Fichamento: Taussig, Michael T. (1999).

Defacement: public secrecy and the labor of the

negative. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

1: When the human body, a nations flag, money, or a public statue is defaced, a strange
surplus of negative energy is likely to be aroused from within the defaced thing itself. It is now
in a state of desecration, the closest many of us are going to get to the sacred in this modern
world. Indeed this negative state can come across as more sacred than sacred, especially
since that most spectacular defacement, the death of God, was announced by Nietzsches
madman: Do you not feel the breath of the empty space? he demands, lantern held high in
the blazing sun.

2: Yet what if the truth is not so much a secret as a public secret, as is the case with most
important social knowledge, knowing what not to know? Then what happens to the inspired
act of defacement? Does it destroy the secret, or further empower it? For are not shared
secrets the basis of our social institutions, the workplace, the market, the family, the state? Is
not such public secrecy the most interesting, the most powerful, the most mischievous and
ubiquitous form of socially active knowledge there is? What we call doctrine, ideology,
consciousness, beliefs, values, and even discourse, pale into sociological insignificance and
philosophical banality by comparison: for it is the task and life force of the public secret to
maintain that verge of a thousand plateaus, resolute in its directionless stasis, my subject,
my just subject: the characterization of negation as sacred surplus whose force lies entirely in
the mode of revelation we seek and seek to make.

4: Defacement is privileged among these arts of magic because it offers the fast track to the
mimetic component of sympathetic magic, in which the representation becomes the
represented, only to have the latter die, in the slipstream of its presencing.

5-6: This reconfiguration of repression in which depth becomes surface so as t o remain depth,
I call the public secret, which, in another version, can be defined as that which is generally
known, but cannot be articulated, first drawn to my attention in an extreme form in Colombia
in the early 1980s, when there were so many situations in which people dared not state the
obvious, thus outlining it, so to speak,with the spectral radiance of the unsaid; as when people
were taken off buses and searched at roadblocks set up by the police or military, the secret
being that these same police and military were probably a good deal more involved in
terrorism and drug running than the guerilla forces they were pitted against.

6: We all knew this, and they knew we knew, but there was no way it could be easily
articulated, certainly not on the ground, face-to-face. Such smoke screens are surely long
known to mankind, but this long knowness is itself an intrinsic component of knowing what
not to know, such that many times, even in our acknowledging it, in striving to extricate
ourselves from its sticky embrace, we fall into even better-laid traps of our own making. Such
is the labor of the negative, as when it is pointed out that something may be obvious, but
needs stating in order to be obvious. For example, the public secret. Knowing it is essential to
its power, equal to the denial. Not being able to say anything is likewise testimony to its
power.

8: God is not the problem. Killing him achieved nothing. Maybe less than nothing. The mystery-
model of the real continues stronger than before with God-substitutes piling up by the minute.
The addiction to the disjunction of appearance and essence goes deep.

13: What exists now is perhaps best thought of as a new amalgam of enchantment and
disenchantment, the sacred existing is muted but powerful forms, especially and this is my
central preoccupation in its negative form as desecration. () Has the sacred ever been
free of transgressive impulse? This suggests that desecration is more than the inverse of the
sacred or sacrifice. Something more complicated than inversion is going on.

20: Why then, we must ask, all the fuss that suddenly arises concerning monuments during
and after the toppling of the regime? Toppling of course gives the game away, as if the
regime itself is a monument and, what is more, as if there exists a sort of death wish deep
within the monument, something in the monumentality of the monument that cries out to be
toppled, besmirched, desecrated in a word, defaced.

24: But which comes first, chicken or egg, defacement or sympathetic magic? A rhetorical
question, no doubt, but let me suggest that defacement comes first or at least creates an
express lane to the magic of the mimetic, such that defacement of the till-then-inert copy
triggers its inherent capacity for life into life.

25: Whats more, its not only as if disfiguring the copy acts on what it is a copy of, but that,
associated with this, the defaced copy emits a charge which seems how else can we say this?
to enter the body of the observer and to extend to physically fill, overflow, and therewith
create an effusion of proliferating defacements As away they rust, so without them even
knowing it, I love it. And the rot spreads in a riot of contagion beginning with (1) the tethering
of a live corgi dog on the bench a day or two after Her beheading, no to mention (2) the loving
care with which the media highlights its ubiquitous tags of image-befoulment, Her bare breasts
and the princes legs apart, and (3) yet, nevertheless, people of all ages wanted more than
anything else to sit with them or between them or behind them, whatever, and have their
photos taken thus.

29: Legal provision for freedom of expression drastically undercuts the success of the defacing
intention. The less censorship there is, the weaker, by and large, becomes the defacing act.
This paradox has paradoxical effects, as, when defacement achieves its goal by antagonizing
authority and bringing repression down upon itself, the artist then protests in the name of
freedom of expression when the point of the work was to arouse that antagonism, create
repression, and strengthen the hostility to defacement that freedom of expression would
undermine. The paradox is only deepened by the observation that the artist seems to have no
option other than protest, whereas in truth what one should be protesting would be the
absence of repression. Such is the insoluble illogic of defacement, equally illustrated by the
selfless dedication of the censor experiencing all manner of grim pleasures in witnessing
obscenity so as to stop it dead in its tracks. Just think of the children.

