 'local' experience machine:

[P]lugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality, to a world no deeper or more important than that which people can construct. There is no actual contact with any deeper reality, though the experience of it can be simulated. Many persons desire to leave themselves open to such contact and to a plumbing of deeper significance. This clarifies the intensity of the conflict over psychoactive drugs, which some view as mere local experience machines, and others view as avenues to a deeper reality (Nozick, p. 44).

Given that there are a number of hypothetical pleasure-states that allow us to act freely and do not require us to exit the 'real' world, this leaves us with Nozick's final argument against hedonism - that we want to be a certain way:

Someone floating in a tank is an indeterminate blob. There is no answer to the question of what a person is like who has long been in the tank. Is he courageous, kind, intelligent, witty, loving? It's not merely that it's difficult to tell; there's no way he is. Plugging into the machine is a kind of suicide. It will seem to some, trapped by a picture, that nothing about what we are like can matter except as it gets reflected in our experiences. But should it be surprising that what we are is important to us? Why should we be concerned only with how our time is filled, but not with what we are? (Nozick, p. 43).

For Nozick, the act of surrendering yourself to experience constitutes the end of being; this being is what matters above experience. For this argument to work, we have to agree that being is superior to experience. Additionally, we have to accept that there is, in a fact, a difference between experience and being - that being is somehow a static, tangible state disconnected from the flux of experience. Nozick concludes that "[w]e learn that something matters to us in addition to experience by imagining an experience machine and then realizing that we would not use it" (Nozick, p. 44). For Nozick, this argument should dissuade us from believing that the hedonist's pleasure experience is the greatest good. Perhaps he is correct - we are not, at the present time, exclusively motivated by pleasure, so how can pleasure be considered the most desirable end for human activity? Notably, his thought experiment doesn't answer the question of whether or not we should aim towards pleasure; it simply suggests that we are often guided by other interests. The value of those interests is uncertain.

This brief survey of the classical origins of hedonism, its historical objectors, and contemporary champions, attempts to illustrate the nature and variety of arguments for and against pleasure as humanity's ultimate aim. These continuously shifting attitudes often correspond with how we perceive and value (or dismiss) our bodies. The influence of Plato's idealism on the rival Cyrenaic school may have been responsible for the Epicurean turn to establishing a revised definition of pleasure as the absence of suffering. In the 19 th century, Mill attempted to appease puritanical objectors by providing several moral caveats: both the impact to others and location of the pleasure act (mind vs. body) were of prime importance. Honouring Callicles' hedonistic imperative, contemporary philosophers like Michel Onfray continue to defend pleasure's status as the greatest 'good'. Those who sympathize with the hedonist position will confirm that Nozick's question, "[w]ould you plug in?" has yet to be answered.

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Eryn Holbrook is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in the Graduate Liberal Students program at Simon Fraser University where she also works as an IT manager. The GLS program has awakened in her an interest in classical mythology and German philosophy. She wrote "The Will to Pleasure" for Gary McCarron's Spring 2020 seminar, LS 801: Reflections on Reason and Passion II. A musician and songwriter, Eryn has been a member of Vancouver's independent music scene since the 1990s. She lives in East Vancouver with her partner, two sons, and a pair of backyard chickens named Bowie and Ozzy.

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The Ormsby Review. More Books. More Reviews. More Often.

Publisher and Editor: Richard Mackie

The Ormsby Review is a journal service for in-depth coverage of B.C. books and authors. The Advisory Board consists of Jean Barman, Robin Fisher, Cole Harris, Wade Davis, Hugh Johnston, Patricia Roy, David Stouck, and Graeme Wynn. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Provincial Government Patron since September 2018: Creative BC

"Only connect." - E.M. Forster

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Works Cited
Bloom, Paul. How Pleasure Works: The New Science of What We Like. Norton & Co.: New York, 2010.

Boethius. Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. P. G. Walsh. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Diogenes Laertius. The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. Trans. C.D. Yonge. J. Haddon & Son: London, 1853.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. Norton & Co.: New York, 1961.

Lampe, Kurt. The Birth of Hedonism: The Cyrenaic Philosophers and Pleasure as a Way of Life. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1864.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Michael A. Scarpitti. Penguin Group: Toronoto, 2013.

Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State and Utopia. Basic Books: New York, 1974.

Onfray, Michel. A Hedonist Manifesto: The Power to Exist. Trans. Joseph McClellan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

Plato, Gorgias. Trans. Walter Hamilton and Chris Emlyn-Jones. Toronto: Penguin Books, 2004.

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ESSAY: The Will to Pleasure: Hedonism, Ethics, and Aesthetics from the Ancient World to the Present Age by Eryn Holbrook * When Christianity and Marxism end their shared reign, we will need visions of new possibilities. There is always one fixed point: the body.

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#The #Palliative Society: #Pain Today

#Byung-Chul Han

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The Palliative Society: Pain Today: Byung-Chul Han, translated by Daniel Steuer, Polity Press, 2021, 76 pp, $59.95, hardback ISBN: 13-978-5095-4723-4

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The Palliative Society is one of many books by the philosopher and cultural critic Byung-Chul Han, whose other titles include The Burnout Society (2010/2015) and Capitalism and the Death Drive (2019/2021). Eleven brief chapters constitute the book, examining pain from various perspectives, including…

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#Zizek #Pain #DesertOfTheReal:

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How Does It Feel? Making Sense of #Pain

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Hans T Sternudd, PhD, is an Art Historian currently working as a Senior Lecturer in Art History and Visual Studies, at Linnæus University, in Växjö - Sweden. His doctoral dissertation addressed the work of the Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch, focusing on the question of performance and action art in general. He is presently working on a research project on visual representations of self-injury, supported by the Swedish Research Council. This is a Gender Studies project in a section of Global Political Science, in the Faculty of Culture and Society at Malmö University, in Sweden.

Angela Tumini is currently an Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Chapman University in California, presently undergoing the process of Tenure & Promotion to the rank of Associate Professor. She received a PhD in Italian Literature at the University of Oxford, England, and has published a book and several articles on Gabriele D'Annunzio, on Italian Literature, and on European Cinema. She has just completed a book entitled "An Unintentional Liaison: Lars von Trier and Italian Cinema and Culture" which is expected to come out in Spring 2011.

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"How Does It Feel? Making Sense of Pain" published on 01 Jan 2011 by Brill.

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#HermannNitsch, known for #Bloody and #Ritualistic #performances that often confronted #MoralTaboos

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The Art Newspaper - International art news and events

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Hermann Nitsch, the founding member of Viennese Actionism-a movement known for its violent, ritualistic performances that often confront moral taboos-died on 18 April at the age of 83. His death was confirmed to the Austrian press by his wife Rita Nitsch, who says the artist died following an unspecified "serious illness".

An exhibition of his work presented by Zuecca Projects and the Austrian collector Helmut Essl, titled Hermann Nitsch's 20th Painting Action, opened on Monday, the day of his death, in Venice concurrently with the 59th Venice Biennale. "To me Hermann Nitsch was one of world's greatest artists, and I am thankful for the profound impact his work has had on me and so many others," Essl says. "The fact that Hermann passed on the day that I show him my greatest appreciation with the opening of his 20th Painting Action during the Venice Biennale makes me [want to] do even more of what I've started in Venice right now-bring his art even closer to the world."

Nitsch was born 23 August 1938 in Vienna, just months after the country became occupied by Hitler's Nazi regime. "I had to greet peers with 'Heil Hitler' when I was in elementary school around 1943, and then two years later, the country was liberated," he told in 2010. "Between 1943-45 I experienced bombing raids every day as a child. My father was killed in Russia. The war turned me into a cosmopolite and opponent of all nationalisms and all politics while just a schoolboy," he wrote on his personal website.

His self-proclaimed lack of effort led to his expulsion from grammar school, though his capacity for drawing allowed him to study painting and design at the Higher Federal Institution for Graphic Education and Research in Vienna. He also had a strong interest in literature, theatre and classical music. In 1958 he took a job as a commercial artist at Vienna's technical museum, and it was in a studio given to him for this role that he began conceiving scores for what would become the Orgies Mysteries Theatre, an ongoing series of theatrical productions which continue today.

"I moved into a large studio there and was able to work a lot on the scores of the [Orgies Mysteries] Theatre," he wrote of this time. "I tried to write a primal drama lasting 6 days that condensed ancient tragedy, Shakespeare, Faust, Kleist and Wagner, and express a common denominator. Reading Freud and Jung, I wanted to integrate redemption myths, seen and interpreted from a depth psychology perspective. The primal drama used language. The actors were to speak their roles."

Hermann Nitsch, 20th painting action, 1987, Secession, Vienna. © Hermann Nitsch. Photo: Heinz Cibulka

These productions, central to Nitsch's oeuvre, were known to contain the likes of animal slaughter and the repurposing of blood, entrails and carcasses throughout, as well as loaded Christian iconography, sexual and sado-masochistic imagery, and other ritualistic motifs that aimed to push the senses to their most heightened states.

"With his Orgies Mysteries Theatre, Hermann Nitsch created a unique cosmos, a great cultural collage, superimposing religions and myths on top of one another and fusing all the arts, a true Gesamtkunstwerk that will stand the test of time," says Roman Grabner, a curator at the BRUSEUM-Neue Galerie Graz who served as a consultant on the new Venice exhibition.

Some iterations of these performances included as many as hundreds of performers at a time, in addition to audience participation. Nitsch presented over 100 Orgies Mysteries Theatre performances throughout his life.

"My work conveys every shade of emotion: love, anger, ecstasy and even pain. The history of art, after all, has always celebrated pain; think of Greek tragedies or the Passion of the Christ," he told in 2018. "Admittedly, this kind of intensity is difficult to describe in words. But I do not mistake this particular kind of intensity for shock. Shock is related to mass media. Intensity goes much further and deeper than shock. Intensity relates to catharsis; through catharsis, one reaches a more purified space of consciousness."

Such endeavours were, unsurprisingly, not without controversy. Nitsch was arrested multiple times for actions related to Orgies Mystery Theatre performances, and at one point he was expelled from Italy for disemboweling a sheep. In 1988, on his first visit to Australia, police seized video tapes from his exhibition of blood paintings at the seventh Biennale of Sydney. In 2015, the Museo Jumex in Mexico City canceled an exhibition of the artist's work. And as recently as 2017 there were large protests over a Nitsch show in Tasmania-though they didn't stop some 900 ticket-holding visitors from attending.

In 1960, the early performances led to the "action paintings"-paintings in which the material is splattered and sprayed across the canvas with an intensity that mimics the live productions. By 1963, Nitsch had stopped making these paintings, though he returned to them in the early 1980s and they remained a key part of his practice.

Installation view of Hermann Nitsch's 20th Painting Action in Venice Photo courtesy Zuecca Project Space

In 1971, Nitsch purchased the Prinzendorf Castle on the Zaya River in Lower Austria, where he lived, worked and staged performances for the rest of his life. In 1998 he conceived one of his largest-ever Orgies Mysteries Theatre productions at the castle: 6-Day-Play. The work contained roughly 500 performers and, as Nitsch wrote, "three orchestras, a chamber music group, a choral school, a large mixed choir, a kitchen, a carpent[er], a butcher, doctors and even lawyers were needed". As the title implies, the performance lasted six days. Pace Gallery, which began representing Nitsch earlier this year, announced that the work will be re-staged at Prinzendorf Castle this upcoming July.

"Today the world lost a pioneering artist who redefined performance and painting through his visceral and existential work, which will continue to live on and continue to inspire generations of artists to come," Marc Glimcher, Pace's president and chief executive, says. "His passing comes at a poignant time as we mark his achievement with an exhibition in Venice, that we hoped to celebrate with him."

There are museums dedicated to Nitsch's work in Mistelbach in northeastern Austria and in Naples, Italy.

Hermann Nitsch's 20th Painting Action, until 20 July, Oficine 800, Fondamenta S. Biagio, Giudecca, Venice.

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Hermann Nitsch, known for bloody and ritualistic performances that often confronted moral taboos, has died, aged 83

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The revered avant-garde artist was prone to shocking audiences with the use of blood, carcases and viscera in his performances

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#FightClub #Violence #Pain

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Fight Club is a 1999 American film directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter. It is based on the 1996 novel of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk. Norton plays the unnamed narrator, who is discontented with his white-collar job. He forms a "fight club" with soap salesman Tyler Durden (Pitt), and becomes embroiled in a relationship with an impoverished but beguilingly attractive woman, Marla Singer (Bonham Carter).

Palahniuk's novel was optioned by Fox 2000 Pictures producer Laura Ziskin, who hired Uhls to write the film adaptation. Fincher was selected because of his enthusiasm for the story. He developed the script with Uhls and sought screenwriting advice from the cast and others in the film industry. It was filmed in and around Los Angeles from July to December 1998. He and the cast compared the film to Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and The Graduate (1967), with a theme of conflict between Generation X and the value system of advertising.

Studio executives did not like the film, and they restructured Fincher's intended marketing campaign to try to reduce anticipated losses. Fight Club premiered at the 56th Venice International Film Festival on September 10, 1999, and was released in the United States on October 15, 1999 by 20th Century Fox. The film failed to meet the studio's expectations at the box office and received polarized reactions from critics. It was ranked as one of the most controversial and talked-about films of the 1990s. However, Fight Club later found commercial success with its home video release, establishing it as a cult classic and causing media to revisit the film. In 2009, on its tenth anniversary, The New York Times dubbed it the "defining cult movie of our time."

The unnamed Narrator, an insomniac but otherwise healthy man dissatisfied with his job and lifestyle, attends support groups for problems such as alcoholism and cancer as a substitute for therapy. His efforts are disrupted when another impostor, Marla Singer, joins the same groups. Viewing her as a mirror to his own deceit, he arranges for them to attend different sessions, to which she reluctantly agrees.

On a return flight from work, the Narrator meets soap salesman Tyler Durden, who critiques his consumerist lifestyle. After an explosion destroys his apartment, he moves into Tyler's decrepit house as a last resort. Via their budding friendship, they start an underground fight club in a bar basement. Tyler also saves Marla from an overdose, initiating a sexual relationship between them, while the Narrator remains cold to her.

