From "Aristocrat's Joke" in The Aristocrats (2005):

I shit in her mouth, it’s mostly liquid. It’s like a diarrheic thing. I try to include corn and things that will not break down in the digestive system. Peanuts, of course. I try to get a lot of solid objects so that there’s a little action too. It’s not just a stream of brown liquid. And it all goes into... I can hit her mouth pretty well. I do have one polyp - I have a large, kind of a hemorrhoidal polyp that sometimes throws my aim off and I have to... It’s kind of like Kentucky windage, but I usually get it. I can hear whether it’s hitting the hollow area of her throat.

( Read more...Collapse )

From The Muses and “Corpus” in Corpus:

How does Nancy’s Corpus help us understand Nancy’s references to women’s bodies in The Muses?

( Read more...Collapse )

From “Spider-Man and Brother Voodoo vs. Moondog” in Marvel Team-Up (~mid-1970s):

I am leaning on Stewart Hall’s "Spectacle of the Other” to understand the representations of race in “Spider-Man and Brother Voodoo vs. Moondog."

( Read more...Collapse )

From “§1 Why Are There Several Arts and Not Just One? (Conversation on the Plurality of Worlds)” in The Muses (1994):



Nancy warns us that “we are not seeking a ‘definition,’ a ‘determination,’ or even a ‘description’ of art... We are seeking merely a fashion of not leaving [] diversity behind” (36). This diversity will be understood through intersecting themes of splitting, the semblant, and grounding.

( Read more...Collapse )

From The Trial of Gilles de Rais (1965):

Gilles de Rais, a pedophile knight who fought beside Joan of Arc, serially killed children. Bataille tells us that Gilles de Rais was psychically a savage, an adult who remained a child - a monster. Why?

( Read more...Collapse )

From Cinema 1 and the beginning of Cinema 2 (1983, 1985):

Deleuze continues from his exposition of movement to the topics of framing (limiting), movement (early montage), close-up (face), action (the baroque), and time.

( Read more...Collapse )

From the first chapter, “Theses on movement: First commentary on Bergson,” in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983):

What is movement, for Deleuze? How does it help us differently understand aesthetics? We are using a special notion of movement wherein a “curve” is “a moving straight line” (4). Movement might be described as a certain inflection such that a cartoon would be an inflected figure. Translation is a movement of language as much as “Movement is a translation in space” (8).

( Read more...Collapse )

From “Panopticism” (1975):

We can see that like Benjamin, Foucault is invested in distinguishing our modernity from previous historical epochs with respect to vision and the masses, but with significantly different terms, “Antiquity had been a civilization of spectacle. ‘To render accessible to a multitude of men the inspection of a small number of objects’ this was the problem to which the architecture of temples, theaters and circuses responded... The modern age poses the opposite problem: ‘To procure for a small number, or even for a single individual, the instantaneous view of a great multitude’” (216). Again the distinction between epochs is visual, “Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance” (217). Surveillance will be linked to discipline (e.g. rather than torture) because observation is a diffuse technique of power, promising liberties like efficiency while it formalizes people into rigid norms (e.g. health self-care which is preventative as opposed to curative), “The ‘Enlightenment’ [a visual metaphor], which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines” (222).

( Read more...Collapse )