Paul Chan: decoupling life from the living decoupling the expansion of productivity from the producers it is not natural it is not even human it is religious

 

God lives on in the sacrament of exchange relations


the nature of spirit: music torture at Guantanamo Bay



power recedes – a church without authority is blessed indeed


the spirit is a bone, …



eschatalogical art – art of the recessional: it is about last things and a hymn:

it is the last thing in the service



I think conflict is good

to make tension

but the work of disarming is incredibly tense

tenser than the other kind, I think


we’re swimming in the heat of a religiosity which infuses everything


5 site-specific productions of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in two locations in New Orleans … what is my belief in theatre? It wasn’t theatre. It was Beckett. … Godot was on every corner of the streets of New Orleans.


the sense of being impotently dragged along in its wake

is no reason to see it as natural, right?

that it’s just the way it is – that’s myth

that’s mythic thinking, right?

it’s natural

it’s just the way that it is


there’s a sense that Beckett is an abstract cold playwright

but they’re not

they’re in fact some of the most concrete things you’ll ever see

put in the right place

and New Orleans was the right place

[Sontag in Sarajevo]

absolutely

because everyone knew what it meant to wait

and to shoot the shit while you were waiting,


it made more sense than sense


the repeating of those events

there’s nothing conspiratorial

I mean they’re in plain sight.


there’s no conspiracy

it’s just the longing to

dominate and in

the dominating

preserving the self

the self of domination

makes the repeat?

its religious practice?

the circularity of mythic

thinking


the perennial self of domination

it’s no magic

that’s what it means

so how do you disarm

this cycle?

how do you survive without dominating?

because you think that only through domination can you survive

is that it?