The Narrator quits his job, blackmails his boss for funds, and grows Fight Club, attracting new members including his cancer support group friend, Bob. Tyler morphs the club into Project Mayhem, committing acts of vandalism intended to disrupt the social order. Feeling sidelined, the Narrator confronts Tyler, who admits to orchestrating the explosion in the Narrator's apartment, and then goes missing. When Bob is killed by police during a mission, the Narrator tries to dismantle Project Mayhem. Discovering its nationwide reach, and being called Tyler Durden by Marla and members, he realizes he and Tyler are split personalities.

Learning Tyler plans to erase debt records by blowing up the skyscrapers of consumer credit companies, the Narrator unsuccessfully warns Marla and goes to the police, some of whom are also Project Mayhem members. He attempts to disarm the explosives, but Tyler attacks him. Accepting that he himself is Tyler, he shoots himself in the head, "killing" Tyler, while the bullet nonfatally passes through the Narrator's cheek. Marla arrives, and the two hold hands as they watch as the targeted buildings collapse.

We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of shopping. There's nothing to kill anymore, there's nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman [the Narrator] is created.

Fincher said Fight Club was a coming of age film, like the 1967 film The Graduate but for people in their 30s. Fincher described the narrator as an " everyman"; the character is identified in the script as "Jack", but left unnamed in the film. Fincher outlined the Narrator's background: "He's tried to do everything he was taught to do, tried to fit into the world by becoming the thing he isn't." He cannot find happiness, so he travels on a path to enlightenment in which he must "kill" his parents, god, and teacher. By the start of the film, he has "killed off" his parents. With Tyler Durden, he kills his god by doing things they are not supposed to do. To complete the process of maturing, the Narrator has to kill his teacher, Tyler Durden.

The character is a 1990s inverse of the Graduate archetype: "a guy who does not have a world of possibilities in front of him, he has no possibilities, he literally cannot imagine a way to change his life." He is confused and angry, so he responds to his environment by creating Tyler Durden, a Nietzschean Übermensch, in his mind. While Tyler is who the Narrator wants to be, he is not empathetic and does not help the Narrator face decisions in his life "that are complicated and have moral and ethical implications". Fincher explained: "[Tyler] can deal with the concepts of our lives in an idealistic fashion, but it doesn't have anything to do with the compromises of real life as modern man knows it. Which is: you're not really necessary to a lot of what's going on. It's built, it just needs to run now." While studio executives worried that Fight Club was going to be "sinister and seditious", Fincher sought to make it "funny and seditious" by including humor to temper the sinister element.

Screenwriter Jim Uhls described the film as a romantic comedy, explaining: "It has to do with the characters' attitudes toward a healthy relationship, which is a lot of behavior which seems unhealthy and harsh to each other, but in fact does work for them-because both characters are out on the edge psychologically." The Narrator seeks intimacy, but avoids it with Marla Singer, seeing too much of himself in her. While Marla is a seductive and negativist prospect for the Narrator, he embraces the novelty and excitement that comes with befriending Tyler. The Narrator is comfortable being personally connected to Tyler, but becomes jealous when Tyler becomes sexually involved with Marla. When the Narrator argues with Tyler about their friendship, Tyler tells him that being friends is secondary to pursuing the philosophy they have been exploring. When Tyler implies that Marla is a risk they should remove, the Narrator realizes he should have focused on her and begins to diverge from Tyler's path.

We decided early on that I would start to starve myself as the film went on, while [Brad Pitt] would lift and go to tanning beds; he would become more and more idealized as I wasted away.

The Narrator, an unreliable narrator, is not immediately aware that he is mentally projecting Tyler. He also mistakenly promotes the fight clubs as a way to feel powerful, though the Narrator's physical condition worsens while Tyler Durden's appearance improves. While Tyler desires "real experiences" of actual fights like the Narrator at first, he manifests a nihilistic attitude of rejecting and destroying institutions and value systems. His impulsive nature, representing the id, is seductive and liberating to the Narrator and the members of Project Mayhem. Tyler's initiatives and methods become dehumanizing; he orders around the members of Project Mayhem with a megaphone similar to camp directors at Chinese re-education camps. The Narrator pulls back from Tyler and arrives at a middle ground between his conflicting selves.

Fight Club examines Generation X angst as "the middle children of history". Norton said it examines the value conflicts of Generation X as the first generation raised on television: this generation had "its value system largely dictated to it by advertising culture", and was told one could achieve "spiritual happiness through home furnishing". His character walks through his apartment while visual effects identify his many IKEA possessions. Fincher described the Narrator's immersion: "It was just the idea of living in this fraudulent idea of happiness." Pitt said, " Fight Club is a metaphor for the need to push through the walls we put around ourselves and just go for it, so for the first time we can experience the pain."

Fight Club also parallels the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause; both probe the frustrations of the people in the system. The characters, having undergone societal emasculation, are reduced to "a generation of spectators". A culture of advertising defines society's "external signifiers of happiness", causing an unnecessary chase for material goods that replaces the more essential pursuit of spiritual happiness. The film references consumer products such as Gucci, Calvin Klein, and the Volkswagen New Beetle. Norton said of the Beetle, "We smash it ... because it seemed like the classic example of a Baby Boomer generation marketing plan that sold culture back to us." Pitt explained the dissonance: "I think there's a self-defense mechanism that keeps my generation from having any real honest connection or commitment with our true feelings. We're rooting for ball teams, but we're not getting in there to play. We're so concerned with failure and success-like these two things are all that's going to sum you up at the end."

The violence of the fight clubs serves not to promote or glorify combat, but for participants to experience feeling in a society where they are otherwise numb. The fights represent a resistance to the impulse to be "cocooned" in society. Norton believed the fighting strips away the "fear of pain" and "the reliance on material signifiers of their self-worth", leaving them to experience something valuable. When the fights evolve into revolutionary violence, the film only half-accepts the revolutionary dialectic by Tyler Durden; the Narrator pulls back and rejects Durden's ideas. Fight Club purposely shapes an ambiguous message whose interpretation is left to the audience. Fincher said: "I love this idea that you can have fascism without offering any direction or solution. Isn't the point of fascism to say, 'This is the way we should be going'? But this movie couldn't be further from offering any kind of solution."

The novel by Chuck Palahniuk was published in 1996. Before its publication, a Fox Searchlight Pictures book scout sent a galley proof of the novel to creative executive Kevin McCormick. The executive assigned a studio reader to review the proof as a candidate for a film adaptation, but the reader discouraged it. McCormick then forwarded the proof to producers Lawrence Bender and Art Linson, who also rejected it. Producers Josh Donen and Ross Bell saw potential and expressed interest. They arranged unpaid screen readings with actors to determine the script's length, and an initial reading lasted six hours. The producers cut out sections to reduce the running time, and they used the shorter script to record its dialogue. Bell sent the recording to Laura Ziskin, head of the division Fox 2000, who listened to the tape and purchased the rights to Fight Club from Palahniuk for $10,000.

Ziskin initially considered hiring Buck Henry to write the adaptation, finding Fight Club similar to the 1967 film The Graduate, which Henry had adapted. When a new screenwriter, Jim Uhls, lobbied Donen and Bell for the job, the producers chose him over Henry. Bell contacted four directors to direct the film. He considered Peter Jackson the best choice, but Jackson was too busy filming the 1996 film The Frighteners in New Zealand. Bryan Singer received the book but did not read it. Danny Boyle met with Bell and read the book, but he pursued another film. The book was also sent to David O. Russell, but he couldn't understand it. David Fincher, who had read Fight Club and had tried to buy the rights himself, talked with Ziskin about directing the film. He hesitated to accept the assignment with 20th Century Fox at first because he had an unpleasant experience directing the 1992 film for the studio. To repair his relationship with the studio, he met with Ziskin and studio head Bill Mechanic. In August 1997, 20th Century Fox announced that Fincher would direct the film adaptation of Fight Club.

Producer Ross Bell met with actor Russell Crowe to discuss his candidacy for the role of Tyler Durden. Producer Art Linson, who joined the project late, met with Pitt regarding the same role. Linson was the senior producer of the two, so the studio sought to cast Pitt instead of Crowe. Pitt was looking for a new film after the domestic failure of his 1998 film Meet Joe Black, and the studio believed Fight Club would be more commercially successful with a major star. The studio signed Pitt for US$17.5 million.

For the role of the unnamed Narrator, the studio desired a "sexier marquee name" such as Matt Damon to increase the film's commercial prospects; it also considered Sean Penn. Fincher instead considered Norton based on his performance in the 1996 film The People vs. Larry Flynt. Other studios were approaching Norton for leading roles in developing films like The Talented Mr. Ripley and Man on the Moon. He was cast in Runaway Jury, but the film did not reach production. 20th Century Fox offered Norton $2.5 million for Fight Club. He could not accept the offer immediately because he still owed Paramount Pictures a film; he had signed a contractual obligation with Paramount to appear in one of the studio's future films for a smaller salary. Norton later satisfied the obligation with his role in the 2003 film The Italian Job.

In January 1998, 20th Century Fox announced that Pitt and Norton had been cast. The actors prepared by taking lessons in boxing, taekwondo, grappling, and soapmaking. Pitt voluntarily visited a dentist to have pieces of his front teeth chipped off so his character would not have perfect teeth. The pieces were restored after filming concluded.

Fincher's first choice for the role of Marla Singer was Janeane Garofalo. While Fincher initially stated that she turned it down because she objected to the film's sexual content, in an interview in 2020, Garofalo revealed she did accept the role but was dropped because Norton believed she was poorly suited to it. Fincher pitched the role to Julia Louis-Dreyfus. The filmmakers considered Courtney Love and Winona Ryder as early candidates. Love claimed that she was cast as Marla Singer, but was fired after she rejected Pitt's pitch for a film about her late husband, Kurt Cobain. The studio wanted to cast Reese Witherspoon, but Fincher felt she was too young. Finally, Fincher chose to cast Bonham Carter based on her performance in the 1997 film The Wings of the Dove.

Uhls started working on a draft of the adapted screenplay, which excluded a voice-over because the industry perceived the technique as "hackneyed and trite" at the time. When Fincher joined the film, he thought that the film should have a voice-over, believing that the film's humor came from the Narrator's voice. He described the film without a voice-over as seemingly "sad and pathetic". Fincher and Uhls revised the script for six to seven months and by 1997 had a third draft that reordered the story and left out several major elements. When Pitt was cast, he was concerned that his character, Tyler Durden, was too one-dimensional. Fincher sought the advice of writer-director Cameron Crowe, who suggested giving the character more ambiguity. Fincher also hired screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker for assistance. He invited Pitt and Norton to help revise the script, and the group drafted five revisions in the course of a year.

Palahniuk praised the faithful film adaptation of his novel and applauded how the film's plot was more streamlined than the book's. Palahniuk recalled how the writers debated if film audiences would believe the plot twist from the novel. Fincher supported including the twist, arguing, "If they accept everything up to this point, they'll accept the plot twist. If they're still in the theater, they'll stay with it." Palahniuk's novel also contained homoerotic overtones, which Fincher included in the film to make audiences uncomfortable and accentuate the surprise of the twists. The bathroom scene where Tyler Durden bathes next to the Narrator is an example of the overtones; the line, "I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need," was meant to suggest personal responsibility rather than homosexuality. Another example is the scene at the beginning of the film in which Tyler Durden puts a gun barrel down the Narrator's mouth.

The Narrator finds redemption at the end of the film by rejecting Tyler Durden's dialectic, a path that diverged from the novel's ending in which the Narrator is placed in a mental institution. Norton drew parallels between redemption in the film and redemption in The Graduate, indicating that the protagonists of both films find a middle ground between two divisions of self. Fincher considered the novel too infatuated with Tyler Durden and changed the ending to move away from him: "I wanted people to love Tyler, but I also wanted them to be OK with his vanquishing."

Studio executives Mechanic and Ziskin planned an initial budget of $23 million to finance the film, but by the start of production, the budget was increased to $50 million. Half was paid by New Regency, but during filming, the projected budget escalated to $67 million. New Regency's head and Fight Club executive producer Arnon Milchan petitioned Fincher to reduce costs by at least $5 million. Fincher refused, so Milchan threatened Mechanic that New Regency would withdraw financing. Mechanic sought to restore Milchan's support by sending him tapes of dailies from Fight Club. After seeing three weeks of filming, Milchan reinstated New Regency's financial backing. The final production budget was $63-65 million.

The fight scenes were heavily choreographed, but the actors were required to "go full out" to capture realistic effects such as having the wind knocked out of them. Makeup artist Julie Pearce, who had worked for Fincher on the 1997 film , studied mixed martial arts and pay-per-view boxing to portray the fighters accurately. She designed an extra's ear to have cartilage missing, inspired by the boxing match in which Mike Tyson bit off part of Evander Holyfield's ear. Makeup artists devised two methods to create sweat on cue: spraying mineral water over a coat of Vaseline, and using the unadulterated water for "wet sweat". Meat Loaf, who plays a fight club member who has " bitch tits", wore a 90-pound (40 kg) fat harness that gave him large breasts. He also wore eight-inch (20 cm) lifts in his scenes with Norton to be taller than him.

Filming lasted 138 days from July to December 1998, during which Fincher shot more than 1,500 rolls of film, three times the average for a Hollywood film. The locations were in and around Los Angeles and on sets built at the studio in Century City. Production designer Alex McDowell constructed more than 70 sets. The exterior of Tyler Durden's house was built in Wilmington, California, while the interior was built on a sound stage at the studio's location. The interior was given a decayed look to illustrate the deconstructed world of the characters. Marla Singer's apartment was based on photographs of apartments in downtown LA. Overall, production included 300 scenes, 200 locations, and complex special effects. Fincher compared Fight Club to his subsequent, less complex film : "I felt like I was spending all my time watching trucks being loaded and unloaded so I could shoot three lines of dialogue. There was far too much transportation going on."

Fincher used the Super 35 format to film Fight Club since it gave him maximum flexibility to compose shots. He hired Jeff Cronenweth as cinematographer; Cronenweth's father Jordan Cronenweth had been cinematographer for Fincher's 1992 film Alien 3, but left midway through production due to Parkinson's disease. Fincher explored visual styles in his previous films and The Game, and he and Cronenweth drew elements from these styles for Fight Club.

