Page 83 - Fernando Sinaga. Ideas K

dictions begin to interact by themselves and almost chemically. Abstract thought achieves a greater degree of self-consciousness the barer and more lacking it is, when it positions itself in a state of watchfulness and permanent attention of a night spent out in the open.10 Both sculpture and writing share this dialectic, for example when they contradict each other; “if in some case these annotations might seem instructions for a more comprehensive view of my oeuvre, nothing would be more mistaken and certain”, or, when they point to the necessary presence of non-thought, that which is not yet at the roots of all thought; “these discontinuous considerations cater to the inner need for clarification and are only a bewildered look at everything which I acknowl- edge not knowing.”11 Art is not the confirmation of what is already known
but a source of knowledge of what is not yet thought. Sculpture and writing are, ultimately, self-knowledge, self-consciousness and self-reflexibility (all tropes of modernity). Sculpture obeys its own internal laws, or, as he puts
it, “it is sculpture understood as a system that regulates material opera- tions and a correlative principle of obediences and correspondences.”12 The dialectic between sculpture and writing is thus that of a path which leads to inner knowledge of the subject, anchoring it in its position in the world, and which links up with Adorno’s radical defence, in his late period, of the need for the individual subject to withdraw from the world as a place for critique. Sculpture is not an illustration of writing and vice-versa, it is its double,
full of difference and indeterminateness. Sculpture, art, does not illustrate concepts; rather, it is in itself a way of thinking that differs from philoso-
phy but establishes parallels and affinities with it. Here, then, Blanchot’s aphorisms echo more powerfully: “To write, ‘to form’, where no forms hold sway, an absent meaning. Absent meaning (and not the absence of meaning or a potential or latent but lacking sense). To write is perhaps to bring to the surface something like absent meaning, to welcome the passive pressure which is not yet what we call thought, for it is already the disastrous ruin of thought.”13 And what would be not the writing of the disaster in Sinaga, but rather a “sculpture of the disaster” that includes the catastrophe, accident, cracks and discontinuity of thought?
Aesthetic Form and Thresholds
We might now ask if Sinaga is not but one of the last heralds of Adorno’s aesthetic form, and explore the social and political consequences of this thinking in negation. In another essential book, The Aesthetic Dimension, Herbert Marcuse attempted to contribute to defining aesthetics by question- ing the predominant Marxist orthodoxy.14 His critique is centred on examin- ing art as a party to the context of existing social relations, attributing a
10. It is possible even to trace
an analogy between Sinaga’s Consideraciones discontinuas (Discontinuous Considerations) and Adorno’s Minima Moralia, basing ourselves not only on the fragmentary and discontinuous as a prominent formal feature but above all on the aphoristic form, often between philosophy, the literary and the everyday, occasionally infused with
a deep feeling of brokenness, a subjectivisation that entails perception of the world, to which should be added the fact that Sinaga sometimes sounds oracular. See Minima Moralia. Reflections from Damaged Life, London: Verso, 2002.
11. Fernando Sinaga, “Introducción”, op. cit., p. 51.
12. Fernando Sinaga, “Solve et Coagula”, op. cit., p. 63.
13. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press, p. 41.
14. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension. Towards a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, Boston: Beacon Press, 1978.
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