To Be Undone

Abstract

This essay examines two seemingly disparate performances of radical generosity: the meticulous conceptual work of Japanese artist On Kawara, and the much-maligned practice among queer men of deliberately seeking seroconversion (to HIV positivity) through ‘bug chasing’ and ‘gift giving’. I begin with a critical (and not often-considered) moment in the early history of empathy: a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, who was at the time apprenticing for the renowned sculptor Auguste Rodin. Rilke had previously been a student of Theodor Lipps, the scholar responsible for coining the English word ‘empathy’ as a translation of the German einfühlung. Rilke’s poem ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, about an ancient sculptural ruin, invokes the original sense of enfühlung as an aesthetic encounter in which the subjectivity of a human spectator becomes radically entangled with—and in fact undone by—the interiority of a beloved object. Rilke treats this encounter as profoundly significant—as profoundly earth-shattering—precisely because it originates within the non-sentient object itself, and precisely because it evokes a radical re-figuring of the very terms of personhood. Subjectivity and objecthood, for Rilke as for Lipps, are not merely co-constitutive, but are intertwined at a much more fundamental level: the level of being itself.

Notes

1 The friendship between Rilke and Rodin has been well documented in previous scholarly and journalistic work. A recent book by Rachel Corbett, You Must Change Your Life (2016), offers an especially full and complex rendering of their relationship.

2 Herter Norton’s rendering would be closely repeated in a 1957 translation by American poet C. F. MacIntyre and again in Stephen Mitchell’s popular 1995 version, cementing this final command as the poem’s definitive English rendering (Herter Norton 1938: 181).

3 In the original German, the line reads ‘Du mußt dein Leben ändern.’

4 I borrow the phrase ‘all things shining’ from Kaja Silverman’s treatment of the film The Thin Red Line in her book World Spectators, where she writes:

When we affirm being, it is always through phenomenal forms; the ‘All’ could not be more earthly or more diverse. … Although we can apprehend what we are only by thinking beyond ourselves, we can affirm the world only through a very particular pair of eyes. (2009: 132)

 

5 The start and end years varied in each version, depending on when Kawara began typing that particular set.

6 From Claura’s description in the exhibition catalogue: ‘What was attempted here was to create a situation making possible an exhibition that would be a disclosing shelter and not a valorizing receptacle any longer’ (Siegelaub 1970: 51).