{"id":24073,"date":"2025-07-01T13:25:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-01T11:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stadtsprachen.de\/de\/?post_type=stsp_text&#038;p=24073"},"modified":"2025-06-19T21:24:19","modified_gmt":"2025-06-19T19:24:19","slug":"exhortation-on-desire","status":"publish","type":"stsp_text","link":"https:\/\/stadtsprachen.de\/de\/text\/exhortation-on-desire\/","title":{"rendered":"Exhortation on desire"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Do the orders say: march on? Have you<\/em><br><em>gone on before me, you my yearning;<\/em><br><em>are you beckoning to me,<\/em><br><em>transfigured, from another world? Oh,<\/em><br><em>I will throw everything overboard to <\/em><br><em>become light enough to follow you.<\/em><a href=\"#_bookmark0\"><em>1<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">i&#8217;m writing at 1 AM after a self-induced orgasm. do you say self-induced or self-inflicted when it comes to orgasms? can one inflict pleasure not only pain? i&#8217;m asking the internet now. well, the etymology could be argued in favour of pleasure, in &#8211; &#8222;in&#8220; + flingere &#8222;to dash, strike&#8220;. the negative connotation seems to have come in the 16th century, back when taking pleasure from pain was sinful, i guess. today is the day when Jesus died on the orthodox cross. i am thinking that his choice of death also had an inflicting quality &#8211; as if to take pleasure from the pain and suffering in favour of redemption. a blasphemous thought i suppose. one that would qualify me as insane, or fit for inquisition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">the desire to write about desire is fading, just as desire itself fades: unknowingly, imperceptibly, unequivocally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">if i were to start somewhere, i would start with the first three names that evoke desire to me: Deleuze, Bataille, Jesus Christ. the utopian, the abstruse, the fanatic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">then, i would turn to cinema: Duras, Deren, Breillat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">three women to counteract the men. for balancing reasons, because that&#8217;s what we tend to do with desire: to balance it with reason. Platonic logic of desire forces us to make a choice between production and acquisition. From the moment that we place desire on the side of acquisition, we make desire an idealistic (dialectical, nihilistic) conception, which causes us to look upon it as primarily a lack: a lack of an object.<a href=\"#_bookmark1\">2<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">shall we speak of desire as a concept, an emotion or an action? i would take Deleuze and consider it an action. for Deleuze <em>desire is a positive force, it is not purely psychic, not a lack as usually understood but productive in nature; like labour, desire is actualised in the course of practice<\/em>.<a href=\"#_bookmark2\">3<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">a question thus arises: why are we afraid of desire? in the end, desire is our capacity to imagine that which is not yet there. the possibility of becoming, not to be mistaken for ambition. something which is not yet there could be interpreted as a lack, if our quest is to attain it. but it can also signify possibility, transcendence, atonement, which could essentially prompt one to act towards something which is in line with their vision. a hallucination. for are we not all mad(wo)men seeing<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">things that don&#8217;t exist? and is this maybe the reason why we invented cinema? the theatre of desire, made from light in the dark. that which connects us to our cosmos, as Anton Vidokle beautifully put it &#8211; The cosmic aspect of cinema is its ontological condition: flickers of light in a dark space that carry information and narratives about the past, present, and future. At the same time, the cinematic aspect of the cosmos is our paradoxical and impossible relationship to time and space: as much as the cosmos directs one\u2019s mind towards wonder and mysticism, it also hones in on science and technology.<a href=\"#_bookmark3\">4<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>J&#8217;ai d\u00e9cid\u00e9 de faire du cin\u00e9ma parce que c&#8217;\u00e9tait le seul lieu o\u00f9 j&#8217;\u00e9tais. Je n&#8217;avais pas de lieu de projection mentale dans le monde niortais o\u00f9 je me trouvais et je n&#8217;avais aucune autre place d&#8217;ailleurs. [&#8230;] Je dirais que j&#8217;ai fait du cin\u00e9ma pour inventer le monde puisque pour moi le monde n&#8217;existait pas, en tout cas, il ne m&#8217;int\u00e9ressait pas, et qu&#8217;il fallait quand m\u00eame bien vivre dans un monde. J&#8217;ai aussi choisi le cin\u00e9ma pour transgresser les interdits, ou plus justement, pour les mat\u00e9rialiser. Si on mat\u00e9rialise les interdits on voit ce qui est interdit, il y a une distance entre l&#8217;interdit et soi-m\u00eame. Cela ne veut pas dire pour autant qu&#8217;on est lib\u00e9r\u00e9, mais disons que \u00e7a devient un<\/em> <em>territoire qu&#8217;on peut s&#8217;approprier, dans lequel on peut naviguer.