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Destruction of the Sexual Thing
H
ERMAN RAPAPORT

"What is a Picture?" Times Two
J
AN AVGIKOS

Saturday Night Fever, or "What is a Picture?"
C
ATHERINE LIU

Étant Donnés: Le Gaz(e) d'Éclairage
A
DRIAN DANNATT

The Rustle of Painting
B
ARRY SCHWABSKY

The Amateur Genius and the Dog
R
ICHARD FOREMAN

The Newly Renovated Opera House on Gilligan's Island
J
OHN YAU

Watching Things Work
B
ARBARA HENNING

What You Do
I
AN GREY

"What is a Picture?"
P
EGGY PHELAN

A Cameo
R
APHAEL RUBINSTEIN

Written/ Spoken/ Drawn


























        

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Josefina Ayerza

The Labyrinth is the name of King Minos's palace. Also called the palace of the double H, is it a bed? Locked at the center of the labyrinth there is the Minotaure, ritually nourished with seven young boys and seven young girls. King Theseus disguises himself as tantalizing food, finds his way through the labyrinth and kills the monster. Holding the thread of Ariadne and his own lighted crown illuminating the corners, Theseus unearths his way back to daylight.
Says J.-A. Miller, "Always, I love someone because I'm in love with somebody else." Mino-taure: the cause separates as the plus (+) that acts for the structure. Though the cause, in as much as it relates to the signifier — S
1, the phallus — is already sot out to reveal in a primordial lack: the Other is Minus-One; One-in-Minus.
Raphael Rubinstein's Cuarto 105, further pursuing the signifier in space oddity, calls on different levels of sentinel perception. Is there any space or time before Repetition may signal "this cigarette in this ashtray, that cigarette in that ashtray, the cigarette in this ashtray?"
Vampirism. The dead arise from the tomb, suck the blood of the living. As well, the vampire's victims, deprived of their blood, are in turn contaminated and become vampires. Slavoj Zizek views, "...the new configuration of the axis-power-knowledge caused by the incommensurability between the field of representation and the Thing..." in fragments of Mme Bovary's cinematic version, of the Marx Brothers' films, of Hitchcock's scenery, of René Magritte's paintings, of Michel Foucault's writings...
The signifier's insistence. Lynn Crawford in Four nails down the subject in the figure of the inexorable husband, "...if I turn to greet him, he leaps behind some object or lies flat on the ground."
Darkness. Woman gains additional expression in The Not-AII where Darian Leader elaborates on her "indeterminate existence" as an element to be constructed. "Thus femininity, described not as an essence, but as a relation." Where are we in the labyrinth?
The thread. John Yau's Sand is procuring the ground for the construction itself. Woman? "You know why I liked you? It was because you were soft in bed."
Is the game the structure? Harry Mathews elaborates on, "Literature and game playing... the words evoke a weedy figure: the playful writer."
The writer is male. Should we chance, that is, dare we translate Lacan in Encore, "...phallic jouissance is the obstacle which the man doesn't get through to, I would say, enjoy the woman's body precisely because what he enjoys is the organ's jouissance. " Peggy Phelan, "Like the familiar stories of beseeching lovers narrating their past... his history, a strange autobiographical fairy tale."
"Crime is masculine," says Barbara Henning.
"We must calm and reassure ourselves," Barbara Einzig.
The filmmaker is a lady. With Adrian Dannatt, "The essence of film is female."
The actress. Rena Grant, "...as to what happens to women in the movies... on the one hand the impossibility of the survival of the narcissistic woman; on the other hand the impossibility of the desires of two women being worked through in the movie."
Man. Isn't he obsessive? Delphine Burrus, "Here is a character. . . he has only one fault: books are his passion. It is a fault because he cannot bear the idea of a single book he does not know."
The female artist. With Maureen Connor woman's speech reduces to sound.
Did we make it out of the Labyrinth?
Daylight. For Jan Avgikos it's "Elimination of gender." For Wolfgang Staehle, "Author/reader, producer/consumer, the distinctions blur. No more static hierarchy and predefined roles."
Ariadne. An omnipresent figure at the heart of the labyrinth creates an imperceptible field. As much as the definite subject (topic) gets lost in the chain, chances are, for the non-specific subject, that it apprehends itself in the strings.
Still David Kelleran has a first and last word: the Woman is the Labyrinth. A double H — a bed? If the woman is the bed, what is in the bed? So she undoubles. Woman, the forever lost object — a signifier — happens to return in each one of them, in the desire for them, which is what invites the one inside the bed.

 


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