A Reader Writes

A reader writes:

In his last post, Professor VJ asks us: "Is not the artist-medium a ghost's ghost, the alien entity who uses unconscious triggers to reveal the paradoxical state of the specter, which is neither being nor non-being?"

I believe he's referring to the Derridean concept of "hauntology" and sees the mystical side of mediumistic art practice in relation to spontaneous poetics, i.e. he's attempting to locate a space of expanding formal experimentation where the artist improvisationally ghostwrites their own pseduo-autobiographical narrative as if they were becoming alienation alienated from alienation itself.

This improvisational ghostwriting of the pseudo-autobiographical narrative of the artist-medium can be viewed in relation to the haunting textuality of Lautreamont whose spirit is summoned by John Ashberry when he writes:

     "Dear ghost, what shelter
     in the noonday crowd? I am going to write
     an hour, then read
     what someone else has written."

These haunto-teleological confusions of who writes who (while reading) are indicative of a similar dilemma Borges found himself in too, especially in that short text "Borges and I".

Somewhere in the background of all of this, like a seance gone wild, Hegel infuses the candle-lit room with his phenomonology of spirit and the "material of dead space."

Professor VJ, on the other hand, goes back to his mediumistic practice and plays with the presets on his After Effects program.

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Metadata: philosophy, poetics, literature, art, ghosts, Derrida, Ashberry, Borges, Lautreamont, Hegel