In writing these verses, […]
the more, goddess, grant a lasting loveliness to my words.
Bring it to pass that meantime the wild works of warfare
may be lulled to sleep over all seas and lands
– Lucretius

01

Under what circumstances do human beings dance? With what body do they dance and how? What is happening when human beings crawl on the ground? There is no straightforward way to answer these questions. However, as a preliminary step before raising them, or something even prior to that step, I would like to consider the historical conjuncture of the body—taking various detours and moving far away from Ko Murobushi.

Yoshikichi Furui built his career as a writer while reading and occasionally translating works by German-language writers such as Musil, Bloch, Hofmannsthal, Rilke, and Kafka. Furui considers the 20th century to be the era of war. This take itself is not unusual, but his perspective is still unique, given that he continuously adapted his own experience of surviving an air raid at the age of eight into his novels in a somewhat obsessive way. Furui considers the year 1914 as the beginning of the 20th century and the start of the Second Thirty One Years’ War. The aforementioned German writers who lived during the interwar period (Nov. 1918 – Sept. 1938) and witnessed the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire must have also inhaled the miasma of war. Furui states, “I have mentioned earlier the enormous growth of the state, capital, and scientific technology as phenomena of the second half of the 19th century. Adding concentration of power to the list, was it not in this era that these phenomena became a gigantic machine which, in reality, transcended control of those involved, and nearly began to operate autonomously? The most horrendous example of this is the mass incarceration and genocide of Jewish people.”

Furthermore, Furui also considers the post-World War II Golden Age of capitalism to be a war, along with the following period of nearly half a century that was invaded by neoliberalism. For Furui, there is a significant connection between capitalism and wars. He argues: “To say the least, I see the half-century of economic growth in this country as another war. There were no arms or ammunition involved, but I consider it to be national warfare which mobilized every possible mass method and technology. There were considerable war casualties, and the number of those who were physically and mentally injured must have been countless. […] There was a desperate desire among people to crawl out of impoverishment after the war. We surely have achieved a society of longevity. However, what have we annihilated in exchange?” For Furui, warfare continued uninterruptedly from 1914 to 1945, and from 1945 until Japan’s economic collapse in the early 1990s, and perhaps even until today while simply changing its form. It is, of course, no accident that wars pervaded every corner of the century of capitalism. Consider the inter-dependence of war, state, and economy, the mobilization system for labor and war, the uncontrollable social machine that produces = desires mass corpses… The shadow of death hangs thickly over capitalism.

Of course, this is not a situation that only concerns Japan. For example, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault discusses the connection between labor and warfare by referencing Marx’s Capital, which points out the similarity between labor and military strategy. That is to say, the management of people at a workplace is directly tied to military technology, and from Foucault’s perspective, is also tied with techniques for physical discipline. He observes how the mobilization of both war and economy proceed simultaneously, progressing together while complementing one another. Foucault also addressed economy as warfare in a 1975-1976 lecture entitled Society Must Be Defended (Il faut défendre la société). For Foucault in this period, the economy was a war that could operate at either low or high intensity.

Mario Tronti, a theorist of the Italian workers’ movement, Autonomia, proposed to call the period from 1945 to 1991 the “Third World War,” pointing out the link between the globalization of the economy and the globalization of war (World Economy and World War). Tronti argues that through a Cold War framework, a large number of wars were waged on a local level, e.g. periphery countries and regions with a smaller economic scale, while major powers avoided becoming battlefields themselves. Although the suffering caused through these conflicts was disregarded as small-scale or trivial, the sum of this violence is surely appalling in its total. Furthermore, the bodies that were brutally maimed in local wars, corpses that were never even represented by major powers, were nothing more than this body. The root of this is a global system whose effects always appear in local places. The logic of the global system is connected to the actual, individual, specific body through brief pathways. What will become of a body that lives with such a connection? In what kind of contradiction will the body, produced by global logic yet obliterated from the space of global representation, be forced to live? What kind of body crawls through capitalism, labor, and war?

