Brekekekex koax koax—
from you I’m catching your
disease!
-Aristophanes, The Frogs
In the realm of ancient comedy, where the essential vision
remains to be reversibility, or the absence of absolute order in the universe,
a god like Dionysius and a slave like Xanthias can exchange identities, even if
for a moment, and divine speech can intersect with, or become one with animal
language. Nonsensical noise, yet still maintaining a simulacrum of order, even
over the level of art and music, the amphibian chorus nevertheless remains, and
cannot be less than, an embodiment of divine logos. Here, nature itself, and
its kingdom of inhuman sound, in surpassing human speech, is enclosed in an art
form that represents in patterns of rhythmic lines that which we can hear but
cannot comprehend .
Today, beyond the confines of art, and within a newer realm
of writing, even this last envelop of order is abandoned, for a simulation of
chaos, the multiple, and the unreadable. However, we no longer have nature nor
the sacred as its indecipherable secret component; we already discarded
the nostalgia for any mysticism or romanticism of the esoteric. What we are
left with is the simple mechanism of a surface burdened with historical and
political overdeterminations, and a culture captivated by its own semantic
weight. To remimic the indecipherable, by some parodic use of valorized
cultural forms, and to return it cold and resisting, by short-circuiting the
patterns of hardened meanings, beyond the confines of themes, rhetoric, and
imagery, and into the matter of language itself, is to renew a link with ancient
comedy, and remember the reverse, or perverse, double of the sign.
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