Journaling - Readings, Muay Thai, Concepts and Articulations

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Jean-Luc Nancy (to turn to him again) gives what he claims to be an illustration of violence: the extraction of a screw with a pair of pliers rather than a screwdriver. How are we to understand violence from this example? Using pliers is not the proper way to extract a screw. It is the wrong way – the disorderly way – to do it. The screw is extracted, the goal is achieved, but the means are violent.

- Violence, Image and Victim in Bataille, Agamben and Girard (16)

On Muay Thai and Violence

Lechte cites a very productive line of analysis of the ethical picture of Muay Thai, this is to say, a picture of Thailand's Muay Thai that assays its worth by what it says and does with violence. It's been my argument for some time that Thailand's Muay Thai has something to teach the Global West - perhaps the world - something significant about violence, and the agonistic affects of violence: anger, rage, pride, vengeance, frustration, etc, a large measure of this due to its cultural braiding with Buddhism. Here (Jean-Luc Nancy), such a picture. The use of the "wrong" tool produces violence in the (needless?) damage it does, its sheer ineffectiveness. It very well gets the job done, but brutishly. The screw itself suffers....and the pliers as well. 

We have a great deal of correspondence to this within the conceptual framework of Thailand's Muay Thai, at least in so far as it developed a femeu (artful) dimension. The femeu tool is the "right" tool, the tool for the moment. The technical elegance (and prowess) that articulates and imposes force or direction. We can see this. A femeu victory as such really in its acme ideal would do no damage. There would be pure submission (I've written about this), even without bending the will of the other.

One thinks as well about the more brute versions of the sport that are rising up, many of them focused much more on "damage". Bonuses for damage, technique clusters meant only for damage. A thought process of damage. In this way we have left the land of the screw driver and its screw. At least in this sense, we have joined Thailand's Muay Thai to violence, rather than being an art of (about) violence.

 

 

Violence, Image and Victim in Bataille, Agamben and Girard -- John Lechte.pdf

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Notes on a Theory of Writing

A theory of writing. Writing composed of strokes, escriures, lines passing through space. escriures in expressive, non-representational clusters. Asemantic gestures, intentions.

This would make shadowboxing, poetry (in brief), and drawing (in sketch) a comparable, single thing.

The ontology of a mark, a signature, a sign. A differential, as a presence. It has been said that violence is a form of writing, as it leaves a mark. This note reflecting back upon the one above it.

Reading as a form of writing, as its the eyes that also make strokes, escriures.

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[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

1 hour ago, Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu said:

Jean-Luc Nancy (to turn to him again) gives what he claims to be an illustration of violence: the extraction of a screw with a pair of pliers rather than a screwdriver. How are we to understand violence from this example? Using pliers is not the proper way to extract a screw. It is the wrong way – the disorderly way – to do it. The screw is extracted, the goal is achieved, but the means are violent.

- Violence, Image and Victim in Bataille, Agamben and Girard (16)

 

"violence does not participate in any order of reasons, nor any set of forces oriented towards results. It denatures, wrecks, and massacres that which it assaults. Violence does not transform what it assaults; rather, it takes away its form and meaning’"

 

Think about this in terms of Thailand's Muay Thai and fighting. The purpose of the rite and practice is not to denature the other. 

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

This. Another form of writing.