The translation of matter

- As if the identity of writing in its ""physical form" was a given. The very material format of glyphs is an ideal vision of language, inasmuch as speech is, both prey to becoming. Both are in a futurity, a virtuality not opposed to reality. Against the hyperforms of desire, the full phallic presence, the fugacity of form is not a distant object, but the very mode of the lived moment of language. Writing, as the defining mode of language, has no precise ontology.

- The fixity of form is more the function of desire than the feature of the physical. It is not the feature of the physical to endure. The quasi-permanent inscription of forms is the prosthetic extension of memory and desire. What is material marries what is psychical, anthropic, ideal. The ideal must find its extension in the material, like a sculpture embodying the imago. But like any cultural form, in marriage the opposites are maintained: the union is abstract, even if the social transformation is real. The material is hence also already the extension of the ideal. Or there are two notions of the ideal. The first defines it as an essential self-identity; the second, as what D & G calls “more abstract than the abstract,” that which is between the material and the ideal conceived traditionally. If objects are the extension of the anthropic, they are nevertheless traversed by an “evil genius” (J. Baudrillard).

- (Can't we say then that the essence of the world as a mystery does not imply some inadequacy on the design of our faculties. In a sense there is a limit, yes, but it less about what we lack than how our relationship to the world is not a matter of reflection but of transformation, that is, translation.)

Salvador Dali, “Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach,” 1938.

- The surrealists have given us so much of that aspect of objects, how they are possessed by an irreducible alterity, visually captured only in terms of the malleability of pictorial punning. We have always thought of painting as the abode of the familiar, mistaking our recognition of what they “depict” as a reaffirmation of our perceptions. (Perhaps this is true for religious paintings. Nevertheless, religious works are like mythic representations: their subject matter is already the surnatural.) The evil genius of matter is what is more natural than our notions of the natural. It is that which lies at the limit of the represented, or the exterior which is intimated, that surrounds the readable, the metaphorical, which is its subject matter, which is the other of both its subject and its matter. And even when we reduce the aesthetic to the objectivity of the material, after the pursuit of the formal is exhausted in Modernism, won’t we have as a logical conclusion the "buchi" in Lucio Fontana’s art? As he says: “I make holes, the infinite goes through them, light passes through them, there is no need to paint… ”

"Concetto Spaziale", Attese (1967), and "Concetto Spaziale, Attesa" (1961) by Lucio Fontana.
From https://www.sleek-mag.com/article/lucio-fontana-art/

- The inscription (a carving out, like abstraction, like cuneiform) which is language's mode of being pays the price of alterity, of non-identity. This tension is, however, integral to the perception of sense. It is the irresolvable requisite of meaning: contradiction, paradox, difference, oxymoron, chiasmus, reversibility, non-identity. To speak is to alter, but incompletely. For alterity itself carries its own non-identity. There is no essential other, since by definition the other is that which has no essence. Or, that which is imagined to have an absolute one, as the negation of becoming.