Today, the self is the body. Subjectivity has been reduced to the body, to its appearance, its image, its performance, its health, its longevity. The predominance of the bodily dimension in the constitution of identity allows for talk of a bio-identity. We no longer face a body made docile by disciplinary institutions, a body striated by the panoptical machine, the body of the factory, the army, the school. Today in gyms or in cosmetic surgery clinics, everyone voluntarily submits him or herself to an ascesis following the scientific and aesthetic precept. This is also what Francisco Ortega, following Foucault, calls bioascesis. On the one hand, we find the adequation of the body to the norms of show business, according to the celebrity-type format. Given the infinite possibilities to transform the body genetically, chemically, and electronically, the obsession for physical perfection, and the compulsion of the self to arouse the other’s desire, even at the cost of one’s own well-being, ultimately substitutes the promised erotic satisfaction with a self-imposed mortification.
Peter Pal Pelbart, Cartography of Exhaustion: Nihilism Inside Out
Peter Pal Pelbart, Cartography of Exhaustion: Nihilism Inside Out
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With the inflation of apocalyptic rhetoric has come the increasing unreality of the apocalypse. A permanent modern scenario: apocalypse looms… and it doesn’t occur. And it still looms… Apocalypse has become an event that is happening and not happening. It may be that some of the most feared events, like those involving the irreparable ruin of the environment, have already happened. But we don’t know it yet, because the standards have changed. Or because we do not have the right indices for measuring the catastrophe. Or simply because this is a catastrophe in slow motion. (Or feels as if it is in slow motion, because we know about it, can anticipate it; and now have to wait for it to happen, to catch up with what we think we know.) Modern life accustoms us to live with the intermittent awareness of monstrous, unthinkable […]
Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors
Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors
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