simon jones: mixing it: towards the hermaphroditic in performance

5:
Today between these profounds of sex is love. All social advancements, for example, the enfranchisement of women or the rights of children, find expression in the wake of love and its absolute requirement at the crest of the mix to reconstitute the Human, to re-dispose of energy, matter, capital and wealth. Capital chases love; love flees capital. A brief chronicle: early modern capital, emerging from the feudal, concerned itself with the family as economic unit and the law as organizing principle, so Shakespeare's girls fled their fathers and the comfort of the city into the wilderness of the woods and their magic. Then industrial capital busied itself with the married couple, so Ibsen's women fled the hearth and crossed the threshold into the unimaginable (and thereby unstageable) beyond of unmarried life or suicide or the sea. Now post-industrial capital colonizes an evolved model of the individual as marketplace, a fragmented set of life-styles and role-plays, so men and women are obliged to flee their genders and sexualities towards the superfluidity of the flesh and the mobility of pure desire, that is, towards the hermaphroditic.
The sex of the addresser awaits its determination by or from the other. It is the other who will perhaps decide who I am - man or woman. Nor is it decided once and for all. It may go one way one time and another way another time.
Derrida, Jacques (1988) The Ear of the Other, trans. Avital Ronell & Peggy Kamuf, Lincoln: University of Nebraska, p52.
EPISODE 3:
The romance of DeliverUs is
a holoworld
a fractal of this universal mix. In this morning after the night before, this jointed reverie of waking from a shared dream, it expresses a series of love's moods or conjugations. Firstly, the infinitive, a mood without person or time, expressing the ecstasies of that first flush of passion. Secondly, the simple present, a forensic mood when the lovers emerge from their passions to interrogate the conditions and circumstances of their love. And thirdly, the subjunctive, that terrible mood that looks forward and connects the lovers to all possible futures, when they turn from what is to what might be. Each new tense soon reaches its own inarticulateness and necessitates the conjugation to the next: passion can only be performed through bodies and their times, so the infinitive collapses into the present; the one thing the present can never be is present to itself, so that simply cannot be known in its entirety and becomes infected with the suppositions of what might be. In doing so, each new tense thickens the love, so that love's very viability depends upon its capacity to accommodate and embody each successive complication of language. As if a series of astonishments, each new mood disorganizes the lovers' sense of selves and provokes an enrichment of love's potentiality. The texture of love's text becomes a medium that thickens, a middle that meddles. In this linguistic flight, Romantic love is dangerous, even deadly, to its participants, since they risk disintegration materially and in principle. From the profounds of love emerge unpredictable offspring.
Inasmuch as it is already animal, human and angelic, flesh is the language of the divine.
Serres, Michel (1995) Angels, A Modern Myth, trans. Francis Cowper, Paris: Flammarion, p185.

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