Destruction III - Body
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 May 2022
Summary
Abstract
In the third destruction, the distance between representation and experience is collapsed into a co-constitutive relation that reveals the tension between physical destruction and the continuity of the self, society, and life in general. Part 1 deals with the mediatized phenomenon of execution in the United States, as a practice that constitutes the heterogenous subject, before performing the excision of that subject from the world, while the process of dissecting their destruction becomes the role of media. In Part 2, this destruction sees its reversal in a philosophy of eroticism. This theory appears in opposition to heterosexual and heteronormative sexuality through practices that elude the reproductive function of the bodies that perform them, and in doing so, destroys what constitutes common understandings of sexuality.
Keywords: Media and capital punishment, execution, eroticism, sexuality, queer theory, philosophy of eroticism
the human being is matter, fragment, excess, clay, filth, nonsense
To this point, I have approached modes of destruction as they operate within the representative aesthetics of media cultures, and in relation to the bodies of an audience, or those who otherwise participate in those representations as potential catalysts or provocations for an experience of sovereignty. I have argued that the common element that provides this potential for an experience of sovereignty in located in the operations of destruction they engage with. These operations, destructive intensities within the narratives, images and intentions of the films and art discussed in the previous chapters have constituted simulacra of destruction, while remaining in the confines of screens and galleries, where a comfortable challenge or exception to the ordinary or expected can be made. Here, I move from exploring these modes and operations of destruction that remain confined within the narratives and images of media cultures to those that transgress the material boundary between images and narratives, and the modes of their production. This is the point at which representation collapses into materiality through experience. The distance between the body of the observer, audience or participant in culture and the image of culture is destroyed by the direct implication of the body itself.
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- The Intoxication of Destruction in Theory, Culture and MediaA Philosophy of Expenditure after Georges Bataille, pp. 103 - 148Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022