Tronti cites the Korean War (1950-53), the Suez Crisis (1956-57), the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), the Vietnam War (1965-1975), and the Palestinian conflict (1948-) as examples of capitalist wars.  The wars since the late 20th century threaten to continue repeating a horrific concept implicitly linked with the racist idea that some people ought to be killed and that those deaths should be disregarded. Capitalism is no different in this respect. Tronti argues that Hiroshima was the beginning of World War III. In other words, the end of World War II was already the beginning of World War III, meaning war itself continued without interruption. We will come back later to the question of atomic bombs highlighted here.

Tronti is particularly known for asserting rejection of labor rather than mere improvement of the work environment in Workers and Capital. This stance is natural because he was looking outside of labor and outside of capitalism. Tronti argues that laborers need to resist themselves, as laborers, in order to reach outside of labor and capitalism. The intense rejection of mobilization towards labor is a tremendous struggle against the self bound by a societal chain, as well as a battle against society itself. In other words, one has to kill oneself as a laborer in order to overthrow the order of capitalism. Tronti argues:

This is the height of contradiction not for the workers but for the capitalists, and it is necessary to expand and organise this contradiction. The capitalist system will no longer function and the plan of capital will begin to retreat […] A working-class struggle against work, the worker’s struggle against her own condition as a wage-labourer, labourpower’s refusal to become labour.

Ko Murobushi’s texts are also a repetition of intense struggles against the self and the system. He continuously attempts, in whatever way he can, to pry off the body and break off that which mobilizes it, that which forces it to work.  As someone who professes unworking, Murobushi engages in a fiery resistance to labor, to work, and to function in society through Butoh—by awkwardly moving with an inverted, fallen body, scraping the ground, convulsing, and groaning. Murobushi writes:

Someone once said, ‘When you start talking about Butoh, you tend to get into a discussion of life philosophy.’ That is probably because dance is more than manual labor. It is physical labor. And Butoh is something which attempts to transcend labor and the entire body… If you ask me “To what end?” then this may indeed become a life philosophy, because ‘He who does not work shall not eat.’ However, at the utmost limit of Butoh there exists a becoming of an unworking thing and traffic between the life of things and the flow of things.

In this text, Ko Murobushi touches upon the traffic between life and the flow of things, in addition to becoming something that does not work (in any sense of the word)—does not labor, does not function, does not have consistency, does not move with a plan, and something that does not have weight or power as a human being. He quickly reacts to things, objects and substances, with an extreme acuteness. In particular, he reacts to things that surround the body and adhere to the surface of the body. In the archive cafe Shy, which houses Murobushi’s book collection, there is a GS (la Gaya Scienza) Special Issue on War Machine published in 1986. The magazine has an article entitled “Death, Metal, and Schizophrenia (Shi, Kinzoku, Bunretsu-byo)”, written by the psychopathologist Seiichi Hanamura, in which he describes how the body sympathizes with substances. In other words, it is about an existence that sharply reacts to events such as the flowing, deforming, shattering, and scattering of matter. What is being described here is not an existence that lives in such a state only in the imagination while maintaining a separate reality. Rather, it is about living in a state of flux or shattering as a direct, primary experience of the body. It is not an issue of simply visualizing one’s body disassembling in one’s mind, but that of actually living in such a body as an unmediated primary process. What Hanamura discusses is people with schizophrenia who interact and sympathize with substances. Let’s look at a few quotes:

[The patient] says, ‘When I fly in an airplane, I cannot keep both my heart and lungs from dissolving.’ This means that when one is required to experience an abnormal speed, one can no longer maintain the order of the body through the organs. The only way left is to become the duralumin of the airplane. In other words, it means speaking a language without articulation as breaths or howls that do not allow any kind of segmentation, and through this the body immediately takes back its complete integrity. What we see here is a wave of intensité—intensity—that can only be described as an idea whereby the more one amorphously becomes fluid, the more one becomes uniquely integrated as such. This is exactly the apocalyptic survival principle that he embodies.”

