sacred-play
Empathy and desire can cross over in human experience so that we confuse wanting to be with wanting to possess ...
Playing with notions of threshold, distinct places, altered states, multiplicities and crossings underlies the work in this exhibition – crossings occur between the sacred and the profane, between one state of being and another, yet skin, surface, in our phenomenological experience, remains the point of interface beyond which we only speculate.
Giorgio Agamben speaks of the ‘threshold,’ the ‘caesura that divides the two spheres’ (of the sacred and profane). Movement can happen in either direction – from the sacred to the profane or vice versa. ‘One of the simplest forms of profanation occurs through contact….there is a profane contagion, a touch that disenchants and returns to use what the sacred had separated and petrified.’[1]
According to Jean Luc Nancy, ‘the image is always sacred,’ he says and goes on ‘[t]he image is a thing that is not the thing…...’ Furthermore, the ‘sacred’ was always a force, not to say a violence.’[2] For Nancy, ‘….[the] tension is that of a setting apart and keeping separate which at the same time is a crossing of this separation.’[3]
By contrast, the act of making sacred, says Nancy, is doing ‘what in principle cannot be done (which can only come from elsewhere, from the depth of withdrawal)….In the religious vocabulary of the sacred, this crossing is what constituted sacrifice or transgression…..sacrifice is legitimated transgression. It consists in making sacred (consecrating).’[4]
Agamben writes of the close connection between the sacred and play. ‘Most of the games with which we are familiar derive from ancient sacred ceremonies, from divinatory practices and rituals that once belonged, broadly speaking, to the religious sphere. The girotondo (ring-a-ring-of roses) was originally a marriage rite; playing with a ball reproduces the struggle of the gods for the possession of the sun; games of chance derive from oracular practices; the spinning top and the chessboard were instruments of divination.’[5] Emile Benveniste, says Agamben, ‘shows that play not only derives from the sphere of the sacred but also in some way represents its overturning. The power of the sacred act, he writes, lies in the conjunction of the myth that tells the story and the rite that reproduces and stages it. Play breaks up this unity: as ludus, or physical play, it drops the myth and preserves the rite; as iocus, or wordplay, it effaces the rite and allows the myth to survive… “one has play when only half of the sacred operation is completed… ’[6]
According to Alfonso Lingus, we are stirred and fascinated by nature because of the multiplicity in ourselves. He says ‘…a cacophonous assemblage of starlings in a maple tree…. a whole marsh throbbing with frogs….exert a primal fascination on us…..[because] of the ‘multiplicity in us……our bodies are coral reefs teeming with polyps, sponges, gorgonians….continually stirred by monsoon climates of moist air, blood and biles.’[7]
For Deleuze and Guattari ‘the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming, between two multiplicities…..A fiber stretches from a human to an animal, from a human or an animal to molecules, from molecules to particles, and so on to the imperceptible.’[8] By this account, we contain within ourselves not only all sorts of multiplicities but also all sorts of other forms. … ‘packs, or multiplicities…continually transform themselves into each other and cross over into each other. Werewolves become vampires when they die. This is not surprising since becoming and multiplicity are the same thing…..it amounts to the same thing to say that each multiplicity is already composed of heterogeneous terms in symbiosis, and that a multiplicity is continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its thresholds and doors……’[9]
[1] Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, Chapter 9 – In Praise of Profanation (2007) NY Zone Books
[2] Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, Chapter 1, The Image – The Distinct (2005) Fordham University Press
[3] Ibid.
[4] Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, Chapter 1, The Image – The Distinct (2005) Fordham University Press
[5] Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, Chapter 9 – In Praise of Profanation (2007) NY Zone Books
[6] Ibid.
[7] Alfonso Lingis, Animal Body, Inhuman Face in Zoontologies, The Question of the Animal. Ed. Cary Wolfe (2003) University of Minnesota Press
[8] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Becoming Intense, Becoming Animal p.250
[9] Ibid. p.249
Empathy and desire can cross over in human experience so that we confuse wanting to be with wanting to possess ...
