kagablog

The particular form this transgression takes
Is an inverted mirror held up to the
repressive modus operandii
of the dominant culture

The necessary inversion of this mirror
Is described as perversion
by the repressive culture
Which itself is perverted

The paradox of transgressive artists and thinkers:
They are the true patriots and intellectuals of the
Cultures whose repressive rules they transgress

It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.

Ever since sentences started to circulate in brains devoted to reflection, an effort at total identification has been made, because with the aid of a copula each sentence ties one thing to another; all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of Ariadne’s thread leading thought into its own labyrinth.

But the copula of terms is no less irritating than the copulation of bodies. And when I scream I AM THE SUN an integral erection results, because the verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy.

Everyone is aware that life is parodic and that it lacks an interpretation. Thus lead is the parody of gold. Air is the parody of water. The brain is the parody of the equator. Coitus is the parody of crime.

Gold, water, the equator, or crime can each be put forward as the principle of things.

And if the origin of things is not like the ground of the planet that seems to be the base, but like the circular movement that the planet describes around a mobile center, then a car a clock, or a sewing machine could equally be accepted as the generative principle.

The two primary motions are rotation and sexual movement, whose combination is expressed by the locomotive’s wheels and pistons.

These two motions are reciprocally transformed, the one into the other.

Thus one notes that the earth, by turning, makes animals and men have coitus, and (because the result is as much the cause as that which provokes it) that animals and men make the earth turn by having coitus.

It is the mechanical combination or transformation of these movements that the alchemists sought as the philosopher’s stone.

It is through the use of this magically valued combination that one can determine the present position of men in the midst of the elements.

An abandoned shoe, a rotten tooth, a snub nose, the cook spitting in the soup of his masters are to love what a battle flag is to nationality.

An umbrella, a sexagenarian, a seminarian, the smell of rotten eggs, the hollow eyes of judges are the roots that nourish love.

A dog devouring the stomach of a goose, a drunken vomiting woman, a slobbering accountant, a jar of mustard represent the confusion that serves as the vehicle of love.

A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why he is not one of the others.

In bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches.

Without knowing it, he suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms.

Love or infantile rage, or a provincial dowager’s vanity, or clerical pornography, or the diamond of a soprano bewilder individuals forgotten in dusty apartments.

They can very well try to find each other; they will never find anything but parodic images, and they will fall asleep as empty as mirrors.

The absent and inert girl hanging dreamless from my arms is no more foreign to me than the door or window through which I can look or pass.

I rediscover indifference (allowing her to leave me) when I fall asleep, through an inability to love what happens.

It is impossible for her to know whom she will discover when I hold her, because she obstinately attains a complete forgetting.

The planetary systems that turn in space like rapid disks, and whose centers also move, describing an infinitely larger circle, only move away continuously from their own position in order to return it, completing their rotation.

Movement is a figure of love, incapable of stopping at a particular being, and rapidly passing from one to another.

But the forgetting that determines it in this way is only a subterfuge of memory.

A man gets up as brusquely as a specter in a coffin and falls in the same way.

He gets up a few hours later and then he falls again, and the same thing happens every day; this great coitus with the celestial atmosphere is regulated by the terrestrial rotation around the sun.

Thus even though terrestrial life moves to the rhythm of this rotation, the image of this movement is not turning earth, but the male shaft penetrating the female and almost entirely emerging, in order to reenter.

Love and life appear to be separate only because everything on earth is broken apart by vibrations of various amplitudes and durations.

However, there are no vibrations that are not conjugated with a continuous circular movement; in the same way, a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis.

Beings only die to be born, in the manner of phalluses that leave bodies in order to enter them.

Plants rise in the direction of the sun and then collapse in the direction of the ground.

Trees bristle the ground with a vast quantity of flowered shafts raised up to the sun.

The trees that forcefully soar end up burned by lightning, chopped down, or uprooted. Returned to the ground, they come back up in another form.

But their polymorphous coitus is a function of uniform terrestrial rotation.

The simplest image of organic life united with rotation is the tide. From the movement of the sea, uniform coitus of the earth with the moon, comes the polymorphous and organic coitus of the earth with the sun.

But the first form of solar love is a cloud raised up over the liquid element. The erotic cloud sometimes becomes a storm and falls back to earth in the form of rain, while lightning staves in the layers of the atmosphere.

The rain is soon raised up again in the form of an immobile plant.

Animal life comes entirely from the movement of the seas and, inside bodies, life continues to come from salt water.

The sea, then, has played the role of the female organ that liquefies under the excitation of the penis.

The sea continuously jerks off.

Solid elements, contained and brewed in water animated by erotic movement, shoot out in the form of flying fish.

The erection and the sun scandalize, in the same way as the cadaver and the darkness of cellars.

Vegetation is uniformly directed towards the sun; human beings, on the other hand, even though phalloid like trees, in opposition to other animals, necessarily avert their eyes.

Human eyes tolerate neither sun, coitus, cadavers, nor obscurity, but with different reactions.

When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene.

It betrays at the same time, through morbid reflexes, a bloody erection and a demanding thirst for indecency and criminal debauchery.

For that reason I am not afraid to affirm that my face is a scandal and that my passions are expressed only by the JESUVE.

The terrestrial globe is covered with volcanoes, which serve as its anus.

Although this globe eats nothing, it often violently ejects the contents of its entrails.

Those contents shoot out with a racket and fall back, streaming down the sides of the Jesuve, spreading death and terror everywhere.

In fact, the erotic movements of the ground are not fertile like those of the water, but they are far more rapid.

The earth sometimes jerks off in a frenzy, and everything collapses on its surface.

The Jesuve is thus the image of an erotic movement that burglarizes the ideas contained in the mind, giving them the force a scandalous eruption.

This eruptive force accumulates in those who are necessarily situated below.

Communist workers appear to the bourgeois to be as ugly and dirty as hairy sexual organs, or lower parts; sooner or later there will be a scandalous eruption in the course of which the asexual noble heads of the bourgeois will be chopped off.

The erotic revolutionary and volcanic deflagrations antagonize the heavens.

As in the case of violent love, they take place beyond the constraints of fecundity.

In opposition to celestial fertility there are terrestrial disasters, the image of terrestrial love without condition, erection without escape and without rule, scandal, and terror.

Love then screams in my own throat; I am the Jesuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun.

I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night.

The Sun exclusively loves the Night and directs its luminous violence, its ignoble shaft, toward the earth, but finds itself incapable of reaching the gaze or the night, even though the nocturnal terrestrial expanses head continuously toward the indecency of the solar ray.

The solar annulus is the intact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is night.

this translation first appeared on the web on greylodge.org

african noise foundation

in association with

grymhetens teater dekadens

present

“qualis artifex pereo”

(”oh what an artist the world loses in me” emperor nero’s dying words upon committing suicide)

an acéphale performance

by

bo i. cavefors, johanna rosenqvist, erica li lundqvist & martin bladh

text by Georges Bataille and Martin Bladh

music composed by martin bladh

sound engineer mikael oretofts

film aryan kaganof

(40min, HDV, Sweden, june 2008)

When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene. It betrays at the same time, through morbid reflexes, a bloody erection and a demanding thirst for indecency and criminal debauchery. For that reason I am not afraid to affirm that my face is a scandal and that my passions are expressed only by the JESUVE.

The terrestrial globe is covered with volcanoes, which serve as its anus. Although this globe eats nothing, it often violently ejects the contents of its entrails. Those contents shoot out with a racket and fall back, streaming down the sides of the Jesuve, spreading death and terror everywhere.

Animal life comes entirely from the movement of the seas and, inside bodies, life continues to come from salt water. The sea, then, has played the female organ that liquefies under the excitation of the penis. The sea continuously jerks off.

Solid elements, contained and brewed in water animated by erotic movement, shoot out in the form of flying fish. The erection and the sun scandalize, in the same way as the cadaver and the darkness of cellars.

Vegetation is uniformly directed towards the sun; human beings, on the other hand, even though phalloid like trees, in opposition to the other animals, necessarily avert their eyes.
Human eyes tolerate neither sun, coitus, cadavers, nor obscurity, but with different reactions.

To be conscious of the world; the organic rhythm between limbs. Always present in the flesh: blood, marrow, phlegm. The belly down; thrash of naked earth. Back and target left out, at your mercy: jackals, vultures.

MOTHERVULTURE
MOTHERJACKAL

Your cruelty nourished me: fruit of Thy womb.
What’s on trial in front of me; my flesh and life-work?
Your faeces?
Fruit of the womb?
The war of free limbs;
the anarchy of the organs – the roar for retribution to ejaculate?

MOTHERVULTURE
MOTHERJACKAL

I’m holding the edges.
I point them at you.
I’m forcing them back up through you.
I meet the resistance inside you,
back through the cruelty;
the plague that nourished me.

The sun, situated at the bottom of the sky like a cadaver at the bottom of a pit, answers this inhuman cry with the spectral attraction of decomposition. Immense nature breaks its chain and collapses into the limitless void. A severed penis, soft and bloody, is substituted for the habitual order of things. In its folds, where painful jaws still bite, pus, spittle, and larva accumulate, deposited by enormous flies: fecal like the eye painted at the bottom of a vase, this Sun, now borrowing its brilliance from death, has buried existence in the stench of the night.