This quote describes the experience of becoming-metal in a real, unmediated way, not on the level of mere imagination or metaphor. This kind of sympathetic reaction with substances not only relates to the substance itself, but it also has a physical resonance with society, technology, and war, as suggested by vocabulary such as duralumin, a military material, airplanes, and even ships, tanks, and jeeps. It is the act of synchronizing one’s body with war machines. Both his existence and his body, so to speak, are impaired by global war machines and are in severe conflict with the dynamics of substances.

02

At the One and thousand nights of ‘Outside’ event produced by Ko Murobushi in November 2013, there was a screening of Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). What screenwriter Marguerite Duras presents first in the script is the following scene, “In the beginning of the film, we don’t see this chance couple. Neither her nor him. Instead we see mutilated bodies.” As is often said, cameras mutilate the subject by framing, which fragments the object. It is well known that close-ups, in particular, generate the effect of partial objects. However, what Duras calls the mutilated body (des corps mutilés in French) has an even more disturbing rawness to it. Perhaps the script, rather than the film, evokes even more strongly bodies which are deficient, disabled, and missing limbs.

In Hiroshima Mon Amour, something is enveloping these mutilated bodies. This is, of course, a metaphor for death ash (radioactive fallout). However, in the actual imagery of the film, it not only looks like ash, but also like sparkling metallic particles that are covering the surfaces of torsos and arms while floating in the air. In this imagery, the ash comes to envelop the entire body, but at the same time there is an illusion of reversed movement. This is, in other words, the body decomposing itself from the inside into countless ash and minute metallic particles. In Duras’s script, the feeling of sweat (des sueurs in French) secreting from inside of the body is conjured along with the image of death ash. There are not only particles coming from outside, but also a fine moisture coming from inside, one drop at a time, which is mixed with ash and metal particles. Here, apart from being cut out by the frame or having limbs removed, there is room for the body to be atomized, to become a particle, where death and life, Eros and Thanatos, seem to intersect. There seems to be a movement in which the individuality of the two bodies is diluted, mixed up, atomized, and recombined through the fine particles that cross the skin which serves as the boundary of a body. In the context of the atomic bombing, such movement would be linked to atoms, nuclei, and fission reactions, as well as to the rupture of the body at the micro level due to radiation. If I may add a note on atomic theory, Murobushi was fond of talking about the term clinamen invented by Lucretius. In other words, as the rain of atoms falls and fills the space, at some point the atoms start to shift and collide as they meet. They condense, form discrete bodies, and then disintegrate again. This is an accidental encountering and parting of individual particles.

According to Duras, the meeting in Hiroshima Mon Amour is “[b]etween two people as dissimilar geographically, philosophically, historically, economically, racially, etc. as it is possible to be.” With this dissimilarity, it is possible to carefully avoid the pitfall of nationalism that may result from atomic bomb discourse. In this film, it is known that the names of two places, Nevers and Hiroshima, are evoked and respectively represented by Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada. (Eiji Okada also appears in Hideo Sekikawa’s Hiroshima (1953), which is quoted in the film.) When the names of these places are spelled, it is easy to notice the similarity between NEVERS and NEVER in English. Duras wrote: “No vows exchanged. No further gesture. / They simply call each other once again. What? Nevers, Hiroshima.” Duras literally put NEVERS and HIROSHIMA right next to each other in the text, making the two meet. This meeting of never-happened-once and Hiroshima is undoubtedly a difficult and strictly fleeting encounter. In a way, Hiroshima Mon Amour repeatedly describes an impossible encounter with various twists and turns in its impossibility.

In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze considers Alain Resnais to be the film-maker of memory, or matter and memory. Deleuze connects the residue of survived memory and questions of reincarnation with the question of returning from the dead. In other words, in Resnais’s account, death and life intersect, and people return from death. The past neither dies nor passes away but continues to be there as matter, as body, as Bergsonian images, and it constantly interacts with the present. Deleuze says that the lives and bodies of those who have passed through death stand still in Resnais’s films. Deleuze poses the question of memory as a question of the zombie-like body that remains while passing away and lives while dying, so to speak. He states, “The character in Resnais’s cinema is Lazarean precisely because he returns from death, from the land of the dead; he has passed through death and is born from death, whose sensory-motor disturbances he retains. Even if he was not personally in Auschwitz, even if he was not personally in Hiroshima…” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, co-written with Guattari, is probably the first time Deleuze touches on the living dead, a subject that intersects with the myth of labor. At the same time, it may remind us of the infamous slogan from the concentration camps.

