Éléments pour une esthétique de la chair : l'art tel un boucher au temps de la viande libre
Out of the cities, slaughterhouses are places in which cruelty, a cruelty fondamental to our societies, is concealed, remains unseen, as if not existing. There, the animal, led to be slaughtered, is transformed from flesh to meat: its flesh, reified, bloodless and abolished in the process, into a guiltless to be swallowed product. The same thing, the same reification is happening to man. In his relation to technology, in his will to not-see and to screen away, at least from his own gaze, cruelties which hurt him in his flesh, to neutralize all affect, man has become a « thing », « meat in the making », lost himself, mindless, one with the cattle. A new idealism takes him away from material reality – to drive him toward a reassuring abstraction where, so he thinks – without really thinking, he is safe from violence and death. In the face of this numbing and blinding of the mind, art only can awake the flesh to all its ambiguities, its life, and can make visible reality’s repressed cruelty: nor science nor philosophy, which tends to subsume any particular and concrete reality (pain becoming a concept of pain), but an art that represents this reality in a constantly new and changing way. This thesis strives to think theorize conceptualize an aesthetic of the flesh as a potential resurrection of the reified flesh (i.e. meat) by art that concretizes reality. The aesthetic of the flesh (of works of art depicting forms of cruelty) wants to oppose an aesthetic of the meat (the art concealing cruelty, leaving the body to his abstraction, to his free meat). It is the figures, always ever more present as the 20th century advances, of the slaughterhouse, the meat, the techno-reified flesh, in modern literature, philosophy and visual arts (in the works of Kafka, Döblin, Bacon, Franju, Pynchon, etc.), that will help me create and conceptualize this aesthetic of the flesh. Horror produced by these works of art is not vain provocation. But an awareness, a knowledge of a cruelty that we tend, it’s only natural, to repress but that we have to acknowledge if we don’t want to be unknowingly subject to its devise. There is in the horror staged by these works something of a truth, that we have to recognize if we want to go beyond it. The aesthetic of the flesh endeavours to such a truth and its possible, its impossible going further.
Abstraction Aesthetic of the flesh Aesthetic of the meat Slaughterhouse Cruelty Abstraction