The terrestrial globe has retained its enormity like a bald head, in the middle of which the eye that opens on the void is both volcanic and lacustrine. It extends its disastrous countryside into the deep folds of hairy flesh, and the hairs that form its bush are inundated with tears. But the troubled feelings of a degradation even stranger than death do not have their source in a typical brain: heavy intestines alone press under this nude flesh, as charged with obscenity as a rear end – one that is just as satanic as the equally nude bottom a young sorceress raises to the black sky at the moment her fundament opens, to admit a flaming torch.

The love-cry torn from this comic crater is a feverish sob and a rattling blast of thunder.
The fecal eye of the sun has also torn itself from these volcanic entrails, and the pain of man who tears out his own eyes with his fingers is no more absurd than this anal maternity of the sun.

Love, then screams in my own throat; I am the Jesuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun. I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night. The Sun exclusively loves the Night and directs its luminous violence, its ignoble shaft, towards the earth, but it finds itself incapable of reaching the gaze or the night, even though the nocturnal terrestrial expanses head continuously toward the indecency of the solar ray.

The solar annulus is the intact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is the night.

I soil myself in the sun tomorrow – naked with regret.
Then futility, further loos – triumph or despair?
Is this what it all comes down to;
negation? inversion? fascination? terror? delight and torture?
A guilty economy?
Profit/loss?
Spending/receiving?
Charge/discharge?
Why are these photographs and videotapes my mirror?
Why these glossy cover; intact wall of flesh and words?
Broken vessels, unfinished sentences still visible beneath the skin surface.
So what make these words come true?
So what exactly is sensation?
An altar; edifice of death raised in my bathroom?
A hidden compartment behind my living room bookshelf?
The outlines of my face, thighs, hands and groin?
On the fringe of…burn out, disintegrate the same way these photographs were conceived.
On the fringe of…fade out, live these words; take them upon me, literarily.
What I do is final; a stumbling block; a private implosion of surplus words, of repeated images.

The sun vomited like a sick drunk above the mouths full of cosmic screams, in the void of an absurd sky… And thus an unparalleled heat and stupor formed an alliance – as excessive as torture: like a severed nose, like a torn-out tongue – and celebrated a wedding (celebrated it with the blade of a razor on petty, insolent rear ends), the little copulation of the stinking hole with the sun…

Like predators you rip my exposed muscles to shreds,
grind them between your razor teeth,
suck nutritive from marrow and blood,
to finally swallow me down into your jagging innards.

Open your universe of red implosions,
malign underwater tumours,
let them swell and propagate in the fertile mould.
I, your undeveloped foetus.
I, your crippled entity.
I, that partially escaped the jaws of the progenitor.

Let me dissolve slowly in your gigantic machinery.
Let me be caressed by the movements of your bowels.
On my way towards the final destination.
On my way towards the end of the world.

Let the outer surface fade away
The link: the resurrected one
Emerges from his predestined trial
The sword, the limb, the arm
I force you back into the swelling meat-gardens of creation.

The eye, at the summit of the skull, opening on the incandescent sun in order to contemplate it in a sinister solitude, is not a product of understanding, but is instead an immediate existence; it opens and blinds itself like a conflagration, or like a fever that eats the being, or more exactly, the head. This great burning head is the image and the disagreeable light of the notion of expenditure, beyond the still empty notion as it is elaborated on the basis of methodical analysis. Starting from the being who bore it, it is not at all an external product, but the form that this being takes in his lubricious avatars, in the ecstatic gift he makes of himself as obscene and nude victim – and a victim not before an obscure and immaterial force, but before great howls of prostitutes´ laughter.

Existence no longer resembles a neatly defined itinerary from one practical sign to another, but a sickly incandescence, a durable orgasm.

All the plants of the earth are raised to the sky, and they continuously throw myriads of brilliant multicoloured jets of spittle at the sun, in the form of flowers, and there is only an obscene Van Gogh, surrounded by madmen, to throw at this same sun the phallic spit of his eyes. The other human creatures miserably drag themselves around like giant impotent and correct phalluses, their eyes riveted on soporific surroundings.

The bald summit of the anus has become the centre, blackened with bushes, of the narrow ravine cleaning the buttocks. The spectral image of this change of sign is represented by a strange human nudity – now obscene – that is substituted for the hairy body of animals, and in particular by the pubescent hairs that appear exactly where the ape was glabrous; surrounded by a halo of death, a creature who is too pale and too large stands up, a creature who, under a sick sun, is nothing other than the celestial eye it lacks.

As the centre of the universe my flesh will be feast upon by your hunger,
Fathers, mothers, sons, daughters.
I’m limitless.
I’m here for all of you.
Black and lifeless; my eyes looks down upon you from the sanctified space above the altarpiece.

My call, the meaning of my deeds and everyday actions.

One flesh unbound – of expressions and possibilities.
How I found myself – the link: Logos.
How you heard the call, took me in your arms.
Carried me to the altar and erected my podium.
All of it, now written in stone.

— when a women and a man are on the same niveau, they are jämställda — Sweden is a society working for jämställdhet between women and men… AHA!!!

bo cavefors

Nero was born at Antium (Anzio) on 15 December AD 37 and was first named Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. He was the son of Cnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, who was descended from a distinguished noble family of the Roman republic (a Domitius Ahenobarbus is known to have been consul in 192 BC, leading troops in the war against Antiochus alongside Scipio Africanus), and Agrippina the younger, who was the daughter of Germanicus.
When Nero was two, his mother was banished by Caligula to the Pontian Islands. His inheritance was then seized when his father died one year later.

With Caligula killed and a milder emperor on the throne, Agrippina (who was emperor Claudius’ niece) was recalled from exile and her son was given a good education. Once in AD 49 Agrippina married Claudius, the task of educating of the young Nero was handed to the eminent philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Further to this Nero was betrothed to Claudius’ daughter Octavia.

In AD 50 Agrippina persuaded Claudius to adopt Nero as his own son. This meant that Nero now took precedence over Claudius’ own younger child Britannicus. It was at his adoption that he assumed the name Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus. These names were clearly largely in honour of his maternal grandfather Germanicus who had been an extrememly popular commander with the army. Evidently it was felt that a future emperor was well advised to bear a name which reminded the troops of their loyalties. In AD 51 he was named heir-apparent by Claudius.

Alas in AD 54 Claudius died, most likely poisoned by his wife. Agrippina, supported by the prefect of the praetorians, Sextus Afranius Burrus, cleared the way for Nero to become emperor. Since Nero was not yet seventeen years old, Agrippina the younger first acted as regent. A unique woman in Roman history, she was the sister of Caligula, the wife of Claudius, and the mother of Nero.

But Agrippina’s dominant position did not last for long. Soon she was shunted aside by Nero, who sought not to share power with anyone. Agrippina was moved to a separate residence, away from the imperial palace and from the levers of power. When in 11 February AD 55 Britannicus died at a dinner party in the palace - most likely poisoned by Nero, Agrippina was said to have been alarmed. She had sought to keep Britannicus in reserve, in case she should lose control of Nero.

Nero was fair-haired, with weak blue eyes, a fat neck, a pot belly and a body which smelt and was covered with spots. He usually appeared in public in a sort of dressing gown without a belt, a scarf around his neck and no shoes. In character he was a strange mix of paradoxes; artistic, sporting, brutal, weak, sensual, erratic, extravagant, sadistic, bisexual - and later in life almost certainly deranged.

But for a period the empire enjoyed sound government under the guidance of Burrus and Seneca. Nero announced he sought to follow the example of Augustus’ reign. The senate was treated respectfully and granted greater freedom, the late Claudius was deified. Sensible legislation was introduced to improve public order, reforms were made to the treasury and provincial governors were prohibited from extorting large sums of money to pay for gladiatorial shows in Rome. Nero himself followed in the steps of his predecessor Claudius in applying himself rigorously to his judicial duties. He also considered liberal ideas, such as ending the killing of gladiators and condemned criminals in public spectacles.

In fact, Nero, most likely largely due to the influence of his tutor Seneca, came across as a very humane ruler at first. When the city prefect Lucius Pedanius Secundus was murdered by one of his slaves, Nero was intensely upset that he was forced by law to have all four hundred slaves of Pedanius’ household put to death.

It was no doubt such decisions which gradually lessened Nero’s resolve for administrative duties and caused him to withdraw more and more, devoting himself to such interests as horse-racing, singing, acting, dancing, poetry and sexual exploits. Seneca and Burrus tried to guard him against too greater excesses and encouraged him to have an affair with freed woman named Acte, provided that Nero appreciated that marriage was impossible. Nero’s excesses were hushed up, and between the three of them they successfully managed to avert continued attempts by Agrippina to exert imperial influence.

Agrippina meanwhile was outraged at such behaviour. She was jealous of Acte and deplored her son’s ‘Greek’ tastes for the arts. But when news reached Nero of what angry gossip she was spreading about him, he became enraged and hostile toward his mother.

