Hi Ana,
I read both below and have a practical question - is the original post, from which the excerpt is taken, available in archives anywhere?
The second piece is beautiful and dark and poetic, and oddly undercut, visually, by one of the symptoms of power and how it's deployed online - I mean the words which are doubly underlined and clickable, something you didn't do, but something that was done to the text, bringing up advertisements that had no relation to what you were writing. It's as if the writing itself became a marker of exile from a kind of integrity, undercut by capital - that isn't the case, of course, but I found it disturbing.
I think both point not only to the contexting of pain, but to its politics - it's been written about, widely here, that torture doesn't work, that this is why it should be discontinued. But I know, myself, that I'm a coward in this regard, and I can't see why it would work, which makes it all the more horrifying. When we - my friends and I - found out that Bush etc. was applying torture routinely (we had always suspected it, in a clandestine way), it spelled the end of a kind of innocence about "good" Americans, that I, at least, had been brought up with. I imagine now something very different, a world of torture, and wonder how we, how anyone or anything, can live with that.
Thank you - Alan On Tue, 2 Oct 2012, Ana Vald?s wrote:
Yes I read Elaine Scarry as well, didn't know Friedrich's work, will look for it. Sadly my book was written in Swedish, at that time Swedish was my first language, the language I spoke daily, now I am back in Uruguay and I am translating with a friend's help my book into Spanish. With luck the book will be published in Spanish here next year. But I don't have any conections with a publisher house to translate it into English, you could be my agent, Alan! :) This links are related to the book, http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/03/28/torture-works/ and this other, http://authspot.com/short-stories/the-new-country/ (The last one was part of an anthology published some years ago by Serpent's Tail, called the Garden of the Alphabet, we were ten or twelve storytellers, one from each country, I was Sweden's chosen contribution). Cheers Ana On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 1:31 PM, Alan Sondheim <sondh...@panix.com> wrote:Hi Ana, Is your book available, and has it been translated? Would very much like to see it. I remember working through Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, and Ernst Friedrich's War Against War (KKrieg dem Kriege), among other texts, while at Eyebeam. I also read a number of Buddhist texts on suffering, but they were personally les helpful. Thanks, Alan On Tue, 2 Oct 2012, Ana Vald?s wrote:Hi Alan and good luck in your month here! Interesting in reading about Monika's work, I was very concerned with these topics when I wrote my book about torture and violence and history. As maybe many or you know since my earlier participation in -empyre I was a political prisoner in Uruguay when I was very young. I was tortured, waterboarded and so on, but could not cope with these memories until now, four years ago I wrote. And when I was writing I was in physical pain, my body remembered things I had deleted or forgotten. To be able to write the book I read many books written about pain and evil, body and memory, Judith Butler, Susan Sontag, etc etc. I am sad I was not aware about Monika's work at that time! Ana On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 1:04 PM, Alan Sondheim <sondh...@panix.com> wrote:Hi - Monika Weiss, Sandy Baldwin, and myself are on together for the first week. I've been fascinated by Monika's work for years, and earlier this year we performed together, in dual performances, at Eyebeam in New York, while I was a resident there. Her work is concerned with anguish, memory, violence, cultural debris, and related concerns. It is multi-media, involving performance, installation, video, and sound. She writes "The transdisciplinary work of Monika Weiss examines relationships between body and history, and evokes ancient rituals of lamentation as traditionally performed in response to war. Her current work considers aspects of public memory and amnesia as reflected within the physical and political space of a City." We're asking her to begin the week; later, Sandy and I will also post, in sections, a text we wrote together on pain, avatars, and virtuality. I just want to say a few words here, in relation to my own interest in the topic. The internet, inscreasingly dominated by social media, is a safe place for many people; at the same time, it is a Kristevan "clean and proper body" that hides or bypasses pain and suffering - not through content, but through the nature of the online media themselves. I think this has troubling psychological repercussions, Levinas, say, on one said, and Baudrillard on the other. Alterity, the presence of the other, disappears into pixels, and simulacra, all the way down, take over. So how do we feel, convey, or act in relation to, pain, suffering, and death, online? How can we deal with the political beyond petition? How can we situate ourselves in a world of images and the imaginary? Sandy and I both moderate email lists, but we're a bit unused to this format - if it's a bit rough at the beginning, bear with us! We'll begin with Monika, and later, intersperse the discussion with the text we wrote back and forth. Because we're beginning October 2, we'll continue for the next seven or eight days; our weeks aren't exact. Thanks for reading, Alan _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre-- http://writings-escrituras.tumblr.com/ http://maraya.tumblr.com/ http://www.twitter.com/caravia158 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/ http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/ http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/ http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/ cell Sweden +4670-3213370 cell Uruguay +598-99470758 "When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. ? Leonardo da Vinci _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre== blog: http://nikuko.blogspot.com/ (main blog) email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552 music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/rp.txt == _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre-- http://writings-escrituras.tumblr.com/ http://maraya.tumblr.com/ http://www.twitter.com/caravia158 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/ http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/ http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/ http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/ cell Sweden +4670-3213370 cell Uruguay +598-99470758 "When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. ? Leonardo da Vinci _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
== blog: http://nikuko.blogspot.com/ (main blog) email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552 music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/rp.txt == _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
