Endless nomadism where you carry your home with you everywhere, is the same
(in way of oppositions) proposition as the One and only Home. If "home" is
"everywhere",then home has no meaning anyway.
The matrixial borderspace is not about endless nomadism, infinite
multiplicity or thousands plateaux, neither is it about the One. Severality
is a different possibility. Hospitality here is to be taken in the
Levinasian sense: as founding the "I" as ethical, in its offering of
hospitality to the other.
In 1990 I asked Edmond Jabes:
"B.L.E.:- Modernity has invented a nomad who symbolises a lack of roots, a
non-relation to territories, a lack of "borderlines".
Edmond Jabes: - Oh yes. When we say nomads, we are reffering to people who
have, in a way, made all places into their own place. Who, with a certain
indifference, are willing to go from one place to another without becoming
attached, without striking roots. The nomad doesn't strike roots, but that
doesn't mean that he doesn't become attached.
Even birds have their territories, and they know it very well, even if
there aren't any obstacles. They sometimes fight when other birds intrude
upon their space. It's theirs! We think that birds are free. Birds aren't
free at all! They know full well that if they go beyond a certain distance,
breathless they will fall. Suddenly, it's as though there were a wall in
front of them. And so, they return to their tree, to their nest. Even the
biggest birds, even eagles an kites, have their territories. And the nomad,
too, is a little like that.
B.L.E.: - He creates his own borders, his invisible borderlines?
E.J.: - Yes, and he manages to transform the place he lives in, which is a
minuscule part of the desert, into a desert of its own. He considers it
totally different. In this part of the desert, he discovers things that are
other, things which, to us, are the same as all the rest. This part is very
close to him; he considers it his own. He spots the tiniest pebble and
takes it upon himself.
You are lost in the desert, but for him you are in his territory. It is his
landscape, his home. The idea of hospitality begins here. You are in the
desert, but to him, you are his guest."
And if the nomad, and even the birds, and even eagles need home, even more
do so the forced nomads and exiles of all ages and of now; concrete home,
but also home in the sense of the desire to get attached and the
possibility to offer hospitality - home as a psychic and ethic space. By
what means a psychic homespace can be in-formed, neither Onehome nor
thousandhomes, nor homeless, neither in fixed identity nor in endless
fragmentation?
Where multiplicity is not endless, in a territory beyond the phallic space
of the One and the All and the Everything, beyond either Original home or
"age of nomadism", even in the cyperdesert home-formations can become
active, by what I call home-affctuations and co/in-habit(u)ations. This
assumes vital investments in an invisible psychic borderspace behind the
screen, erotic inter-subjective acts and rythmes that arize a partial and
joint dimension. And of course, you can blow the process as well, it is
fragile, it is interwoven with your - and my - acts and is a part of them.
Cyberscreen is interactive, so they say, but does it, to bring your
question, Ricardo, have the potentiality to evoke bodies, to vibrate
affects? Are its acts inter-psychic? Can a body be awaken by the
cyberscreen's Gaze? Does interactivity offer a key to joint home-formation
and affectuation? Certainly not. Nothing offers such a key in advance
anyway, even painting doesn't, even poetry doesn't. Even in face of the
other, in physical closeness no key is offered. But matrixial shareability
- or the potentiality for sharing in trauma and phantasy - steps in here as
a critical force. It can be ephemeral, it can fall apart, and it can get
stronger by some intensities of art-forces (rare).
(......There are of course also other kinds of shareabilities, guided by
economical interests, etc., which are probably stronger then art's
intensity for creating "common interst", but these kinds of shareablity are
not based on affect, are not matrixial, and are not my subject here.....)
I see in Jordan's project, installation, book, and this list - a project of
which we are, in a way now, a living prolongation or transforming
participants - a way to experience the potentiality of ours and of others'
erotic gazes to transpasse the thresholds and change them into borderlinks,
into metramorphosis that evokes affects of unknown bodies and spirits - and
of ours - to such an extent that a shared home-affect will arize with
unknown others, at the end of this road without - as Lucio puts it -
without goal. The road is the production, history and inscription of this
joint affectuation and co/in-habit(u)ation itself.
Bracha