Without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle, the theatre is not possible. In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.
Antonin Artaud
The Theatre and Its Double (page 99)
Let us now address the subject of the body, once a secret and no longer one. Let us observe the process of the decay of the body in Utopian society, its disappearance through the process of revelation, and remark the paradox that the unrelenting gaze results in the decomposition of the subject, and let us admit this process is paradigmatical for all that is hidden in Utopia, a despotism which, because it is humanist, exercises its violence in the name of liberty and love. Let us assert without fear of contradiction, that the body has forfeited its authority on-stage and off, and that the spiritual injury of nakedness can be restored by one thing only — the quality of the spoken word applied to it, for a public immune now even to the most exotic manifestations of the flesh can be lent the privilege of anxiety only by an attitude to nakedness and not nakedness itself. …
… [In] order to seize back the injury of nakedness from the benign and supervisory Utopian regard, we recognize the body must be mediated through the distinctly theatrical mechanism of characterization. The anxiety created by the actor naked – in contradistinction to the bathos of the actor undressed – is substantially the creation of text delivered by performers with whom she shares the stage, a condition shaped by longing, contempt, the entire repertoire of erotic disorder, a condition which serve to disobjectify the flesh such that beauty or its converse is ascribable from the application of speech to the surface of the body and not discernible in the body itself. The Utopian gaze, annihilating from principle the possibility of shame, renders flesh transparent, a hygienic substance, neither hierarchical nor individualized, in essence no more than a mobile accumulation of the facts. The tragic text restores to its public the privilege of suffering the opacity of the flesh, its impenetrability, the focus of an ecstatic ignorance. The war fought over the meaning of the body in contemporary theatre is no less desperate than the battles waged in Homer over the hero’s corpse. Dead or alive, the body drives us mad, and — without straining the paradox remarked upon above — only the word can shield our gaze from Utopia’s dazzling and obliterating light.
Howard Barker
“The Spoken Body and the Utopian Regard”
Gramma: The Text Strikes Back: The Dynamics of Performativity, 2009
The body, thought: Freja Beha in Purple Fashion #13 (http://www.purple.fr/fashion.php?i=1) (Photo: Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin)
Philosophy is an art of touching, just as sex is an art of intelligence. Touch is the living experience of the world on the part of what “thinks thought” in us. Philosophy is an art of touching because it experiences what it thinks, because it appears only in and through that act, while sex, for its part, allows us to experience just what is untouchable in the other. That other who can be explored, restrained, enveloped, consoled, hurt, and brought to jouissance unveils in the rawest and most exposed intimacy the fact that some part will always escape not only desire but also even sex (a word that refers both to the sex act and to the associated organs), and that there is something untouchable in the body itself. Spinoza’s genius lay here: transcendence is in the most intimate proximity to the self, and you don’t know it. No one knows what a body can do. The body — its exact resonance, its matter, its history — is located in the blank spot of desire, of speech, of thought.
Sex is not named by philosophy. Or only in such an impoverished, caricatural manner that it’s almost funny: appetites, affections, lasciviousness — sex is found lying in ambush in a blank spot, in a deafening silence. Everywhere except where love is in question. Ignored, demonized, effaced, sex is the first philosophical aporia, the locus of philosophy’s obscure, nocturnal, indiscernible astonishment. Sex is touch unable to express itself; philosophy, which has no tactile surface, no skin or nerve endings, is an art of touching concepts: their imbrications, their meticulous constructions, their silence. A touch other than that of the skin, comparable to a musician’s touch, that is, a touch that sets up a precise virtuosic resonance in which the world is engaged.
Sex experiences itself as a philosophical aporia, a body mingling with another body or with other plural bodies, a world mingling with another world, another skin, another voice, and one that comes undone just where it is resolved. To enter into jouissance is to be nevertheless at that place where the body no longer belongs to the body, where it becomes pure resonance, pure intelligence of the other, and, in that abandonment, “thought.”
Anne Dufourmantelle
Blind Date: Sex and Philosophy (p. 9-10)