we graft the other onto us, says bazzicalupo

This is crucial. Neither biology nor anthropology can sketch the essence of the before the constitutive relationship with what is outside, to that which opens to our animality or vitality as "opening" and "feeling". It is aesthesis: the active reactivity or receptive-transformative passivity that depends on that which is other from the self. To the extent that it is dependent (and therefore removed from a divinely created and inauthentic mode of being), the human draws mimetic forms. It is therefore technique; it is art as artifice [see Bazzicalupo]. This implies a rethinking of identity as constitutively not insular: as metisse, as hybrid, and paradoxically as always cyborg. Our capacities for life are [our] capacities for artifice, for putting ourselves in relation to that which is other from us: the human is not a given, but that which can be modified. We graft the other onto us inasmuch as we are capable of assimilating and metabolizing it. By virtue of this, the corporeal doesn't dissolve into the virtual or the technological, because body and life represent an active passivity, the mnestic and selective features of that creative assimilation.

Laura Bazzicalupo, "The ambivalence of biopolitics".
 diacritics, Volume 36, Number 2, Summer 2006  

do you dream often, they asked, their faces the shape of dehydrated tortoises

Goya, Disparate número dos

They came up and they asked, do you dream often? And I said, of course I don't, even if I was precisely asleep at that moment. They shook their heads, and started walking away, dismissing me completely, dismissing me like a three-legged cat is dismissed on a black sabbath. What could I have done, if not just run after them, call out their names, which I didn't know yet, and yell, cry, plea for them to give me one more opportunity. I wouldn't lie this time around, I sniffled apologetically, but they wouldn't give me the time of day, the time of night, they wouldn't give me time, period, and that's what I needed, because I could hear the alarm clock's bray on the other side of the placenta, and I was suddenly certain, positive, genuinely and indisputably confident, like you can only be in the subjunctive of dreams, that what they had to say carried a truth, no, the truth of that singular instant. When they finally stopped, and turned around, with faces the shape of dehydrated tortoises, they uttered--in a language so mine that it escaped me completely--a whisper (can a whisper be uttered?), and I realized that that was it, that that was all there was, stepped back, let myself fall, fall on my ass, fall on my body, fall awake: calm, so calm, so placid and serene. My bed was so soft. The fan was going about its rounds. The upstairs neighbor was stomping her feet.

A song. What was that song?

why this body, this world, asks nancy

Why is there this thing, sight, rather than sight blended with hearing? And woult id make any sense to discuss such a blend? In what sense? Why this sight, which doesn't see infrared? This hearing, which doesn't hear ultrasound? Why should every sense have a treshold, and why are senses walled off from each other? Further still: aren't senses separate universes? Or else the dislocation for every possible universe? What's the disjunction of the senses? And why five fingers? Why that beauty spot? Why this fold at the corner of the lips? That crease, there? That appearance, this gait, that restraint, this excess? Why this body, this world, absolutely and exclusively this one?

--Corpus, Jean Luc Nancy

la alteridad que somos, dixit Nancy

la escalera

La escalera se torció frente a él. Se hizo un espiral, una chorrera, un torbellino hecho de pequeñísimas vorágines ansiosas por consumirlo; y, al otro lado, llovía. Llovía un aguacero frío, aguacero hecho para darle fin al espeso calor que humedecía impregnablemente esas ocho de la noche. Llovía y él en chancletas, y él allí, frente a ese escalón, con todo puesto en su contra, a sus espaldas un espacio cálido, a sus espaldas una opción, un hueco que apuntaba a otra vida, pero insistía en la escalera, y esa insistencia surgía de su piel, no de un supuesto interior, pero sino de una pulsión en su piel que declaraba su existencia por primera vez, y, en su voz neonata le ordenaba a descender, a saltar, a desperdigarse por aquél acantilado, a alimentar el sinnúmero de fauces que esperaban, impávidas, por su banquete, por esa oportunidad de devorar las temporalidades paralelas que surgirían tan pronto él tomase la decisión. Y lo hizo. Dio el paso. Bajó la escalera casi corriendo. Abordó el automóvil.


Por la algarabía de la diluvio, no escuchó la puerta cerrarse detrás de él. 

Fotografía de Alvin Ailey, de http://www.blackarchives.org/nove/595

Le pedí a mi padre, le dije, "Padre, cámbiame el nombre, el que estoy usando ahora está embarrado con miedo y sucio y cobardía y bochorno".
Él me dijo, "te encerré en ese cuerpo. Lo hice como un tipo de prueba. Lo puedes usar como un arma, o lo puedes usar para hacer a una mujer sonreir". 


"Entonces, déjame comenzar desde cero", rogué, "déjame comenzar desde el principio, quiero un rostro que sea justo esta vez, quiero un espíritu que esté calmado". 


"Yo nunca miré para el lado," respondió, "Yo nunca les di la espalda. Fuiste tú que construiste el templo. Fuiste tú que cubrió mi rostro". 

[Lover, lover, lover, de Leonard Cohen]