Anny and list,

The below quote from Anny is very close to some stuff I am doing with
vampire imagery.

But rather then someone from the outside it is a force of the outside
which is not external to the formal object, following Foucault's
Nietzschean reading of forces to at least begin with somewhere in the
middle. It takes also from Blanchot's theory of narrative voice as a
force of the outside inside narrative and the break with Hegelian logic
which elides the outside into the external space of the Absolute which
opens an elision into formalism and transitives which fold back onto
Aristotlian hylomorophism and Plato's measure of the good.

One should look to the 19th Century German gay liberationist, Ullich,
who theorised gays and lesbians as a third non-human sex he called
Uranians and wrote a Gothic tale, _A Manor Tale_ (see
www.queerhorror.com) in which the two lovers become vampires with the
village against them and preparing to strike a stake into the lover's
heart. One can then connect with the powerful image of the dirty blood
of gay men, heroin users, people perceived to be from non-white
non-European countries and the dirty blood of non-procreative women and
the spectre of the Vampire which is HIV/AIDS. This is an image of horror
or what may be termed Gothic fiction, a momentous invention first
wrought in the 18th Century by homosexuals and women who could hardly be
satisfied with what review criticism championed as the proper
literature. A powerful force; a power of the false which is Gothic.

This image of horror is not the traditional notion of image on which
various moral and political measures are to be made or compromised into
submission to the image. This image is in-itself a force from the
outside yet not external so as to form an object of transitive good
sense and common sense thinking that is said to be an image by a
perceived majority point of view itself established through political
compromises unacceptable to those it is compromised against and hence
excludes. This is not the image of a formal transcendental of Kant,
Fiche, Husserl, Hegel, who assign image to that of the perceptive human
and is captured within the limited bourgeois horizon of Phenomenology.
This image may begin and connect with immanence of the image as a
fundamental appearing according to the plane of immanence laid out by
Henri Bergson in _Matter ands Memory_, an image which is God as a plane
of immanence laid out by Spinoza in book one of _Ethics_ and the Rhizome
plane of immanence laid out by Deleuze and Guattarri in _A Thousand
Plateaus_. Yet even these three immanent planes, rare occurrences in the
history of philosophy, are only partially able to approach what is
termed image in my usage. To think image one must break with the limited
historical planes of thought, the transcendental plane and the plane of
immanence and think a new type of plane. Even the Rhizome plane of
Deleuze invites a light slap on his wrist for a failure of nerve to
break decisively with this historical chain and be left wearing chains.
(Only a light slap on the wrist... that is the most one can expect to
give one of the true giants in the history of philosophy.)

I call this new type of plane a transitional plane, if only for want of
a better word since it is good enough for a working terminology. This
transitional plane is referred back to by both transcendental and
immanent planes and must be referred back to by transcendental positions
and immanence for a transitional plane is only transitional to itself.
Transitional; from the etymology of transit which is to be in transit
between points, always passing though points. It is a topological plane
of the manifold. It is on this plane that the Vampire as a Gothic image
operates and as such the image in-itself comes. The rest is just
illusion, a spectre or ghost said to be image. It is on this plane that
dirty blood, the blood of the Vampire laid down with so many compost
heaps is the absolute horizon of life in-itself. The bacterial lateral
gene transfer as code transferring on the horizontal between species and
genres which breaks any limited notion of teleology assigning life to an
always hoped for new human god as the god of procreation in a flower
pot, still.

best wishes

Chris Jones.

On Sun, 2003-11-02 at 20:06, Anny Ballardini wrote:
>  And it is
> indifferent if this invading spirit is female or male, it is anyhow someone
> from the outside who not only menaces the unity of a marriage, but
> physically and mentally destroys its members. In a broader sense, the
> destruction of a society, or of specific patterns, action which might also
> be positive, but which takes place only through blood. In astrology for
> example, Lilith is identified in the Black Moon, and I remember reading an
> interpretation on Rimbaud's Black Moon and the author did a good job in
> pointing out the changes in his life according to the position of the
> planet. It mainly rules unconscious desires. Which still leaves a door open
> in our potentialities, be it a spirit or the influence of a planet on our
> selves, it is a crack in our personalities which makes this possible. Or, in
> Rimbaud's case, it is thanks to this crack that we have such beautiful and
> genial poems, at the expense of the personal suffering of the being.
>
> On the other hand I think that the powerful sexual images given to Lilith
> might also show our human desire/fear of a devouring lover, someone who can
> not only eradicate from us all will, but suck us out from our daily lives.
> Again in Rimbaud's case, this unspecified identity or energy, was so
> powerful that he gave up all comforts to follow the Dark Muse.
>
> This my interpretation, take care, Anny