towards the Klossowskian (Count de Rola) gesture, of a group subject: notes for The Ordinary Light, playscript in progress

The ‘anthropomorphosis’ of Capital is complete when its fictitious character is generalised.

– Giorgio Cesarano quoted in Tiqqun, Raw Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl, here

– Balthus

The point is that humans are simulacra much more vertiginous than the painted faces of deities. They are perfectly ambiguous beings because they speak, move their fingers and appear suddenly in windows like semaphores (is it to send signs or to give the impression of doing so while in fact they are only making a simulacra of signs?).

– Michel Foucault, “The Prose of Actæon,” in The Baphomet, Pierre Klossowski, Eridanos Press, Hygiene, Colorado, 1988, p. xxix

– James Lord by Balthus

The issue of the title per se was in a strange way irrelevant, though it pointed precisely to what was central, because every artist’s responsibility as well as his license is to forge a self capable of creating the art necessary for the sustenance of that self.

– James Lord, the chapter headed “The Strange Case of the Count de Rola,” in Some Remarkable Men: Further Memoirs, Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 1996, p. 162

– drawing for Three Sisters, Balthus