ALCHIMIE_DISCURSIVE_OU_NÉCRO_ÉTHIQUE<>? _THÉORIE_DU_DRONE

« On peut y voir l’aboutissement d’un désir ancien, qui anime toute l’histoire des armes balistiques : accroître son allonge de sorte de pouvoir atteindre l’ennemi à distance, avant que celui-ci ne soit en mesure de le faire. Mais la spécificité du drone tient à ce qu’il joue sur un autre segment de distance. Entre la gâchette, sur laquelle on a le doigt, et le canon, d’où la balle va sortir, s’intercalent désormais des milliers de kilomètres. A la distance de la portée – distance de l’arme à sa cible – s’ajoute celle de la télécommande – distance de l’opérateur à son arme ». (p. 23)

« Cette tentative d’éradication de toute réciprocité dans l’exposition à la violence dans l’hostilité reconfigure non seulement la conduite matérielle de la violence armée, techniquement, tactiquement, psychiquement, mais aussi les principes traditionnels d’un ethos militaire officiellement fondé sur la bravoure et l’esprit de sacrifice. À l’aune des catégories classiques, le drone apparaît comme l’arme du lâche ». (p. 30)

« Cela n’empêche pas ses partisans de la proclamer être l’arme la plus éthique que l’humanité ait jamais connue. Opérer cette conversion morale, cette transmutation des valeurs est la tâche à laquelle s’attellent aujourd’hui des philosophes qui oeuvrent dans le petit champ de l’éthique militaire. Le drone, disent-ils, est l’arme humanitaire par excellence. Leur travail discursif est essentiel pour assurer l’acceptabilité sociale et politique de cette arme. Dans ces discours de légitimation, les « éléments de langage » de marchands d’armes et de porte-parole des forces armées se trouvent recyclés, par de grossiers processus d’alchimie discursive, en principes directeurs d’une philosophie éthique de nouveau genre – une « nécro-éthique », dont il est urgent de faire la critique ». (pp. 30-31)

IMAGES : 

« The Magician », Martin Sharp Tarot (1967)

« The Queen of Swords », Hexen 2.0 Tarot de Suzanne Treister (2009-2011)

« The flow of energy through a system acts to organise that system », Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand et al., citation de Norbert Wiener (1968)

« Untitled (p. 180) », Brion Gysin,  William S. Burroughs, (circa 1965)

TEXT :

Grégoire Chamayou, Théorie du drone, Paris : La Fabrique (2013)

ECUSSONS :

Les écussons de l'USAF Pararescue et de l'USAF MQ-9 Reaper drone (la faucheuse)

als ich kann

In the judgement of posterity - and no doubt also in that of contemporaries - the most refined representative of Ghent painting in the later 15th century was not Joos van Wassenhove, alias Justus van Gent, but his friend Hugo van der Goes, who, as we know, financed his journey to Italy. We have far more biographical information on Hugo van der Goes than of Justus van Gent; and the difference is more than quantitative. Goes is the earliest Northern European painter whose mental state is a matter of written record. This is because he had the misfortune to die insane. 

He had retired to a monastery, the Roode Clooster near Brussels, and a memoir written long afterwards by a fellow monk describes some of the symptoms of his illness. After spending several years there as a novice, he fell ill on his way home from a visit to Cologne and died not long afterwards, in the year 1482. The affinity between genius and madness is an issue to which modern students of artistic psychology attach great importance, so it is not surprising that an artist who lends himself to discussion of the phenomenon seems more approachable and even begins to look like a modern personality.

I should stress that the evolution that I shall try to outline does not agree with the chronology, or rather chronologies, given in the Goes literature. Not that I have any desire to presnet my own chronology as the one true way to salvation; this is rather more a case of Jan van Eyck's motto, 'As best I can' (als ich kann).

Otto Pächt

Why is this such an absolute masterpiece? Aside from the obvious Eyckian character of the left panel of this diptyque, van der Goes' Satan belies a humanity and a depth comparable to Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost. And for the late 15th century, when representations were considered excessively evidential and so potentially dangerous, this is no mean feat. 


William Blake writing about John Milton said that he was nothing other than "a true poet & of the Devils party without knowing it." Cecil B. DeMille was the most famous producer of early (20s-40s) Biblical Sword-and-Sandal films, who was a devout protestant and called the bible "the source of all drama - and the lexicon of human behaviour, good and bad." One critic pointed out, however, that "Mr DeMille's real interest is in the wicket Romans... with the enthusiasm of an artist... he paints the manifold nature of their sins, their cruelties, their decadent luxuries."

