autothanatography i have learned has many associated
practices. one of these, naturally, is
autobiography, but autobiography transformed by death. no longer is the account of one’s life
dominated by time or even space.
language, form, loss, dream, degradation – all these and infinite
other structures offer themselves as complements, substitutes, and subversions
of time, identity, reputation, unity, facticity, social convention, of
biography constructed according to life’s tyrannies and humanity’s relentless
hierarchies … and so as much thanatography – as thanatography, being constituted
in an animate form given to death, is also biography.
another associated practice is autohagiography. in writing my life-death, i write my
sainthood, the unmitigated holiness of my life.
saint genet wrote in his autobiothanatohagiography, sainthood is the loftiest human attitude. the saint arrives at its goal if it sheds
them; its expression is original, its sole basis renunciation – i therefore
associate it with freedom. as the
loftiest sainthood was once martyrdom and now is its secularized child, suicide
(martyrdom being impossible in capitalism, one of its many craftinesses, for it
specializes in laundering and virtualizing its blood), i bring suicide into my
life as a practice: i plan my death and
enact it in visions and words, my funeral becomes the stage on which i
breathe. more centrally, i build death
into my relation to self and world through value and volition: i pluralize and expand value to extents that
empty any value of potency, that radically distribute value such that the human
becomes what it is in distributed space:
a speck, a geranium petal, a bicycle.
i direct volition toward itself in carnivals of complexity. such building effectively leaves me dead in
society, a martyr of myself – judged, judge, journalist, spectator, scholar,
protestor, crown and defense, indifferent other – the powers united, primal,
pragmatically ineffectual, usefully useless, seething in voids of words.
autothanatography is the intentional and continuous denaming
of myself to provide new perspectives, forms, obstacles, passages, a subverting
of barriers and incarcerations through a weaving of the yes-no into new
flesh. technology, cyborgs, are for the
unimaginative, the bifurcated, the scholarly.
i create a new body with the natural energies of myself. who needs industrial complexes and
pharmaceutical conspiracies and entitled academic circuses in fashions of
synthetic knowledge?
and you, you so committed to life, to wellness, power, will,
community, society, progress, health – i say to you i’ve lived your lives, your
health, your communities. i’ve lived the
sickness and death and hatred that govern them.
living death and turning this living into writing minimizes
– through death – the imprint of the i, except in that most energy-efficient
resource, words, and so is ecological, contextual, non-speciest, and aligned
with a reality that confers no distinction on any specific singularity or
group.
autothanatography de-evolves the autothanatographer
gradually through the process of removing the prosthetics we have been
enculturated to associate with life without necessarily removing life. a de-evolution travelling sufficiently back through to encounter tomorrow in nascent
glory.
it returns the human to a pre-civilized state while merging
the most noble aspects of that pre-civilization (a daily intimacy with
existence’s core) with the most noble aspects of civilization (language),
bypassing the production of waste of the between.
so daily i choose death and in this choosing find energy and
life. this is hardly some christian
masochism any more than it is a nietzschean ubermenschanitis. it bypasses the high and low by uniting both
in itself.
autothanatography is protest: against the brutality of names, against the
hard hierarchies of the human, against the savage ennui of nature. it distinguishes the human by its most
distinctive capacity, combining its uncommon consciousness of death with its
rare capacity to not fear death and its rarer capacity to translate this
consciousness and not-fearing into language, that uncompromising compromising
concatenation of human and inhuman infinity.
***
sadoo diaper and art obio, sadoos who met on a banana peel
in thiruvetipuram during the overthrow of the cumhurbaşkanlığı külliyesi, are
increasingly collaborating on an exercise in exercises of encountering death
and birth through ripped myth, reimagining self-world in diverse ways, blurring
the distinctions that the hierarchies of society and its linear obsessions
with time say are the gifts we are given to work with.
what is the difference
between autobiography and autothanatography then? asks sadoo diaper?
if we have done our
work properly, replies art obio, this
question hardly has a clear answer – both being liminal portals of possibility,
even as autohagiography may very well be.
are you saying, continues
sadoo diaper, that birth and death – and
maybe even holiness should it exist – each being a marginal event at the center
of things, participate equally in something more nameless, less articulate?
while not discounting
any validity that might be resident in your words i would not say precisely
this, replies art obio, but perhaps
rather say … {and yet this conversation, like this blog, continues interminably
and future fragments are saved for elsewhere and elsetime, for we will get no
sleep if we never silence the sadoos who, despite their theories, like to talk
…} …
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