Playing with notions of threshold, distinct places, altered states, multiplicities and crossings underlies the work in this exhibition – crossings occur between the sacred and the profane, between one state of being and another, yet skin, surface, in our phenomenological experience, remains the point of interface beyond which we only speculate.
Giorgio Agamben speaks of the ‘threshold,’ the ‘caesura that divides the two spheres’ (of the sacred and profane). Movement can happen in either direction – from the sacred to the profane or vice versa. ‘One of the simplest forms of profanation occurs through contact….there is a profane contagion, a touch that disenchants and returns to use what the sacred had separated and petrified.’[1]
According to Jean Luc Nancy, ‘the image is always sacred,’ he says and goes on ‘[t]he image is a thing that is not the thing…...’ Furthermore, the ‘sacred’ was always a force, not to say a violence.’[2] For Nancy, ‘….[the] tension is that of a setting apart and keeping separate which at the same time is a crossing of this separation.’[3]
By contrast, the act of making sacred, says Nancy, is doing ‘what in principle cannot be done (which can only come from elsewhere, from the depth of withdrawal)….In the religious vocabulary of the sacred, this crossing is what constituted sacrifice or transgression…..sacrifice is legitimated transgression. It consists in making sacred (consecrating).’[4]
Agamben writes of the close connection between the sacred and play. ‘Most of the games with which we are familiar derive from ancient sacred ceremonies, from divinatory practices and rituals that once belonged, broadly speaking, to the religious sphere. The girotondo (ring-a-ring-of roses) was originally a marriage rite; playing with a ball reproduces the struggle of the gods for the possession of the sun; games of chance derive from oracular practices; the spinning top and the chessboard were instruments of divination.’[5] Emile Benveniste, says Agamben, ‘shows that play not only derives from the sphere of the sacred but also in some way represents its overturning. The power of the sacred act, he writes, lies in the conjunction of the myth that tells the story and the rite that reproduces and stages it. Play breaks up this unity: as ludus, or physical play, it drops the myth and preserves the rite; as iocus, or wordplay, it effaces the rite and allows the myth to survive… “one has play when only half of the sacred operation is completed… ’[6]
According to Alfonso Lingus, we are stirred and fascinated by nature because of the multiplicity in ourselves. He says ‘…a cacophonous assemblage of starlings in a maple tree…. a whole marsh throbbing with frogs….exert a primal fascination on us…..[because] of the ‘multiplicity in us……our bodies are coral reefs teeming with polyps, sponges, gorgonians….continually stirred by monsoon climates of moist air, blood and biles.’[7]
For Deleuze and Guattari ‘the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming, between two multiplicities…..A fiber stretches from a human to an animal, from a human or an animal to molecules, from molecules to particles, and so on to the imperceptible.’[8] By this account, we contain within ourselves not only all sorts of multiplicities but also all sorts of other forms. … ‘packs, or multiplicities…continually transform themselves into each other and cross over into each other. Werewolves become vampires when they die. This is not surprising since becoming and multiplicity are the same thing…..it amounts to the same thing to say that each multiplicity is already composed of heterogeneous terms in symbiosis, and that a multiplicity is continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its thresholds and doors……’[9]
[1] Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, Chapter 9 – In Praise of Profanation (2007) NY Zone Books
[2] Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, Chapter 1, The Image – The Distinct (2005) Fordham University Press
[3] Ibid.
[4] Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, Chapter 1, The Image – The Distinct (2005) Fordham University Press
[5] Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, Chapter 9 – In Praise of Profanation (2007) NY Zone Books
[6] Ibid.
[7] Alfonso Lingis, Animal Body, Inhuman Face in Zoontologies, The Question of the Animal. Ed. Cary Wolfe (2003) University of Minnesota Press
[8] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Becoming Intense, Becoming Animal p.250
[9] Ibid. p.249
