AN ESSAY ON DESONANCE[i]

0. GOBEKLI TEPE

No matter if the scientists, researchers, historians, anthropologists seem to have agreed upon that the ruins in Gobekli Tepe should be considered as a clear proof of a primordial and obscure religion with its temples built around 10.000 BC, there is still no evidence to support such a metaphysical approach scientifically. If science finds its moment of truth from such metaphysical concerns, then it means that everything can be speculative – a fiction – about Gobekli Tepe, including scientific research. Taking my cue from the availability of such a speculation granted by the subject of enunciation and the large “scientific” research encircling it, first I thought I should be discussing about the desonative force of the“stones” as they are the only materials on which, the site as we know it today, is structured.

In scientific circles it was largely believed that humanoid communities lived as hunters and gatherers in the Neolithic Age and it was only after they settled down and were involved with agriculture and domesticating animals that they commenced on building ethical values for living in a community, the foremost examples of which were religions. The ground breaking discovery as the excavation at Gobekli Tepe proceeded was that these so-called “temples” were started to be erected when man was still in the hunters and gatherers phase, and not settled yet: much earlier than Stonehenge (3000 BC), much earlier than the earliest Egyptian pyramids (2500 BC). My point in reconsidering this scientific scandal is not only due to the general fallacy of the Humanities in general until the discovery of Gobekli Tepe but basically due to the insistence on covering up this scandal by adding up more metaphysics on top of everything as if the metaphysics we endured until today has not been truly suffocating.

For example, a professor of comparative religions, Karl W. Luckert went so far to commit obvious anachronisms such as the inhabitants of Gobekli Tepe had similar habits with the Navajo Indians (1400 AD) and Siberian shamans (earliest traces date back to 13th century) and claimed that the ruins were built due to a sense of guilt, that is, as a culmination of a sense of guilt due to the things they violently extracted from the mother earth. Sense of guilt? Did homo-sapiens have a sense of guilt? Did they really learn it by observing the animals as Luckert put it? Oh but Mircae Eliade and Nietzsche, please come to my help! This is true that human beings might have learned tremendous amount of habits from observing animals yet the sense of guilt would be the last thing to be learned from animals. As Nietzsche would put it much later in the 19th century, it developed only in the human species as an effect of monotheist religions, especially Christianity. All this goes to showing that we are stuck in metaphysics up to our neck and cannot do without ascribing transcendental traits to those which are basically our human struggle between the formed and the unformed, the near and the distant, the figural and the non-figural, the stone and the unstone, desonance and resonance.

Let us be patient and try to look at the figures carved on the stones at Gobekli Tepe. Let us imagine a community known as hunters and gatherers, Neolithic folk, who are the primary examples of the primordial passage from noise to voice, from mouth+sound organisation to sound+voice organisation. The destructive forces inherent to the passage from noise to voice, informing ontologically the coming into being of that which is known as human-being, the subject of the universe in general … Now if the coming into being of the subject is conditioned by such a passage, what happens when man starts carving figures on stones at Gobekli Tepe? Are these figures, the letters of an unknown language waiting for an impossible sonorisation? Can such a passage from noise to voice be held as the first evidence for the passage from nature to Homo sapiens? What if the Homo sapiens, the subject as such, first had to represent itself to itself via a primal act of sonorisation which is impossible to repeat, revert or imitate once enacted?

With all these questions above my intention is to re-route our discussion from religion to representation, art and sound. If one prefers not religion but representation, art and sound as one’s vantage point in investigating the Gobekli Tepe ruins, a series of different concerns will populate our re-evaluation. Such as, the question of distance. In other words, “actio-in-distans” which denotes the effect of one body on another which are light years away from each other, similar to the ways in which black magic works. Yet inviting magic to our concern at this juncture will not lead to convenient results because the worst part of magic is that it works sometimes. We should find something which actually doesn’t work or something the effect of which is observable only in its result where the the reason of the result isn’t observable either. If representation is to make something distant near, then one might ask: are those figures carved on T-shaped monoliths at Gobekli Tepe there in order to apply the very same passage to the whole nature so as to render everything liable to sonorisation and hence manipulation and domination? If yes, what were the reasons for burying three or more layers of “temples”, one after another between 10.000 and 8.000 BC? Could this mean that representation of desonance on stones had some unforeseeable results which led massive destruction in time? Did Gobekli Tepe inhabitants observe something horrible and unbearable in their act of representation so that finally they had to give up erecting T-shaped monoliths after they buried the last site around 8000 BC?  