The turning point came largely through Nero’s inherent lust and lack of self-control, for he took, as his mistress the beautiful Poppaea Sabina. She was the wife of his partner in frequent exploits, Marcus Salvius Otho. In AD 58 Otho was dispatched to be governor of Lusitania, no doubt to move him out of the way. Agrippina, presumably seeing the departure of Nero’s apparent friend as an opportunity to reassert herself, sided with Nero’s wife, Octavia, who naturally opposed her husbands affair with Poppaea Sabina.

Nero angrily responded, according to the historian Suetonius, with various attempts on his mother’s life, three of which were by poison and one by rigging the ceiling over her bed to collapse while she would lay in bed. Therafter even a collapsible boat was built, which was meant to sink in the Bay of Naples. But the plot only succeeded in sinking the boat, as Agrippina managed to swim ashore. Exasperated, Nero sent an assassin who clubbed and stabbed her to death (AD 59).

Nero reported to the senate that his mother had plotted to have him killed, forcing him to act first. The senate didn’t appear to regret her removal at all. There had never been much love lost by the senators for Agrippina.

Nero celebrated by staging yet wilder orgies and by creating two new festivals of chariot-racing and athletics. He also staged musical contests, which gave him further chance to demonstrate in public his talent for singing while accompanying himself on the lyre. In an age when actors and performers were seen as something unsavoury, it was a moral outrage to have an emperor performing on stage. Worse still, Nero being the emperor, no one was allowed to leave the auditorium while he was performing, for whatever reason. The historian Suetonius writes of women giving birth during a Nero recital, and of men who pretended to die and were carried out.

In AD 62 Nero’s reign should change completely. First Burrus died from illness. He was succeeded in his position as praetorian prefect by two men who held the office as colleagues. One was Faenius Rufus, and the other was the sinister Gaius Ofonius Tigellinus. Tigellinus was a terrible influence on Nero, who only encouraged his excesses rather than trying to curb them. And one of Tigellinus first actions in office was to revive the hated treason courts.

Seneca soon found Tigellinus - and an ever-more willful emperor - too much to bear and resigned. This left Nero totally subject to corrupt advisers. His life turned into little else but a series of excesses in sport, music, orgies and murder. In AD 62 he divorced Octavia and then had her executed on a trumped-up charge of adultery. All this to make way for Poppaea Sabina whom he married. (But then Poppaea too was later killed. - Suetonius says he kicked her to death when she complained at his coming home late from the races.)

Had his change of wife not created too much of a scandal, Nero’s next move did. Until then he had kept his stage appearances to private stages, but in AD 64 he gave his first public performance in Neapolis (Naples). - Romans saw it indeed as a bad omen that the very theatre Nero had performed in shortly after was destroyed by an earthquake. Within a year the emperor made his second appearance, this time in Rome. The senate was outraged.

And yet still the empire enjoyed moderate and responsible government by the administration. Hence the senate was not yet alienated enough to overcome its fear and do something against the madman whom it knew on the throne.

Then, in July AD 64, the Great Fire ravaged Rome for six days. The historian Tacitus, who was about 9 years old at the time, reports that of the fourteen districts of the city, ‘four were undamaged, three were utterly destroyed and in the other seven there remained only a few mangled and half-burnt traces of houses.’

This is when Nero was famously to have ‘fiddled while Rome burned’. This expression however appears to have its roots in the 17th century (alas, Romans didn’t know the fiddle).
The historian Suetonius describes him singing from the tower of Maecenas, watching as the fire consumed Rome. Dio Cassius tells us how he ‘climbed on to the palace roof, from which there was the best overall view of the greater part of the fire and, and sang ‘The capture of Troy'’

Meanwhile Tacitus wrote; ‘At the very time that Rome burned, he mounted his private stage and, reflecting present disasters in ancient calamities, sang about the destruction of Troy’.
But Tacitus also takes care to point out that this story was a rumour, not the account of an eye witness.

If his singing on the roof tops was true or not, the rumour was enough to make people suspicious that his measures to put out the fire might not have been genuine. To Nero’s credit, it does indeed appear that he had done his best to control the fire. But after the fire he used a vast area between the Palatine and the Equiline hills, which had been utterly destroyed by the fire to build his ‘Golden Palace’ (’Domus Aurea’). This was a huge area, ranging from the Portico of Livia to the Circus Maximus (close to where the fire was said to have started), which now was turned into pleasure gardens for the emperor, even an artificial lake being created in its centre. The temple of the deified Claudius was not yet completed and - being in the way of Nero’s plans, it was demolished. Judging by the sheer scale of this complex, it was obvious it could never have been built, were it not have been for the fire. And so quite naturally Romans had their suspicions about who had actually started it.

It would be unfair however to omit that Nero did rebuild large residential areas of Rome at his own expense. But people, dazzled by the immensity of the Golden Palace and its parks, nonetheless remained suspicious.

Nero, always a man desparate to be popular, therefore looked for scapegoats on whom the fire could be blamed. He found it in an obscure new religious sect, the Christians.
And so many Christians were arrested and thrown to the wild beasts in the circus, or they were crucified . Many of them were also burned to death at night, serving as ‘lighting’ in Nero’s gardens, while Nero mingled among the watching crowds.

It is this brutal persecution which immortalized Nero as the first Antichrist in the eyes of the Christian church. (The second Antichrist being the reformist Luther by edict of the Catholic Church.)

Meanwhile Nero’s relation’s with the senate deteriorated sharply, largely due to the execution of suspects through Tigellinus and his revived treason laws. Then in AD 65 there was a serious plot against Nero. Known as the ‘Pisonian Conspiracy’ it was led by Gaius Calpurnius Piso. The plot was uncovered and nineteen executions and suicides followed, and thirteen banishments. Piso and Seneca were among those who died. There was never anything even resembling a trial: people whom Nero suspected or disliked or who merely aroused the jealousy of his advisers were sent a note ordering them to commit suicide.

Nero, leaving Rome in charge of the freedman Helius, went to Greece to display his artistic abilities in the theatres of Greece. He won contests in the Olympic Games, - winning the chariot race although he fell of his chariot (as obviously nobody dared to defeat him), collected works of art, and opened a canal, which was never finished.

Alas, the situation was becoming very serious in Rome. The executions continued. Gaius Petronius, man of letters and former ‘director of imperial pleasures’, died in this manner in AD 66. So did countless senators, noblemen, and generals, including in AD 67 Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, hero of the Armenian wars and supreme commander in the Euphrates region. Further, a food shortage caused great hardship. Eventually Helius, fearing the worst, crossed over to Greece to summon back his master.

By January AD 68 Nero was back in Rome, but things were now too late. In March AD 68 the governor of Gallia Lugdunensis, Gaius Julius Vindex, himself Gallic-born, withdrew his oath of allegiance to the emperor and encouraged the governor of northern and eastern Spain, Galba, a hardened veteran of 71, to do the same. Vindex’ troops were defeated at Vesontio by the Rhine legions who marched in from Germany, and Vindex committed suicide. However, thereafter these German troops, too, refused to furthermore recognize Nero’s authority. So too Clodius Macer declared against Nero in north Africa. Galba, having informed the senate that he was available, if required, to head a government, simply waited.

Meanwhile in Rome nothing was actually done to control the crisis. Tigellinus was seriously ill at the time and Nero could only dream up fantastic tortures which he sought to inflict on the rebels once he had defeated them. The praetorian prefect of the day, Nymphidius Sabinus, persuaded his troops to abandon their allegiance to Nero. Alas, the senate condemned the emperor to be flogged to death. As Nero heard of this he chose rather to commit suicide, which he did with the assistance of a secretary (9 June AD 68).

His last words were, “Qualis artifex pereo.” (”What an artist the world loses in me.”)

this article originally appeared here

The title of this exhibition about Swedish Art is taken from a poem by the group Vesuvius, “Turn on THE DARK / death to the eternity”. This quotation gives the special quality of this group show of Swedish art between 1975 and 1985. This was indeed an important part of the art life those years, but you can always discuss how typical it was. In the galleries, institutions, museums were shown mostly traditional paintings, often in a lyrical Nordic tradition. But all around were people searching for new results and realities using different alternative spaces - from books, leaflets to old hospitals or cheap premises, that were free for some months, years or even days. Many of these artists formed the cultural life later in Sweden.

We have the pleasure to show dancer and choreographer Margaretha Åsberg’s pioner work Life Boat from 1976 on video. In her work she combined interfaces - art, music, literature, performance, dance. Her knowledge, intellect and artistic network was of great importance as was her work with performance and dance.

Other important pioneers those years are found in our rooms downstairs. The editor Bo Cavefors started 1959 and soon became not only one of the foremost radical editors in our country but soon showed to be of an importance that could only be fully understood in an international perspective. He edited artists’ books as well as new African writers and such different persons as Ma Zedong, Karl Marx and Ernst Jünger. When it came to the RAF in West Germany, an important topic those years, he did not hesitate to collect their writings so that everyone could read them. In 1979 the authorities used some slight economic trouble to stop him and he fled abroad. In connection to Cavefors Bokförlag we also show parts of Sture and Charlotte Johannesson’s exhibition for CultureHouse in Stockholm, which was closed only after two days.

