The Order of Animals

“This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that."

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970) xv.

(also in History of Sexuality and some interviews, on the emphasis on eating than sexual taboo)

Article: Woman in China roasts puppy alive
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/blogs/singaporescene/woman-roasted-puppy-alive-061603091.html

Hey,

read the sanctimonious comments. What about chickens, pigs, cows and fish? Your book should've been Dog Meat not Diced Meat to irritate more people. The order of animals: pandas, whales, sharks, dogs, cats, birds, chicken, cows... endangered species, pets, poultry, cattle. Barbaric because dogs did not move up to the category of Pets in some places. Houseflies, cockroaches and lizards remain within the category of Pests in most places. Thus, public displays of sympathy for the puppy betray the fascistic inclination of the masses.

Red Herring - not about why some animals shouldn't be harmed, but rather why it is justifiable to kill (or eat) certain species. Anyway, this is just a thought exercise. I know you aren't an animal lover too, and love to eat meat.

absent city - notes

The Girl p.46-7 "Extravagant References"
The girl (Laura) was born healthy. It was only with time that they began to notice certain strange signs. Her system of hallucinations was the topic of a complicated report that appeared in a scientific journal, but her father had deciphered it long before that. Yves Fonagy called it "extravagant references." In these highly unusual cases the patient imagines that everything that occurs around him is a projection of his personality. The patient excludes real people from his experience, because he considers himself much more intelligent than anyone else. The world was an extension of herself; her body spread outward and reproduced itself. She was constantly preoccupied by mechanical objects, especially electric light bulbs. She saw them as words, every time one was turned on it was like someone had begun to speak. Thus she considered darkness as a form of silent thinking. One summer afternoon (when she was five years old) she looked at an electric fan spinning on a dresser. She thought it was a living being, a female living being. The girl of the air, her soul trapped in a cage. Laura said that she lived "there," and raised her hand to indicate the ceiling. There, she said, moving her head from left to right. Her mother turned off the fan. That is when she began having difficulties with language. She lost the capacity to use personal pronouns. With time she stopped using them altogether, then hid all the words she knew in her memory. She would only utter a little clucking sound as she opened and closed her eyes. The mother separated the boys from their sister because she was afraid that it was contagious. One of the small town beliefs. [...] They did not want her to be committed. So they took her twice a week to an institute in La Plata and followed the orders given by Doctor Arana, who treated her with electric shock therapy. He explained that the girl lived in an extreme emotional void. That is why Laura's language was slowly becoming more and more abstract and unpersonalized. At first she still used the correct names for food. She would say "butter," "sugar," "water," but later began to refer to different food items in groups that were disconnected from their nutritive nature. Sugar became "white sand," butter, "soft mud," water, "wet air."

p.74 Mirror
because politics is a mirror... faces and faces that appear and look at each other and get lost again and are substituted by new faces that appear and look at each other and get lost again.
It swallows up faces.
But the mirror is always there. The truth is television is a mirror. A mirror that holds onto the faces.

p.116 Atomic Bomb
The possibilities of converting what already exists into something else that are infinite. But I would not be able to make something out of nothing. In that respect, I am not like Richter. You cannot compare my discovery with Richter's invention, he built an atomic plant for Peron using only words, just with the reality of his German accent. He told him he was an atomic scientist and that he had the secret to make the bomb, and Peron believed him and fell like a fool, and had underground buildings and useless labs with pipes and turbines for him that were never used.

p.121
Macedonio and the fundamental chord (guitar) the entire universe is derived