Could it be that the Gobekli Tepe inhabitants could not find a way to tame the question of representation and rendering this passage non-destructive?

Could it be that we have sound because desonance as discovered and buried by Gobekli Tepe settlers was purely destructive in its essence?

1. THE STONE OF DESONANCE

Especially in the Dutch painting between 15th and 17th centuries there was a curious involvement in a certain type of stone as far as its relationship to madness and alchemy was concerned. In the work of a number of painters, for example, Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516), Jan Sanders Van Hemessen (1519-1564), Pieter Huys (1519-1584), Pieter Quast (1605-1647), there is a repeated scene about the removal of a stone of madness from the patient’s head or skull. According to the common sense of the age, madness or stupidity was caused by the presense of a stone in the skull of the injured, and it was believed that the ill would be cured by the removal of the stone from their skull. Now let us imagine that the stone to be removed from the skull emitted the effects of what I am trying to formulate as desonance, causing madness, self-destruction and overall destruction, eventually.

If we have to concentrate on one of these depictions, such as the one painted by Bosch, “The Cure of Folly” (1494), a surgent seems to be removing something from the head of a man with the aid of a scalpel where a priest and a nun are present as witnesses. On the head of the surgeon stands an inverted funnel whereas on the head of the nun, a book. Another suspicious object in the painting is the “flower of wisdom” or the “gold flower”[1] on the table which looks exactly as the one about to be removed from the head of the mad man. The whole scene is portrayed in a circular plane as if viewed through a telescope or a microscope and in the black rectangular area surrounding the circle is written: “Master, quickly cut away the stonemy name is Lubbert Das”.

Madness, according to Foucault, is the moment when the historical obstacles erected against the dispositifs that established normality or rationality gain visibility. And with visibility, I do not only mean things becoming visually recognisable but becoming specular, or open to speculation, much against the normalised and accepted ways of perception, both aurally and visually. For Deleuze, on the other hand, stupidity is the major enemy of human beings because it produces nothing but clichés. If madness requires a way of thinking that lies outside the boundaries of normality, stupidity is not to be preferred as it only ends up in the proliferation of clichés. Yet in  Deleuze’s conceptualisation of the word there is still kept a backdoor open for an alternative understanding of stupidity: “radical stupidity” or “cutupidité”[2] which  stands not only for the denial of the production of “clichés” but also of forms. Given these evaluations and re-evaluations of madness and stupidity, then we can ask once again: What is happening in this painting by Bosch, depicting a scene of the removal of the stone of madness (or stupidity)? Will the one from whose head the stone of madness is removed be cured? Will everything, as a result of this operation, end up in the emancipation of the subject from the production of clichés? What could be the meaning of this visual puzzle which portrays the cure not by the extraction of a stone but a flower from the skull of the mad man?

When we consider the historical context, we find out that this stone is also related to the “philosopher’s stone” which the alchemists sought for ages to transform mercury to silver, copper to gold and etc. The reason why the extracted is not depicted as a stone but as a flower, lies in the fact that the “philosopher’s stone” sometimes denoted the “flower of wisdom” in the Middle Ages. Then, what would be the use of the removal of the “flower of wisdom” from the skull of the mad or the stupid? Would it enable the men to get rid of the desonative forces inherent to the stone? The stone as a surface for the inscription of desonance? Lest it be inscribed and sonorised after thousands of years?

2. PLEASURE

In another work, an engraving, by Pieter Quast, “Fighting Peasants in an Inn” (1630), there is a peculiar scene of desonance where violence is coupled with pleasure. A kneeling figure in the middle is attacked by three deranged peasants in an inn: one is threatening with a knife, another is holding a chair to be smashed on the head on the kneeling man, and a third man is caught in the act of assailing with nun chucks. Despite all the death threats surrounding him – it should also be added that the attacker on the right is portrayed wearing breeches with an unflapped codpiece where an erected penis is carefully hidden – the one about to be destroyed has a rather enchanted, mesmerised, pleased, fascinated and enticing look in his eyes. It is as if his satisfaction will reach a climax if only we the spectators take part in his pleasure of desonance, or join him in this scene of a desonative act, representation of a desonative destruction, as it were.