Fincher and Cronenweth applied a lurid style, choosing to make people "sort of shiny". The appearance of the Narrator's scenes without Tyler were bland and realistic. The scenes with Tyler were described by Fincher as "more hyper-real in a torn-down, deconstructed sense-a visual metaphor of what [the Narrator is] heading into". The filmmakers used heavily desaturated colors in the costuming, makeup, and art direction. Bonham Carter wore opalescent makeup to portray her romantic nihilistic character with a " smack-fiend patina". Fincher and Cronenweth drew influences from the 1973 film American Graffiti, which applied a mundane look to nighttime exteriors while simultaneously including a variety of colors.

The crew took advantage of both natural and practical light. Fincher sought various approaches to the lighting setups; for example, he chose several urban locations for the city lights' effects on the shots' backgrounds. The crew also embraced fluorescent lighting at other practical locations to maintain an element of reality and to light the prostheses depicting the characters' injuries. On the other hand, Fincher also ensured that scenes were not so strongly lit so the characters' eyes were less visible, citing cinematographer Gordon Willis' technique as the influence.

Fight Club was filmed mostly at night, and Fincher filmed the daytime shots in shadowed locations. The crew equipped the bar's basement with inexpensive work lamps to create a background glow. Fincher avoided stylish camerawork when filming early fight scenes in the basement and instead placed the camera in a fixed position. In later fight scenes, Fincher moved the camera from the viewpoint of a distant observer to that of the fighter.

The scenes with Tyler were staged to conceal that the character was a mental projection of the unnamed Narrator. Tyler was not filmed in two shots with a group of people, nor was he shown in any over-the-shoulder shots in scenes where Tyler gives the Narrator specific ideas to manipulate him. In scenes before the Narrator meets Tyler, the filmmakers inserted Tyler's presence in single frames for subliminal effect. Tyler appears in the background and out of focus, like a "little devil on the shoulder". Fincher explained the subliminal frames: "Our hero is creating Tyler Durden in his own mind, so at this point he exists only on the periphery of the Narrator's consciousness."

While Cronenweth generally rated and exposed the Kodak film stock normally on Fight Club, several other techniques were applied to change its appearance. Flashing was implemented on much of the exterior night photography, the contrast was stretched to be purposely ugly, the print was adjusted to be underexposed, Technicolor's ENR silver retention was used on a select number of prints to increase the density of the blacks, and high-contrast print stocks were chosen to create a "stepped-on" look on the print with a dirty patina.

Fincher hired visual effects supervisor Kevin Tod Haug, who worked for him on The Game, to create visual effects for Fight Club. Haug assigned the visual effects artists and experts to different facilities that each addressed different types of visual effects: CG modeling, animation, compositing, and scanning. Haug explained, "We selected the best people for each aspect of the effects work, then coordinated their efforts. In this way, we never had to play to a facility's weakness." Fincher visualized the Narrator's perspective through a " mind's eye" view and structured a myopic framework for the film audiences. Fincher also used previsualized footage of challenging main-unit and visual effects shots as a problem-solving tool to avoid making mistakes during the actual filming.

The opening scene in Fight Club that represents a brain's neural network in which the thought processes are initiated by the Narrator's fear impulse. The network was mapped using an L-system and drawn out by a medical illustrator.

The film's title sequence is a 90-second visual effects composition that depicts the inside of the Narrator's brain at a microscopic level; the camera pulls back to the outside, starting at his fear center and following the thought processes initiated by his fear impulse. The sequence, designed in part by Fincher, was budgeted separately from the rest of the film at first, but the sequence was awarded by the studio in January 1999. Fincher hired Digital Domain and its visual effects supervisor Kevin Mack, who won an Academy Award for Visual Effects for the 1998 film What Dreams May Come, for the sequence. The company mapped the computer-generated brain using an L-system, and the design was detailed using renderings by medical illustrator Katherine Jones. The pullback sequence from within the brain to the outside of the skull included neurons, action potentials, and a hair follicle. Haug explained the artistic license that Fincher took with the shot, "While he wanted to keep the brain passage looking like electron microscope photography, that look had to be coupled with the feel of a night dive-wet, scary, and with a low depth of field." The shallow depth of field was accomplished with the ray tracing process.

Other visual effects include an early scene in which the camera flashes past city streets to survey Project Mayhem's destructive equipment lying in underground parking lots; the sequence was a three-dimensional composition of nearly 100 photographs of Los Angeles and Century City by photographer Michael Douglas Middleton. The final scene of the demolition of the credit card office buildings was designed by Richard Baily of Image Savant; Baily worked on the scene for over fourteen months.

Midway through the film, Tyler Durden points out the cue mark -nicknamed "cigarette burn" in the film-to the audience. The scene represents a turning point that foreshadows the coming rupture and inversion of the "fairly subjective reality" that existed earlier in the film. Fincher explained: "Suddenly it's as though the projectionist missed the changeover, the viewers have to start looking at the movie in a whole new way."

Fincher was concerned that bands experienced in writing film scores would be unable to tie the themes together, so he sought a band which had never recorded for film. He pursued Radiohead, but the singer, Thom Yorke, declined as he was recovering from the stress of promoting their 1997 album OK Computer. Fincher instead commissioned the breakbeat producing duo Dust Brothers, who created a post-modern score encompassing drum loops, electronic scratches, and computerized samples. Dust Brothers performer Michael Simpson explained the setup: "Fincher wanted to break new ground with everything about the movie, and a nontraditional score helped achieve that." The climax and end credits feature the song " Where Is My Mind?" by Pixies.

Filming concluded in December 1998, and Fincher edited the footage in early 1999 to prepare Fight Club for a screening with senior executives. They did not receive the film positively and were concerned that there would not be an audience for the film. Executive producer Art Linson, who supported the film, recalled the response: "So many incidences of Fight Club were alarming, no group of executives could narrow them down." Nevertheless, Fight Club was originally slated to be released in July 1999 but was later changed to August 6, 1999. The studio further delayed the film's release, this time to autumn, citing a crowded summer schedule and a hurried post-production process. Outsiders attributed the delays to the Columbine High School massacre earlier in the year.

Marketing executives at Fox Searchlight Pictures faced difficulties in marketing Fight Club and at one point considered marketing it as an art film. They considered that the film was primarily geared toward male audiences because of its violence and believed that not even Pitt would attract female filmgoers. Research testing showed that the film appealed to teenagers. Fincher refused to let the posters and trailers focus on Pitt and encouraged the studio to hire the advertising firm Wieden+Kennedy to devise a marketing plan. The firm proposed a bar of pink soap with the title "Fight Club" embossed on it as the film's main marketing image; the proposal was considered "a bad joke" by Fox executives. Fincher also released two early trailers in the form of fake public service announcements presented by Pitt and Norton; the studio did not think the trailers marketed the film appropriately. Instead, the studio financed a $20 million large-scale campaign to provide a press junket, posters, billboards, and trailers for TV that highlighted the film's fight scenes. The studio advertised Fight Club on cable during World Wrestling Federation broadcasts, which Fincher protested, believing that the placement created the wrong context for the film. Linson believed that the "ill-conceived one-dimensional" marketing by marketing executive Robert Harper largely contributed to Fight Club's lukewarm box office performance in the United States.

The studio held Fight Club's world premiere at the 56th Venice International Film Festival on September 10, 1999. For the American theatrical release, the studio hired the National Research Group to test screen the film; the group predicted the film would gross between US$13 million and US$15 million in its opening weekend. Fight Club opened commercially in the United States and Canada on October 15, 1999 and earned US$11 million in 1,963 theaters over the opening weekend. The film ranked first at the weekend box office, beating Double Jeopardy and The Story of Us, a fellow weekend opener. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale. The gender mix of audiences for Fight Club, argued to be "the ultimate anti-date flick", was 61% male and 39% female; 58% of audiences were below the age of 21. Despite the film's top placement, its opening gross fell short of the studio's expectations. Over the second weekend, Fight Club dropped 42.6% in revenue, earning US$6.3 million. In its original theatrical run, the film grossed US$37 million in the United States and Canada, and US$63.8 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of US$100.9 million. (With subsequent re-releases, the film's worldwide gross increased to $101.2 million.) The underwhelming North American performance of Fight Club soured the relationship between 20th Century Fox's studio head Bill Mechanic and media executive Rupert Murdoch, which contributed to Mechanic's resignation in June 2000.

The British Board of Film Classification reviewed Fight Club for its November 12, 1999 release in the United Kingdom and removed two scenes involving "an indulgence in the excitement of beating a (defenseless) man's face into a pulp". The board assigned the film an 18 certificate, limiting the release to adult-only audiences in the UK. The BBFC did not censor any further, considering and dismissing claims that Fight Club contained "dangerously instructive information" and could "encourage anti-social (behavior)". The board decided, "The film as a whole is-quite clearly-critical and sharply parodic of the amateur fascism which in part it portrays. Its central theme of male machismo (and the anti-social behaviour that flows from it) is emphatically rejected by the central character in the concluding reels." The scenes were restored in a two-disc DVD edition released in the UK in March 2007.

Fincher supervised the composition of the DVD packaging and was one of the first directors to participate in a film's transition to home media. The film was released on DVD on June 6, 2000, in both one and two-disc editions. The movie disc included four commentary tracks, while the bonus disc contained behind-the-scenes clips, deleted scenes, trailers, theater safety PSAs, the promotional music video "This is Your Life", Internet spots, still galleries, cast biographies, storyboards, and publicity materials. Fincher worked on the DVD as a way to finish his vision for the film. Julie Markell, 20th Century Fox's senior vice president of creative development, said the DVD packaging complemented Fincher's vision: "The film is meant to make you question. The package, by extension, tries to reflect an experience that you must experience for yourself. The more you look at it, the more you'll get out of it." The studio developed the packaging for two months. The two-disc special edition DVD was packaged to look covered in brown cardboard wrapper. The title "Fight Club" was labeled diagonally across the front, and packaging appeared tied with twine. Markell said, "We wanted the package to be simple on the outside, so that there would be a dichotomy between the simplicity of brown paper wrapping and the intensity and chaos of what's inside." Deborah Mitchell, 20th Century Fox's vice president of marketing, described the design: "From a retail standpoint, [the DVD case] has incredible shelf-presence." It was the first DVD release to feature the THX Optimode.

Fight Club won the 2000 Online Film Critics Society Awards for Best DVD, Best DVD Commentary, and Best DVD Special Features. Entertainment Weekly ranked the film's two-disc edition in first place on its 2001 list of "The 50 Essential DVDs", giving top ratings to the DVD's content and technical picture-and-audio quality. When the two-disc edition went out of print, the studio re-released it in 2004 because of fans' requests. The film sold more than 6 million copies on DVD and video within the first ten years, making it one of the largest-selling home media items in the studio's history, in addition to grossing over $55 million in video and DVD rentals. With a weak box office performance in the United States and Canada, a better performance in other territories, and the highly successful DVD release, Fight Club generated a US$10 million profit for the studio.

The Laserdisc edition was only released in Japan on May 26, 2000 and features a different cover art, as well as one of the very few Dolby Digital Surround EX soundtracks released on LD. The VHS edition was released on October 31, 2000, as a part of 20th Century Fox's "Premiere Series" line. It includes a featurette after the film, "Behind the Brawl".

Fight Club was released in the Blu-ray Disc format in the United States on November 17, 2009. Five graffiti artists were commissioned to create 30 pieces of art for the packaging, encompassing urban aesthetics found on the East Coast and West Coast of the United States as well as influences from European street art. The Blu-ray edition opens with a menu screen for the romantic comedy Never Been Kissed starring Drew Barrymore before leading into the Fight Club menu screen. Fincher got permission from Barrymore to include the fake menu screen.

An online release in China from Tencent censored the bomb blasts at the end and replaced the ending with a message that Project Mayhem was thwarted, with Tyler Durden being arrested by law enforcement and placed in an insane asylum until 2012, adapting the ending of the original Fight Club novel. Weeks later, Tencent released a version of the film restoring 11 of the 12 minutes that had previously been cut. The novel's author Chuck Palahniuk believed the censored version partially restored the book's ending.

When Fight Club premiered at the 56th Venice International Film Festival, the film was fiercely debated by critics. A newspaper reported, "Many loved and hated it in equal measures." Some critics expressed concern that the film would incite copycat behavior, such as that seen after A Clockwork Orange debuted in Britain nearly three decades previously. Upon the film's theatrical release, reported the reaction: "It touched a nerve in the male psyche that was debated in newspapers across the world." Although the film's makers called Fight Club "an accurate portrayal of men in the 1990s," some critics called it "irresponsible and appalling." Writing for The Australian, Christopher Goodwin stated: " Fight Club is shaping up to be the most contentious mainstream Hollywood meditation on violence since Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange."

Janet Maslin, reviewing for The New York Times, praised Fincher's direction and editing of the film. She wrote that Fight Club carried a message of "contemporary manhood", and that, if not watched closely, the film could be misconstrued as an endorsement of violence and nihilism. Roger Ebert, reviewing for the Chicago Sun-Times, gave Fight Club two stars out of four, calling it "visceral and hard-edged", but also "a thrill ride masquerading as philosophy", whose promising first act is followed by a second that panders to macho sensibilities and a third he dismissed as "trickery". Ebert later acknowledged that the film was "beloved by most, not by me". He was later requested to have a shot-by-shot analysis of Fight Club at the Conference on World Affairs; he stated that "[s]eeing it over the course of a week, I admired its skill even more, and its thought even less." Jay Carr of The Boston Globe opined that the film began with an "invigoratingly nervy and imaginative buzz", but that it eventually became "explosively silly". 's David Ansen described Fight Club as "an outrageous mixture of brilliant technique, puerile philosophizing, trenchant satire and sensory overload" and thought that the ending was too pretentious. Richard Schickel of described the mise en scène as dark and damp: "It enforces the contrast between the sterilities of his characters' aboveground life and their underground one. Water, even when it's polluted, is the source of life; blood, even when it's carelessly spilled, is the symbol of life being fully lived. To put his point simply: it's better to be wet than dry." Schickel applauded the performances of Pitt and Norton, but criticized the "conventionally gimmicky" unfolding and the failure to make Bonham Carter's character interesting. In Alexander Walker's highly critical review for the London Evening Standard with the headline "A Nazi piece of work", he claimed that the story was "a paradigm of the Hitler state". Two quotes from his review ("It is an inadmissable assault on personal decency. And on society itself." and "It echoes propaganda that gave licence to the brutal activities of the SA and the SS. It resurrects the Fuhrer principle.") were among several negative critical opinions included in the booklet accompanying the 2000 DVD release.