It is not at all clear to what extent it is relevant to this context, and it may even be completely unrelated, but clearly Ko Murobushi had a strong interest in the concept of living dead. He calls out to “those who have been omitted, concealed, and discarded, those who have been buried away in the darkness.” Murobushi writes:

Living Dead

No matter if you stay in a form, or bask in the flow of how a form collapses, or reside in the unformal formless flow, is this not living dead? Is this not to live death?

The more you sharpen external and internal physical sensuality and sensibility, the more you deepen them even further, the more that process resembles the work of exhuming dead bodies, some who were omitted between the interpreted=misinterpreted truths, just as Nietzsche said, or, in other words, the ones who were buried away in the darkness, in our noises, or in the incomprehensible.

It is as if every single act of raising arms and throwing legs, unearthing our own respective graves and continuing to dig deep, starts to shine in the interaction with death, via death: as if digging out our shiny fetus, another life, from the darkness.

Incidentally, Hiroshima Mon Amour, which was released in 1959, was filmed in 1958. This year was one of the turning points in the history of the atomic bombing. This is because it was in 1958 that the Urakami Cathedral, which had been destroyed by the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki by the U.S. military but continued to stand as tiled walls in the form of ruined walls and pillars, was definitively (re)destroyed by human hands. The suppression of Christianity in Japan lasted for more than 250 long, harsh years from the beginning of the 17th century, going through countless collapses (roundups, tortures, and massacres). Nagasaki nevertheless remained a place of faith, and the Urakami Cathedral, completed in 1925 after decades of work, was located a few hundred meters from the hypocenter. On the morning of August 9th, 1945, a U.S. bomber and its crew, having received a blessing from a Catholic priest, accidentally dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki contrary to what was originally planned, killing everyone in the Urakami Cathedral and nearly 70% of the Christians living in Urakami. The remains of the Urakami Cathedral were the matter-memory of these dead people. Assume that Resnais is a film-maker of memory, and yet the remains of the Urakami Cathedral, which served as a memory of the atomic bombing in Nagasaki, were physically erased from the Earth at the same time as the filming of Hiroshima Mon Amour in 1958. The war on memory continued after 1945, painting more disasters on top of more disasters. The destruction of the remains of Urakami Cathedral was probably carried out under the political, economic, and military circumstances of the Cold War when the “peaceful use” of nuclear energy began to be advocated, as well as a fear of the theological and political significance that the remains might have in the future. In Japan, discourse on the damage caused by the atomic bombing was repeatedly condemned, and anti-communist forces crossed national borders to help raise funds for the reconstruction of the Urakami Cathedral. Scars must be erased. Such politics of erasure will be repeated in Japan after 2011.

I would also like to note here that the word body in European languages indicates a range of things. The word body (corps in French) stands for not only flesh and a physical structure but also an object and furthermore, a group of people or an organization. This is why, as Kantorowicz pointed out, the church is traditionally viewed as an individual body in Christianity. He explains that “the customary anthropomorphic image comparing the Church and its members with a, or any, human body was sided by a more specific comparison: the Church as a corpus mysticum compared with the individual body of Christ, his corpus verum or naturale.” Given a traditional concept of body such as this, the remains of the dilapidated Urakami Cathedral perhaps may be viewed as a body, as ruins that were barely standing on their own. Tsuyoshi Takase describes what he found in the cathedral as follows, “The right half of the statue of Our Lady of Sorrows was charred as though it had been engraved. A dainty face of an angel with the left side of its forehead to its right eye was gouged out. It had a defined nose and a faint smile on its well-shaped lips. A sacred statue stood with its upper half blown away. A statue of St. Mark the Evangelist standing while missing his entire head, and that of Jesus with two-thirds of it burnt.” In 1958, the body-turned-ruins was demolished once again. Having been destroyed by the atomic bombing first, the vestige of the destruction itself was destroyed all over again.

