"if we can say that murder and hate designate everything that excludes closeness, it is insofar as they ravage from within an original relationship to alterity. the hostis responds to hospitality in the way that the ghost recalls himself to the living, not letting them forget."

anne dufourmantelle in of hospitality: anne dufourmantelle invites jacques derrida to respond. footnote 2: “the latin hostis means guest but also enemy.” this reminds me of my favorite line in this song with “you’ve been a guest in your own home” and what it was like living as a guest and an enemy for a year and a half (i’m feeling somewhere between too blase and too magnanimous tonight to link) and i so get this and this is how i understand of hospitality: anne dufourmantelle invites jacques derrida to respond.  

"one confesses—or is forced to confess."

michel foucault, the history of sexuality, an introduction: volume I

"silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers—is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies. there is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. there is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses."

michel foucault, the history of sexuality, an introduction: volume I 

this makes me think about when i said that i felt like privacy rejected me and so why be silent. this also make me think about when we were first dating and he was like, “i know you like to keep your relationships private” or, much, much later, when mikki said to me, “this must be really hard for you. the relationship has been so theatrical from the beginning and you’ve always been such a private person.” one of the reasons i was always so private, i think, is because that’s what allowed me to actually be vulnerable.

i became less private, perhaps, during all of those terrible couples therapy sessions—not my idea—in which silence is considered an affront to the entire process. i remember one time, in particular, when i felt like the therapist and my boyfriend were colluding to try to get me to speak on a subject, even though i clearly didn’t want to, even though it was hardly the worst of our problems, but perhaps a convenient one for him, a way for him to make it look like i was acting out on issues that were all in my head, or maybe it was our worst problem, related to the fact that i thought he was all talk about the relationship but wouldn’t do anything, least of all protect me or my feelings. anyway, they both appeared rational, your dry heat feels like power, while i was clearly on the verge of some traumatic reaction—i felt terrible, i felt like no one cared that i felt terrible, not to mention overpowered—and i had already said i didn’t want to talk about it. and so i didn’t. i fucking refused to talk about it and remained silent as a form of speech and self-protection and i’m glad i did. vulnerability is a privilege. anyway, when i was ready i did talk about it, right here, on my tumblr. 

"romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. for a woman, love is defined as her willingness to submit to her own annihilation."

andrea dworkin (via whateverjeanne). yes, but. 

negotiations

at valentine’s day dinner last year, during one of our endless discussions of our discussions, he looked genuinely pained and said he didn’t think i wanted “violent intimacy” the same way he did. today my therapist said “what i don’t think you want to do is get into another relationship where you feel lonely in the relationship.” the space between these two statements—maybe the “you said” and “truth is only an act”—is what i am still negotiating. i woke up way too late today because i was having this really extended dream. i couldn’t remember what happened so my therapist wanted to know what it felt like. i said, “it felt, not ambivalent exactly, but like it couldn’t end until i had worked it all out. just like the relationship felt, actually.” i once told jeanne, in the midst of those violently intimate couples counseling sessions, that i had to feel like i had tried everything, which i did, but i guess my unconscious has a little bit more work to do. 

also he he once said he saw the “you said” and “truth is only an act” on my tumblr and had never felt so concerned about our relationship and i was like (…it’s not about self-esteem, it’s about recognition…), “i’ve been telling you this stuff for months!”

intimate objects

vito acconci (with kathy dillon), pryings, 1971 

“you’re not being open.”  

(Source: sagan-indiana)

on intellectual lingering

“methodologically, their work involves something that might at first glance look rather rearguard or recalcitrant: close readings of the past for the odd detail, the unintelligible or resistant moment. reading closely means fixating on that which resists any easy translation into present-tense terms, any ‘progressive’ program for the turning of art into a cultural/historical magic bullet or toxin. to close read is to linger, to dally, to take pleasure in tarrying, and to hold out that these activities can allow us to look both hard and askance at the norm. but in the works i have gathered here, close reading is a way into history, not a way out of it, and itself a form of historiography and historical analysis. these artists see any sign as an amalgam of the incommensurate: of dominant uses in the present, of obsolete meanings sensible only as a kind of radiation from the past, of new potential, and, more simply, of different points in time as meanings accrue and shed…what id like to identify as perhaps the queerest commitment of my own book is also close reading: the decision to unfold, slowly, a small number of imaginative texts rather than amass a weighty archive of or around texts, and to treat these texts and their formal work as theories of their own, interventions upon both critical theory and historiography…my texts are…minor visual works by minor artists in a minor key…”

—elizabeth freeman in time binds: queer temporalities, queer histories, on her “commitment to overcloseness.” like lauren berlants intellectual loitering. (she doesnt call it that, but i once did.) between the two of them they outline not just my basic intellectual method, but my basic life method.  

(boystown)

zoe leonard, seated anatomical model, 1991/92

thinking about “abjection and the body,” “the body in visual art from 1960-present,” “feminist visual culture,” and just thinking about this piece in general. or feeling it, actually.