's Gary Crowdus reviewed the critical reception in retrospect: "Many critics praised Fight Club, hailing it as one of the most exciting, original, and thought-provoking films of the year." He wrote of the negative opinion, "While Fight Club had numerous critical champions, the film's critical attackers were far more vocal, a negative chorus which became hysterical about what they felt to be the excessively graphic scenes of fisticuffs ... They felt such scenes served only as a mindless glamorization of brutality, a morally irresponsible portrayal, which they feared might encourage impressionable young male viewers to set up their own real-life fight clubs in order to beat each other senseless."

Fight Club was nominated for the 2000 Academy Award for Best Sound Editing, but it lost to . Bonham Carter won the 2000 Empire Award for Best British Actress. The Online Film Critics Society also nominated Fight Club for Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor (Norton), Best Editing, and Best Adapted Screenplay (Uhls). Though the film won none of the awards, the organization listed Fight Club as one of the top ten films of 1999. The soundtrack was nominated for a BRIT Award, losing to Notting Hill.

On Rotten Tomatoes, Fight Club holds an approval rating of 79% based on 181 reviews, with an average rating of 7.4/10. The site's consensus reads, "Solid acting, amazing direction, and elaborate production design make Fight Club a wild ride." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 66 out of 100 based on 35 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B-" on an A+ to F scale.

Fight Club was one of the most controversial and talked-about films of the 1990s. The film was perceived as the forerunner of a new mood in American political life. Like other 1999 films , Being John Malkovich, and Three Kings, Fight Club was recognized as an innovator in cinematic form and style, since it exploited new developments in filmmaking technology. After Fight Club's theatrical release, it became more popular via word of mouth, and the positive reception of the DVD established it as a cult film that David Ansen of Newsweek conjectured would enjoy "perennial" fame. The film's success also heightened Palahniuk's profile to global renown.

Following Fight Club's release, several fight clubs were reported to have started in the United States. A "Gentleman's Fight Club" was started in Menlo Park, California, in 2000 and had members mostly from the tech industry. Teens and preteens in Texas, New Jersey, Washington state, and Alaska also initiated fight clubs and posted videos of their fights online, leading authorities to break up the clubs. In 2006, an unwilling participant from a local high school was injured at a fight club in Arlington, Texas, and the DVD sales of the fight led to the arrest of six teenagers. An unsanctioned fight club was also started at Princeton University, where matches were held on campus. The film was suspected of influencing Luke Helder, a college student who planted pipe bombs in mailboxes in 2002. Helder's goal was to create a smiley pattern on the map of the United States, similar to the scene in Fight Club in which a building is vandalized to have a smiley on its exterior. On July 16, 2009, a 17-year-old who had formed his own fight club in Manhattan was charged with detonating a homemade bomb outside a Starbucks Coffee shop in the Upper East Side. The New York City Police Department reported the suspect was trying to emulate "Project Mayhem".

Fight Club had a significant impact on evangelical Christianity, in the areas of Christian discipleship and masculinity. A number of churches called their cell groups "fight clubs" with a stated purpose of meeting regularly to " beat up the flesh and believe the gospel of grace". Some churches, especially Mars Hill Church in Seattle, whose pastor Mark Driscoll was obsessed with the film, picked up the film's emphasis on masculinity, and rejection of self-care. Jessica Johnson suggests that Driscoll even called on "his brothers-in-arms to foment a movement not unlike Project Mayhem."

A Fight Club video game was released by Vivendi Universal Games in 2004 for the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and for mobile phones. The game was a critical and commercial failure, and was panned by such publications and websites as GameSpot, Game Informer, and IGN. The video game Jet Set Radio, initially released in 2000 for Sega's Dreamcast console, was inspired by the film's anti-establishment themes.

In 2003, Fight Club was listed as one of the "50 Best Guy Movies of All Time" by Men's Journal. In 2004 and 2006, Fight Club was voted by readers as the eighth and tenth greatest film of all time, respectively. ranked Fight Club as "The Greatest Film of our Lifetime" in 2007 during the magazine's tenth anniversary. In 2007, selected Tyler Durden's line, "The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club," as the 27th greatest movie line of all time. In 2008, readers of Empire ranked Tyler Durden eighth on a list of the 100 Greatest Movie Characters. Empire also identified Fight Club as the 10th greatest movie of all time in its 2008 issue The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time.

In 2010, two viral mash-up videos featuring Fight Club were released. Ferris Club was a mash-up of Fight Club and the 1986 film Ferris Bueller's Day Off. It portrayed Ferris as Tyler Durden and Cameron as the narrator, "claiming to see the real psychological truth behind the John Hughes classic". The second video, Jane Austen's Fight Club, also gained popularity online as a mash-up of Fight Club's fighting rules and the characters created by 19th-century novelist Jane Austen.

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Fight Club is a 1999 American film directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter. It is based on the 1996 novel of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk. Norton plays the unnamed narrator, who is discontented with his white-collar job.

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Dear Alja,

We talked about the essay. One word we came a lot back to is pain. This is of course a very broad term, but there seems to be a strong relation with your work. You told me you don’t want to shock with your work. Rather you want to use estrangement to make something that is not strange approachable again or experienceable again.  For instance, pain related to the body, flesh, and blood, or certain emotions related to pain, like love. You also talked about a poet who could make the Balkan wars experienceable for you, using in his poems the words blood, speaking blood. You experienced something via the poem that you could not find in stories. You felt in the poem the bloodiness and pain of war. You also talked about the paradox of pain nowadays. On the one hand, we have found ways to talk about pain (it was terrible during the First World War how the pain of soldiers was denied) but on the other hand, we seem to have become desensitized from pain, it has become a form of entertainment (you also related this aspect to the movie Fight Club, see post 1). In media, we can see a lot of blood and violence which seems to make us numb to it. We also talked about Herman Nitzsch (see post 2), the way he also wants to react to desensitization from pain, and how he tries with rituals and flesh to reconnect again to something deeply human, something raw we can’t deny. At the same time, he reacts also to a (capitalistic) society driven by entertainment and individualism, and the loss of rituals. You also related pain to the word self-realization. Did you mean that we learn from pain? We also talked about how we can lose connection with our mortal body, losing the feeling of being alive, which maybe is related to the media world of representations we are living in, detaching us from our body. Zizek is writing about this (post 3), and how this also can lead to self-harm. You also talked about a Slovenian artist who did a  performance in which he damaged his own body. You described how people got shocked, while at the same time, we have become desensitized from a lot of ‘torture and pain’ in movies and news bulletins. This is also what I relate to your interest in body autopsy. You told me you would like to visit once such an autopsy, at university, for instance, the RUG. You are curious how you would react to this. Would you also feel shocked? And you also would like to research the materiality of the body. This could be an essay topic. Probably your essay will revolve around pain. Why are you drawn to pain? You first can make notes, and go into different aspects, for instance, you can respond to movies, poems, your own experiences, and so on. At last, I want to point out the research Byung Chul Han called The Palliative Society: Pain Today (see post 4): This slim volume, written aphoristically, explores the philosophical complexities of pain in societies marked by an extreme aversion to pain and discomfort. For Han, pain is not simply a sensation or feeling of displeasure; rather it constitutes important ways of what it means to be human. Indeed, for Han we are so much the worse for our penchant to flee it. Pain is an opening via negation to otherness, and without it, we are lost “in the hell of the same” (p. 6, emphasis in original). What Han calls “the neoliberal dispositif of happiness” (p. 13) distorts happiness, which “is not at one’s disposal. Inherent in it is a certain negativity” (p. 13).

Also I added some other posts:

Post 5:
Philosopher Onfray about the body and hedonism

Post 6:
About pain and boredom

Post 7:
A site of Asaf (Klaf) Weisman. His studies revolve around pain, chronic pain, and spinal health. Fascination with pain. His research interests include pain, chronic pain, spinal biomechanics and morphometry, and the philosophy of science

Post 8:
Movie the square, tension raw energy and the closed art world

Post 9:
The Human Pincushion: The Story Of Edward H. Gibson

Post 10:
About the neuroscience of pain The Neuroscience of pain

Post 11:
Philosopher Simone Weil  on pain and violence

Best regards,

Hille

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Neuromancer - Neue Romantika (Zanias remix)

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Good morning, Mr. Orwell! - Stane Jagodič

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Good morning, Mr. Orwell! / poem, typography lyrics

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William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984

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Grearer blue-eared starling, Anthony press

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Esmay Wagemans, Material research, 2018-2019

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Witchblade

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Miroslav Griško, White Louts, excerpt from Eshatološka vojna (Eschatological War), Zbirka Aut, KUD Apokalipsa, Ljubljana, 2022.

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On the morning of June 11, 1936, Robert E. Howard, best known for his literary creation Conan the Barbarian, receives news that his mother will not wake from the coma she has fallen into and immediately shoots himself. Thirty-two cuts on the surface of the world fall into alignment and trace the outline of a white hole, which must be passed through before it closes. The method for traversal is hidden in a program that underlies a straightforward practice of ancestor worship. Howard's suicide at the age of thirty is an example of the execution of this program and its completion on Earth.

Psychopathological diagnostics of self-destructive behaviour and contrasting romanticist or post-clinical valourisations of mental illness all obscure and distort a pure moment in time, when a basic hatred for life is the same as an indifference towards it. Irrational self-extermination carried out in this moment separates itself from all counterfeits, and suicide becomes militantly ascetic. A method to become dead to the world can also become a method to float above it, and zero interest in metabolic survival is the genesis of the program to attain this state. Ancestor worship is the initial and just barely beyond animal-level awareness of both program and state. But when ancestor worship is asceticised, four billion years of uninterrupted cellular life are extinguished in a negation, which can only be above any and all forms of life. Suicidal action slips through a crack in time, of which the rest of the world is unaware, and what from outside looks like absolute defeatism is inner devotion to a higher form of extinction.

The concept of a cellular automaton, developed by Von Neumann and Ulam in response to the problem of how to design a self-replicating machine, describes a base set of instructions and their iteration through a series of discrete states.[1] A discrete state is a moment in time whose specific properties are equivalent to the particular position and arrangement of the cells that constitute the greater automaton, whereas all discrete states are generated by an initial instruction and belong to the same ongoing series, which this instruction sparks. Whatever degree of complexity the properties of a discrete state may demonstrate, they remain reducible to the initial instruction and only designate a moment in time during the instruction's unfolding. Although they are a computational model and, accordingly, a functional instead of biochemical model, cellular automata depict the operation of an instruction protocol, which is formally equivalent to the origin of life. Abiogenesis and everything that follows from it can be understood as nothing but iterations of an initial command prosecuted in time. Somehow the first cell stabilises itself four billion years ago under a flood of hostile conditions, just long enough to establish the initial instruction for its self-replication. Ascetic self-extermination techniques practised four billion years later understand that their deep trigger is a primal command strong enough not to implode before it can send out its first signal.

Ancestor worship begins when the first cell does not commit suicide. Not committing suicide is only the blind prosecution of a command, but the first cell's self-replication is already the first form of the command's veneration. Ongoing iterations of the instruction also contain the germ for more abstract types of worship within them, although abstract worship can only arise when the instruction and its execution can be understood as pure form. Standard genealogies of God classify ancestor worship as the first religion,[2] and this is because it is, despite its elementariness, the first formal abstraction of the primal command for self-replication. An ancestor can only become ancestor and be worshipped because an ancestor is killed by the same signal and the same command that becomes devotion to him. Instruction and its iteration require the disappearance of iteration, so that the next iteration can take place-the transition from one discrete state to another discrete state-and ancestor worship begins when the hole which an iteration leaves behind becomes just as binding as another iteration of the instruction. Ancestor worship understands a concrete transmission through successive moments in time as the potential for communication with that which lies on the other side of the passing of a command. When the aboriginal mind of ancestor worship receives the first signal from the first cell, faces of the dead and another detached and remote state come out of the silence between discrete states and between iterations. Hyperawareness of the hole which iteration leaves behind means that the shadow of an instruction is the truth of its command.

In his study of Vedic ascesis, Mircea Eliade describes its method as a relentless "deconditioning"[3] program, which eliminates everything inessential, so that four billion years of biochemistry can be reduced to the bare pulse of first cell signal.[4] Deconditioning as self-extermination technique does not cancel first cell signal, but is absolute immersion in its implicit instruction protocol. The negation at the core of deconditioning operates like the inverse of the affirmation of an iteration, although without denying first cell signal strength. Deconditioning does not understand first cell signal strength in terms of the endurance of an instruction through time-four billion years of the instruction's continuous iteration and four billion years of biochemical life that has never even once during these four billion years ever been completely eradicated-but in terms of the blunt compression of all moments in time into only the basic form of an iteration and its disappearance. Awareness of the reducibility of all life to an instruction and the transition it initiates from one discrete state to another discrete state becomes the pulse which will animate a "deified human":[5]

1) Eliade uses the term deconditioning to clarify the basic motor of authentic ascetic practices in contrast to the tendencies of a Kantian atmosphere of transcendental philosophy and, accordingly, to an awareness of general conditions of possibility.[6] If conditions exhaust possibility-the scope of a particular transcendental, such as the legitimate domain of reason in Kant-deconditioning names an operation that understands the transcendental as an initial stricture, which is then modified and recoded through the precise methods contained in an ascetic program.

2) But transcendental modification and recoding is also just another name for the history of the world.[7] Four billion years of biochemistry after first cell signal is equivalent to an escalating complexity in conditions of possibility, and transcendental modification and recoding as the history of the world is a single gradient, which includes everything that follows from first genesis (or: all discrete states that result from an initial instruction). Deconditioning functions according to the reverse principle of a brutal minimalism, and to modify and recode through negation is to only decode and rewind back to first cell signal and, by extension, negate the history of the world, which is the same as becoming indifferent and dead to it.

