the donkey and you

"There is only so much you can get from that donkey walking with the carrot in front. Sometimes it's got to stop, or it's got to bite the carrot, otherwise he gets crazy and he keeps turning around instead of going straight. That's what I did." JCN

nymph in water

visible and invisible

“Absolutely visible body, in one sense, I know very well what it is to be looked over by someone else from head to toe. I know what it is to be spied from behind, watched over the shoulder, caught off guard when I least expect it. I know what it is to be naked. And yet this same body, which is so visible, is also withdrawn, captured by a kind of invisibility from which I can never really detach it. This skull, the back of my skull, I can feel it, with my finger. But see it? Never. This back, which I can feel leaning, against the pressures of the matters, against the couch when I am lying down, and which I might catch but only by the ruse of the mirror. And what is this shoulder, whose movements and positions I know nothing with precision, but that I will never be able to see without dreadfully contorting myself? The body-phantom that only appears in the mirage of the mirror, and then only in fragmentary fashion- do I really need genies and fairies, and death and the soul, in order to be, at the same time both visible and invisible? ”


‘Le corps utopique’ translated by Lucia Allais in consultation with Caroline A. Jones and Arnold Davidson from Michel Foucault, Utopies and Heterotopies, a CD release of two 1966 radio broadcasts published in 2004 by the Institut National d’Audiovisuel, Paris.

The First Fatality