Or, in a painting by Caravaggio, “The Boy Bitten by a Lizard” (1594), a boy is unexpectedly bitten by a lizard concealed among cherries. Although made of glass, hence transparent, the vase acts as the focus of obscurity of the scene where we do not get much explanation as to why the lizard is crawling around and what might have been the motivation of the painter in portraying such a scene. However, the only clue to the scene can be found in the “gesture” of the boy’s mouth and hands. They are, without doubt, silent but shocked by the pain and the unknown pleasure of the bite and they seem to be marked by a disorganization, which shuns representation, muted at the phase of an outburst. Caravaggio apparently knew how to handle the desonance.

3. NIHILISM

One of the most frequently quoted paragraphs written by Marx could well be modified by Nietzsche as follows: “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Nihilism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre”. For the philosopher, Nihilism was the illness of the 19th century; both the symptom of a disease and its cure at the same time, yet in both senses of the word, Nihilism was related to “destruction”. Spectrality of nihilism, then, could be interpreted as having an utmost urgency with regard to destruction and its invisibility, that is, its capacity of haunting not only the 19th century Europe but also long after, even up to today. Let’s replace what Nietzsche described as Nihilism and the eventual destruction of all values with our concept of desonance. As put by Nietzsche:

What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism[3] (desonance).

For Marx, on the other hand, the spectrality of communism, or its capacity of haunting was by no means related to any notion of destruction but to the emancipation of humanity from capitalist modes of production. Destruction on the one hand, and emancipation, on the other. The form of spectrality employed in each case determines the ways by means of which the two terms are differentiated from one another.  That which designates the soul, for example in Homeric texts, is Psuché: after the body is deceased, the “soul” – psuché – is separated from the body and is free to wander between the living and the dead. It is only with Plato, psuché is transformed into psyche, that is, soul, as we know it today, as that which is condemned to the land of Thanatos, never to appear among the living any more. Considered from this perspective, while emancipation gives a promise of truth, destruction/desonance is a free spectre which can come back any time and haunt the living. The roots of the haunting character of the spectre with respect to nihilism/desonance can be found in its relationship to the “ground”. Appearance of a spectre or any visit by a spectre is disturbing because it shakes our metaphysical footing that is based on the clear cut distinction between the living and the dead. Imagine, for example, Hamlet’s father never visited him: it would lead to the impossibility of writing his tragedy, a destruction of the whole plot even before the tragedy unfolds. Yet, it is equally possible to consider that Hamlet’s self-destruction is actually caused by the spectre of his father. Either it pays a visit or not, the non-present presence of a spectre invites the desonative forces into play because it puts into crisis of our belief into a ground.

It was actually where Nietzsche stood with respect to Nihilism when he formulated it as the illness of our age. Groundlessness was caused first by the disappearance of religion, Christianity, which paved the way for the dissolution of values. Without a ground supplied by the values produced by religion, humanity was now condemned to total Nihilism, total destruction. However, even when the ground was intact before the mids of the 19th century, the seeds of Nihilism were already contained within Christianity for it deceived people into thinking that metaphysics can supply unshakeable grounds. It meant such a ground was available only at the cost of disregarding the values outside the Christian world: that which passed itself off as a universal truth contained in its construction the seeds of destruction. Nihilism, understood as the gaining visibility of the destructive forces of Desonance was not only peculiar to the 19th century but was at the root of man since Gobeklitepe.

The crucial aspect of Nihilism presented by Nietzsche lies in its consideration of Nihilism both as a symptom of an illness and the cure for this illness at the same time. Nietzsche’s whole philosophy was related to the question of how to maintain philosophy by forgetting any thought about “ground”. In face of this difficulty, he proposed two types of Nihilism: passive nihilism and active nihilism. The former meant the acceptance of valuelessness and continue with depression and pessimism whereas the latter meant the creation of new values after re-evaluating all the values which meant to continue thinking without having any ground. History bears witness to this event, whether it brought more destruction is open to speculation.