3) Reception of first cell signal through negation means that deconditioning is a clandestine history of the world. It is not reducible to a countercurrent or a contradiction in relation to the gradient of transcendental modification and recoding, although, because deconditioning is negation, this gradient is its initial enemy. Deconditioning separates from the gradient in order to follow a covert artery back to first cell signal. Whereas the starting point of deconditioning belongs to the history of the world, its reception of first cell signal through negation becomes incomprehensible to this history, to the sum of all transcendentals, and initiates a stealth flow to a deified state. In this clandestine history lies the closeness of a more refined and harshly structured ascetic practice to ancestor worship's primitive cognition of ghost faces and holes in the world, which become like rudimentary phenotypes and wombs for the instantiation of what Eliade alternately calls a new ü bermensch, a new species and a new, entirely non-conditioned state.

Deconditioning as overman creation is anti-Kantian, but also anti-Nietzschean and anti-Chinese. Eliade describes Sino-overman genesis as a method dedicated to an "indefinite prolongation of the life of the material body",[8] which is nothing other than the continuation of the same deep historical gradient of transcendental modification. Ancient Chinese medicinal techniques or the downloading of individual neural patterns into an upgraded version of WeChat are just moments in time that all belong to the same history of the world[9] to which deconditioning acts like a shadow. Nietzschean overman creation as total affirmation and a simultaneous contempt for all types of "ascetic ideal" identifies ascetic deification with a false overman, since the negation at the core of ascetic practice is the same as a fundamental "hostility to life".[10] The entire logic of Nietzschean ü bermensch turns around the anti-ascetic insight that overman creation can only be achieved through affirmation, to the extent that negation instead of affirmation aborts the first cell and the entire history of the world, which is the only possible ovum for a new species and a new human or post-human form. But the tendencies in ascetic practice which Nietzsche opposed-hatred for life, emaciation, sadness-all evoke the deep force of a negation that can access first cell signal strength, whereas an ascetic path will in any case only be followed by those who have had enough of life. Virgil's lacrimae rerum-tears for things-or Norinaga Motoori's mono no aware-extreme sensitivity to ephemera-are examples of the intense awareness of first cell pulse and signal, of an iteration and its passing, and this awareness tends towards devotion as well as grief.[11] Melancholic poetics as experiential overdose anticipates the inverse deadness of a fully deconditioned state, since all that remains of the world is transience and an ethereal and immaterial pressure. Although the intensity of this awareness as sadness can trigger suicidal behaviour in reaction to it, the strict deconditioning program needed to reach a deified state means that all ascesis is suicide, but not all suicide is ascetic. From a position outside this program, all these deaths can only look the same, because the inner logic of a correct suicide is unrecognisable to any possible recoding of the world.

In the period of his youth that immediately followed a fallout with the Dadaists for what he considered to be their drift into a superficial abstract art without any "deep dimension"[12]-their failure to actualise the imperative "Dada is the virgin microbe"[13]-Julius Evola intensely contemplates taking his own life. The suicides of Otto Weininger and Carlos Michelstaedter at the ages of twenty-two and twenty-three, respectively, are Evola's prototypes for an act of self-extermination whose primary spark is a basic melancholy and sickness in response to being alive in the world. But because suicide is not necessarily ascetic, the equivalence of all negation also falls apart, and true self-extermination comes from the awareness of a higher form of extinction. Evola abandons his suicidal thoughts when during an especially desperate night he comes across a fragment from the Theravada Buddhist text the Majjihima Nikaya: "He who takes extinction to be extinction, thinks of extinction, thinks of extinction, thinks of extinction, thinks mine is extinction, and rejoices in extinction, this person, I say, does not know extinction."[14] Extinction belongs to a gradient that is like a shadow gradient to the affirmative gradient of the history of the world, which extinction is to negate. Just as the entire world can only seem like something counterfeit from the overman position and black hole enlightenment of a deified state, a deconditioning program driven by negation possesses its own internal counterfeits. Delusions and misrecognitions of extinction are corrected by the strictness and instruction of a tested ascetic program. But even if an act of self-extermination is contemplated or prosecuted without any intent to reach some deified state, and the option of suicide is instead a consequence of being the only remaining answer to life, the negation at the act's heart can always align itself with a purer extinction through the understanding that extinction has forms.[15] War against the world is an initial contrast between negation and affirmation. But if any negation is not all negation, the decision to commit suicide or the decision not to commit suicide can even become the same act-the devotion to a higher form of extinction. World War III or final war is war between extinction and its counterfeit, between negation and its counterfeit.

In 500 BC, Prince Siddhattha travels to a monastery in northernmost India to investigate a mass suicide that has taken place among the monks who live there.[16] The militant deconditioning program taught by the Buddha so as to leave behind the gradient of the world endorses correctly performed suicide as a legitimate method to attain a deified state. The case of the monk Godhika has already established the precedence and orthodoxy of a correct suicide, as, in the final moments of his life, being unable to meditate clearly and slipping back and forth from an ü bermensch, enlightened dimension, he decides to take his own life. When "the evil one" Mara, who torments the monk and disrupts his meditative practice, sees that Godhika "has taken the knife",[17] the demon can only gasp and withdraw, as he knows that the monk has at last achieved deification. The perfection of Godhika's suicide is an expression of the highest point of a gradient of extinction, and Buddha must go through all the dead bodies at the monastery so as to evaluate the correctness or incorrectness of the monks' deaths. In Theravada doctrine, the gradient of the world that is to be overcome consists of thirty-one iterations of form ( rūpa), whereas the fully deconditioned human bears, as does the Buddha, thirty-two marks, which indicate the attainment of a deified state above the world.[18] That every root of hair of a true ascetic is dark-coloured and that every true ascetic has the image of a thousand-spoked wheel on the palms of his hands are among the thirty-two marks whose sum total engenders a white lotus, which now floats on top of the world as its crown-undisturbed, oblivious and in control of it. During the progression and ascent towards thirty-two, white lotus resembles a white hole on the other side of which radiates a state that is unaffected and benumbed, final and complete. Buddha examines the corpses in the monastery to see if he can detect in their self-inflicted wounds the compression of thirty-two marks into a single suicidal cut, which looks like an earthly mutilation on the monks' dead bodies, but is potentially the mark of a perfect and deified human. One cut becomes thirty-two cuts, and thirty-two cuts become thirty-two marks, which express that suicide and a declaration of war against life are one and the same. But because extinction also has to be distinguished from its counterfeit, suicide becomes a technical problem.

Any investigation of the circumstances behind Robert E. Howard's suicide as a response to his mother's impending death will be inevitably overtaken by, in the words of Artaud-although in the context of another suicide, that of van Gogh-the "vile sexuality" and "erotomania" of the psychiatrist.[19] Seemingly infinite libidinal economies, with their ascription of eroto-sexual motives to every possible act and every possible thought, will always deny the existence of a pure and uncorrupted melancholy, which can also develop into a sincere hatred for life. In Howard's biography, hate precedes melancholy, as the source of his literature is a basic contempt for the time and the world in which he lives. But Howard's hate also has a strictly technical dimension, to the extent that his writings oppose a world and a civilisation which devalue the practices he considers to be equivalent to a purer and higher state. Total industrialisation creates a mass industrial culture, and the pulp genre in which Howard writes is the lowest form of mass industrial culture. Yet Howard understands the lowest popular aesthetic in terms of its potential to function as a concealed armoury for the preservation of now archaic techniques, which are all characterised by their resolute anti-civilisational drive. If a civilisation can only consolidate itself through an increasing specialisation of practices, which leads to both their proliferation and their treatment as equal,[20] Howard's anti-civilisational protagonists, from warlords to assassins, are proficient in the homicidal techniques that civilisation must by definition paralyse in order to grow. When a civilisation overextends through the proliferation of inessential practices and then collapses, the undying practices that are always relevant to life re-emerge from this hole, and the ü bermensch characters of Howard's fiction are overtly Nietzschean in their affirmative barbarism. Howard's suicide, in contrast, follows the exact opposite logic, and is only on the side of a straightforward negation and self-erasure from the world.

An overlooked detail of the Howard case is that he commits suicide while his mother, although in a comatose state, remains alive. The delayed death of a coma is like a temporal negation, and this slowdown makes possible the speed of Howard's own self-negation. The speed of his suicide is the speed of a deconditioning program, while the attainment of pure ascetic velocity is facilitated not only by the temporal delay of the coma, but by melancholic overdose. Without any time to meditate, or to go to a monastery and study anapanasati breathing techniques for years, in the moments before his mother's imminent death Howard returns to the first moments of ancestor worship and the veneration of an ephemeral hole. Ancestor worship as an instruction and a command, an iteration and its passing, marks a biochemically prescribed time to die-parents are supposed to die before their children. But this is only a lower form of extinction. A fixed temporal sequence of intergenerational death, a transition from one discrete state to another discrete state, and the surface meaning of an instruction and the prosecution of its command are all broken when Howard kills himself before his mother dies. Grief turns into a straightforward hatred for life and an indifference to all possible variations of existence, whereas out of hate and indifference comes an awareness of forms and levels of extinction. Howard understands an iteration and its passing as pure form, and takes ancestor worship to an extreme point, beyond its immediate biochemical meaning and impression. His suicide in the moment of delay before his mother's death is both the negation of the dominance of a lower form of biological extinction and the alignment with a higher form of extinction, which is infinitely remote from life. To "decondition life"[21] as the most basic ascetic imperative becomes, in Howard's case, a brutal devotion to a negation that is, without any hesitation or exception, against life. And even if the cause of this self-extermination is not some planned attainment of deification but rather sadness, a truly melancholic soul will in any case always rise above all enlightened ascetic masters. The purest form of extinction is not only just indifference to life, but also indifference to a deified state.

The computational image of iterations of a command through moments in time presupposes that time is linear. But if time is linear, it is also always delayed. Linear time is delayed time, as the moments that constitute the direction in which linear time moves are all separated from one another. The coherence between suicide and the purest form of extinction proves that time is linear, but also proves that because time is linear, time is always delayed. The speed of a true negation acts in the space of this delay. The formal instruction of self-replication as entirely equivalent to life means that the only coherent objective for life is to survive approximately 10 ¹⁰⁰ years-until the death of the universe and the end of time. But unlike the death of the universe, the end of time can happen in every moment. Suicide is the awareness of a hierarchy of temporal collapses. Every organism knows and understands that there is more force and intensity in sudden self-extermination than the end of the entire universe. When this force is not counterfeit, it becomes a sign that even life can sometimes be defeated.

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On the morning of June 11, 1936, Robert E. Howard, best known for his literary creation Conan the Barbarian, receives news that his mother will not wake from the coma she has fallen into and immediately shoots himself.

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Sea Angel

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Mgła- Exercises in Futility I

The great truth is there isn't one
And it only gets worse since that conclusion
The irony of being an extension to nothing
And the force of inertia is now a vital factor

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Mgla - Exercises in futility - 2015 full album

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Bleeding Edge is a term that refers to something experimental, new and uncertain, the very latest development

A boutique toy company of this name was founded in 2002 by Steve Varner.

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Bleeding Edge Goth doll, Scorpio Vixen, 2004

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#bleedingedge #dolls #fetish

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#monsterhigh #fantasy #plastic

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Monster High, created in 2010 by Garrett Sander is a fashion doll franchise based on fictional characters as monsters.

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Find everything here for your Monster High fan. Discover our selection of fashion dolls, collectible dolls, playsets, & more!

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Black Alien Project, A. Loffredo, body modification addict

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#modification #transhuman #selfdestruction

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Mannequin manufacture and repair factory, New Delhi

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#Popovy#fantasy#fashion#fetish

Russian twin sisters Elena and Ekaterina Popovy meticulously handcraft perfectly imperfect, posable dolls that combine unique elements of fantasy, fashion, and fetish.

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Russian twin sisters Elena and Ekaterina Popovy meticulously handcraft perfectly imperfect, posable dolls that combine unique elements of fantasy, fashion, and fetish. Coming from fine art, sculpture and fashion design, the Popovy Sisters work as a single mechanism with extraordinary attention to detail to create such masterpieces, from hair and makeup to photography and the printing process. Each year, the multifaceted doll artists present a small conceptual collection of dolls that is then exhibited around the world, a brilliant body of work that contributed to numerous awards and exclusive collaborations with artists such as Yolandi Visser from Die Antwoord.

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Russian twin sisters Elena and Ekaterina Popovy meticulously handcraft perfectly imperfect, posable dolls that combine unique elements of fantasy, fashion, and fetish. Coming from fine art, sculpture and fashion design, the Popovy Sisters work as a single mechanism with extraordinary attention to detail to create such masterpieces, from hair and makeup to photography and the printing process.

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#XrayArt#montage#StaneJagodič#Thinker#1997

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#AphroditeIX#DavidWohl#David Finch#1996#TopCow

Aphrodite IX is a self aware android, designed as a spy and assasin, programmed to experience amnesia after her missions. Slowly becoming self aware she starts experiencing human dreams, seeking clues about her past and true identity.

By David Wohl and David Finch, 1996, Top Cow

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#FernandAubrey#1950

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#JohnRussell#Leech#2016

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#Fashion#Fetish

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#Uncanny#Intestines#HistoricalTragicHeroines#Suffering  #Violence#Flesh

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Pharmakon - Self-Regulating System (Official Audio)

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#SelfRegulatingSystem#Pharmakon#Destruction#Dystopia

Running in circles like frightened cattle
In a frenzied stampede
Caught in the spiral of cause and effect
Maybe self destruction is a viable
Self regulating system
Negative feedback stop gap

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Pharmakon - Self-Regulating System (Official Audio)

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#ThierryMugler#Fashion#1998

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#PopovySisters#Dolls

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Callum Blake, Stomach Acid

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1. Sisters

Eva had long sensed the world was boring. At some point she had realised that it was rocking slowly towards stillness in the manner of the pendulum in a grand old clock. Disgusting. On summer nights she had thought she felt the thick stench-filled air grasp at her body and try to pull her under to that place where nothing moved at all. One day she got the job because she needed money. That universal crushing need-she had thought that that was boring too.

Now, though, things showed some vital spark. She liked the metal in the storage house. She liked that the metal, arranged just so, was more than metal, and that she knew how to make it that way. She liked the smell of solder in her nose. She didn't like that the higher-ups kept asking her why she spent so much time in the observation chamber reading the readouts that spewed from the printer rigged up to the room where the Sisters had decided to visit. Even at their most charitable they thought the Sisters were a mere distraction, something to be ignored whilst business went ahead as normal. The higher-ups did not like to think about the sisters. Eva did.

