…this subject is never anything but a “living contradiction”: a split subject, who simultaneously enjoys, through text, the consistency of his selfhood and its collapse, its fall.[1]

With the writer of bliss (and his reader) begins the untenable text, the impossible text. This text is outside pleasure, outside criticism, unless it is reached through another text of bliss: you cannot speak “on” such a text, you can only speak “in” it, in its fashion, enter into a desperate plagiarism, hysterically affirm the void of bliss.[2]

How can one speak of this split subject? The subject that can be cut up in the text, divided and reunited as far as a practice of reading (and writing) is concerned. The subject is indeed a historical manifestation that has been before and will come after; there is no end to this subject. Barthes uses the idea of the image-repertoire as a dialectical transformation on the image of the subject and its other, a praxis that both eludes the doxa of a naturalized language and the violence of explicit demythologization; this is the neutral.

If I was searching for a text that split the subject while projecting the imaginary ‘other’ it would involve a deflection, simultaneously doubled and transformed, seemingly reproduced in form, only to be denied a privilege of materiality. Bone, silver, black glass, light, darkness, shadow; how can any kind of taxonomy be created? How can density, weight, substance be indexed to a shadow? Where is the referent?  It is the signifiers that matter, the signifieds can take care of themselves.

Split, silver, glass, light, 2011