Another anecdote on the form of bodies can be associated with this idea of a body as ruins. Fransisco de Xavier—one of the founding members of the Society of Jesus with Ignatius de Loyola—who is considered to have introduced Christianity to Japan, was mummified after his death in 1552 and had his right arm cut off approximately 60 years later. Xavier’s right arm, which had seldom left Rome where it had been stored, visited Nagasaki in 1949 for the 400th anniversary of the introduction of Christianity with the atomic bombing as the backdrop. Xavier continued to be transferred throughout and after his life: A native of the Basque Country, he went to India and then to China for missionary work, returned to the continent after visiting Japan, and ultimately died in China, after which his dead body was transferred to India, and his right arm was cut off and transferred to Rome before it finally arrived in Japan. Yoshikichi Furui made the following comment about that experience: “Then four hundred years later in 1949, Showa 24, during the 400th anniversary of Xavier’s arrival in Japan, Xavier’s right arm in a glass container revisited Japan. I was in the 6th grade of elementary school, and was astonished to see the photograph in the newspaper. I encountered the persistence of the westerners who terrified me four years ago during the air raid here. […] Worship of holy relics has been a foundation of the establishment of churches […]”

Furui’s use of the word “persistence” is truly accurate. It was not only Xavier’s right arm, but also various other body parts of his that had been scattered around the world. These body parts have become holy relics, holy dust, or mummies, forming a foundation of the church. It is through a process of mutilation and dispersion such as this that those body parts, symbols of holiness transported and disseminated, also literally rise as one body, a church = body, at the various sites at which they were disseminated. Just as the body of Jesus persisted as a prodigious body of a worldwide organization that consists of churches and congregations, the body of Xavier, whose parts were physically and materially cut off, was scattered and thus provided sacred foundations. In the age of technological reproducibility, a film, for instance, has its copies dispersed and distributed worldwide in a single burst and is consumed globally in different contexts at different times and places. In the case of Xavier, however, it is not copies that are being dispersed. It is his actual body that has been torn to pieces and scattered. Supported by the uniformity of the body, chronological and semantic continuity and tradition continue to be passed on organically to various places. This is accompanied by the concrete and horrific evidence that appears in the form of a mummified body.

Ko Muorbushi, on the other hand, premises his statements regarding sacred beings on the body detached from its uniformity and organicity. He describes a situation where “sacred beings” themselves are “detached from a sacred being” and where “collective”ly formed “circles” are “torn to pieces.” His concept of body includes collectivity, yet does not aim at organically becoming a part of a collective. He demands the process of withdrawing not only from the human collective but also from being a human, thus approaching disabled bodies and disabled collectives. The quoted text below can be viewed as a reenactment of the process of the subject I falling away, given how the subject is missing in many parts:

Have been wondering about sacred beings detached from a sacred being: about what’s out of place, out of mind, and out of communication. Have been dancing as though leaning over to the rights owned by things such as dysfunctionality and katateochi (lit. ‘one hand dropping’ = to be incomplete, unfair). Have always been skeptical about things that are sufficiently repaid or compensated.

For instance, steps that are aligned with the music collapse there. Circles formed in round dance that are under collective intoxication get torn to pieces. There is a dance which strays from that, in which something beautiful in the form of neither a human being nor a beast hobbles out at a slanted angle.

