Some Intimacies and Objects

Lisa Jeschke in Dusie 16: “You have addressed me by means of words, which is nearly love, a bit of.” The bit might be the muzzle in the horse’s mouth, the gift horse looked upon with all its soldiers inside as love or as love disguise offered up, the imposition of such gifting; and too might be the broken object, not integrated to be split, in good and bad bits, the good breast the bad breast as present or absent, loved or hated, incorporated or lost, word sucked in as the other’s sucked in, swallowed and eaten to be part of me, my nutritious inner self, registers of privacy or intimacy as recognition of the other instead making address the mere taking over of that other in linguistic conquest, violence at the root of love, exclusion of others to focus on this one object, exclusion of this one object to focus on that focus itself, object standing in for that x lost thing now existing as “you” or as “me”, pronoun in substitution and deferral. Here are some of the words by which “you” might “address” me, from Robert Kiely’s ‘Intimacies’, in the same issue: “I want you to whisper your PIN in my ear slowly.” Intimacy here becomes parody of communist sharing as sexual sharing, as that conduct in sexual relation in which socialism must also manifest itself and be constituted: where sharing here instead is merely my access to your money as my power over you, as a come-on, as a whispered token of love, my access to all your tokens of love, the money shot, the money store. PIN is Personal Information Number: the number that therefore I am, the “bit of” me broken off to info-cash. Recall: Jeschke and Lucy Beynon’s 2012 piece 'Self-Portrait', satirizing a project for theatrical intimacy, in which Beynon’s National Insurance Number was blown up to gigantic art-display size and put up on a wall, as ‘revelation’ of self, the category of self as categorized state, as State Category, self-surveillance, a resolutely non-erotic display of intimacy. Jeschke’s ‘No’ as negativity, Levinas parody - “Love has assumed the FACE of the person one loves,” as mere greeting “Hey, good to see you!”, you become object, “I am a PIECE of FURNITURE,” that object merely filling the space, to be sat down in like the ‘commentary’ on sex-race fetishism on whose spread-eagled legs sits the wife of everyone’s favourite Russian billionaire oligarch Roman Abramovich, performaing art. “We” are “part of the furniture,” taken for granted, objects constructed by craftsman whose labour’s obscured, fixed, “still at any particular”. It’s a “hotel,” with the movement through, the strait gate through which at any time the Messiah might enter only in parody, as parody Messiah, the worker bringing us our meal, room service, for us to feel them up. We are experts in taste and we have chosen you as our lover, and something dies, inside, nothing is moving, the “you” that is “leaking” as “matter” is just a corpse to show you it was once alive, you only notice it when it starts to smell, it’s history’s angel blown into the window like a pigeon and splattered on the carpet. It is all too far and seperate and broken, made to work, to be used, for “EMPLOYMENT”, the storm itself is calm, the tempest blowing the angel forward and away from the past rubble to be righted, its has become internalized as a static chair with the sun in our face and our hair, a frozen rictus grin. The conversation itself has died, la petite mort, a horrible sexy trinity, its third ghost term no transformation of the one by and into the other, no dialectic overthrow, no negative transformation and just instead this beautifully smooth corpse in the freezer, cryogenic preservation for future activation deferral and or a stalled past stall, dragging limbs over limbs in listless list, inscribed and restricted by terms as terminal no-space middle-ground, not alive but not not alive, dead inside and outside in hell getting by. It is cold, and you are centuries late.