Monday, January 07, 2008

Nietzsche vs. Jason

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is the artist?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him --- you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? ... Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying the artist? Do we smell nothing as yet of the artistic decomposition? Artists, too, decompose. The artist is dead. The artist remains dead. And we have killed him.

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? ... Must we ourselves not become artists simply to appear worthy of it?

...

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several galleries and libraries and there struck up his requiem. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "what after all are these galleries and libraries now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of the artist?"

3 comments:

glen_smith said...

Wow. Your Philoso-Fu is strong, master.

Neat thing: I keep re-reading it as I work my way through the links. (Neat little trick, there, Mr. Marketing Man. :) )

glen_smith said...

HA! Just read the link to The Onion, on "Student Deconstructs Take-out Menu"! Oh, that's funny.

The one "Why Publishing Should Send Fruit-Baskets to Google" is pretty informative. I hadn't heard a lot about this lately. All that showed up on the TV and Radio news was that publishers were suing Google, with no real detail of the positions or what was at stake.

Roger Whitson said...

"Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations to dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted. Which is why it is derisory to condemn the new writing in the name of a humanism hypocritically turned champion of the reader's rights. Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favor of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author."
--Roland Barthes