<\/em><a href=\"#_bookmark4\"><em>5<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">but in order to pursue that which we desire, we firstly need to be aware of desire. desire forms as a curiosity. and curiosity is a form of knowledge. it is that which prompts us to move outside of our state of immanence towards an unknown. now, whether the unknown is right for us or not, it is purely a religious aspect of reasoning. judging the quality of the unknown, before even reaching out for it, is that which creates the fear. evolutionists would blame it on the ancestral instinct of survival. but to me, the possibility of the failure of comfort (and by comfort i mean the impossibility of returning to the previous state, before curiosity), is the one that envelops desire in darkness. it makes desire illicit, for it holds within it the possibility of annihilation. the absence of peace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">and here we get to the point of religious sacrifice as the affective foundation of community and the primordial role of violence therein<a href=\"#_bookmark5\">6<\/a>. this is where Jesus bleeds on his cross and the world watches through the screens of their smartphones. for as Bataille says: <em>no greater desire exists than a wounded person&#8217;s need for another wound.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">which reminds me of Maya Deren writing about cinema, more precisely about film expression as the principle of infinite pains:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>This principle &#8211; that the dynamic of movement in film is stronger than anything else &#8211; that any changes of matter&#8230; that movement, or energy is more important, or powerful, than space or matter<\/em> <em>&#8211; that, in fact, it creates matter &#8211; seemed to me to be marvellous, like an illumination, that I wanted to just stop and celebrate that wonder, just by itself.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">now, i didn&#8217;t choose Deren only for the ritualistic dimension of her films (thinking here particularly about Ritual in Transfigured Time) but also because of her story of becoming a filmmaker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">before she was a filmmaker, she was a poet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>&#8230; I had been a poet up until then, and the reason that I had not been a very good poet was because actually my mind worked in images which I had been trying to translate or describe in words; therefore, when I undertook cinema, I was relieved of the false step of translating image into words, and could work directly so that it was not like discovering a new medium so much as finally coming home into a world whose vocabulary, syntax, grammar, was<\/em> m<em>y mother tongue, which I understood and thought it, but, like a mute, had never spoken.<\/em><a href=\"#_bookmark6\"><em>7<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">i end my exhortation on desire with Marguerite Duras, this Hecate of cinema, preaching the entropy of desire to such a painful degree that desire is <em>d\u00e9shabill\u00e9e <\/em>and redressed, every time with a garment either placed on the wrong part of the body, or inside out, or misbuttoned, unzipped, <em>d\u00e9chir\u00e9e <\/em>&#8230;up to the point where it ends up looking like the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. desire desiring itself. Entirety exists within me as exuberance in empty longing in the desire to burn with desire.<a href=\"#_bookmark7\">8<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">perhaps desire is after all so frightening because it marches undisturbed towards death, and all our meaning we concentrate towards resisting the idea of death; of that which we cannot contain, possess, nor end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>1 S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard diaries (February 2: II A 347) &#8211; 1839<br><br>2 Deleuze and Guattari 1987:25<br><br>3 Jihai Gao &#8211; Deleuze Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3, Deleuze in China Papers from the 2012 Kaifeng International Deleuze Conference (2013), pp. 406-420<br><br>4 Anton Vidokle&#8217;s curatorial statement for the 14th Shanghai Biennale<br><br>5 Catherine Breillat &#8211; Corps Amoureux, Entretiens avec Claire Vasse, Deno\u00ebl 2006, p. 16<br><br>6 TIINA ARPPE (2009) Sacred Violence: Girard, Bataille and the Vicissitudes of Human Desire, Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 10:2, 31-58<br><br>7 Maya Deren&#8217;s letter to James Card, April 1955<br><br>8 Georges Bataille &#8222;On Nietzsche&#8220;, p.27, 1945<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Do the orders say: march on? Have yougone on before me, you my yearning;are you beckoning to me,transfigured, from another world? Oh,I will throw everything overboard to become light enough to follow you.1 i&#8217;m writing at 1 AM after a self-induced orgasm. do you say self-induced or self-inflicted when it comes to orgasms? can one [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":24026,"template":"","categories":[63,12],"class_list":["post-24073","stsp_text","type-stsp_text","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issue-32","category-non-fiction"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Exhortation on desire - stadtsprachen<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/stadtsprachen.de\/de\/text\/exhortation-on-desire\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"de_DE\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale:alternate\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Exhortation on desire - stadtsprachen\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Do the orders say: march on? Have yougone on before me, you my yearning;are you beckoning to me,transfigured, from another world? 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