4. FIGURE

In a book written on the perception of Wagner’s music in the 19th and 20th centuries, Musica Ficta[4], Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe discusses the impact of Wagner on intellectuals and artists such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Heidegger and Adorno, and carefully scrutinizes how a figure becomes audible or visible in front of an ideologically prepared background. Haneke’s White Ribbon (2009) is probably one of the finest examples to illustrate a situation where a toxic social organisation without a cause precedes the rise of Nazi Germany. Similarly, what Wagner does in music is to search for aural figures in the layers of Germanic myths which are well preserved in Teutonic origins such as Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan und Isolde, Siegfried and Die Walküre. Armed with a musical concept, “leitmotif”, Wagner is also the inventor of a performative style, known as “gesamtkunstwerk” which means to create a total impact on audience by using different arts such as, music, drama, opera, dance, word, poetry, lights and etc., during the performance, not unlike the massive rock concerts we have today. Surprisingly, Wagner’s music, which carried the seeds of social control via media that would be realised a century later, influenced profoundly the artists, writers and intellectuals of his time, especially Baudelaire and Proust.

Alarmed to the forces of manipulation at work or the transformation of representation to destruction in Wagner’s music with an intention of giving birth to a “figure”, Nietzsche denounced his friendship with Wagner and condemned his music as Nihilism per se. Isn’t Nihilism, that is, passive nihilism, as of then and now, there to destroy all the values yet preserving a figure of value in the background at the same time? Isn’t this a re-discovery of the power of desonance yet not in order to shun from representation but to turn it into a political manipulation, a political tool of mass annihilation?

5. HEIDEGGER

Let us continue with the stone again but especially with the ground. This time, let us consider the stone and the animals in Heidegger. Bounded by the force of gravity, the stone touches the ground on which it lies. Yet the way that the stone touches the ground is quite unlike the sort of touching that the lizard has with the stone[5]. Let us pretend that we are unkindly ungrounding the lizard from its ground, and throwing the stone to lie wherever it falls, on the meadow or at the bottom of a water-filled ditch. The unfortunate lizard, accustomed to basking on that particular ground, will surely notice that something is amiss, but the stone will give no sign of being ungrounded as it notices nothing. Though physically grounded and it will not sense the contrast between hard ground, soft grass and cool water; the stone, according to Heidegger, is worldless, ungrounded from the start. This is not to say that it lacks a world: though it may have a world, it does not have the capacity to notice it.

What happens to the lizard then? It seeks the warmth of the sunlight but knows nothing of the sun; it seeks a hard surface to bask in the light but knows nothing of the stone. Yet it would not be true to say that, like the stone, it is indifferent to these things. The lizard’s “touching” the stone is a modality of sensory engagement and not just an exertion of pressure, as with the stone’s “touching” the ground. And whereas the stone merely warms up in the sun, the lizard feels its warmth. In Heidegger’s words, “the lizard has its own relation to the rock, to the sun, and to a host of other things”[6]. Yet for the lizard they remain unequivocally “lizard things” – that is, things which open up pathways for the animal to carry on its own lizardly form of life. In a sense, therefore, the lizard has a world but this is not the sense in which the world exists for the philosopher. Therefore, both the stone and the animals are ungrounded from the start; and the latter are the poor in the world.

Unlike the animal that is captivated by its world, bounden to it, absorbed in it, and therefore unable to apprehend it as such, the human recognises this world as a world, but only because, he is set apart from it by accounting for a firm ground. This separation, unique to the human condition, is the price we have to pay for the privilege, in one sense, of “having” a world, a ground[7].

Yet, Caravaggio asks: does Heidegger ever have something to say about the desire of a lizard? Especially the desire of a boy bitten by a lizard?

Ontologically speaking, is not the Western philosophy made of a series of recuperative footnotes against the return of a destructive sonorisation, of desonance?

6. WHY HASN’T EVERYTHING ALREADY DISAPPEARED?

In the beginning was the word. It was only afterwards that the Silence came[8].

In one of the last longish essays[9] he wrote before he passed away Baudrillard challenged our common notions about disappearance. For example, the ideologies we no longer believe, the atrocities of authoritarian regimes which we think have disappeared, or simply put, all the worries we suffered in a love affair under capitalist mode of production which we would like to think to have disappeared – they never disappear but are internalised into our unconscious.

But let us start from the beginning. According to Baudrillard, disappearance of things is actually not a modern event: it is all related, in the first place, to the disappearance of the real. The real disappeared not only with the rise of media, virtual reality and networks but the transformation was already there in the rise of the sciences since from Archimedes and Galileo. The real world begins, paradoxically, to disappear at the very same time as it begins to exist.

