“Will we choose to believe in an art that launders pain and calls that an ethics? Or will we opt for something else, not knowing necessarily what it might be but certain it will involve the loss of something precious – an elegant idea, a charming concert, a way of being effortlessly in the world?”
Instead, it’s just been one thing after another, and there are no neat conclusions except the certainty of death.
[…]
Well, helpfully, my mother has written a novel, a quite autobiographical novel called “The Day I Fell Off My Island.” She was born in very tough circumstances. She grew up extremely poor. Her mother left to work with the Windrush generation as an orderly in a hospital. And she left my mother in Jamaica. So she was alone for a long time.”
As early as 1934 he argued that communism had failed to exploit the ‘political importance of collective emotions’ as adroitly as fascism had: ‘The great discovery and the essential originality of fascism is its utilisation of the irrational as [an] autonomous … factor in the political domain.’ Fascism was an ‘emotional and ideational revolution’ that exploited the ‘psychological misery’ of the proletariat as much as its ‘economic poverty’. Surrealism spoke to this ‘misery of desire’ too, but in a way that opposed the fascist manipulation of ‘masochism and sublimation’. Such attention to collective emotions suggests that Yoyotte had read Freud, in particular Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921).
[…]
Bataille was also involved in the mid-1930s, with his bitter rival Breton no less, in an explicitly anti-fascist group called Contre-Attaque, which in one of its communiqués inveighed against the ‘heterogeneous’ trinity of French fascism: père, patrie, patron.
[…]
these old anti-fascists had failed to see that, in the society of spectacle, fascism operates primarily through the colonisation of everyday life.
Marsha Silverman, Grey vase with etchings, won in a CLM auction
A song of Enchantment I sang me there, In a green—green wood, by waters fair, Just as the words came up to me I sang it under the wild wood tree.
Widdershins turned I, singing it low, Watching the wild birds come and go; No cloud in the deep dark blue to be seen Under the thick-thatched branches green.
Twilight came: silence came: The planet of Evening’s silver flame; By darkening paths I wandered through Thickets trembling with drops of dew.
But the music is lost and the words are gone Of the song I sang as I sat alone, Ages and ages have fallen on me— On the wood and the pool and the elder tree.
Aristotle also credits Empedocles for highlighting the functional affinity between the parts of what appear to be different living things, such as the seed of a tree and an animal fetus. Empedocles’ belief in the continuum of living species perhaps finds its deepest expression in his groundbreaking view of the origin of life. He appears to have believed that the cosmos begins in a state of Love, in which all the roots are fused and combined in a perfect sphere. Then Strife enters the fray, and the sphere begins to be pulled apart in a centrifugal, whirling motion, eventually resulting in the complete separation and segregation of the roots. Then, at the highest degree of Strife, Love begins to exert her influence, pulling the homogeneous roots into an accord, synthesising like with unlike, until the world as we know it, with its sea, sky, Sun and Earth, begins to take shape. Love increasingly holds sway until, after a vast stretch of time, it consolidates once again into a perfect, undifferentiated sphere, only to be disrupted one day by Strife, and so on, endlessly.
[…]
Empedocles’ solution to the prejudice, dogmatism and narrow-mindedness afflicting existence differs from that of the modern impartialists. The answer is not to try to adopt an impersonal, God’s-eye perspective, foregoing all and any relationships as the inexorable source of ethical harm. It is instead to strive to forge new bonds or to recognise bonds that already exist. It is Love that allows us to do this. Whereas Strife sorts like with like, atomising the cosmos into homogenous parts, Love combines unlike and like, forging a higher unity, bringing together what seems to be different. Thus, Love overcomes prejudice not by overcoming partiality but by providing it with a more inclusive, elevated form. The highest such form is partiality towards the living as such.
To achieve Empedoclean enlightenment is to divest yourself of your ingrained attachment to familiar body shapes and conventional kinds of conduct. It is to recognise the seemingly alien other as in fact fundamentally akin to you. Revising and widening the Stoic maxim, the Empedoclean position can be captured in the proposition: I am a living being, I consider nothing alive alien to me. From this higher standpoint, the relations that bind us to our family, friends, compatriots, humanity and to other animals appear much like the spiralling whorl of a mollusc shell, each form enclosed within broader forms, with the all-embracing form of life encompassing them all.
Marius Bercea Untitled (Boy who imitates sunset), 2025 Oil on paper, 23.3 × 16.6 inch
Jecza Gallery at Untitled Art Fair
Autographis the small press of JOAN, an experimental exhibition space in Los Angeles, documenting expressions that arise from new imaginings: alternative histories, cosmologies, and systems of release.