that thin layer about the wet hot heat is godsland

Corporeal Friends are Spiritual Enemies by Deborah Birch on Mixcloud

Oh, Mickey you're so fine you're so fine you blow my mind hey mickey, hey hey mickey. White out. Blue light, dark out. Spears of accentuated mad flicker silver slap the jittery eyes, bugging bodies. Who moves you? smell of wet hot heat. wet hot inner under inner arms. inside groin. loins, clothed, modesty flaps in the armmade wind. heat ascends. rubber soled shoes, hermes winged messenger stripes of colour slap and push the solid world away. melts. Who knows you? un peu d'air sur terre. very clever campaign. But does it float? Caché. Were Jesus' loins holy? Were they ever touched, rubbed, loved? Did lips murmur over them? Stiff linen of the dead. White wash it. Near out. Light blue. Dark light. Did it rain that day? Back though, they are touching you there, face ascended to God's face. Those three used to be joined by sugared words, deadly laced strychnine arcs. How many dependents do you have? Dependence wha? Dependents, you know, spouse, kids? Ain't got none. No, two, gently laced arcs. Tell your intimates your intimates. Particles from the masticated cud, gentle arcs of the elect, Mani est vivant! Did St. Augustine eat the fig as well? Did he burp God? Mani could never have won, we know that now. We need God to grow in the hollows of ourselves, the vacuoles of man. He is the autophagy of our misfoldings, misdoings, miswiringhardgivings. He can not be in the fig. He can not be in the breath of those Ancient Greek gods. Inspiration, they breathed into Penelope, the other Sisyphus, weaver of Fatum woven by Moira, roller of Peter. Moons of Jupiter. Too many wives, too much jealousy. No, God in human hollows. Begins in not out. Much better. Perspiration. 99% sure to win in the end. Inspiration. We reserve the right to hope have faith in 1%. Sneakers dally with the floor. I… I can't touch… I can't touch you… Faces are wondering upward. Fingers in the warmth of caché spaces. Nothing so maddeningly moist as fig finger particles of God. Faces wondering upward. It is coming out of me. Upward. That's her friend. They were joined not two hours before and since they were 7. Slow arcs so slow the world seems real without them. Watched her cry, held her hand. Who would say such a thing to their own daughter. Wished she had never been born. More for other things. Silent imprecations against the whoreful mother of her friend. Should she die? Who have you disposed of in your thoughts? Fingered a hot wet tear, held her hand. One slow arc. Was it completed then or in the shopping mall, where three stole silently separately, emboldened by bright lights and identical rows. How to. Take it to the oversized women's section, for some reason there are never guards there, too self conscious already to steal. Trash taken for treasure. Treasures of time, bright lights, mad silver flicker in six eyes, and others too, countless, across lands. Give it away, moments mad lit moments are treasured, not matter. Don't fetishise thinginess, she said. Points in focus, slow directrix. Equidistant, but she was her, the maitresse. The directrix. The rest are fools along the arc, but it slowly traced from one to the other to the other to the one hot wet tear to the fingering finger. Was she Adam? They drunk old bottles of wine in the downstairs bathroom. Laughter bigger than bottles. Nux vomica. Arcs of amity. But there, switchblade eyes on her maitresse, whose wet hot fig fingered bright silver flicker, mad switchblade eyes on him, who wonders wanders down to groaning loins. Faces wondering skyward. Is she tasting God, wide pupils larger than saucers. Mad mad mad jealousy the slowest jitter, infinitesimally slowed, might miss it in armmade sneakermade slapping floating wind. But don't. It is there. Caché in shimmering slow boiling surface, perspiring sheen, melted glow. Lanced reality, that thin layer above the wet hot heat is godsland.

15.01.13

secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned... Joyce, Milton, Blake

 

Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it. A phrase, then, of impatience, thud of Blake's wings of excess. I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame. What's left us then?

Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam's hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death? They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possi­bilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? Weave, weaver of the wind.

- Weep no more, woeful shepherd, weep no more
For Lycidas, your sorrow is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor...

Fed and feeding brains about me: under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers: and in my mind's darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds. Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquility sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms.

He held out his copybook. The word Sums was written on the headline. Beneath were sloping figures and at the foot a crooked signature with blind loops and a blot. Cyril Sargeant: his name and seal.

Stephen touched the edges of the book. Futility.

Ugly and futile: lean neck and tangled hair and a stain of ink, a snail's bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him under foot, a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life?

Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly. Mine is far and his secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned."

\\\

"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," Blake writes, and, "No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings." At the start of the passage Stephen Dedalus asks a boy about the battle of Asculum, where King Pyrrhus, although victorious, suffered irreplaceable casualties;

"- And he said: Another victory like that and we are done for.
That phrase the world has remembered. A dull ease of the mind."

Joyce has Stephen, who is teaching a history class to privileged but dull boys, referring to William Blake's description of history as allegory - "a totally distinct and inferior kind of Poetry . . . Form'd by the daughters of Memory" from the "Vanities of Time and Space." In his notes for the Vision of the Last Judgment, Blake insists that "Vision or Imagination is a Representation of what Eternally Exists, Really and Unchangeably." The romantic poet would destroy the edifice of past history because it contradicts pure imaginative thought. But if time collapses into "one livid final flame," Stephen asks, "What's left us then?"