Although the birth of sciences seem to be marking the time when the real started to disappear, the disappearance of things actually goes even further back in time. For Baudrillard, when we started conceptualising things, or representing them to ourselves, we call them into being, into existence yet at the same time we hasten their doom, detaching them from brute reality. Take the concept of the “unconscious”, for example. It is when a thing begins to disappear that its concept appears. Thus the real vanishes into its concept.

Together with the disappearance of things, human beings and everything related to the human species also have disappeared as if it was part of the fulfilment of a grandiose project. Death-wish has now reached its final stages with the extinction of human beings as if the latter was programmed from the beginning to murder itself.

Art itself in the modern period exists only on the basis of its disappearance. Paradoxically art survives its disappearance by playing on its disappearance just as human beings who by cloning themselves need to know that they have not disappeared. Can it be that all we have is an illusion of disappearance?

At any rate, Baudrillard proposes, nothing just vanishes, there remain always some traces. The problem is what remains when everything disappears. And why they do not disappear completely? Take, for example, Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat and its grin. The grin without a cat is more terrifying than the cat which has completely disappeared.

Everything that disappears – institutions, values, prohibitions, ideologies, ideas – continues to lead a clandestine existence and exert an occult influence. Everything that disappears seeps back into our lives in infinitesimal doses, often more dangerous than the visible authority that ruled us. In our age of tolerance and transperancy, prohibitions, controls and inequalities only apparently disappear one by one but only to be more profoundly internalised in our mental sphere. Nothing disappears.

According to the same logic, if behind every sound and image there is something that has disappeared, can it be the source of sound and image’s fascination we experience today? Can it be the desonance which has disappeared but still preserves its existence as a destructive force behind each sound and image? Is it in fact its disappearance we worship?

7. SILENCE ON TRIAL

Paul Virilio’s account of silence in his “Silence on Trial”[10] foregrounds different problematics about silence, mediation and representation. In this work, but also in his other works, Virilio, assuming an apocalyptic tone about modern technology severely criticises the introduction of sound to artworks which, in turn, led to  a gradual process as a result of which the spectator has been silenced.  Heasks:

Has remaining silent now become a discreet form of assent, of connivance, in the age of the sonorisation of images and all audiovisual icons? Have vocal machines’ power of enunciation gone as far as the denunciation of silence, of a silence that has turned into MUTISM[11]?

Sonorisation of images? Is Virilio making a reference to what we have been describing in this essay as desonance since from the start? Yet, let’s be patient and try to understand first what Virilio means by mutism in his work. Mutism, the earliest signs of which Virilio traces back to Munch’s The Scream (1893), reaches its peak in the post-modern era with the absolute preponderance of the audiovisual. It works on a strange, and an inverse proportion: the more the sound prevails the artworks the more the spectator is silenced and has stopped perceiving the artworks in their silence, or rather, stopped hearing “the voice of the silence” which was, according to Virilio, a characteristic of an earlier era, that is, pre-modern age. As he puts it:

Silence no longer has a voice. It LOST ITS VOICE half a century ago. But this mutism has now come to a head … The voices of silence have been silenced; what is now regarded as obscene is not so much the image as the sound – or, rather, the lack of sound[12].

Here this distinction between the modern and the pre-modern is layered on having and not having a voice, yet in another essay, “A Pitiless Art”[13], Virilio explains it as a passage from representation to presentation, whereby art is transformed into a pure means of communication. Virilio’s critique of the modern and the post-modern art on the basis of this move is founded, as explained in the essay, on the question of the immediate, which is the sole claim of presentation.  In contrast, as he quotes Schlegel, the art work of the pre-modern era required to be contemplated within its own silence, demanding an attentiveness of ears that would listen to its “voice of silence”:

But did anyone in the past ever fret about the very particular silence of the VISIBLE, best exemplified by the pictorial or sculptural image? Think of what August Wilhelm Schlegel once wrote about Raphael’s Dresden Madonna. ‘The effect is so immediate that no words spring to mind. Besides, what use are words in the face of what offers itself with such luminous obviousness’[14]?

So, for Schlegel, as Virilio is convinced, the artwork in the pre-modern era erased the necessity of a sonorous or a vocal element such that it reached us without any mediation whatsoever. Today, in contrast, the immediate perception of the artwork in its silence, or in its “voice of silence” is what we fail to achieve, all because, in their claim to presentation, that is, to mediate the immediate, the artworks make use of sound in order to be perceived immediately.

