2.108
If there were aonto which the
There’d have to be this outside for a cube to be put overtop of the other cube like clothing. But ‘things’ aren’t there, waiting to be stripped to their core to display their essence. Interpretation is never to clothe the naked truth nor to strip clothing off to get at this truth: as though science were a process of tearing at clothes.[1] As though the most important thing is nudity and not seductions of clothing. As though nudity were fully nude itself and not another seduction.[2] As though science thought it could reveal full desire (or its lack) through its arsenal. As though what’s key to our interactions is unabashed staring at the stripped and stretched — “When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table”:[3] the non-seductive, flat, thereness of any given thing.
The spreading board onto which butterflies are pinned isn’t just an instance: it’s symptomatic. There’s a violence, a fastening to (fascination with) the linear grid, a revealing, un-concealing, dis-covering, un-veiling, disrobing, forced bareness to the ‘thing’ (the butterfly) — that is, a certain ‘derived’ visibility, a certain gendering at play. The patriarchal, onto-ethical orientation to beings is bound with an exposed passivity — but also, paradoxically, the concealing of “the alternating rhythm of erection and detumescence that the male is unable to dissimulatein the face-to-face of copulation […].”[4]
Things seduce one another. When a bird dances for a potential mate, it’s not using this seduction as a tool to clothe naked ambition; this seduction is its ‘naked’ ambition. That is, seduction is not a clothing or dissimulation. Seduction isn’t an accidental feature covering the essence of mating, breeding, copulating, joining, binding, bonding. Seduction isn’t exclusively intentional nor restricted to organisms: the bird can seduce before it starts its dance; a rock can draw us in. Seduction is a nod to the discrepancy between things; it’s an acknowledgement and a responding to the similarity and difference of things.
Things seduce not only other things, but spaces between them. Things speak in seduction. Seduction means shining. Shining is not only a reaching out, but also a receding back.
‘I get it: this is just a metaphoric way of speaking.’
— What does that mean, ‘just a metaphoric way of speaking’? – It is a metaphoric way of speaking, but not ‘just.’
[1] See Derrida on Descartes and his discussion of the intelligible qualities of wax. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 73.
[2] Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1990), p. 33.
[3] T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in The Waste Land and Other Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), p. 9, lines 2-3.
[4] Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 61, emphasis added.