p.122 M & E
"... Macedonio fell in love with Elena before he met her, as he used to say, because they had told him so much abut her that it was as if a spirit had come to visit him. Even many of the things he had done earlier in life were to impress her at a distance and to try to get her to fall in love with him, he would say. He always thought that his passion is what made her ill, he always thought it as his fault that she died. Macedonio saw her for the first time at a cousin's house the day she turned eighteen, and again by coincidence one afternoon on a street in Azul. This second meeting proved to be definitive. He had gotten off the train because he was doing an experiment having to do with the length of thoughts. He got off there without knowing where he was was because he had already traveled the number of leagues needed for his thoughts, and had decided to send a telegram from there saying he would be coming back late. When he left the post office he sat down at a bar to have a brandy, and then walked around the corner and ran into Elena, who was looking at window of a shoe store, as if she had been placed there just so Macedonio would find her. She started to laugh because she thought it was funny to see that man dressed in a white shirt and a dark suit at siesta time, as if he were sleepwalking in a lost town in the middle of the Pampas. He looked like a seminarist going out to ask for alms for the poor parish. And I was asking for alms, Macedonio would say, because she gave me the grace of her beauty and of her intelligence, bright as the morning sun. He invited her to have tea with him at the cafe in the train station, and from that afternoon on, they were together until the day she died."

p.129-30
I know the Police Museum, with the wax reproductions of the criminals. Punk Head, Madman Gaitan... wearing the clothes they had on when they were arrested or killed (the shirt with the bullet hole in back), and the cells where they were locked up... and the instruments used by the police for centuries to hold the murderers. He used to say to me that narrative is an art that belongs to the police, that they are always trying to get people to tell their secrets, to narc on other suspects, to tell on their friends, their brothers. That is why the police and the so-called justice system have done more for the progress of narrative, he used to say, than any writer in history.

p.131
Lugones Chief of Police

Trading Monologues - Mishima

Two men may talk enthusiastically for an hour or so about shared experiences, and yet not have a true conversation. A lonely man who wants to indulge his nostalgic mood feels the need of someone with whom to share it. When he finds such a companion, he starts to pour out his monologue as though recounting a dream. And so the talk goes on between them, their monologues alternating, but after a time they suddenly become aware that they have nothing to say to each other. They are like two men standing at either side of a chasm, the bridge across which has been destroyed.

Then at last, since they cannot bear to remain silent, their conversation turns again to the past.

Runaway Horses, p.57 (Vintage, 2000 [1970])

The Pain of Dialogue - Blanchot

It is a matter of dialogue. How rare dialogue is; we realize this by the surprise it makes us feel, bringing us into the presence of an unusual event, almost more painful than remarkable. In novels, the "dialogued" part is the expression of laziness and routine: the characters speak to put white spaces on a page and out of an imitation of life, where there is no narration, only conversation; from time to time one must give speech to people in books; the direct contact is an economy and a repose (for the author more than for the reader). Or, the "dialogue", under the influence of some American writers, can be wrought of an expressive incommunicativeness: more threadbare than in reality, a little below the meaningless speech that suffice for us in current life. When someone speaks , it is his refusal to speak that becomes obvious; his discourse is his silence: closed, violent, saying nothing but himself, his abrupt massiveness, his desire to emit words rather than to speak. Or simply, as happens in Hemingway, this exquisite way of expressing himself a little below zero is a ruse to make us believe in some high degree of life, emotion, or thought, an honest and classic ruse that often succeeds and to which Hemingway's melancholy talent given various resources.

The Book to Come, p. 151 (Stanford Uni. Press)

To read what was never written - Walter Benjamin

Historical method is a philological method, a method that has as its foundation the book of life. 'To read what was never written,' is what Hofmannsthal calls it. The reader referred here is the true historian. (Theses on the Philosophy of History)

[It is in this moment that the past is saved, not in being returned to what it once existed but, instead, precisely in being transformed into something that never was: in being read, in the words of Hofmannsthal, as what was never written - Daniel Heller-Roazen]

only young poets and old whores can appreciate

A poet can endure anything. Which amounts to saying that a human being can endure anything. Except that it's not true: there are obviously limits to what a human being can endure. Really endure. A poet, on the other hand, can endure anything. We grew up with this conviction. The opening assertion is true, but that way lie ruin, madness, and death.

[...] it has to be said that he wrote badly [...] He wanted to be a poet, and threw himself into this endeavour with all his energy and willpower. He was tenacious in a blind ,uncritical way, like the bad guys in westerns, falling like flies but persevering, determined to take the hero's bullets, and in the end there was something likable about this tenacity; it give him an aura, a kind of literary sanctity that only young poets and old whores can appreciate.