“[A]s though leaning over to the rights owned by things such as dysfunctionality and katateochi,” he says. Murobushi often interprets words as what they literally mean and metaphors and idiomatic phrases as what they literally indicate. He associates the expression “one hand dropping” with a literal act of dropping a hand or a state of missing a hand. In this case, there must be a vision of a body whose hand is missing and a hand dropped from the body, each dancing on its own while losing its balance and swaying in the middle of the fall. This happens while losing the uniformity and coidentity of the original body and straying from the cooperativity of a collective body. Steps aligned with music and their resulting satisfaction (the body’s collective conformity to the music) are jointly deconstructed and collapsed.  A body segment, namely an articulation, also collapses, bends where it should not bend, and stiffens where it should bend, thus forming a new dysfunctional and uneven body. Murobushi reflects as follows:

My collection of physical techniques includes stiffening muscles, bones, and skin, thus deconstructing them into pieces or relaxing the whole body all at once at the point where it is stiffened to maximum, namely, like a Möbius loop, refluxing and inverting the cutaneous sense that divides the inside and the outside. However, one never knows the fatal dose of poison or an absolute speed until it reaches that point… Is eternity a one-time thing?

03

Ko Mubobushi seeks the boundary zone of “something beautiful in the form of neither a human being nor a beast.” The zone is distorted space-time that does not belong to any territory or realm. It is in such fundamental subject matter of his that cosmos and chaos reside, and the traffic between the two is known as transit. That is to say, somewhere between cosmos and chaos, order and disorder, or to translate that into Nietzsche’s language, between Dionysus and Apollo. It is between a chaotic being torn to pieces and a being under the morphological principle. Murobushi envisions a configuration of traffic where cosmos and chaos fuel one another from their respective counterpoints. Cosmos transfers to chaos and chaos to cosmos. It is only in this process of transferring and switching that the transit persists. Murobushi describes the process:

If it is chaos that gives life to order and order that gives shape to chaos, a form and the outside of it can be tentatively viewed as coexisting with each other.
So then that boundary… it is always in the form of transit as you may know. Transit is a form that transitions. Its default state is likely due to one or a myriad of upheaving and transforming states of things.
It is something that exercises.
A thing, in other words.
Or events.
The state of chaos-mos!
Our lives are lived under the flux of reality and hyperreality due to the motility of things in a transitory state, of formally ambiguous and therefore unnamed things.

Transit is a transition between chaos and cosmos and what always remains in between. The boundary is not being crossed in the transition but rather the transition itself and both sides of the boundary—order and disorder—transform along in reaction to the transition. While order changes its form in a course of continuous differential convulsions, chaos too is constantly reformed in different times and places. Transit, in Murobushi’s account, is probably not a matter of traveling between different locations. A mere trip between different locations is nothing more than moving within a maintained order. His focus is not on getting lost within order, but rather on losing order itself. It is on inverting order itself into chaos like a Möbius loop and spotting the moment when chaos concurrently becomes order. Murobushi continues to travel as though turning the entire Earth into the water’s edge where order and chaos jostle.

I would like to investigate two texts here: the linguist Émile Benveniste’s “The Notion of ‘Rhythm’ in its Linguistic Expression” published in 1951 and the aesthetician Henri Maldiney’s “L’esthétique des rythmes” published in 1967. Benveniste methodically explores the context of various Greek texts in which the word rhythm is used. Although what he conducts is a historical investigation regarding the usage of the word, he attempts to overthrow the concept of rhythm itself on the way. This comes from the idea that the general concept of rhythm in contemporary society, namely rhythm as a regular beat and a measure for movements to follow along, has only been acknowledged since Plato, and that there were completely different definitions of the word rhythm if we examine its usage before that. This other usage involves atomic theory as well.

Let us briefly go over the outlines of Benveniste’s argument. To begin, he states, “[B]eyond the human sphere, we project a rhythm into things and events. This vast unification of man and nature under time, with its intervals and repetitions.” Benveniste considers rhythm to be something that crosses the boundaries between animals, plants, minerals, the organic and the inorganic, living nature and perished nature, and cogitation and the body. Rhythm becomes a fluctuation of the boundaries itself as it crosses any boundary. Secondly, what the word rhythm (ῥυθμός) indicates according to Benveniste is “the form in the instant that it is assumed by what is moving, mobile and fluid, the form of that which does not have organic consistency […] It is the form improvised, momentary, changeable.” Benveniste’s objective is to conceptually displace the notion of rhythm as a so-called regular beat. Rhythm, in his account, is a form that is fluid, improvised, momentary, and prone to change, and one which is in constant transformation. It is therefore the impromptu state of being transboundary worn by the body with no “organic consistency” (consistance organique).

