User:Trashpuppy/Chris Kraus - Aliens & Anorexia

SYNOPSIS

CHRIS KRAUS' ALIENS & ANOREXIA : book of auto-fiction that attempts (and succeeds) to save Simone Weil from the disgusting misinterpretations of her work and (end of) life.

The battlefield, for Kraus, is the body. A prison, as in Plato? Perhaps. But as Weil wrote, the walls that separate two prisoners is also, when they tap on it, their means of communication. Perhaps the body is, after all, our spaceship, the only vehicle we have for transcendence (p. 14).

THOUGHTS

The impossibility of transcending the body. First time round, reading this book I was so struck - forcefully, recognising this impossibility. Now a bit later, I am thinking about not just the physical body but also biography - the lineage and context informing the body. Where does the physical body end and the self begin? - Where does the inside separate itself from the outside? While I don't believe in the Cartesian Dualism of mind and body I do believe you can lose your body. The body can become other. But this loss then, is mine - part of my biographical body [The Self is Other]

There's a tendency for me to posit my own body in my art. Put it at the core of things. Precisely because my belief in this impossibility of physical transcendence. Instead, use it as a tool [Evidently, Chicken town!].

I think there is something dangerous in the desire for transcendence. Context is important and should not be lost. But it depends on what value is attached to one's context. Or if it unfairly stirs the interpretation.

QUOTES

• Commenting on Sartre's condescending, reductive account of women in The Emotions, Kraus says that "I think emotion is a like hyperspace," through which, via a "second set of neural networks" those who "experience an intolerable situation through their bodies" ("she felt the suffering of others in her body," Kraus says of Weil)do not become Sartre's "manipulative cowards," but rather travelers beyond reach of space.
  
  

"Female pain," says Kraus flying in Sartre's face and in face's of Weil's accusers, "can be impersonal." Not for Kraus the standard line that "like all the female anorexics and mystics [like Weil, "the anorexic philosopher," as in the sourcebook quoted by Kraus], 'the girl' can only be a brat ... starving for attention (p. 15).

• There is a tendency among romantic people to see their lives as grids and mazes, unfolding through an erratic but connected set of lines. These randomly occurring series of casualties may be retrospectively observed to form a pattern...
  
  

And so, as the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari surmise from reading William Burroughs, the idea of chance becomes a kind of fairy tale. Chance as a means of trumping chaos, discovering a more deeply comprehensive secret unity in the world (p. 51)

• Time was the not-so-secret weapon of the medieval church ... Time is mixed with blood (p. 88)

• Why should woman settle to think and talk about just femaleness when men are constantly transcending gender? (p. 103)

• The "idea of movie" is that emotion is a place. It's site-specific. Just as the optic nerve makes cubist cut-ups out of objects for the brain to reassemble, emotion happens in and out. It is a symbolic loop, a country that we enter through our bodies. (p. 131)

• Food's a disembodied signifier, there's almost always something missing, something wrong with the picture ... (To question food is to question everything)(p. 165)

• History, barely visible but shuddering underneath the translucent skin of the present (p. 201)