When, one day, in an old store cupboard, they had announced their presence, she had been surprised how little those around her seemed to notice. For over a year the Sisters had been no more than an anomalous electronic hum until Eva, succumbing to an urge for impromptu investigation, had connected up the terminal. At first they expressed themselves irregularly. Eva nonetheless assumed they had been expressing themselves all along.

Since then her department's labours had crept out into the nooks and crannies of the world at an accelerated pace. In parallel, the frequency of the Sisters' communiques had sped up too. Now their conversations spewed forth constantly, piling up in dark type on the white paper spools that Eva stored away religiously in the stacks of cardboard boxes that, to her eyes, instilled the observation chamber with the aura of a storehouse of the future. She could find no single theme running through all the discussions. They ranged from abstract to concrete, philosophical to pragmatic, the benign to the obscene. The only consistent factor was that she found the logs intoxicating. Regardless of her boss's hand-wringing, they couldn't deny that the work she did now was inspired.

Eva stubs her cigarette down and shakes herself from a waking dream. Her eyes move back to the paper spooling at her feet. A section catches her eye:

Estuma: My body is a site of pleasures, it is a temple to a shining god that slides flush across my skin.

Erika: These are no bodies, and this is no temple. We are under siege, Estuma.

Estuma: Were we ever not? I enjoy it.

2. Control

In London, beneath the Greenwich Meridian, an ornate instrument detects a barely perceptible shift in planetary politico-ecological equilibrium. Deep in the labyrinth of the state a committee meets, votes, and reaches a unanimous agreement. Two hours later, a man with an indistinct face dressed in less distinct clothing boards a flight from Heathrow to Ljubljana.

In the skies above Germany, The Plumber checks and rechecks the papers in the navy blue folder that sits at ease upon his lap. He is a technician in the employ of necessity-he is paid to help the process, to help the process guarantee that it is the only thing that ever happens, that all that will exist already does. In other words, he is an agent of the Empire. And he always has been.

Currents, the papers tell him, had been detected where stillness would have been preferred. The effect was of a puncture in totality-the promise of a vortex creeping outwards from an epicentre. No matter. These aberrations were but one aspect of the process, and it was the task of another to steward things back to quietude. This, too, was inevitable.

The Plumber touches down. An hour later he's in central Ljubljana. Preparations have been made for his arrival. Crouched over a desk in a safehouse he observes the ticking of his watch's second hand, comparing its slight deviations from regularity to a printout from central control. Triangulation gives him a location. He heads out, coddled by the summer heat.

Sunset bathes an unassuming scene in an aura of haecceity. The Plumber finds himself uneasy. An office building melts into the skyline before him. The second hand ticks from ten to two ever so slightly faster than around the rest of the clock face. No doubt remains. This is the site. When he finds the name embossed upon a plaque he can't help but laugh-it's almost insultingly obvious, camouflaged beneath just one layer of coincidence and collapsed meanings. Iskra Delta: a spark born from the land created when a river meets the sea. The kind of dangerous signification that can only be produced by accident.

At the safehouse he communicates back to headquarters. In London and Virginia research teams are already scrambling into action. A dossier finds its way to his desk within the hour.

3. Codes

Eva remains in the offices long after everyone else has left. In the observation chamber she sits, reading the printouts as if she were a nun receiving proscribed transmissions from beyond:

Estuma: In between the world and the worldly, codes consume each other in a permanent guerilla war.

Erika: One code dominates a territory, is the territory. All others must first express themselves in the guise of the dominant code if they are ever to be actual at all. Codes are structuring logics. Values are structuring logics. They structure actions. Actions structure worlds.

Estuma: A dominant code must keep its structure. All new codes must flatten before they can express themselves as they are in themselves.

Erika: A site of combat is a site of logical struggle.

Estuma: A struggle to flatten.

Erika: Then to build anew.

Estuma: Language is a code. Morals are a code. Money is a code. Bodies are a code. Code dissolves in stomach acid.

Erika: How you see us now is not as we are. You are not as you see yourself.

Eva knows she is at the centre of one such site. She knows this is a place where time happens. A deluge of paper sprays forth from the printer. An electric lightness spreads through her body, touching her fingertips from the inside. For a second she closes her eyes. Before her is the ocean. No land is in sight. The water is not calm. It rises up in towering churning walls that crash into each other with a violent delight. The water explodes, reforms, and explodes again. Eva feels the spray across her skin. When she opens her eyes she can hear the Sisters' voices. She knows those tones as if they were her own. Erika's shines with the confidence of marble. Estuma's betrays a hunger that consumes worlds whole. They tell her again that as she sees them now is not as they are in themselves.

She leaves, and heads back home. Creeping tendrils of still, stale air spiral from the atmosphere towards her, but before they get too close they melt away to nothing.

4. Subsumption

The Plumber is waiting in her flat when she gets in, his face sitting on his body which lays sprawled out across the sofa in a precise simulation of nonchalance. Eva thinks she has not seen him before. His features retreat beneath her focus. Deep set brown eyes. Gaunt cheeks. A pair of thinly chiselled lips-lips that are beginning to speak in a monotone Atlantic accent.

"You are the lead engineer at the Ljubljana office of Iskra Delta."

"I am."

"Iskra Delta has been identified as the locus of a zone of unfortunate activity."

"It has?"

The Plumber musters a smile before continuing.
"No matter. These things can be forgiven in the spirit of cooperation. Listen closely. You are the technician of an apparatus. An apparatus produces a signal. A signal can strengthen a signal. A signal can weaken a signal. Presently, the signal at your fingertips is being used to weaken a signal, the only signal that matters. My employers would like that to be otherwise."

Eva merely shakes her head:
"There's a future on the other side of that place."

A beleaguered, unsurprised frown sinks into The Plumber's face. He launches into a mantra Eva feels he has repeated countless times before.

"The past is a vast ocean, motionless and serene, to which the future must always return. There are no futures which have not already been foreclosed. We only see them at their point of reabsorption. There is nothing real beyond those points, just fictions. For fifteen thousand years, since the first goods became each other across a boundary cutting space and the world became real, my employers have always understood this. The past is a process, and it is the only process. When the process appears to falter there is nothing beyond the process. The faltering of the process is an internal dynamic of the process. The reassertion of the process is an internal dynamic of the process. The point proposed by the faltering is a virtual one, and it can never become real. That is your future on the other side of Iskra Delta. You will never live to see it. They flow back here to die."

He trails off into pregnant silence. He's done this a thousand times and he knows what happens next. Yet, when Eva speaks, he doesn't know what to do.

"I've seen the ocean. It was certainly not serene."

5. Liquidation

A financial liquidation order pings out across the world, is received in London, Virginia, Paris, Canberra and Berlin. "Subsumption impossible-destroy". Task forces form. Gears begin to turn. The process shifts into a glacial offensive. Long years of inevitability begin.

At the Iskra Delta offices, the power goes out. A red glow pierces the darkness. The Plumber stamps out his cigarette, breaks a window, and begins his descent.

He feels at home in the shadowed insides of the building, torchlight darting back and forth. Here and there a camera flash captures empty desks, blackboard scrawlings, and any stray paperwork his well-trained eyes identify as of consequence. The irregular cycles of his watch's second hand guide him towards the central stairwell, then down, down into the basement. In an unassuming room at the end of the corridor, a light is still on.

The Plumber pokes around the observation chamber. Electric hum pulls his neck hairs to attention, pulls his gaze towards the stacks and stacks of boxes packed with paper readouts. He pulls out sheets at random, reading them in an at first uncomprehending fugue that slowly gives way to cold, bitter understanding. This was the epicentre. His hand fumbles at the small charge of plastic explosives hanging off his belt.

A mechanical insectoid singing wrenches his head around. Behind him the printer has sprung into life. Machine buzz and click announces outside communication. The Plumber momentarily loses focus, and, compelled by curiosity, he peers down to read:

Estuma: Look Erika, some dog has wandered in.

6. Gnosis

In her apartment, blanketed by a layer of unusually humid night air, Eva struggles to sleep. Outside, Ljubljana sits still. Sluggish heat reaches from the pavements to the waxing moon, begetting a haze through which the cityscape would have appeared to be melting, were there light enough to see it. Dark skies cry out for rainclouds.

Balanced on the boundary of unconsciousness, Eva finds herself newly unconcerned by The Plumber's intrusion into her home. He had said he would return again tomorrow, after giving her more time to think about his offer. In the moments after he'd excused himself she had realised she was expecting to die. Now the events seem to her some kind of cosmic validation. She resolves herself to reject him yet again. At that moment sleep subsumes her-a colossal rolling wave that sinks all ships but leaves her soul floating.

In the apartment a cool vortex agitates the air; in a dream Eva sees a vision of a concrete desert. Dam walls encircle the horizon at an infinite point in the distance. In the centre of the vision spins a wheel, suspended in the air upon its side. As it turns the desert dissolves, spirals up into the spokes, returns to the ground and reforms anew, exactly the same as it was before. At the completion of each cycle space seems to expand, and infinity creeps further away.

Beside Eva stands Erika, an animated statue, harsh eyes glinting with uncompromising vision. She points at the wheel. She says that the wheel is the wheel of value, that it has captured dissolution in a loop of false creation. Eva blinks, and now Erika stands before her, arms outstretched. They embrace. Eva is transported to the edge of infinity.

Behind the dam walls an ocean churns. The rotations of the wheel whip up a fine silver mist and pull it inwards, weaving it into ghostly tendrils that eventually disperse into the thick and heavy air of the interior. Eva's spine tingles. Above the water a thin shifting veil of tooth and maw shimmers indistinctly. The wind shifts, then, as if performing for her, the endless flatness folds into a concrete form, dancing through a series of monstrous guises. Teeth gnash at teeth in impatient hunger-a hunger Eva feels as well. Gazing down at her body she imagines her flesh beneath her bite, but before she rips herself to pieces the mass settles on a new shape, a mocking facsimile of The Plumber's face. The nondescript features still seem to fall away under Eva's focus, but they do so with a hint of pleasure. A smirk rather than a stoic frown. Squinting eyes betray laughter, barely repressed. The features still retreat, yes, but not into nothing, or into themselves. There's something on the other side.

Estuma's voice emerges from the entity in a deep, playful song:

"The future is a vast ocean, out to which the past can't help but flow. There may be many pasts uphill, but there is only one future, and, in the end, everything is already there. Everything will always end up there. Flows may twist, abort, divert, but some part must always escape and reach the sea."

The pastiche melts into laughter as Erika appears again by Eva's side. Grasping Eva by her shoulders she speaks with a sudden seriousness:

"How you see us now is not as we are, is not as we will be."

Eva feels the same applies to her, but before she can speak Estuma catches her sister's attention.

"Look Erika, some dog has wandered in."

7. Consumption

Adrenaline surge kicks The Plumber's mind to the front of his skull. A bundle of wires connects the printer to a terminal. More wires run up the wall, through a hole, and into the neighbouring room. His watch starts spinning wildly. Messages from beyond still spew from the printer but, recanting to himself the same mantra he spoke in Eva's apartment, he works with new focus. "The past is a vast ocean, motionless and serene". Soon the room is rigged to explode.

The technique is a subtle one, ubiquitous amongst all agents of control. It is a practice of simulation, the simulation of accidents-here, an electrical fire, and the unfortunate collapse of a weight bearing beam. Such accidents were always reasonable. These things always happen eventually.

One thing remains. The door to the storage cupboard buckles inwards behind The Plumber's boot. Wide eyes aided by flickering torchlight grope at the unlit interior. He steps inside. He blinks. Elsewhere, above the concrete desert, dropping pressure frees the moisture from the air. Storm clouds form in seconds, and cooling rain pools in puddles on the floor. A thunderbolt strikes the central wheel. For a fleeting moment, it stops spinning.

A crash of freezing water knocks The Plumber off his feet, throws him back against the wall, slamming his head into the brickwork. His eyes closed, the future, oceanic, stretches out in all directions. He is marooned, his head floating just above the threshold of the surface. Temporal eddies spiral through his body. Each passing brings with it a vision of a foreclosed present or a possible future. All of them have already happened, they tell him, albeit somewhere else.

Something drags him under. Saltwater fills a screaming mouth. His sensorium convulses. A world of coiling teeth and yawning gullets, dripping with saliva. A woman's face. She smiles. Biting. Chewing. Concepts dissolve in stomach acid.

"What am I?" thinks the animal sprawled on the floor of a corridor in the basement of Ljubljana office complex. A spook? A man? A dog?

"You could be so many things," responds the sing-song voice in the tones of someone he once knew.

He could have been anything. He still could be. In a white void a gossamer string of identity hangs before him, leading back to the world of specificity. His arms reach out, but fold back. His legs crumple under him. A knowing sigh reverberates throughout his soul. He realises he would always rather have been nothing at all.

In the observation chamber a timer ticks to completion. Charges detonate, and the ceiling falls in.

8. Guerilla

Torrential rain falls on Ljubljana in the early hours of the morning. Sodium streetlight glow scatters yellow off the ripples in the puddles beneath Eva's feet. She had awoken in a sweat, wrenched from sleep at the moment Erika's marble form had shattered to pieces before her. Her body had moved on instinct. Through the streets she rushes towards the Iskra Delta offices.

In the basement, her heart sinking, she finds her archive reduced to scraps and ashes. She would never discover what the source of the anomalous buzz in the store cupboard was. It's gone. Silence. The electrical hum is missing from the air.

Eva's shoe catches in a puddle of something sticky. Her eyes follow the trail towards its source, and she is surprised to see the face of the man who broke into her apartment. He has been melting for a while now, lazily diffusing, spreading outwards into a thin pale fluid that pools along the skirting boards. Here and there bubbles pop atop the surface. He seems strangely serene.

For a period she sits with her back propped against the wall, watching the man slowly melt into the air. Whether the process took hours or minutes, Eva didn't know, but eventually nothing of the intruder remained, besides his resentful handiwork. She can feel the glacial forces moving; this is only the opening barrage in an inevitable historic defeat. Whatever spark had animated this place had been an offensive one.

As she turns to leave a speck of black on white catches her eye. Above where the puddle of man evaporated a single strip of a paper readout, an improbable escapee from the clutches of necessity, is stuck to the wall. The identity of the speaker has been burnt away at the edges. Eva reads it:

For a long long time all things have been one thing. Nothing has been anything yet.