At this juncture, considering our theorisation of desonance, both together with Virilio but also against him, I would like to propose that there is no such distinction between pre-modern and modern; the real distinction is between pre-human and human as far as the mediation of the artworks is concerned. Sonorisation of art works was there already at the first drawing of a figure on a stone at Gobekli Tepe. It included a moment of terror and destruction: protection from the latter came with the replacement of the destructive forces of desonance, or rather the sonorisation of desonance with mediation and representation whereby sonorisation of the figure, the ourburst of desonance was perennially prohibited.

Silencing of the audience, mutism, or, the prohibition of sonorisation did not come with the rise of the modern but it is what has been conditioning our production of sound by safely grounding it on firm grounds since from the beginning. We are all deaf and mute in face of the absent presence of DESONANCE. 

8. LENZ

The following scene comes from Georg Büchner’s story, Lenz, where Lenz is one of those romantic characters for whom the tension between nature and man is resolved by a capacity he develops in the end: Lenz starts hearing the “silence” and, right before he jumps out of the window, or goes mad, he has the following to say:

Don’t you hear anything, don’t you hear the terrible voice, usually called silence, screaming around the entire horizon, ever since I’ve been in this silent valley I always hear it, it won’t let me sleep, yes, Pastor, if only I could sleep once again.[15]


[1] Although the depicted flower had been interpreted as tulip by a number of interpreters, the truth is the tulips did not arrive the Western Europe before 1593 and the Dutch madness about the tulips had to wait until the 17th century. Therefore, the flower in the painting cannot be a tulip but somehow should be considered as “the flower of wisdom” much in the spirit of the “philosopher’s stone”. https://hekint.org/2017/01/24/boschs-stone-operation-meaning-medicine-and-morality/

[2] I described this alternative as “cutupidité” in my “Cutupidité: Devenir-Radicalement-Stupide” (Revue Chimères, No:81, Paris: February, 2014). The English version, “Cutupidité: Becoming-Radically-Stupid” was published in rhizomes.net (Rhizomes No:28, Spring 2015, http://rhizomes.net/issue28/aracagok/index.html) and the Turkish version, “Parçaptal: Radikal-Aptal-Olus” in Express, No:137, Istanbul: .August, 2013). Man and the animal are differentiated on the basis of a capacity to create forms by means of which man becomes the only source of individuation. Stupidity is the failure of thought in creating new forms of thought in each attempt of thinking, and therefore it ends up producing the clichés, a repressive structure of thought echoed between the despot and the slave. “Cutupidité”, on the other hand, denotes a defendable animal position by means of which not only the production of clichés but also the production of forms is denied: dividuation contra individuation.

[3] Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, tr. Walter Kauffman, New York: Vintage Books, p. 3.

[4] Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta: Figures of Wagner, tr. Felicia McCarren, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.

[5] Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, tr. W. McNeil and N. Walker. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995, pp. 195-96.

[6] The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, p. 197.

[7] The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, p. 117.

[8] Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, tr. C. Turner, Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2011, p. 70.

[9] Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, tr. C. Turner, Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2011.

[10] Paul Virilio, Art and Fear, tr. Julie Rose, London: Continuum, 2004.

[11] Art and Fear, p. 69.

[12] Art and Fear, p. 71.

[13] Also included in Art and Fear.

[14] Art and Fear, p. 82.

[15] Georg Büchner, Complete Works and Letters, eds. W. Hinderer and H.J. Schmidt, Continuum, New York: 1991, p. 159. (Hören Sie denn nichts? Hören Sie denn nicht die entsetzliche Stimme, die um den ganzen Horizont schreit und die man gewöhnlich die Stille heißt? Seit ich in dem stillen Tal bin, hör ich’s immer, es läßt mich nicht schlafen; ja, Herr Pfarrer, wenn ich wieder einmal schlafen.)

könnte!)


[i] This essay first appeared in the booklet designed for the mini LP, Chaos Variation VII, Obsolete Capitalism and Zafer Aracagök / SIFIR, Rizosfera and Rough Trade, Italy & UK, July 2020. https://rizosfera.net/prodotto/nurkfm011-eng/

Foto: Sylvia John

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