Liza Michaeli, University of California, Berkeley

Cult E: Affection, intimation, expression (advanced!)

Liza Michaeli (University of California, Berkeley)
We are, most of us, removed from the intimacy of our own breath; removed from the perilous urgency of touch; removed from the fact that voice is deeply connected to pain inside the body. What is it to have an intimate knowing that we are alive? A knowledge of struggle, there where our being exposes itself? What does it mean to give the physical enigmata of living the preponderance they are due? This seminar will not pretend to take experience as an object for analysis, nor will it practice a descriptive analytic of reality; rather it will take an inward turn into some "thing," fatal, echoic, that is incomparable except by the experience itself. Together, we will attempt an exactness about this feeling, attending to the grain of the voice, the beat of the body, an exposure that is essentially constitutive. In this physical advance into the unknown, we will remain close to the sincerity of affection. We will discover how difficult it is to speak about the physical. We will attend to indicators that there is life is inside, encountering not the explicit, but the subtle implied. For what is essential, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once wrote, is invisible to the eye. . .