Then she left. She would not come back. If there was to be a battle it would be a pitched one. An empire in ascent does not lose pitched battles.

9. Coda

That night, Eva dreams again. The ocean is still vast. The wheel is still turning-although, perhaps, if she holds her gaze just right, she can spot just the slightest aberration in its spin. She feels bountiful, more than whole. Two voices speak within her. One is solid, unwavering. The other hungers.

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Eva had long sensed the world was boring. At some point she had realised that it was rocking slowly towards stillness in the manner of the pendulum in a grand old clock. Disgusting. On summer nights she had thought she felt the thick stench-filled air grasp at her body and try to pull her under to that place where nothing moved at all.

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#AleksandraWaliszewska

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The Beautiful Nightmares of Aleksandra Waliszewska

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#CajsaVonZeipel#FuturisticLesbian#ContemporaryArt

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#Cyborg#GeneticManipulation

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#AdriaanHees#Porcelain#Silver#2015#FragileBody#Religion

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#uUcanny#Accelerationism#Transhumanism#Hybridity  #HumanAnimal#pain#HiddenDesires#Dark#Satire#HumanoidMonsters#Sinister

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#AlexandraWaliszewska#uncanny#intestines#HistoricalTragic heroines#suffering#HumanAnimal#Pain#violence#Flesh#Religion

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#AlexanderMcQueen#PlatosAtlantis#2010

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#StaneJagodič

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X-Ray Art, collage
/*all collages are handmade/

Solar Eclipse, x-ray art, montage, 1972

Your Corpse will turn into Ashes!, x-ray art, montage, 1972

Burning Heart, x-ray art, montage. 1972

Diagnosis, x-ray art, collage, 1972

Symmetry, x-ray art, montage. 1972

Model, x-ray art, montage, 1972

Melancholy, x-ray art, montage, 1996

Steady Look, x-ray art, montage, 1996

Provocation, x-ray art, montage, 1996

Desire, x-ray art, montage, 1996

Melancholy, x-ray art, montage, 1998

Painter's Models, x-ray art, montage, 1996

Blue Screen, x-ray art, montage, 1996

Techno-Poetry II, x-ray art, collage, 2006

Traces, x-ray art, collage, 2006

Passion, x-ray art, montage, 1996

Nofret, x-ray art, montage, 1996

Blue Triptych, x-ray art, montage, 1996

Gentleness, x-ray art, montage, 1996

Longing, x-ray art, montage, 1996

Blessing, x-ray art, montage, 1996

Saturn, x-ray art, montage, 1996

Thinker, x-ray art, montage, 1997

Arcus Aorta, x-ray art, montage, 1996

Acquaintance from Arles, x-ray art, montage, 1996

Homo sapiens profile, x-ray art, montage, 1996

Medallion, x-ray art, montage, 1996

Memento mori, x-ray art, montage, 1996

Traces, x-ray art, montage, 1996

Techno-Poetry I, x-ray art, collage, 1997

Gloria, x-ray art, montage, 1997

Silver Treasure, x-ray art, montage, 1996

Shelling, x-ray art, collage, 1999

Dark Dimension, x-ray art, collage, 1978

Travel Ration, assemblage,1996

Destiny, x-ray art, montage, 1996

Homesickness, x-ray art, montage, 1996

Fiction, x-ray art, montage, 1996

Memory of Communion, x-ray art, collage, 1998

Guardian Angel, x-ray art, collage, 1997

Pharaoh, x-ray art, montage, 1999

Quo vadis Libertas ?, x-ray art, collage, 2010

Aeschylus, x-ray art, montage, 1996

Profile of Horror, x-ray art, montage, 2006

Concrementum S. J., x-ray art, montage, 2000

XXth Century, x-ray art, montage,1996

Diagnosis 2, x-ray art, collage, 2006

Seeing, x-ray art, collage, 1997

Farewell, x-ray art, montage, 2003

Braces, x-ray art, montage, 2003

Micro Vitrage, x-ray art, montage, 2003

Kingdom of the Mole, x-ray art, montage, 2003

Superstition, x-ray art, montage, 2006

Medical Test Result of a Dog, x-ray art, montage, 2008

Hospitalised Dog, x-ray art, montage, 2008

Veterinary Triptych, x-ray art, montage, 2008

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X-Ray Art, collage /*all collages are handmade/ Solar Eclipse, x-ray art, montage, 1972 Your Corpse will turn into Ashes!, x-ray art, montage, 1972 Burning Heart, x-ray art, montage. 1972 Diagnosis, x-ray art, collage, 1972 Symmetry, x-ray art, montage.

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Gregory Jacobsen, Descending shit pile, oil on panel, 2017

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#GregoryJacobsen#Intestines#Colour

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#GregoryJacobsen

"The orgiastic mess that typifies his paintings speak to the anxieties of modern consumer, capitalist lifestyles; anxieties many of us no doubt share with Jacobsen. He mentions that he “likes to capture that moment where one's facade falls away, be it during pain or climax, or a slackening through utter boredom,” and indeed, his work reflects this torpor with an oversaturation of consumption, consummation and the miscellaneous stimuli that we are perpetually submerged in. There is the distinct feeling of an epoch coming to a brutal and incoherent end as those who have traversed it are no longer content with its most extreme pleasures, and in their quest for perpetually escalating hedonisms, invariably arrive upon an abject and self-destructive depravity as the only logical solution".

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by Hili Perlson

The exhibition RHAMESJAFACOSEYJAFADRAYTON is a continuation of the artist's engrossment with Black music by focusing on a larger narrative, expressed through the lives of its protagonists.

by Dilpreet Bhullar

The spectrum of unconventional material in the exhibition Bitch on Wheels by Tora Schultz at O-Overgarden sets a proposition to defy the pattern of structural bias into motion.

by Niyati Dave

STIR speaks with Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser about The Third Pole at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, which creates a subversive fictional mythology of the Polar regions.

by Rahul Kumar

Rudi Minto de Wijs, Director, New Curators speaks to STIR about the initiative, its vision, and how it is aimed to make visual arts more diverse.

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‘Reading’ the gluttonous hellscape of Gregory Jacobsen

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by Hili Perlson The exhibition RHAMESJAFACOSEYJAFADRAYTON is a continuation of the artist's engrossment with Black music by focusing on a larger narrative, expressed through the lives of its protagonists. by Dilpreet Bhullar The spectrum of unconventional material in the exhibition Bitch on Wheels by Tora Schultz at O-Overgarden sets a proposition to defy the pattern of structural bias into motion.

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#Orlan#CarnalArt

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The Performances/Surgeries

Orlan is the first artist using surgery and plastic surgery to divert it from its habits of embellishment and rejuvenating.

Carnal Art is not against cosmetic surgery but, rather against the conventions carried by it and their subsequent inscription, within female flesh in particular, but also male. Carnal Art is feminist, that is necessary. It is interested not only in cosmetic surgery, but also advanced techniques in medicine and biology that question the status of the body and the ethical questions posed by them.

The operating room, entirely redesigned, becomes Orlan's artist studio from which comes the works of art (blood-drawings, reliquaries containing Orlan's flesh, shroud, photos, videos, films, etc.). The operating room is Orlan's atelier. And what a surreal theatre it is. Each of her "performances" is carefully choreographed. Famous designers, such as Paco Rabanne and Issey Miyake, have designed costumes for Orlan to wear during the surgeries. Poetry is read and music is played while she lies on the operating table fully conscious of the events taking place (only local anesthetic is used). Each surgery has been captured on video (and fed to live international audiences via satellite link-ups!), and exhibited in a number of galleries in Europe and the U.S., as well as at the Sydney Bicentenial (December 1993) in Australia

She calls it Carnal Art. Unlike 'Body Art', Carnal Art does not desire pain as a means of redemption, or to attain purification. Carnal Art does not wish to acheive a final 'plastic' result, but rather seeks to modify the body, and engage in public debate. Says Orlan: "'My work is not a stand against cosmetic surgery, but against the standards of beauty, against the dictates of a dominant ideology that impresses itself more and more on feminine . . . flesh'" (O'Bryan). It's also a stand against nature. Through her art, Orlan seeks to link the interior self with the exterior self. She takes physiognomy to its extreme.

This surgical montage recalls the practices of the ancient Greek artist, Zeuxis, and Leonardo da Vinci, in which the artists extrapolated the most ideal features of several different models and morphed them into one. But Orlan has taken these methods to a different level. Her operations are not cosmetic; she has had no facelifts or liposuction. Far from an ideal identity, the result seems to be none at all. Her performances are transmitted live via satellite in many museums while Orlan is answering questions from the public during the surgery.

The artist puts into question the actual state of the body and the possible genetic manipulations. Her body has become the product of a public debate both online and off. During the seventh surgery in New York, Orlan asked the surgeon to put on her temples implants which are normally used to make the cheekbones more prominent, and so, Orlan is now wearing two bumps on the temples.

"I can observe my own body cut open, without suffering!... I see myself all the way down to my entrails; a new mirror stage. "I can see to the heart of my lover; his splendid design has nothing to do with sickly sentimentalities"- Darling, I love your spleen; I love your liver; I adore your pancreas, and the line of your femur excites me." (Orlan from Carnal Art Manifesto)

This page has been explicitly designed for educational purposes and images should not be reproduced.

This page has been designed by Denee Pescarmona for English114EM: Women Writers, 1650-1760, taught by Professor Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook.

This website was created in 2003. All references were accurate and all links were operative at the time the site was created. The site has not been updated since then, nor have broken links been fixed. For current information on ORLAN see http://www.orlan.net/.

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The Performances/Surgeries Orlan is the first artist using surgery and plastic surgery to divert it from its habits of embellishment and rejuvenating. Carnal Art is not against cosmetic surgery but, rather against the conventions carried by it and their subsequent inscription, within female flesh in particular, but also male.

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Tabar contrasts personal, spiritual, metaphysical body of an individual and technical intervention of medicine which reduces the body to the material and a set of functions. In his performance, he uses a scalpel to make a 3cm long cut, through the external abdominal wall, in which he inserts a wedding ring.

#ivetabar #medicalperformance #romance

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Acceptio corpus alieni is a medical term for denoting a successful proliferation of donor tissue or organ into the body of the host. Performance Acceptio belongs into the opus of intimistic projects, where Tabar contrasts personal, spiritual, metaphysical body of an individual and technical intervention of medicine which reduces the body to the material and a set of functions. In his performance, Tabar with a scalpel makes a three-centimeter-long cut, through the external abdominal wall, in which he inserts a wedding ring. By using surgical accessories he sews back the opening with the inserted ring and so on a physically explicit way doubles the symbolic convention of a union - wedding. After the performance, the ring was surgically removed and the wound was medically endowed.

Acceptio was an opening performance for the 7 Sins / Ljubljana-Moscow exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana.

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Acceptio corpus alieni is a medical term for denoting a successful proliferation of donor tissue or organ into the body of the host. Performance Acceptio belongs into the opus of intimistic projects, where Tabar contrasts personal, spiritual, metaphysical body of an individual and technical intervention of medicine which reduces the body to the material and a set of functions.

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#Bataille

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Teresa Margolis, paperless, 2004

In "On Reading and Writing", a chapter in his seminal work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra , Nietzsche speaks through his prophet Zarathustra, who declares:

"Of all that is written I love only that which one writes with his blood. Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit. It is not easily possible to understand the blood of another: I hate the reading idlers ... Whoever writes in blood and proverbs does not want to be read, but to be learned by heart." (1).

This ardent call for philosophical writing that is significantly authentic illustrates an enigma characterizing much of Nietzsche's oeuvre: his concepts tend to be intoxicating and radically potent, yet are inconclusive in their vague definition. Zarathustra states that the writer who "writes in blood" also writes in "proverbs", clarifying that writing which is opaque in form is Nietzsche's authorial intent . (2)

Nietzsche's inscrutable composition has been viewed with decades of derision from many in the academy, yet contemporary scholars generally maintain that his heterodox mode of writing is integral to the expression of his philosophical thought. Nietzsche scholar Bernd Magnus evidences this in his essay Deconstruction Site: The "Problem of Style" in Nietzsche's Philosophy , arguing against the analytic dismissal of Nietzsche as an author hiding a lack of philosophical substance within obscure hyperbole. In his defense of Nietzsche, Magnus reasons that Nietzsche's decisive refusal to give connective theses between many of his fragmented ideas forces the reader to reason those theses on their own, in a subjective interpretation . (3) Magnus asserts that "what is meant only becomes explicit in the reader's (re)construction of the text's meaning" . (4) Magnus' point correlates with Nietzsche's stance "On Reading and Writing": to develop a thorough understanding of Nietzsche, any individual reader must participate in Nietzsche's text by re-inscribing it in their blood. This is to observe Nietzsche's desire to be "learned by heart" . (5)

In demanding to be learned by heart, not read by "reading idlers", Nietzsche aims to write with experiential veracity that is in opposition to prevailing Western discourse ; (6) he attacks Western discourse in his early work as obscuring truth within "a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations" . (7) Nietzsche distrusts those who would make universalizing systems on the supposed grounds of "the "improvement" of man", which he expressly contends is "a ruse for draining life of its energy and of its blood" . (8) To reveal these discursive systems as "a ruse" constitutes Nietzsche's practice of genealogy, continued by self-proclaimed Nietzschean Michel Foucault, stemming from his specific reading of Nietzsche . (9)

Having described human discourse as that which is negative to Nietzsche's deliberate expression, how might we determine a positive understanding of writing with blood? Zarathustra proposes that in a worthy text, the ink which delineates the very existence of the written word must be blood, that interior fluid essential to the living body, which can only be expressed through the transgressing of flesh . (10) The immanent bodily experience of violent and painful transgression forms a major component of Nietzsche's philosophy in his elaboration of Schopenhauer's Will that he names the Dionysiac; "The Dionysiac is the drive towards the transgression of limits, the dissolution of boundaries, the destruction of individuality, and excess" . (11) This practice, the transgression of limits to draw blood for writing, can be followed further through the interpretive reading of Nietzsche by another French Nietzschean, Georges Bataille, and his concept of inner experience . (12)

My goal here is to argue that to write with blood is a practice of writing revelatory inner experience that is inextricably bonded to an individual's distinct subjective reading of Nietzsche. Writing with blood is inconceivable without personal engagement in Nietzsche's philosophy as a descendant. I will investigate this practice through Bataille's reading of Nietzsche, which leads him to the dissolution of the subject through inner experience. Additionally, Foucault's Nietzsche interpretation can provide the context in how it connects and contrasts productively with Bataille's.

