adding to a previous post, beginning by reposting part of a post it links to, and a bit of the paper.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency began as a slide show to music, at the Pyramid Club. Then it became mid-sized photographs, 16 x 20 inches with simple frames, and later at the request of her dealer reprinted at 30 x 40 or bigger, with thick frames in bright red.  What was ephemeral as light and time became solid, and then grand. What began as a loving record of the melancholy self-dramatizing behavior of minor narcissists, deserving of love no more or less than the rest of us, ended as the celebration of demigods, ubermenschen, dying for our sins. Even earlier the moralizing superiority of Against our Vanishing made me cringe.


"Borges by his own admission was a frail child. When he was older and his father brought him to a whorehouse he was so traumatized he didn’t attempt sex again for 30 years. He was a cloistered aesthete, a Duchampian formalist proselytizing a masculine moral relativism. His works return always to a violence that he describes and then explains, to justify it; the men he worships wouldn’t care. Borges  cerebralized an aristocratic anti-bourgeois social order as a bourgeois ideology, as if gauchos had built a way of life out of whole cloth and free choice instead of accommodating to hard reality. This is close to what Clark claims for Picasso as a representative of Nietzschean philosophical formalism, the formalism of Borges, Robbe-Grillet and Paul deMan, like Bourdieu and G.A. Cohen, but fantasists of the right and not the left. Borges’ writing is more violent than Hemingway because librarians are bureaucrats of books, and bureaucratized violence, cleaned of its smell is more violent than simple barbarism."

Thug life is barbarism. It needs no written philosophy. It needs no defense. It's not opposed to art. As I've said more than once, maybe not here, if art were about morality, killers wouldn't know how to dance.

The philosophical, academic and intellectual defense of barbarism, the theory of barbarism, is no longer barbarism. It's fascism.

A new tag: Borges