Photo by Jacques Martens

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2018
performance
duration: 3 h
TIME performance event, Grey Space Gallery, The Hague, The Netherlands

Idea and inspiration for this performance comes from writings of french philosopher Catherine Malabou on repetition, revenge and plasticity. The human is as a product of repetition (in a biological and cultural sense). “Spirit of revenge” as something specific to the human. Revenge is essentially another name for repetition. Revenge is human. The spirit of revenge and repetition originates in a relationship to time: time is a “spiritual injury”.

“The human is a being who cannot forget offense, who cannot erase the past, and constantly ruminates over it.“ (Nietzsche)

Photo by Jacques Martens

If there is only one thing the human seeks revenge for, it is the passage of time, and thus, of course, finitude - “passing away”. Having to die is the utmost injury. Time is the utmost offense. There is nothing we can do against time. This engenders resentment. We repeat what we cannot change. We repeat because we cannot change. The essence of humanity is to repeat its anger and dispossession; it is always too late.

Found-footage .GIF loop,

Plasticity designates the capacity to concurrently receive and bestow form. Plasticity also implies the ability to destroy oneself (words “plasticage” or “plastic” the putty-like explosive). Revenge, on the contrary, implies rigidity, incapacity to change, and attachment to sameness. Zarathustra teaches his soul to treat time in a non-vengeful way by reforming its relationship with repetition itself: instead of thinking of repetition as the return of the same—that “most abysmal thought”—he learns to recognize that the space for difference it opens. That is, he learns to affirm what is repeated, thus transforming repetition itself. Instead of passively bearing what happens, one can desire it, plastically.

Photo by Jacques Martens

The “Overman,” was above all else characterized by its plastic quality; it was the incarnation, the very body of plasticity. To renounce revenge, that which leads to the Overman, implies what Nietzsche calls “active forgetting”. Yet is it possible for the human - asks Malabou - to actively forget what it is? Will we ever be liberated, freed from revenge, and thus from our humanity? Will we ever be able to invent a new relationship to time, to law, to justice?

Are we, the superhumans to come, different from post-humans in being able to open ourselves to the future without developing hatred against time, without trying to crucify transiency and passage?

The question of how it is possible to repeat plastically, how repetition changes and transforms what it repeats:

“To determine this degree, and therewith the boundary at which the past has to be forgotten if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present, one would have to know exactly how great the plastic power of a man, a people, a culture is: I mean by plastic power the capacity to develop out of oneself in one’s own way, to transform and incorporate into oneself what is past and foreign, to heal wounds, to replace what has been lost, to recreate broken molds.” (Nietzsche)

“To develop out of oneself” and “to recreate broken molds” implies openness to what makes the routine of time explode, that is, the event. We need “new plastic events”.