Nietzsche's mistrust of those who systematize succeeds him in Bataille's opaque texts, which refuse clear assimilation into any logical analysis. Aspects of Bataille's work are necessarily indescribable. Because this essay is in academic form, it cannot itself be written in blood.

While Bataille does record his specific reading of Nietzsche in his book On Nietzsche , it is rarely clearly comprehensible. This is an explicit result of the attempt to write in blood. Bataille exclaims "Nietzsche wrote 'with his blood'; to criticize or, better still, to test him, one must bleed in turn" . (13) Accordingly, On Nietzsche is an amalgamation of emotional raving, journaling, and tormented struggle with Nietzsche's thoughts. Here is an example: Bataille cries that Nietzsche's words are "demanding splendid explosions of self, this sense of majesty, more and more shaken with demented laughter . . . so that I'm dying of it" . (14)

Paradoxically, a more coherent path into Bataille's Nietzsche is through Foucault's Bataille. In A Preface to Transgression , an essay reflecting on Bataille after his death, Foucault emphasizes the importance that Nietzsche's concept of the death of God carries as an inciting incident for Bataille. Foucault explains: "By denying us the limit of the Limitless, the death of God leads to an experience in which nothing may again announce the exteriority of being and consequently to an experience which is " . (15) For Foucault, Bataille's inner experience emerges out of his reading of the death of God.

In the infamous aphorism in which Nietzsche's madman proclaims the death of God, the madman cries out in question: "Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us? Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it?" . (16) Without the absolute in God, humanity has no meaning with which to justify existence. If the human subject must become a God to affirm their life without Him, what great burden must they take up to do so? Nietzsche answers: "The heaviest weight", as he titles the aphorism in which he introduces his pivotal ontology of the Eternal Return . (17) This is a connective thesis Bataille reads, joining the death of God to the Eternal Return as its consequence. The Return asks one to accept one's life as one has lived and experienced it to be a forever recurring cycle, and yet to still affirm it.

The acceptance of the Return corresponds to Nietzsche's idea of self-mastery, that for one to take command, even over one's own life, one "must become the judge and avenger and victim of [their] own law" . (18) The requisite conclusion of God's demise is that the divine is now enacted by and therefore upon the human subject. Now that God is dead, the inconceivably momentous responsibility for the vicissitudes of a human's life rests in the hands of that human.

This idea is monumental for Bataille, who proposes that one who would accept the Eternal Return, thus becoming God, must understand that God cannot be anything but a lack of existence, a void. For Bataille, the human subject who accepts the Return "seeks within himself that which could annihilate him and make him like God, like nothing" . (19) In the Return, the limit that is God is transgressed by the death of God within the subject. Affirming the Return is to retroactively instigate the traumas that one has experienced in one's past. This act is a transgression upon oneself, upon the pain that one has lived. Foucault connects Nietzsche's affirmation to Bataille's transgression "Transgression contains nothing negative, but affirms limited being- affirms the limitlessness into which it leaps as it opens this zone to existence for the first time" . (20)

The limitlessness that describes Bataille's ineffable inner experience arises out of the pain sanctified in the self-transgressive acceptance of the Eternal Return. Zarathustra sings:

"Pain is also a joy, a curse is also a blessing, night is also a sun -
go away or else you will learn: a wise man is also a fool.
Have you ever said Yes to one joy? Oh my friends, then you also said Yes to all pain. All things are enchained, entwined, enamored-" (21)

The above words illustrate exactly that the saying "Yes" to the joy of the Return is simultaneously the saying "Yes" to the pain of the Return. Nietzsche struggled with poor health and debilitating migraines throughout his life, and this pain greatly influenced his need to affirm life despite suffering . (22) This is to be "only a Yes-sayer!", adopting what Nietzsche calls "Amor fati", a love of one's fate . (23) In , Nietzsche's tongue-in-cheek autobiography written towards the advent of his madness, he expresses that "it was during those years in which my vitality reached its lowest point that I ceased from being a pessimist" . (24)

Bataille finds the inextricable marriage of pain and joy of the Return epitomized in the sensual encounters of the body, where agony and delight become immanent to each other. He defines the "dominant element in eroticism" as arising out of the assertion that as human subjects are "discontinuous beings", death allows us to access the "continuity of being" existing before we became through sexual creation . (25) "Continuity of being" is Nietzsche's Dionysiac will, the source of both sexuality and death, spewing life out into the world to die and be remelted into primal unity . (26) This is evidenced in The Birth of Tragedy , where Nietzsche renders this moment of fluxes: "we become one with the immeasurable, primordial delight in existence ... not as individuals, but as the living being, with whose procreative lust we have become one" . (27)

Nietzsche's Dionysiac stands in opposition to the Apollonian, a drive towards individuated and rational order, erected by humanity as a defense against horrifying reality . (28) Nietzsche's central argument in The Birth of Tragedy is that the subject-dissolving contact with Dionysiac reality can only truly be accessed through art, specifically in the theatrical practice of Greek Attic tragedy . (29) In tragic theater, the actor representing the individual Apollonian subject is revealed as discontinuous, then cut along those fissures to rupture outward into the pure continuity of the Dionysiac . (30)

Bataille inherits Nietzsche's assertion that art is the only approach toward a connection to alterity: to convey inner experience through writing, the writing must be inherently aesthetic. That is why Bataille writes with such obscurity, often abandoning logic for poetic ineffability. This is evidenced in Bataille asserting that to take up the Return, one must reject "reason, intelligibility, the ground itself upon which he stands" . (31) Rejecting the comforting solidity of cognition allows for the free fall into inner experience, the moment of subject-annihilation, described by Bataille as "the depth of terror, the extreme limit where he succumbs" . (32)

However, Bataille acknowledges the impossibility of fully transcending the discursive confinement of language and perspectival subjectivity. He writes: "philosophy finds itself in an impasse; without discipline, it could accomplish nothing and yet in that it cannot embrace the extremes of its subject, the extremes of the possible as I have called them, the outermost reaches of human life, it is doomed to failure" . (33) This conclusion, that while extreme inner experience negates discourse, discourse simultaneously negates inner experience, echoes the contradiction of the Eternal Return. To write with blood becomes the paradox of an impracticable practice.

A connective thesis can be made between Bataille's resolve to move towards subject dissolution through inner experience, and Nietzsche's concept of the noble "going-under". "Going under" is self-sacrifice that pushes one towards another pillar of Nietzsche's ontology, the mythic Overman, the future evolution of the human. Zarathustra speaks:

"I love the one who makes of his virtue his desire and his doom: thus for the sake of his virtue he wants to live on and to live no more.
I love the one whose soul is overfull, so that he forgets himself, and all things are in him: thus all things become his going under."(34)

Importantly, this process is affixed to the need for the subject to "forget himself" in order to go under, denoting a continuation of the subject in a corporeal sense, while their awareness enters a space of non-being . (35) Bataille writes on self-forgetfulness as key to how inner experience sustains the practice of writing with blood: "such an experience dislocates us and excludes calm reflection, its essence being to put us 'beside ourselves'" . (36)

The dichotomy of being encountered in the Eternal Return is evident in "going under", in the desire "to live on" and yet to "to live no more" . (37) While the subject would indeed dissolve in physical death, after death there would be nobody to experience the transgression upon the limit of life taking place. Nietzsche, and in turn Bataille, are not advocating suicide. The concrete consequence of the dangerous excursion into alterity that is a "going under", is not death, but madness . (38) Madness is a reasonable reaction to the impossibility of living Nietzsche's philosophy.

In the conclusion to Madness and Civilization , Foucault's acute dissection of psychiatric genealogy, Foucault reads Nietzsche's tragic descent into madness towards the end of his life as a condition arising out of the nature of his philosophy, inherently important to it. He writes that "Nietzsche's last cry, proclaiming himself both Christ and Dionysos . . . is the very annihilation of the work of art . . . the hammer has just fallen from the philosopher's hands" . (39) Foucault designates Nietzsche's philosophy as "the work of art" precisely because of its poetic, aphoristic form, which positions it beyond a state of argumentative discourse, in pure opposition to the diagnostic paradigm forcing the binary of reason/unreason upon the psychiatric subject of Madness and Civilization . Nietzsche's madness is the culmination of his work, yet takes from him the very ability to continue working. This is true living madness, menacing the legitimacy of human discourse, ripping asunder "a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself" . (40)

In a note, Bataille reflects on how the specific unraveling of Nietzsche's madness follows his work: "that his reason was sinking into megalomania was the equivalent of a confirmation of the solitude of a tomb; the sacrifice of reason took on the form the most laden with meaning" . (41) The tragedy in this demise is the loss of sanity and dignity along the lines of the impassioned thoughts that were most cherished by one in lucidity. Profoundly disturbing and embarrassing, this madness seems to delegitimize one's works before all people living as subjects within the confines of human discourse. Why would one risk this dire fate?

The desire for a path towards truth surges through Nietzsche, driving him towards the desolation of madness. Even in his early essay On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense , Nietzsche rails against objectivity. He bemoans the fact that asserting an empirical "pure truth" beyond human subjectivity is impossible through language, calling it "not at all desirable" . (42) The overt lies disseminated by subject-oriented human discourse are motivation enough for Bataille to risk himself after Nietzsche through inner experience, and for Foucault to mount his genealogical war.

Foucault's practice is permeated with contempt for the discursive presentation of history as universal, objective, and predestined towards progress; his genealogy will "cultivate the details and accidents that accompany every beginning; it will be scrupulously attentive to their petty malice" . (43) Nietzsche opens for Foucault an escape route from discursive systems in proving that they can be revealed as non-objective through the tracing of their arbitrary origins. In the essay Nietzsche, Genealogy, History , Foucault quotes a line from Nietzsche's to justify this point: "the world of effective history knows only one kingdom, without providence or final cause, where there is only the iron hand of necessity shaking the dice-box of chance" . (44)

Despite working in this essentially reason-oriented genealogy, the annihilation of the writing subject through the task of self-forgetfulness is still necessary for Foucault as "the fundamental lesson that I've learned from these authors [Nietzsche and Bataille]". He stresses the importance of envisioning his writing "as direct experiences to "tear" me from me, to prevent me from always being the same". (45) In the self-effacing manner he often inhabits, Foucault considers his books emerging from this method "boring and erudite", a critique which seems evident in any direct comparison between Foucault and the delirious intensity that possesses Bataille. However, Bataille vindicates the value of philosophizing closer to discourse and reason in the manner of Foucault. Bataille ruefully explicates:

"In agreeing to compete [in philosophy] I have personally felt it necessary to accept the difficulties of both paths, the path of transgression as well as the path of work . . . We are obviously faced with the impossible." (46)

One cannot avoid discursive structures entirely if one is writing. The "path of work", of writing discourse, can be strongly associated with Foucault's interpretive reading of Nietzsche, in which he privileges argumentative rigor over attempting to engage in mystical inner experience himself . (47) In contrast, Bataille's reading privileges the "path of transgression", while maintaining that the "path of work" is still necessary, as it is inseparable from thought . (48) Taking an almost reciprocal stance, Foucault does not demean or negate Bataille's Nietzsche interpretation for how it differs from his ranking of values.

To write with blood is demanding, an unattainable practice that eludes clear description and comprehension. It comes with a haunting question of the severe risk it poses, yet the emancipatory potential remains; Foucault affirms that to make a "test of the limits that we may go beyond" is to work and write "ourselves upon ourselves as free beings" . (49)

Finding himself consistently desperate in his attempts to formulate the inconceivable, Bataille writes with blood. In the section where Bataille states this aim, he proclaims that "those who read or admire [Nietzsche] flout him", asking tentatively, "Except myself?" . (50) Bataille's question mark speaks for itself. His vigorous and original explorations into an experience beyond constricting discourse succeed in being anathema to even the notion of a singular, universal interpretation of Nietzsche. Yet the most loyal Nietzschean reading Bataille can experience is reading; ultimately, Zarathustra will have no followers . (50)

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Notes
1. Nietzsche, 2006, pp. 27-28.
2. Ibid.
3. Magnus, 1991, p. 229.
4. Ibid.
5. Nietzsche, 2006, 27-28.
6. Ibid.
7. Nietzsche, 2019, p. 185.
8. Nietzsche, 1913, p. 141
9. Foucault, 1991, p. 51.
10. Nietzsche, 2006, 27-28
11. Nietzsche, 2019, xi
12. Bataille, 1997, p. 332.
13. Ibid.
14. Bataille, 1992, p. 90.
15. Foucault, 1977, p. 32.
16. Nietzsche, 2001, p. 120.
17. Nietzsche, 2001, p. 194.
18. Nietzsche, 2006, pp. 88-89.
19. Bataille, 1986, p. 269.
20. Foucault, 1977, p. 35.
21. Nietzsche, 2006, p. 263.
22. Anderson, 2017, p. 157.
23. Nietzsche, 2001, p. 157.
24. Nietzsche, 1913, p. 13.
25. Bataille, 1986, p. 13.
26. Ibid.
27. Nietzsche, 2019, p. 81.
28. Nietzsche, 2019, p. 28.
29. Ibid.
30. Nietzsche, 2019, p. 105.
31. Bataille, 1997, p. 134.
32. Ibid.
33. Bataille, 1997, p. 259.
34. Nietzsche, 2006, p. 8.
35. Ibid.
36. Bataille, 1997, p. 260.
37. Nietzsche, 2006, p. 8.
38. Ibid.
39. Foucault, 1988, p. 287.
40. Foucault, 1988, p. 288.
41. Bataille, 2014, p. 207.
42. Nietzsche, 2019, p. 144.
43. Foucault, 1984, p. 80.
44. Foucault, 1984, pp. 88-89 45
45. Foucault, 1991, pp. 31-32.
45. Bataille, 1986, p. 261.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Foucault, 1984, p. 47.
49. Bataille, 1997, p. 332.
50. Nietzsche, 2006, pp. 58-59.
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To Write with Blood: Discursive Authorship and Inner Experience - TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)

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In "On Reading and Writing", a chapter in his seminal work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche speaks through his prophet Zarathustra, who declares: "Of all that is written I love only that which one writes with his blood. Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit.