Thursday, June 08, 2006

On Michael Hardt and 'flesh'

Hardt conceives incarnation as abandonment of something and to something: abandonment of form, emptying out, and abandonment to flesh, taking on materiality. Incarnation is a becoming flesh, a self-emptying as exposure of the flesh (which is formed by consciousness, psychology, cognitivism and phenomenology, or sustained by artistic expression, see Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy) Flesh= percepts, affects, acts of the body as virtual, abstract.

Transcendental form is emptyied and divinity is trasnferred to the material. This abandonment to flesh might seem precarious, weak, but the affirmation of the plenitude of the material is in fact a fullness. Denying any possible exteriority and any possibility of mediation, incarnation reveals transcendental substances as empty, because the transcendental resides in the material itself, as immanent potentiality. Transcendent and immanent are not in opposition (therefore they do not need any mediation), but complementary.
"The surfaces of the world are charged with a powerful intensity. Divinity resides precisely in the boundaries or thresholds of things, at their limits, passionate and exposed, as if surrounding them with a halo." The divine becomes flesh with an electric vitality, and the body becomes divine ("How little we have realized our flesh! We don't even know what flesh can do!") Incarnation here is the moment of the encounter, when the overcoded body is energised (see Gil).

Exposing flesh does not mean to reveal a hidden secret, but it dissolves any possibility of a self, something to hide. Without possessing anything separate to grasp, we become imperceptible. While transgression exceeds a limit and at the same time verifies it (as its accomplished terminus, retrospectively), exposure operates on a positive logic of emanation. The violation of a norm is not primary anymore: negation is only a secondary afterthought.

While torture separates, incarnation and its exposure implies a living of the violence in the flesh, making its pain a mode of intensity and joy.

"Exposed, the passions of the flesh are released from any normative structures or organic functions:" Becoming-flesh becomes a form of forgetting, of the self, of discontinuity.

Pasolini does not use the term 'body', which he relates to the discontinuous and hierarchical functioning of the organs (body as organism), to detachment and consciousness, but he prefers terms such as 'members' or 'limbs', or simply 'flesh', for the vital materiality of existence: flesh for him is matter, passionately charged and intense, but always also intellectual, not opposed to thought and consciosness. In this sense, flesh is the condition of possibility for the qualities of the world, both a foundation and an immanent transcendence, beyond reality-appearance, depth-surface dialectics: a superficial depth.

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