In response to these points made by Benveniste, the aesthetician Maldiney brings rhythm to a whole new level: as an argument regarding chaos. While referring to Paul Klee, Maldiney defines rhythm as something that manages to make a shift from chaos to cosmos and that which enables such a shift. Rhythm is now placed between chaos and cosmos. Maldiney describes, “There is nothing but rhythm between a tangled bundle of wandering lines that almost makes viewers lose their focus—which Paul Klee refers to as an example of chaos—and the radiance of space originating from a sudden movement. Rhythm allows the transition of chaos to order. Hans von Bülow said: ‘In the beginning was rhythm.’ Rhythm is a secondary response to an abyss.”

If the quote above was to be supplemented, I would add that the rhythm in Murobushi’s account does not remain only in the realm of transition from chaos to order, but also implies the opposite transition as well. He repeatedly questions a breakdown in morphological principle, a form that appears for the first time within, and deformed beings that are in between. As though descending into chaos means ascending to form and collapsing into form means ascending to chaos. As though falling while rising and rising while falling at the precise moment of leaping flesh.

A form breaks down
All the forms reveal themselves in the middle of collapsing

Something that rises with deterioration and something that deteriorates as it rises. / The crisis, that’s what Butoh is. […]
A group of men simply crumbles down / Collapses with heated breath
Collapses and hit bones / No more than that

Finally, I would like to briefly add a few notes on Lucretius. Lucretius states in On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura) that body parts were not made for any specific purpose. Eyes, for instance, are not made for seeing. He suspends teleology and dismisses the principle that organically arranges each body part by doing so. Lucretius deconstructs the final cause just as Nietzsche’s genealogy does. The same may apply to ears, tongue, shins and hamstrings, and hands. The same goes for tools and weapons. The idea that ears are there for hearing, a tongue for talking, and feet for walking appears absurd to Lucretius. According to him, there exists a body with things called eyes or legs ex post facto, which do not yet have a usage such as seeing and walking attached. Functions such as seeing and walking are formed eventually in the process of moving that body part in a certain way. These functions are not destined to be generated. There once was, therefore, a body prior to its uses, operating in ways other than seeing or walking, a body of no use, and a body that did not serve any purpose before the emergence of body parts made for seeing and for walking. This is how Lucretius reclaims the idea of organs stripped of their fixed usage and body movements of no use. According to Lucretius,  “[S]ince nothing at all was born in the body that we might be able to use it, but what is born creates its own use. […] the birth of the tongue came long before discourse, and the ears were created much before sound was heard, and in short all the limbs, I trow, existed before their use came out.”

As long as it is given that a body is saturated with conventions, a body of no use presumably should be created as rebellion and insurrection and as a rejection of labor, functions, and usability under certain circumstances. This must be a body that does not labor or function at all. On the other hand, this body might generate new usages of organs that deviate from conventional ones, thus leading to a metamorphosis of the organs. An enigmatic body becoming an organ for seeing things and an organ for walking is an outrageous event. If that’s the case, the construction of new usages should radically change the organism of a body itself and the placement of joints. The body derails and constructs new usages which, however, are of no use themselves. This is a rhythm between uselessness and usefulness. This body would only appear in a particular shape as the usage disintegrated. This is a body losing its way in eternity, a body that leaps as it falls and speaks a convulsing language. These are bodies that only dance on the edge, on the boundary, and thus are the bodies of unworking.

There is hatred toward any kind of morphology. Guess what that is? Isn’t it rather like an attachment?—an attachment that is mingled with aversion while also in conflict and swinging between form and unform. Things that are something else before becoming words or taking form. Do we dance in the hope of reaching ‘unworking’ which has always been alive and interacted with?
[…]
Clinamen: to quirk, to always deviate, to diagonalize, to move onto another line haphazardly, to collide, to blend.