You will also find on this floor many examples of artists’ books, archives and other alternative spaces, so typical for South Sweden - and it still is. The artists tend to create a room for themslves outside the institutions.

On the second floor you will find examples of art that was not that common those years. Both Leif Elggren and Beth Laurin are important figures who have been focused in Swedish art only the last years. Laurin focused sometime on femininity in a new way. Elggren started many new projects in sound, books and idea. His space could be anywhere, as with the colors bland and yellow, which he claimed to be his own property.

The tent in the next room represents a group of women who had an important gallery and meeting space in Stockholm. They also made early sound art, which is collacted on their self produced vinly LP. Indeen early for this time and indeed of outstanding quality.
In this room you also see examples of the cartoons that became more and more common as an important genre per se.

Those years many female artists went further on in their understanding of society and their own possibilities, by defining themselves in the first place and not the obstacles. This goes for many of the participants in the exhiition. Like photographer Eva Klasson. In the 70s she worked in Paris and produced a huge book 1976 and photos were she lingered on her own body. This project went on for some years before she stopped photographing. Eva Klasson was a long time forgotten in Sweden. But I had had contact with her writing about Swedish artists in Paris. And thus when I started to work as a director in Ystad Art Museum I decided to get in touch with her to make an exhiition. I found her, she had almost nothing left. I succeeded in finding in the basement of the mujseumwere she had her las exhibition. Now these works showed to be an important part of her work, it was sent to the museum, and Eva Klasson came here to look at it. We decided to give The Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm all these works, which they of course accepted. This saved the unique works of Wva Klasson.

On the third floor there are many examples of the vital painting from those years. In 1979 the young German painters had an enormous breakthrough for their Wilde Malarei. Erla Thórarinnsdóttir worked a lot together with Knut Swane in Stockholm, although coming from Iceland resp Norway.

On the floor you find a catapult of the unique Italian born artist Franco Leidi who combined religion, sexuality, surrealism in a very personal way. Some of his sculptures move between lust, torture, belief and disbelief.

Dear Aryan!

You must know that Sweden was earlier than Germany with a such law, and all these about the “racial hygiene” is a Swedish speciality and was exported to other countries, for example Deutschland.

FRA.

Here is the official statement: http://www.fra.se/english.shtml

In fact ALL papers, magazines, the associations for Publishers of books, papers, magaznes etc, the Swedish association for lawyers, the associaton for journalists and so on and so on and so on, said NO,

but ALL the members of the Parliament (all the Riksdagsmännen i Riksdagen) said YES

(only 1 women said NO…)

It was consensus (99,99%).

What says the law: that the FRA can/shall watch over ALL msm, mail, telephone calls and so on and so on from Sweden to other countries, and from other countries to Sweden.

For to stop the terrorists!!!!!!!!

Rubbish… You never stop terrorism that way BUT you get an absolute control over the swedish citizens. It is the mot effective control ANY country has get… more effective than the USa or any other european country.

My opinion is that ALL the members of the Parliament (Riksdagen) has written their own “death-sentence” - in the history books, because they have in a democratic way murdered the democratic system (Weimar and Hitler 1933?!). Suicide.

And all these gay people in Riksdagen… Did they not understand that this FRA-law in some years will be a weapon against them?

Bo

here is the official statement about the fra

FRA, brief presentation

Försvarets radioanstalt (FRA), or the National Defence Radio Establishment as it is officially rendered in English, is the Swedish national authority for signals intelligence.

FRA is also engaged in information assurance. On demand, we support government authorities and state owned companies regarding current IT threats as well as general advice to improve security.

FRA is a civilian organisation, subordinated to the Ministry of Defence. Funds for 2008 are SEK 562 million. Oversight is provided by the Defence Intelligence Commission.

FRA is led by a Director General assisted by a Deputy Director General and central functions for coordination and planning. The line organisation consists of seven divisions: COMINT, ELINT, Information Assurance, Systems Development, Systems Maintenance, Personnel and Administration.

FRA main customers are the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Defence, the Military Intelligence And Security Directorate (MUST) and the Security Police.

Fixed sites on Swedish territory are complemented with a SIGINT ship (Orion) operating in the Baltic, and two Gulfstream IV aircraft capable of extended missions. The ship is run by the Swedish Navy and the aircraft by the Air Force, both on behalf of FRA, whose operators are doing the collection.

Anonymous
THE QURAM, GAY SEX AND THE GANG RAPE AT SODOM
A QUEER HISTORY OF EARLY ISLAM

Brief Introduction

This essay reveal a forgotten history including the amazing saga of the Prophet Muhammad and Zaid Ibn Haritha. A story which has been suppressed in order to justify the persecution of gays in the name of Islam.Zaid was a slave, a wedding gift from Muhammad’s wealthy older bride Khadija, so there was no question of adultery under Sharia law. When the Prophet eventually freed Zaid, he proclaimed a formal partnership or union, equivalent to a marriage. Zaid became, in effect, a “male wife” who was equal in status to Khadija.

First with Zaid, and later with Ali, Muhammad formed a bond which was even closer than those of his ten “heterosexual marriages.” Love that was tested through extreme adversity and martydom.

It’s time for Muslims to wake up. Five hundred years ago the Christian Reformation rejected the doctrine that every word of the Bible came directly from God. Muslims must take the same attitude to the Quran if their faith is to bring any relevance to the Twenty First Century.If scholars were more open minded they would find new freedoms for a reformation in Islamic thinking, especially on the subject of gay relationships and sex. Some Islamic countries would still have gay men stoned to death on the basis of misinterpreted Quranic passages. ALLAH PUNISHES GANG RAPE BUT HE LOVES THE PASSIVE QUEER

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The precise vocabulary of sexuality wasn’t invented until centuries later, but these rapists were not doing anything which would mark themselves out as being at all “different” from the norm in terms of sexuality in the Middle East, except in that they were contemplating sexual violence.

There is no passage to suggest they were unmarried or rejecting traditional values. The only aspect notable about their words and actions was the threat and use of force against defenceless visitors who would have been forced into passive “queer” sex. But they were the ones Allah defended !

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The Quran has a verse which seems to endorse all types of consensual loving sexuality within a partnership or marriage. The traditional view is that Sura 33:51 applies only to the Prophet’s female wives, but that Muhammad took atleast one same-sex partner, would allow the following interpretation “You may have whomever (of your female and male partners) you desire; there is no blame.”The Quran also has several passages which, while not explicitly endorsing gay love, do demonstrate that Muslims were not unafraid to discuss male beauty. The good Muslim could expect a highly charged homoerotic heaven - Sura 52:24 “And there shall wait on them [the Muslim men] young men of their own, as fair as virgin pearls.”Sura 76:19 “They shall be attended by boys graced with eternal youth, who will seem like scattered pearls to the beholders.”

THE SUNNAH OR LIFE OF MUHAMMAD AS INSPIRATION
However, to an extent, the endless argument over the precise interpretation of Quranic text is a white elephant, because the overwhelming majority of Muslims do not choose to follow the Quran word for word. This is lucky for those who pray for world peace since surah 9.5 (the sword verse) has been translated as “Fight and slay the non-believers wherever ye find them and seize them, confine them, and lie in wait for them in every place of ambush”.

Like other Muslims, the world’s 175 million queer Muslims have to judge passages from the Quran in context and they can also look to other sources including the lifestyle, or Sunnah, of Prophet Muhammad for inspiration. This is an often overlooked reference for how we should lead our lives. Yet in the Quran (33:21) we read that Allah said “You have in the Messenger of Allah, a beautiful example to follow.”

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I am not suggesting that Muhammad was “gay” or “homosexual” in a our modern sense - neither term had even been invented in Seventh Century Arabia. But the evidence does suggest that the great Prophet, like most of his male contemporaries, had feelings towards men that at some times and in certain particular respects were more intense than his relationships with women.I repeat that I am not saying that there is definite proof he had sex with other men but he does seem to have had several highly intimate associations with men of a much younger age. Though these relationships may have been “platonic”, they were also based on that same affection of an older for a younger man for which Plato enthused and which inspired nineteenth century writers to defend “the sex which dare not speak its’ name.”I recognise that I am not tackling head on some of the passages in the Quran that are alleged to relate to sex between men. Several eminent historians and sociologists have been brave enough to tackle this issue and there is now a considerable amount of academic literature which surrounds this and related topics.However no academics have, to my knowledge, researched directly for evidence of homoerotic inclination and for tolerance of such relationships in early Islam and especially in the lifestyle and teachings of Allah’s blessed messenger, Muhammad.

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… (there) was a strong homoerotic element in Muhammad’s life as well as those of his Muslim fighters and that there was considerable toleration for those men (eunuchs) whose sexual orientation was exclusively directed towards their own sex. In the early chapters we deal with the evidence regarding Muhammad’s own sexuality and later we look more broadly at queer relationships in early Islamic society.

There are four bases for believing that Muhammad may have had homoerotic relationships ( possibly “platonic” ) which were either tolerated or accepted by his contemporaries. This chapter deals with the first.Perhaps the closest of Muhammad’s many close male relationships, one which predated Ali’s birth, was his love for his own slave Zaid.Khadija, the Prophet’s first wife, was already forty and independently wealthy at the time of their marriage and though beloved by the Prophet, was well past her youth. He was some fifteen years her junior. It was moreover Khadija, not Muhammad, who first proposed. The offer came secretly through her trusted slave Maisara and her beloved quickly accepted. It was a marriage to a woman of considerable wealth and influence. A wise decision for it gave him the time, connections and influence he needed to pursue his destiny.And as if the circumstance of the wedding were not unusual enough in itself, Khadija presented Muhammad with a handsome sixteen year old, Zaid, as a wedding gift. These two young men soon became virtually inseparable - something akin to other famous heroic homoerotic relationships such as that of the Greek fighters Achillees and Patroclus.

Zaid had been captured hundreds of miles to the north in or near present day Iraq and had been bought by Khadijah’s nephew in the slave-market at Ukaz and later gifted to her.It was some time after Khadijah in turn gifted Zaid to Muhammad that Zaid’s family discovered him at Mecca. They approached the Prophet to beg for his return and if necessary to pay whatever ransom he might demand. Clearly they really loved him for they had travelled a long and dangerous route across the Arabian desert to find him.

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…there is another even more astonishing twist to the story of their relationship. When the prophet was in his fifties, Muhammad decided to marry Zaid’s wife Zainab bint Jahash. But his decision seems to have been motivated by Zaid’s own unhappinness with the marriage and not by any Caligula like obsession with another man’s wife. Zaid was always much more close to Muhammad than to his wife Zainab, and had only married her reluctantly.Nevertheless, if it is really true that Muhammad had earlier pronounced Zaid to be his son in front of the Kaaba, he was now marrying his daughter-in-law - an unthinkable scandal even in pre-Islamic Arabia. This would never have been accepted by his followers.A more credible explanation is that Muhammad, in that moment of great emotional turmoil when Zaid had, perhaps against Muhammad’s own expectations, chosen him over his own family, decided to make a very public declaration of his love for Zaid. It is probable that he never mentioned the word “son” in the declaration but only that Zaid would be his heir and he Zaid’s - in effect announcing that they were just as close as man and wife. Later, however, Muhammad’s biographers chose to cover this up by declaring that Muhammad had actually adopted Zaid as his “son.”

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It is intriguing that in the Quran ( The Believers 023.005 - 023.006 ) we read that Allah asks men to guard their modesty from all except their wives and their slaves. A sexual relationship with a slave such as Zaid would not have been seen as a sin like adultery as it posed no threat to a marriage. However, we might speculate that once Muhammad declared Zaid as his heir and implicitly freeing him from slavery, then any sexual relationship would have had to have been either terminated or in the unlikely event of it continuing, then it would have had to have been well hidden from wider society.

This chapter looks at the second reason we have for thinking that the Prophet Muhammad may have been queer. It is his relationship with young men and in particular his bond with Ali which was arguably the most important in the Prophet’s life. It was certainly more intense and longer lasting than any of his ten marriages.The prophet surrounded himself mostly, though there were a few notable exceptions, with young male converts. Indeed, most of them were much younger than him; men in their teens and early twenties. This is intriguing. More mature men would have given his movement much greater respect by virtue of their seniority. But by courting almost exclusively the companionship of younger men Muhammad deepened the suspicions of their parents and elder kinsmen. He also embarrassed and alienated the city elders and even many of his own companions in both Mecca and Yathrib [ Medina ].For instance, late in his life, Muhammad was often seen in the company of Usama ibn Zaid, his former servant’s son. Sometimes they even shared a camel together, Usama mounted behind. But Muhammad’s companions were astonished when he appointed this teenager ( he was then just eighteen years old ) to head an expedition against Syria in 10AH ( 632AD ). The planned campaign was considered so difficult that only the original muhajirin and ansar were employed and these veteran soldiers were severely critical of the Prophet for placing them under the command of an inexperienced and beardless youth. Muhammad responded that “Your criticism of his leadership is just like your earlier criticism of his father’s appointment to command. Yet it was God who gave his father all the qualities necessary to command and he was one of my dearest and closest companions. His son is also someone I love dearly.” [ Ibn Kathir ]

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As a decoy Abu Talib’s youngest son was also a poor choice. Ali was a strikingly handsome youth who would not easily have been mistaken for the middle aged prophet. He was muscular and broad shouldered with a straight nose and a beautifully formed mouth. The prophet himself confessed that “Looking upon Ali is worship,” [ Ibn Asakir on the authority of Caliph Abubakr ] and that “Ali would appear [even] to the dwellers of paradise as a morning star.” [Sawai’q muhari’qa.]But let us return to the scene which greeted the assassins. The idea that Ali was lying in Muhammad’s bed as a “decoy” seems a little far fetched. Moreover it ignores the fact that Muhammad frequently shared a bed with Ali. As one historian wrote - “He [Muhammad] often made [Ali] sleep by his side, and Ali enjoyed the warmth of Muhammad’s body and inhaled the holy fragrance of his breath.”Indeed, there is not one of Muhammad’s ten wives who continuously shared the same living quarters with the prophet for as long as Ali. From his youth, until the prophet’s death, Ali was always living either in the prophet’s home or in an adjacent apartment.

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Just after completing what was to be his final pilgrimmage in 632, at a place called Ghadir Khumm on the road between Mecca and Medina, Muhammad addressed an assembled crowd of many thousands. Holding Ali’s hand and raising it high, he declared that “Anyone whose Guardian I have been has Ali as his Guardian. Oh God protect anyone who protects him and opose anyone who opposes him. Ali is of me and I am of him,” and according to one source [ Ibn Abu Bukayr ] even told his listeners that “No one settles debts on my behalf except myself or Ali.” Clearly the Prophet wanted to make everyone aware not only that there was no one he trusted as much as Ali, but that he and Ali were so close spiritually that he thought of Ali and himself as a single spirit occupying two bodies.

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This romantic vision of the past and present is fascinatingly similar to that described a thousand years earlier by Plato when he attempted to explain the origin of homosexuality. In Plato’s Symposium the reason for the power of all love, heterosexual and homosexual, is the need to be reunited with one’s “other half.” At the beginning of mankind each person was composed of two halfs - either male-male, female-female or male-female - until the gods cut them all into two; thereby creating the powerful desire to be reunited, manifesting itself in either heterosexual or homoerotic desire.Though Muhammad adored Ali as his “other half,” he did not try to stop his beloved when Ali asked his permission to marry a woman. It’s not clear, however, whether Ali’s desire to tie the knot was motivated more by his love for his bride to be or his love for Muhammad, for when he finally married, of all the possible partners he might have chosen, he chose Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter. The balance of probability is that the marriage was born out of formality rather than infatuation, and was designed as a ritualistic cement for Muhammad’s and Ali’s long-standing, but still passionate, partnership.

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The third reason we have for supposing that the Prophet Muhammad was queer is the unusual fondness of his uncle Abu Talib [ who never converted to Islam ] for the prophet which seems to have been regarded by others in the Quraish as homoerotic.Though there is no evidence of any physical relationship, Muhammad was more than willing to rely continuously on his Uncle’s protection and seems to have held a great and strong affection for him. Nothing surprising in that.But when the Meccan elders challenged Abu Talib, who by virtue of kinship acted as Muhammad’s protector, and requested him to relinquish his protection of his nephew who so mocked their religion and practices, they offered him another man “as a son” - who they claimed was the most handsome man of all the Quraish. In other words Mecca’s sheikhs who had for years been in daily contact with Abu Talib, himself a senior and respected elder among the Quraish, felt they had a chance of convincing the man to turn a blind eye to his own nephew’s assassination in return for the gift of the city’s most handsome young man !

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. . . Muhammad generally prefered the company of older widows. It was an odd choice that did not go unnoticed. Aisha herself attempted to solicit an explanation - “O Messenger of God, do you think that if you were to go down into a valley where there was one tree whose fruit had previously been eaten from, and another that had not been eaten from, at which of them would you graze your camel ?” [ Abd Allah ]To which the Prophet responded without much evident forthought “At the one never eaten from.”His preference for widows was not just unconventional. By marrying mostly middle-aged women he was also reducing his chances of having a surviving son. So, it is difficult to explain his unusual choice of older marriage partners as politically motivated. The real explanation was probably more simple. The Prophet was more comfortable with their less threatening comanionship.In an extraordinary statement Muhammad once declared “I like women and perfume better than anything else, but the apple of my eye is prayer.” By linking women with prayer it seems as if his affection for women can’t have been anything other than innocent, and we must assume he knew that his followers also realized this. Otherwise, it would have been scandalous for him to have made such a statement.

There were few laws to protect the individual in sixth century Arabia from assault, theft, abduction or other crimes. Free men depended on their relatives, and slaves on their slave masters for protection.

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The new Islamic society born in Medina was, like the Spartans of ancient Greece, a highly militaristic one. Not only was there a very real threat of attack from the majority of Meccans who still rejected Islam and who were suspicious about Muhammad’s long term aims, but the necessities of economic survival also required Muhammad to launch piratic attacks against traders from Mecca and other “unfriendly” tribes.The size of Muhammad’s military expeditions were small, generally much smaller than those of his enemies. With hand to hand combat always the crucial aspect of any battle, the loyalty of one’s immediate companions was vital. As with the outnumbered Spartans whose army of three hundred gay lovers fought with legendary courage and self-sacrifice against the Persian army at Thermopylae in 480BC, there is considerable evidence that Muhammad’s soldiers also fought in pairs. With other Arabian tribal armies this might have meant two brothers fighting together or perhaps a freed man alongside his former master.The battles of early Islam, however, witnessed brother opposing brother, nephew battling uncle ( Ali ibn Abu Talib famously faced his uncle Amr ibn Abd Wudd in a duel during the siege of Medina ) and sometimes slaves fighting their former masters. So, the only real options were bonds built from either deep friendship or love.

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It was an extremely youthful army by any historical standard. Boys could become soldiers once they turned fifteen. The polytheist Meccans were contemptuous of Muhammad’s recruits, dismissing them as “young gazelles.” The Prophet’s young soldiers in turn ridiculed their Meccan opponents as “bald old women like camels bound for sacrifice.”Any military man knows that at such a young age attachments with other young men in the face of extreme danger often borders on the homoerotic and almost inevitably on a friendship deeper than that of most marital love. It seems likely that in such circumstances, homoerotic relationships would have been tolerated as an accepted, even indispensable aspect, of a tightly knit military society.While such homoerotic relationships were vital to early Islam’s political and military survival, they did not preclude those involved marrying women and setting up a family as soon as the opportunity arose. In fact many such men may have been bisexual or even heterosexual to the extent that they may have prefered women as sexual partners given the freedom to chose. However there is also evidence that individuals who we would now call “gay” and who showed no signs of sexual attraction towards women, also played a significant role in early Islam.

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this article originally appeared on gayegypt, and was re-posted on bo cavefors’ blog

By David L. R. Kosalka

There has always been a strain of thought that argued that the capitalist system lacked a personal sense of humanity. All effort is put into the increase of production. Value is seemingly analogous to price. There seems little allowance for the truly human, for emotion and passion. There is nothing truly sacred or outside the scope of capitalistic calculation. For a while, some saw communism as an alternative to capitalism. Nevertheless, as details of the constructions of Stalinist communism were revealed, the path seemed even more mechanized and depressing than the capitalist alternative. In either system, economics was the prime determinant of human history. In light of these trends, some thinkers sought alternatives to capitalist production and exchange, for the re-introduction of the truly human and non-economic element into modern society. Within this discourse, discussions on the economic nature of the gift have played a central role in attempting to expose the cracks in theories that place economic necessity as the prime mover of history.

There was one promising hope that emerged from Anthropology. Marcel Mauss proposed the notion of the gift as an alternative to the rationalist calculation of capitalist exchange. Mauss’ unique perspective inspired many philosophers and social scientists seeking to find a more humanistic basis for human relations and the movement of goods. One of the thinkers whom Mauss’ essay inspired was be Georges Bataille. For Bataille, reflection on the nature of the gift was a point of departure for his overall conception of general economy. Bataille’s revolutionary perspective on economic structure used the Maussian conception of the gift to support his affirmation of the possibility of human sovereignty within economic systems, to break the stanglehold of economic predetermination. Bataille’s construct is important to explore in that holds much fertile ground for philosophy and the human sciences.

Georges Bataille (1897 - 1962) was a Parisian thinker in the great subcultural tradition of Paris that produced such figures as Baudelaire, Appolionaire, and Breton. He was a literary figure, an art critic, and a philosopher, not to mention a librarian. He moved in Surrealist circles, earning early on the wrath of Breton for appearing to create a competing group of surrealists, a rift healed in the wake of rising fascism in Europe. Bataille had a flair for the dramatic and the mystical that was so much a part of Surrealism. He emphasized the irrational in opposition to the rational, the erotic as opposed to bourgeois morality, celebration of excess as opposed to capitalist restraint, transgression as opposed to conformity.

He carried these tendencies over into his work on “general economy”, which is found primarily in The Accursed Share . He saw the descriptions of classical economics as having a limited understanding of the nature of economic movement. In response, Bataille conceived of a meta-category of the movement of energy to which classical economics is only a subcategory. The flow of energy in his model extends as far back as the energy received from the sun. As the light and its energy falls upon the plants they capture it and make energy out of it to use for their own survival. But more importantly they create an excess of energy. The excess that they produce goes either into growth and reproduction or must be expended, used for the beauty of their leaves, for useless parts, or simply spilled into the ground.
This model he extends to all economic phenomena. As he writes in The Accursed Share:

On the whole, a society always produces more than is necessary for its survival; it has a surplus at its disposal. It is precisely the use it makes of this surplus that determines it: The Surplus is the cause of the agitation, of the structural changes and of the entire history of society. But this surplus has more than one outlet, the most common of which is growth. And growth itself has many forms, each one of which eventually comes up against some limit. Thwarted demographic growth becomes military; it is forced to engage in conquest. Once the military limits is reached, the surplus has the sumptuary forms of religion as an outlet, along with games and spectacles that derive therefrom, or personal luxury.

Moreover, therein lies his primary challenge to traditional economics. In contrast to the classical notion of scarcity driving economic activity, he proposed a law of surplus. While classical economic thought emphasized the need for an efficient utilization of resources to fight the ravages of the scarcity of economic resources, he analyzed history in terms of the expenditure of excess energy and production. This put into question many of the classical historical assumptions, those of war as the competition among nations over scarce economic resources or that of the state as a Hobbesian limit placed on the competition of individuals fighting over those same resources. The impact of this refutation of classical economics cannot be underestimated.

The way a given society chooses to annihilate the excess energy it produces is of the utmost importance. It is around this expenditure that a culture is defined. Whether a society is aggressive, imperialistic, or non-violent all depends on the form the society gives to expenditure of surplus energy. Each society had a defining choice on how it would expend excess resources, building its values on an economically useless expenditure. The artifices of religion and art all form around this essential cultural activity, acting as recipients and modes of expression of the basic embodiment of surplus. Be it a church with its corps of people removed from economic activity, or a frugal dedication of energy in terms of a military structure dedicated to expansion, they all have their origins in the same need to find a channel for excess production.

It is within this general economic context, then, that Bataille begins an explication of the gift which first of all fundamentally related to a type of sacrifice. To understand Bataille’s notion of the gift, however, it is first necessary to see his conception of sacrifice and then how that relates to the gift. In a rational economy goods and production are either designated for meeting the general life needs of the populace or for the process of growth. All production then is designed with the future in mind, as part of a process of growth and expansion in which all objects are pre-ordained and understood as means towards the end, of the future telos of the economy. “The subject leaves its own domain and subordinates itself to the objects of the real order as soon as it becomes concerned for the future.” In the ritual destruction of material in the form of sacrifice, however, these goods are removed from that process, from that orientation towards a future telos. They are no longer seen as objects directed towards the use of the overall cultural system, but are seen in and of themselves, free of utilitarian domination.

Symbolically, along with the object itself, the one who offers the sacrifice is seen as removed from the demands of utility and consequently as possibly a sovereign subject. Those who offer the sacrifice are not completely dominated by the needs of the system or the process, but, rather, can exist free of their constraints in the moment of the sacrifice. Bataille examines these notions in light of Aztec sacrifice. While to modern sensibilities the immense level of human sacrifice in that culture seems an abomination, it represents the nature of sacrifice. In the words of Bataille, “The victim is surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth. And he can only be withdrawn from it in order to be consumed profitlessly, and therefore utterly destroyed. Once chosen, he is the accursed share, destined for violent consumption. But the curse tears him away from the order of things; it gives him a recognizable figure, which now radiates intimacy, anguish, the profundity of living beings.”

Those captured in war were sacrificed in place of the individuals of a particular culture. An immense symbolic tie was created between the victim of the sacrifice and those for whom the victim was a substitute. An immense level of intimacy is infused in the relationship with the victim. The victim is treated like a son, a daughter, or even as a king. By killing the associated victim, that victim is removed from the realm of the object. He can no longer be used for anything, and becomes simply itself, a sovereign subject in its absolute uselessness, and by association so is the one who offers the sacrifice. They enter the realm of the sacred, of the free subject who is not subordinated to the demands of useful production. “The world of the subject is the night: that changeable, infinitely suspect night which, in the sleep of reason, produces monsters. I submit that madness itself gives a rarefied idea of the free ’subject,’ unsubordinated to the ‘real’ order and occupied only with the present.”

The notion of the gift in Bataille is closely related to that of sacrifice. Bataille basis his comments on the nature of the gift on the essay by Marcel Mauss, first published as “Essai sur le Don” in 1950 . Marcel Mauss (1872 - 1950) was the literal heir of Emile Durkheim and deeply involved in Durkheim’s project of sociology. While substantially a work of objective anthropology, the impact of the work, as Mauss makes clear in comments in his conclusion, was to be a critique, indeed an alternative vision, to utilitarian visions of capitalism. As Mary Douglas has argued in her foreword to the translation of the essay, “The Essay on the Gift was part of an organized onslaught on contemporary political theory, a plank in the platform against utilitarianism.”
At the heart of the essay lies a critique of anthropologists’ reading of gift-giving as a form of rational economic exchange. He berated anthropologists for imposing on other cultures preconceived models concerning the necessity and universality of economic exchange. Considering the analyses of gift exchange given by many of his contemporaries, Mauss argued that “current economic and judicial history is largely mistaken in this matter. Imbued with modern ideas, it forms a priori ideas of development and follows a so-called necessary logic.” Nevertheless, he found different aims than utilitarian economics had in its considerations of different systems of gift-giving. “Thus one section of humanity, comparatively rich, hardworking, and creating considerable surpluses, has known how to, and still does know how to, exchange things of great value, under different forms and for reasons different from those with which we are familiar.”

Mauss asserted that in the ability to give a gift, as found in the supposedly “archaic” societies he was analyzing, there is a certain spiritual force that is associated with the gift. For every gift, there is a necessity of counter-gift necessary to remove or return the inherent power of the gift. It was the only way of lifting a certain hold that the giver had on the recipient through the gift. Gift-giving, according to Mauss, is fundamental glue in these societies for the maintenance of social structures. As Mary Douglas again argues, “the theory of the gift is a theory of social solidarity.” Through gift giving social bonds are created, individuals are joined, sharing with each other the back and forth of the social power that is associated with the gifts exchanged. It places the individual into a structure of “total services.” In typical Durkheimian fashion, he emphasizes the collaborative, consensual social structure of an economic system as opposed to the rational calculation of individuals.

In other societies, however, Mauss related that this notion of gift-exchange rises to another level where gift-exchange takes on an essentially competitive aspect. The textbook case of this type of this kind of gift is found in the “potlatch” practiced among the tribes of the American Northwest. The potlatch takes the gift completely beyond the regime of utilitarian economic exchange, taking on an essentially destructive nature. During a potlatch, there is an orgy of gift-giving by the person holding the event. The emphasis is on a display of luxury and excess. However, one good potlatch deserves another. Being the recipient of a potlatch demands that one reciprocates and holds an even more lavish potlatch. “Everything is based upon the principles of antagonism and rivalry. The political status of individuals in the brotherhoods and clans, ranks of all kinds, are gained in a ‘war of property’.” The givers of the potlatch are urged to show a disdain for economic wealth to the point of destroying gifts in order that they will not be returned. Precious coppers are broken and thrown in to the rivers. In extreme cases, entire villages are left destitute by the ravages of potlatch. In the destruction of wealth, then, the individual gains status, the recognition of superiority by their contemporaries.

Needless to say, the publication of Mauss’s essay inspired a lot of interest. As Bataille stated it, “since the publication of Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, the institution of potlatch has been the object of sometime dubious interest and curiosity.” Bataille found, in the description of potlatch, a fundamental challenge to the necessity and role of rational capitalist economics. He saw in the potlatch the hint of his conception of the need to annihilate excess, rather than the gathering and hoarding necessitated by conventional analyses based on the assumption of scarcity. He argued that “classical economy imagined the first exchanges in the form of barter. Why would it have thought that in the beginning a mode of acquisition such as exchange had not answered the need to acquire, but rather the contrary need to lose or squander? The classical conception is now questionable in a sense.” As one commentator on Bataille described, “The entire classical conceptual structure excludes an explanation for all human activities (such as extreme or violent pleasure) that are motivated not by a desire to gain, but rather by a desire to lose.”
Thus, in this process he could conceive of the gift as having a central role. It is one of the primary means of expending excess. As Bataille argues in considering the potlatch as well as the activities of Aztec “merchants”,

We need to give away, lose or destroy. But the gift would be senseless (and so we would never decide to give) if it did not take on the meaning of an acquisition. Hence giving must become acquiring of power. Gift-giving has the virtue of surpassing of the subject who gives, but in exchange for the object given, the subject appropriates the surpassing: He regards his virtue, that which he had the capacity for, as an asset, as a power that he now posses. He enriches himself with a contempt for riches, and what he proves to be miserly of is in fact his generosity.

Thus by making a display of his disregard for his excess he obtains in the eye of the other who observes (and thus the necessity for giving over private destruction) a status, a power of expenditure and destruction. It is a means of killing two birds with one stone. Not only is the necessary annihilation accomplished, but also there is acquired the respect and regard of the other members of the society. Thus, paradoxically, by giving one is in fact gaining in presteige and societal power and status.
This is tied to his conception of sacrifice in that the gift is an escape from the circle of necessity. “An article of exchange, in these practices, was not a thing; it was not reduced to the inertia, the lifelessness of the profane world. The gift that one made of it was a sign of glory, and the object itself had the radiance of glory. By giving one exhibited one’s wealth and one’s good fortune (one’s power).” Thus by association the giver escapes the domination of objectivity through an assertion of the ability to engage in such expenditure. As the object is taken from the realm of utility to the sacred uselessness of sacrifice, so too is the subjecthood, a basic freedom to express an individual will, of the giver affirmed through his ability to expend beyond the demands of utility.

Bataille applies the schema of the gift to many parts of human life. The second major portion of The Accursed Share attempts a history of eroticism. There he argues that “it should come as no surprise to us that the principle of the gift, which propels the movement of general activity, is at the basis of sexual activity.” It is an expression of the kind of sacred intimacy that is engendered from the escape from, and, indeed, the blatant disregard for rational necessity.

Like Mauss, Bataille saw the modern world having forgotten, to be lacking the type of intimacy that the gift allows. Bataille asserted a kind of greatness in the useless expression of wealth, which laid the foundation for great cultural and individual expression. The capitalist demand for the utilitarian deployment of resources does not allow for the kind of sacred affirmation of subjecthood that the excess of the gift required, a basic subjecthood that allowed for an intimacy that was antithetical to appropriation of the individual as an object of production. He argued,

It would be easy in fact to find ourselves personally looking for a form of humanity that does not betray it, shunning those vacant lots, those suburbs and factories, whose appearance expresses the nature of industrial societies, and making our way toward some dead city, bristling with gothic spires. We cannot deny that present-day humanity has lost the secret, kept until the current age, of giving itself a face in which it might recognize the splendor that is proper to it. Doubtless the ‘works’ of the Middle Ages in a sense were only things: They could rightly appear worthless to anyone who envisioned, beyond, in its inaccessible purity, the wealth that he attributed to God. And yet the medieval representation of society has the power today of evoking that ‘lost intimacy.’

Thus with capitalist society Bataille saw an essential abdication of the search for subjective meaning in the expenditure of success, a phenomenon well documented to in the contemporary situation. The needed outlet of expenditure is provided in the controlled environment of strip malls, providing the small and directed release necessary to avoid an outright explosion. The individual is marginalized as spectator, sharing symbolically in the expulsion of excess found in sports and talk shows. As Laura Marz has emphasized, “the spectacle steals every experience and sells it back to us, but only symbolically, so that we are never satisfied: via this mechanism we support the machine of endless consumption over and over.” Subjecthood is lost to a system of production and consumption. It does not allow for the kind of expression of personal power and subjecthood found in the gift. The nature of the expenditure does not come from a personal, intimate, relation to the subject, but is rather given to the consumer by the large corporations operating on an economy of scale. The personal and human, as was found in Bataille’s considerations of Aztec sacrifice, is entirely absent in a pre-given impersonal world of the suburbs. Thus, there is no personal escape into the realm of the sacred subject.

It is in this context that one can recognize his essential interest in Nietzsche. Indeed, Bataille’s work On Nietzsche is one of the fundamental documents of Nietzsche reception in France. It provides an essential bridge in the French reception between the invalidation of Nietzsche by his association with Nazism and the rejuvenation of the interest in Nietzsche with such figures as Derrida and Foucault. Foucault himself has stated that “I read him [Nietzsche] because of Bataille, and Bataille because of Blanchot.” They found in his interpretation of Nietzsche a way of describing and holding on to the subject that had been declared dead by Structuralism. Indeed one can say that Bataille put the “post” in post-structuralism. As Foucault further argued, “reading Nietzsche was the point of rupture for me. There is a history of the subject just as there is a history of reason; but we can never demand that the history of reason unfold at a first and founding act of the rationalist subject.”

This clearly follows Bataille’s reading in that he sees Nietzsche as the prophet of the subject in opposition to an in-humane rational economic construction. Bataille argued that “in fact, today there are only two admissible positions remain in the world: Communism, reducing each man to the object (thus rejecting the deceptive appearances that the subject had assumed), and the attitude of Nietzsche — similar to the one that emerges from this work — free the subject at the same time, of the limits imposed on it by the past and of the objectivity of the present.” Nietzsche sought to escape the imposition of objective rational necessity. Bataille further argued “he [Nietzsche] remained completely on the side where calculation is unknown: Nietzsche’s gift is the gift that nothing limits; it is the sovereign gift, that of subjectivity.”

