hundredmillionlifetimes
Banned
La passion du real? Lust (forget courtly love?). Watching Oshima's Ai No Corrida again recently reminded me of this distinctly 20th century obsession/affliction.
Wasn't it Badiou who contrasted the subliminal-innocent 19th century, with its utopian or 'scientific' aspirations and ideals which somehow were to be vaguely fulfilled in the rosy future, with the 20th century's impatient immediacy, its insistence on bypassing all appearance with a view to being directly delivered the thing itself, at directly achieving the desired New Order? The ultimate and defining experience of the 20th century was the direct experience of the 'real' as distinct from quotidian social reality — the real, in its extreme violence, is the price to be paid for peeling off the deceiving layers of reality. "Love" (more properly, sexuality) now defined as the authentic, teleological intersubjective encounter, with its authenticity now ultimately residing in the act of violent transgression, whether in the form of an encounter with the Lacanian real — the thing, to refer to the other thread, Antigone confronts when she challenges the established order of the city and then suffers a Symbolic death — or of Bataillean excess. In the realm of sexuality, I'm reminded, then, that the icon of this passion of the real is Ai No Corrida, in which the couple's love is radicalised into mutual torture and eventually death, much like Bataille's Story of the Eye.
