If they don’t have the guts, I call them girly-men.
–Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California, in a speech on 7/17/2004
Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted. It begins around the eyes. From there it radiates … Nothing more happens than that the man begins to understand the inscription … our man deciphers it with his wounds …
–Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony
The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated Self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration.
–Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice
The work Inscription might be said to have three fathers: Arnold, Franz and Michel. Or, it might be said that the dirty business of conceiving Inscriptionwas the consequence of an even more crowded couch in which these daddies where only the last to deposit their gifts, and that therefore the memories of their conjugal adieus are just easier to re-member. Each stands, in a way, for a category, a body-type, a way of thinking and acting, a story, a function, an example for which their names are only one instantiation. They are archetypes, proto-types, exemplars.