The primary German receptions of Nietzsche that emphasized the will to power, tied to an advancement of the societal structure. They possited a telos of the Volk concerned with a future in a relation to the past all tied to an essential temporal progress. Bataille, on the other hand, asserted the importance of Eternal Return in Nietzsche’s thought, which emphasized the experience of the moment and which thus escaped the essentially temporal progress. Habermas has said that “For Bataille, as for Nietzsche, there is a convergence between the self-aggrandizing and meaning-creating will to power and a cosmically moored fatalism of the eternal return of the same.” Bataille argues that “if we stop looking at states of ardor simply as preliminary to other subsequent conditions grasped as beneficial, the state I propose seems a pure play of lightening, merely an empty consummation. Lacking any relation to material benefits such as power or growth of the state (or of God or a Church or a party), this consummation can’t even be comprehended. It appears that positive value of loss can only be given as gain.” This is closely related to Bataille’s notion of the gift in its relinquishing of the objectivity of a process for an escape into a possibility of a moment. It is the freedom provided by the subjecthood allowed by the gift.

The emphasis is on an escape from the forward progression of humanity in time and, instead, a focus on the potentiality of the moment. “Immanence exists simultaneously and in an indissoluble moment as both an immediate summit (which from all standpoints, is the same as the individual’s destruction) and a spiritual summit.” That is the essential meaning of eternal return, a moment, and experience, that escapes rational necessity. “At least the idea of eternal return is added . . . In a spontaneous movement (so it seems), it adds the expansion of eternal time to passive terrors.” As he argued elsewhere in reference to Surrealism, this seizure of the moment as opposed to dissolution in the temporal flow is essential.

This seizure of the instant — in which the will is relinquished at the same time — certainly has a decisive value. It is true that operation is not without difficulties, which surrealism has revealed but not resolved. The possibilities brought into play go further than they seem. If we were genuinely to break the servitude by which the existence of the instant is submitted to useful activity, the essence would suddenly be revealed in us with an unbearable clarity. At least, everything leads one to believe so. The seizure of the instant cannot differ from ecstasy.

The anti-temporal character of the gift as expenditure of excess cannot be understated for it is the support of the escape from utility. And yet, this must be coordinated with Derrida’s conception of the gift in his work Given Time. Derrida found the gift a most paradoxical, perhaps impossible idea (indeed, “the Impossible”). According to Derrida, vernacular usage of the term indicates the gift is a giving without expectation of return. Yet, some kind of return seems inevitable. If one gives a gift normally one expects to get one back, if one gives a party it is proper for others in the group to hold one in turn, if one buys a friend a Guinness, that friend usually tries to buy one next time. When this is not the case, the return is in terms of a gain in prestige at the manifestation of power that is inherent in the gift, or merely in the pleasure of giving and in seeing the joy of the recipient. Even a kind of symbolic return would seem to eliminate the possibility of gift.

Therefore, in Derrida’s view, if a gift exists at all, it must not be recognized as such, either by the giver or the receiver. The parties involved must forget the giving every occurred, even before it is given. However, it would have to be a forgetting more complete than even the normal modes of forgetting of psychoanalysis. It must not be repressed and be part of the subconscious. It must, rather, be apparently obliterated, without obliterating the gift itself. To be a gift the gift must not be a gift; i.e. it is the Impossible.

It is from this understanding of the gift that Derrida also approached Mauss’s anthropological account of the gift and giving. He criticized it primarily on two grounds. The first seems a more general critique of anthropologic synthesis itself. He asked “How is one to legitimate the translations thanks to which Mauss circulates and travels, identifying from one culture to another what he understands by gift, what he calls gift.” Derrida dances amongst the ambiguities of language and was very careful as to how the particular terms are being used. He noted how Mauss had criticized other scholar’s casual application of gift to the language of economic exchange. Yet, later on, Mauss seemed to recognize the ambiguity of the term gift when it is necessarily part of an exchange, and argued explicitly for a melding of the two in an understanding of the practices he had considered. For Derrida, this shows a recognition towards the madness of the impossibility of the term itself.

Indeed, this ties in to a second line of his critique of Mauss, his idea of the gift itself. If a gift is a giving without hope of exchange, Mauss’s account denies its very possibility by insisting that for every gift there is a return. “He never asks the question as to whether gifts can remain gifts once they are exchanged.” Derrida graphs this exchange in terms of the circle, of gift and counter gift, of exchange. However, the gift, to be a gift, must break out of this circle. According to Mauss’ perspective this is an impossibility, the gift is cemented firmly into this circle of exchange. “It deals with economy, exchange, contract (do ut des), it speaks of raising the stakes, sacrifice, gift and counter-gift — in short, everything that in the thing itself impels the gift and the annulment of the gift.” The gift Mauss discussed, according to the Derrida’s perspective, cannot be a gift at all.

There are two aspects of Mauss’ description that intrigued Derrida, however. The first is the emphasis on time. For Mauss there must elapse a certain period between gift and counter-gift. It is rude to both return too quickly and to return immediately. Thus, what the gift gives is time. “The gift is not a gift, the gift only gives to the extent it gives time.” It gives to the cycle of human relations a history, an essential temporality. This is a point that will important later for comparison with Bataille.

Second, he notices that the gift must be excessive. It tries to move beyond the circle of exchange in extravagance. However, this seems to be a hopeless task. As with the potlatch, an attempt to go beyond simply ups the bet, requiring a greater exchange gift. Indeed, this aspect gives to the idea of the gift a certain madness, a “madness of keeping or of hypermnesic capitalization and madness of the forgetful expenditure.” If the gift attempts to break free of the circle of exchange, it instead draws the circle to it, moving it anew. Derrida compared the gift to the first mover. In an attempt to break free of the circle, it draws the circle around it. The gift in its destruction of itself as gift brings movement and history forward, initiating anew, sparking the circle, and changing its weave. “For finally, the overrunning of the circle by the gift, if there is any, does not lead to a simple, ineffable exteriority that would be transcendent and without relation. It is this exteriority that sets the circle going; it is this exteriority that puts the economy in motion. It is this exteriority that engages in the circle and makes it turn.”

Derrida’s notion of the gift also seems to have an essentially temporal character that on first glance seems to invalidate Bataille’s emphasis on an escape from temporal progression. Derrida extrapolates from Mauss’s observation that between gift and counter-gift there must be a proper lapse of time. Thus while the value of the gift is returned in the socially required counter-gift, indeed, in most cases a demand of return with interest, the gift gives time. “One can translate as follows: The gift is not a gift, the gift only gives to the extent it gives time. The difference between a gift and every other operation of pure and simple exchange is that the gift gives time. There where there is gift, there is time. What it gives, the gift, is time.”

Thus how does one rectify the notion of Bataille that the gift as an annihilation of excess escapes a forward movement of time into the privileged domain of the sacred and eternal moment and Derrida’s argument that the gift actually creates a forward motion, an opening in temporal flow? The answer lies in the magnetic, indeed impossible, power of the gift. As Derrida argued, the gift draws the flow of exchange and the temporal flow towards itself. In the gift, the giver as subject initiates, the giver creates the demands and determines the very nature of the exchange. It is thus for that subject an escape from the rational discourse, which demands the individual as object. It opens the area of freedom, of play, that Bataille demanded and saw the hope for in Nietzsche. As Bataille saw an essential paradox of a gift that is an attempt at acquisition of a power, so Derrida saw an essential madness of the gift that seeking to escape and lose itself, draws the world to it. It is an escape from the rational discourse of economic utility, an emptying out that is really a new creation and acquisition. The subject becomes sovereign in the very creation of the temporal place for play. It is the impossible moment that diverts the flow of energy in rational exchange in its selfish uselessness to a new point of definition.

Such a power of the annihilation of excess is reflected in the structural analyses Bataille gives in The Accursed Share of different cultures. Each culture he analyzes, be it Tibet, the Aztecs, or early Islam, is defined by an initial choice of gift, of the way the excess wealth the culture produces is expended. “Human improductive expenditure creates new improductive values, which reconnect humans to the universe through the loss principle.” In this notion, there is more than a slight echo of the demands of Dionysus as the foundation of a healthy culture. There is the possibility of a sovereign act of cultural production that bears little resemblance to a rational choice determined by maximization of available resources. It is the very moment of definition of humanity rising above the utilitarian dominance that signifies the life of an animal. As another commentator has argued, for Bataille, “interdiction is presented as a negation of nature (le donnJ) which founds culture, marking the emergence of man from animal.”

Thus, for Bataille, the notion of gift plays an essential role in the life of individuals and of cultures. In his vision of general economy, every culture produces excess that must be expended, annihilated. It is a vision of cultural surplus rather than of economic scarcity. The gift is one of the primary means of the expenditure of that surplus. As he expands on the observations of Marcel Mauss, in the giving of the gift, givers affirms their power as sovereign subjects, the ability to give, to expend in excess, to enjoy in luxury and leisure their wealth, taking them beyond the domination of rational economic necessity that would make them objects. With Derrida, he affirms that in the moment of madness that is the gift there is an opening of freedom to change and define individual and cultural self-understanding. The gift, then, for Bataille is a manifestation of the demand to escape a structural determinism, allowing for a return of the subject and human freedom to philosophical discourse through a paradox of loosing it, of giving it away.