Material excess and aesthetic transmutation

Parallax

Volumn 7, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 64-75

  Mandoki, Katya ^a  

^a UNIVERSIDAD AUTÓNOMA METROPOLITANA   (Mexico)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149401828     PISSN: 13534645     EISSN: 1460700X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13534640010015935     Document Type: Review

References (28)

1. A previous and more schematic version of this paper was presented at the XIVth International Congress of Aesthetics at Ljubljana, Slovenia, September 1998 (published in the proceedings).
2. Friedrich Nietzsche The Birth of Tragedy, with commentary W. Kaufmann (trans.) (New York: Vintage, 1967 [1872]).
3. Georges Bataille, La parte maldita (Barcelona: Icaria, 1987)
4. Francisco Muñóz de Escalona (trans.) from L'usage des richesses (Paris: Minuit, 1949), pp.57-8. All quotations from Spanish into English are my translations.
5. For a critical examination of this aspect in Lacanian psychoanalysis, see Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Roots of Power: Animate Form and Gendered Bodies (Illinois: Open Court, 1994), pp.311-17.
6. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations. Book V, Ch. II, Part II, Article IV ('Taxes upon consumable Commodities') Edwin Canaan (ed.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), II, p.399.
7. Cited by Georges Bataille, La parte maldita.
8. Hospers' key concept of 'unity in variety', for example, asserts that in the unified object there are all the necessary things and nothing superfluous. John Hospers, Understanding the Arts (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1982), pp.102-14.
9. An unusual attempt to explore excesses (sexual, libidinal, emotional) in relation to madness, perversion and psychoanalysis via the artistic by examining authors like Sade, Breton, Artaud, Bataille, Nietzsche, Klossowski is in Allen S. Weiss, The Aesthetics of Excess (New York: SUNY, 1989).
10. The Trobriand tribes studied by Malinowski exchanged necklaces and bracelets, objects that, not strictly necessary as food and tools are, can be considered luxurious and symbols of wealth. Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (New York: Dutton, 1961 [1922]).
11. Including the American Northwest and the Rocky Mountains, Polynesia, Malaysia, Papua, South America and New Zealand.
12. Marcel Mauss, The Gift, W. D. Halls (trans.) (New York: Norton and Routledge, 1990), p.6.
13. 'La visée (Einstellung) du message en tant que tel, l'accent mis sur le message pour son propre compte, este ce qui caractérise la fonction poétique du langage'. Roman Jakobson, Essais de Linguistique Générale (Paris: Minuit, 1963), p.218.
14. Mauss, The Gif, p.11.
15. See the specific sense of the term 'pulse' in Katya Mandoki, Prosaica, introducción a la estética de lo cotidiano (México: Grijalbo, 1994), pp.163-66.
16. A common tradition of Prehispanic origin still practiced today in Mexico City at the barrios of Xochimilco and Ixtapalapa.
17. Mauss, The Gift, p.16.
18. Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, Invitación a la Estética (México: Grijalbo, 1992), p.100.
19. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment [1790] James Creed Meredith (trans.). Electronic version from the American Philosophical Association Gopher. Section 2 'The delight which determines the judgement of taste is independent of all interest'.
20. See Bataille, Part II, Chapter I 'Sacrifices and wars among the Aztecs', passim, particularly when he states: Sacrifice returns to the sacred world what servile use has degraded, profaned. Servile use has made a thing (an object) what, deeply, is of the same nature as the subject, that keeps with the subject an intimate relation... Destruction is the best means to deny an utilitarian relation between man and animal or plant.
21. Bataille, La parte maldita, p.92.
22. See Alfonso Caso, El pueblo del Sol (México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1953), p.125.
23. Moreover, as Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, Apologética Historia Sumaria (Edmundo O'Gorman ed., México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 1967) states, the Aztecs sacrificed all sorts of living creatures to the gods, not only human but animals, not for the sake of elevating them over their servile, profane condition, as Bataille's view implies, but to bring benefits to the community, as private ofrendas were made in every household to bring benefits for the family. Bataille himself quotes Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, contradicting his ideas of the non-servile belief of sacrifice. 'Truly, you are not in an error by wanting that the soldiers should die in combat, since you have not sent them to this world for a mission other than to serve as food to the sun and the earth with their blood and their flesh'.
24. Sánchez Vázquez, Invitación a la Estética, pp.100-1.
25. Jakobson, Essais de Linguistique Générale, p.218.
26. Kant, Critique of Judgment, SS15 'That the delight in an object on account of which we call it beautiful is incapable of resting on the representation of its utility, is abundantly evident from the two preceding articles; for in that case, it would not be an immediate delight in the object, which latter is the essential condition of the judgment upon beauty'.
27. I understand this appearance before others in the public realm according to Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), Sec. II.
28. Based on Darwinian approach, Ellen Dyssanake argues that the aesthetic, or rather the artistic, is non-superfluous because it is necessary for survival. See her Homo Aestheticus; Where Art Comes From and Why (Washington: University of Washington Press, 1992). I, on the other hand, am claiming that the aesthetic, artistic or not, is necessary precisely because it is superfluous.