31: The slide towards bodily realness of defaced statuary ensures that the media itself
becomes an extension of the defacement, essential to its proliferation. What catches the eye
of the media is the pathos of this challenge to the death of representation. How the words and
images now fly!

43: The power of the curse and obscenity speaks to the same awakening of slumbering
powers, and this brings us to the unsettling and indeed contemptible consideration that there
is a large class of representations that have a strategic, built-in, desire to be violated, without
which they are gapingly incomplete. This is Robert Musils mischievous point regarding statues,
for instance, and it implies that the critique supplied by defacement is already inscribed within
the object and that what defacement does, like a magic wand, is no more that to tap the
object to bring these otherwise obscure or concealed inner powers flooding forth.

50: Such a (public) secret may for the moment be defined as that which is generally known but
cannot be spoken, and here, at the outset, as the definition sinks in, to the degree it can, let us
pay homage to the heterogeneity of the knowledge at stake here with its knowing what not to
know, its strategic absences, its resort to riddle and tone

51: Think of Robert Musils statement that the most striking thing about monuments is their
lack of strikingness. In fact they are invisible: Like a drop of water on an oilskin, he wrote,
the attention runs down them without stopping for a moment. For him, the most striking
feature of monuments is that you do not notice them. There is nothing in the world as invisible
as monuments. Doubtless they have been erected to be seen even to attract attention; yet
at the same time something has impregnated them against attention Yes, as Marina Warner
goes on to note with reference to this observation and its relevance to the statue of The Law in
the Place du Palais Boubon in Paris, were it to be removed, her absence would be acutely
felt.

54: the grandeur of the nation, in the case of the flag, and the extraordinary, indeed super-
naturally complicated and taken-for-granted wonder of the socially contrived social
agreement to agree on circulation of tokens of wealth that is the state-endorsed thing called
money ()

54: And it is precisely here in the very nerve center of this active forgetting that, with its
burnings, its savage markings, its cruel and often clever cuttings defacement exerts its
curious property of magnifying, not destroying, value, drawing out the sacred from the
habitual-mundane, illuminating what Nietzsche saw as metaphoric basis for all existence but
effaced by usage, passing into the practical illusions of factual truth. Defacement puts this
habitual operation of effacement into reverse, releasing, through its metonymic hands-on
downright crassness the magical quality of the metaphor which lies hidden or asleep in the
uprightness of the everyday. The true defacement, of course, is precisely this exposure of
facticitys hidden dependence on illusion. For who could live in such a world?

55: () as if defacement was first and foremost a ripping of the surface and thereby an
unmasking of hidden capacities waiting behind ready to burst forth with immolation the
immolation defining this invisible border waiting to be crossed, tempting but dangerous, even
cruel, guarding some secret awaiting release.

57: Take Elias Canettis fearsome dictum in his book Crowds and Power that secrecy lies at the
very core of power, no less than Michel Foucaults statement in his History of Sexuality that
secrecy is not in the nature of an abuse of power, but is indispensable to its operation.

61: As long as the law is upheld to all appearances, he writes, the power of the state is
inviolate and the authorities satisfied.

75: Hence the methodology of human science unites with the ancient methodology of public
secrecy as both blur into the charade of scientific detachment, and this cuts to the heart of
anthropological or cross-cultural knowledge (). In other words, detachment from ones
own values is followed by projection of oneself into the Others, which in turn is followed by
detachment from that projection so that one can then detach oneself from ones own.

103: Let me then call this struggle with ambiguity the labor of the negative, and while
underlining the suffering no less than the patience here required, let me also recall the gloss
Hegel gives to Understanding as not only the most astonishing and greatest of all powers,
but as love disporting with itself. To me this suggests that far from Understanding being an
attainable and stable goal, its very greatness implies a profound instability, as when Hegel
speaks not only of love disporting with itself, but of mind as the power that can look the
negative in the face and dwell with it as with death in a sundered wholeness, providing the
magical power that converts the negative into being.

144: () what sacrifice demands in light of the aforementioned texts is that we try to
understand the nature of a giving that involves destruction precisely the terms of the
revelation of the secret and its subsequent etherealization as some sort of spiritual presence.
Indeed, the parallel here between the secret and the self-sacrificing god is uncanny. If we
make a further substitution, that of the public secret for the secret proper, then we move the
parallel even closer to the self-sacrifice of the god as the prime mechanism for the origin not
only of the god, but, as I see it, as the origin of Being itself, because with the public secret
knowing what not to know there is decidedly repetitive if irregular pulse, a sort of trembling
between revelation and concealment by an infinitude of what we could call mini-self-sacrifices
from which springs life no less constant than death.

144: Canettis feverish figure of the secret as a process rather than a thing, a process which
ineluctably bestows upon the secret a godly status, prior to its terrible self-destruction,

170: This, Crocker calls a public secret, which he neatly defines as something privately
known but collectively denied.

268: it is precisely the role of secrecy, specifically public secrecy, to control and hence to
harness the great powers of contradiction so that ideology can function.