To Sleep So As to Dream: On Louise Bourgeois

In one of her Cells, Louise Bourgeois sets up a 19th century, or early 20th century 'room' demarcated by a wall of used and broken doors. In this 'room', we see a bed, on which there lie some sheets and blankets with red words embroidered on them. I can't remember exactly what these words are, but they roughly say something like 'let me sleep so I can make my dreams.' Beneath the bed, there are more blankets like this. Next to the bed, there is a side table, on which there are pieces of glassware that remind me, perhaps because of my current research on drugs, opium paraphernalia.

The room perhaps has nothing to do with opium or drug use, but the installation strikes me as a plea for the right to sleep and to dream from someone who is suffering from an intense physical or emotional turmoil.

But do we have a right to sleep? As animal lives, we need to sleep, and it is not so much a question of right that our biological bodies would inevitably fall asleep. Nevertheless, as political lives, this need to sleep is peculiarly translated into a 'right', something that as individuals, we would need to negotiate with the rest of the community. In fact, sleep deprivation is often regarded as a disciplinary tool at school, in torture, in fraternity rushes, as though the surrendering of sleep as a right were a test of loyalty, a contract one makes with the political community by sacrificing the biological functions of one's animal life.

As a means to suppress pain, either emotional or physical, opiate use in the 19th century and early 20th century challenged a political community, whose 'consciousness' of its political life was made ever more palpable by the formation of the medical profession and the power it vested in itself, precisely because it asserted this individual right to sleep, and the transgression of humanity by an animal need over which the polity has essentially no power to intervene unless it translates it into a 'right'. In this sense, opiate use is much more intimately related to one's right to 'die', and the increasingly ambiguous definition of medical death based on what the community sees fits regarding to its control over animal lives.

In this sense, art, by asserting the animalistic poesis, the constant resistance against the translation of the artist's 'will' into a communal 'right', is fundamentally anti-social. The moment art enters the public space, its poesis disintegrates into aesthetics. By 'fencing' a patch of this shared world with a wall of doors, Bourgeois has perhaps attempted to protect this poetic space from the contamination of aesthetics. However, a wall of doors always has the potential to be dismantled, and between doors, there are always gaps through which one can escape into the artist's private space. This 'right' to sleep and to dream can be disintegrated and returned to the animal 'self' if we cease to be spectators, and when we are willing to climb onto her bed in order to dream our dreams.

What 'America' Can Truly Stand For

The telltale sign of a cat is her/his hair, something that I have recently discovered every morning in the washbasin of my bathroom.

I basked in joy as I went to New Haven with John today. There was something beautiful and satisfying about riding the train with him, reading my book while he dozed off, introducing him to my hairdresser Holly (one of the coolest human beings I've ever met), and appearing with him together in front of my colleagues. Perhaps it's a sign of age, that I too fancy the pride and bliss of the togetherness and sharing of two beings in the world, the caring and ever-renewal of life that his presence in my little private temporality, a certain comfort in existence out of a certain suspension of what the existentialists would conceive as a state of solitude--a 'taking-care' of the time-outside. I loved every moment of it, as we walked through the reading rooms of the SML and discovered the little squirrel staring at us with its curious eyes--life becomes a transgression of time.

There is indeed a sense of peacefulness in me on this year's Independence Day. The first time I celebrated it with my friends was the summer I spent in NYU. The year after 9/11, Debbie invited me to the rooftop of a hotel around Gramercy Park (or was it the Gramercy Park Hotel itself?) to watch the fireworks. When the homilou sang the 'Star Spangled Banner,' I felt absolutely painful. It has always been painful for a person who was abandoned by Britain by birth, then by China by law, and reinstated as a British citizen only as an act of pity the moment I left that country; but the 4th July of that year reminded me how a nation (any nation) is inevitably built upon the violence that human beings have always inflicted upon each other. In a way, the celebration that year, and for many years to come, was built upon the victims of 9/11, the numerous violated bodies and souls in the War Against Terrorism, and the exclusion of an increasing number of people outside the 'American' law (its constitutional law, and its social ethical values) as animal lives. The immediate reaction of many Americans and those who love this country (and in a way, including myself) that year, was fundamentally at odds with what has always been classically defined as 'American' values. That night, the national anthem instantiated the aporia of what 'America' stands for, an aporia that many 'Americans' have spent centuries to 'make sense of,' to reconcile, and to re-configure in the hope that democracy and freedom would cease to be merely exchange values in the execution of life in a polity, but a state of exception worthy of standing outside the world as the world-to-be not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself.

What 'America' can be proud of are not freedom and democracy, values that every regime in the world, from the classical period until today, has offered numerous models and versions for their citizens as an imaginary system of biopolitical control. What the Independence Day stands for is the implicit and explicit acknowledgment, for the first time in modern history, that the constitution of a community is, and should be based on, the formation of such ethical values as freedom and democracy under negotiations that are meaningful to the beings who share their world as they imagine. It is the 'inventiveness' of this process of negotiation that offers the possibilities (not always actualities) for people in this political community to constantly rewrite and redefine these ethical values. Stalin and Mao had precisely missed the very point that Marx, Engel and Lenin proposed: if one were to invent an alternative sense of 'history,' one needs to rethink what it means to dismantle the conceptual percept of a system, or a 'principle' of being. By establishing a 'system' or by identifying a 'principle,' a political community begins to sanction a law, a way of being, that excludes other possibilities, i.e. negotiative processes that make up the very material relations that define 'history.'

The fundamental assumption in Bush's War Against Terrorism is the elimination of alternative 'American values.' This terror is precisely the fear that democracy itself would rewrite what his administration has identified as the 'real.' This 'War' is not one between 'America' and the Arabic world the Bush administration has adamantly defined and imaged as a world 'outside', but a frenzied demarcation of the interiority/exteriority of the American polis, a way to close up the juridico-political 'openness' 'America' has always prided itself, a conscious erasure of what 'America' represents, and how its 'founding fathers' have constituted it as a political community that has supposed to question the 'inside/outside' model of how the law is constituted. It has precisely engaged the 'American' people into the very ideological foundation that underlined the inexcusable violence that was imposed upon the victims of 9/11: the animalisation of the human world. To fight against some human beings who have turned themselves into animals in order to execute lives as animals by turning the entire nation into animals has simply perpetuated the human impasse that the law is always founded upon a state of animalisation, and the true spirit of the American Revolution is that such state of animalisation might seem inevitable, but it doesn't need to be, as long as a meaningful sociopolitical negotiation continues to exist. The task after 9/11 is not to perpetuate the fight for a new nomos; rather, it is time for us to rethink what the conceptual percept of the nomos has done to us, its purposesiveness in our sense of history, and how a new material condition (including the distribution of natural resources) can come to terms with our consciousness with the actual violence we face by engaging all beings in the world in the process of negotiation. It is not a reiteration of the centuries-old demarcation between the inside-ousidenesses of the Euro-West versus the 'Orient', but the disintegration of the purposiveness of animalisation in the constitution of this inside-outside relationship, the deep-structured demon that is the core of our terror, a 'pure' globalisation which is not merely a reconstruction of competing empires.