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| FUSELI |
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"Silence/Silence" from Negotiations Towards a Self, 1770-1830
A self lives in this temporality of delays and deferrals, but it does not exist now, in the present, never in presence. Its existence is never for all time, all places, all races, and yet this is what drives Fuseli, the desire to speak the epic language, a desire that a Fuseli always deems impossible. Traditionally, Fuseli has been viewed as an artist who strove for the epic and either succeeded or failed, or succeeded on occasion, for this is the basis upon which a history of art wants to define itself as, a history of artists who rose above their contemporaries. Fuseli's painting does not write of the noble and, therefore, a tradition of art history will have excluded him. Fuseli went below, and precisely challenged such a tradition, but it was always with a sleight of hand, always with deception, for Fuseli's self is always deceptive. Fuseli talks about how the gaze never meets, but doesn't suggest how such a gaze may take place. "I might have basked in the sunbeam of all your eyes." All that Fuseli says is that something is missing, something is missing in the social self, namely the self, the self that cannot be named. This self is always elsewhere.
Within this movement of deception, of babble, of silence/Silence, of will have been, had been, this play of a self, a playing with oneself, a self-castration, a playing with castration, comes a harrowing reality, a reality embodied in Ugolino, a reality embodied by Prometheus, a reality of a self that is destined to cannibalism, a self that will be picked at everyday. In the prison that is the self, chained and bound, the self may only wish that it could be trapped in a fantasy of sado-masochism. In the prison that is the self, blind to the Other, the self imposed on male heroism is condemned to atrocities. Here, Fuseli foresees what will ultimately be one of Géricault's most powerful insights into the self, recognizing the fall into mediation, mediation that separates us from the body, yet a separation that may form the basis for a relation with the Other, a relation that Fuseli rarely, if ever, sees.
Yet this only states more succinctly what Fuseli says elsewhere concerning the self, and in particular the male self. In blindness, a blindness due to temporality, because knowledge is always delayed, deferred, the call for action does not always lead to triumph, the male hero does not want to act, acting being the very problem of an inauthentic self, and passivity is not always an answer to the call of the Other. The law of the father may lead to cannibalism, but the law of elsewhere may lead nowhere. While Fuseli may laugh at the father, mock the father, this Fuseli is still a self that will be perceived at a particular level as a father, a foolish father, and, while a Fuseli that un-loads, lets loose upon a tradition of authority may believe himself free of this authority, Fuseli is subjected to this authority. While he may have fun with his reputation, his castration, he at the same time suffers form it. All of Fuseli's victories are Pyrrhic.
The guerrilla warrior does not hold out for ultimate victory. The guerrilla warrior only lives to fight another day, elsewhere. Presence may be what is sought, but existence is absence. Christianity may offer the ultimate bliss, but the first and last Christian according to Fuseli was Christ. Like Christ, Fuseli is both first and last in his religion of depravity. He effaces himself in bringing himself forth. In announcing his arrival, he has already disappeared, vanished. Fuseli skates upon the edge of nihilism, along the edge of the abyss and he laughs, but his laughter is empty, a process of dumping, of un-loading, and ultimately un-loading results in re-loading, in translation, a translation in which there is no Fuseli, for Fuseli consumes and buries his self in his selves. In his eroticism, there may be a cold element, but there is little cruelty, just little feeling, and if the road of excess leads to wisdom, then wisdom may not be some thing. Wisdom may be something undesirable. Fuseli's distancing from Blake has to do with the pursuit of wisdom, and for Fuseli the pursuit of the abyss may never be seriously considered, may only ever be considered with a playful gesture, a comedic gesture. There lies nothingness, and nothingness lies just as much as presence. Nothingness does not offer escape. Such an escape only results in what Fuseli already knows. Bread remains bread. Wine remains wine. There is no transubstantiation. Not on this earth. Fuseli does not translate the name of God. He is not able to translate Babel, but he himself remains untranslatable, and he never translated his name into a school, or had that name translated into something more monstrous than his own little foot. Just as with big foot, many sightings of Fuseli have been reported, but the evidence always leads elsewhere.
This is where Fuseli's subversive project takes place. Not here, but elsewhere. Fuseli's representation is always a transposition of himself, but a transposition that never quite takes place. Fuseli's representation is always doubled, always a double, a stand-in, but his stand-in does not always stand up. Sometimes the stand-in falls, falls limp, a limpness that leads to despair and laughter. Ridiculous and sublime blend into one another. It is not a paradox or a lie, it just "is" in as much as Fuseli is capable of addressing what "is". "They mistook his wit for reason." We, however, also mistake his seriousness for a joke. This is where an understanding of a process of re-loading is important. In Fuseli, nothing may be properly translated. Beyond a form of ambivalence and undecidability, Fuseli translates both yes and no in the most affirmative and oppressive of ways. It is horribly stifling. His heat is always humid, the fiery Teuton, born in cold ambivalence, ambivalence towards his small stature. With Fuseli, all is more and less than what it seems, but what it seems cannot be translated.
Not literally; and this is what a tradition of art history has claimed, that translation takes place, and that, if one works hard enough, the translation matches the original. With Fuseli/Füssli, however, there is no original, but just eclecticism, quotation, citation, leaving no origin, but a multiplicity of origins caught in the social gaze. There is no Fuseli, and, in saying this, "I am not afraid of having advanced a paradox hostile to the progress of" art history. I do not mean to say that there isn't a Fuseli, but that this Fuseli is always indefinite. A Fuseli, not the Füssli. "...or as Johnson has since expressed it, on talking of the political disputes of Milton with Salimasius and More, 'that let the subject of dispute be the rights of princes and of nations, it will, if treated by grammarians, end in grammatic squabbles.'" With Fuseli/Füssli the grammar and temporality are always difficult and literal translation opens up to endless translation which ends with the statement: This will (not) have been a translation.
Next to him who can finish, is he who has hid from you that he cannot.
(Henry Fuseli)
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