I attempt here a clarification of some of the theoretical work on the relationships among and between authorship, text, and meaning.  I am particularly concerned with the more problematic aspects of language: the perils of translating between any combination of languages and of transcribing speech into writing; the universal inability to describe experiences of wonder and trauma; the existence of infinite possible interpretations of poetry and everyday miscommunications.  Building upon the work of Barthes and Blanchot, I first establish the author’s lack of agency over language — in that the author lacks control over the path of intended and interpreted meanings as they travel from the author to the text to the reader.  I further contend that words exist as bodies;  moving, growing, and procreating as such.  Finally, I propose a possible solution to the lack of authorial agency by framing the embodied act of authorship as a productive act.  The act of writing entails the interactions between embodied words and embodied authors, and this embodied experience inscribes itself on the world as agency.  The work of Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, and in particular her novel The Hour of the Star, provides a case study for this project, while the work of Cixous serves as a theoretical ground.   .pdf

Much of contemporary theory presents the human subject as deprived of agency, a mere “product” of converging biological, social, political, semiotic and/or linguistic forces. This essay examines Gloria Anzaldúa’s allegorical poem “Cervicide,” about Self-murder or suicide, to argue that, indeed, the Subject—especially the border-dwelling, rejected Other—is often positioned by culture to resist, reinterpret, and recombine those same constitutive influences to, in effect, remake the Self.  Louis Althusser’s theories on ideology and art, Sigmund Freud’s speculations on the mind of the creative writer, and Virginia Woolf’s descriptions of her own creative process are brought to bear upon Anzaldúa’s discussion of the artist-as-shaman and the role of art in the quest for a “complete” Self.  I argue that “good art,” in both the Althusserian and Anzaldúan senses, arises from the artist’s (often psychologically painful) engagement with the ideology that shapes her; in addition, beyond the artist’s personal creative process, art must, to be successful or “good,” transform the ideology that constructs the consciousness of the viewer/participant, thereby, changing the larger culture and its influences upon the Subject.   .pdf

What is currently known as “destruction art” originated in the artistic and cultural work of avant-garde art groups during the 1960s. In the aftermath of World War Two, the threat of annihilation through nuclear conflict and the Vietnam War drastically changed the cultural landscapes and everyday life in the United States, Asia, and Europe. In this context, “destruction art” has been situated as the “discourse of the survivor,” or the method in which the visual arts cope with societies structured by violence and the underlying threat of death. Many artists involved in destruction art at this time were concerned with destroying not just physical objects, but also with performing destruction with various media. By integrating the body into conceptual works rather than literal narratives of violence, artists contested and redefined mainstream definitions of art, social relations and hierarchies, and consciousness. Yoko Ono, who was born in Tokyo in 1933 and began her work as an artist in the late 1950s, addresses destruction through conceptual performances, instructions, and by presenting and modifying objects. Ono’s work is not only vital to understanding the development of the international avant garde, but it is relevant to contemporary art and society. Her attention to the internalization of violence and oppression reflects contemporaneous feminist theory that situates the female body as text and battleground. By repositioning violence in performance work, Ono’s art promotes creative thinking, ultimately drawing out the reality of destruction that remains hidden within the physical and social body.   .pdf

I present here  an interpretation of Nietzsche’s concept of the “will to power” as an immanent and creative force that serves as an organizing principle of reality. This churning, yet systematic chaosmological force is first (re)constructed from Nietzsche’s posthumously published notes in The Will to Power and is then applied to the field of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, showing how order arises from chaos through the internalization and organization of energy in an open system. These conclusions are then applied to various scales of social organization, focusing on the creative capacity of chaos and the problem of rigid organization.   .pdf

Karl Barth and Paul Tillich were two of the foremost Protestant Christian theologians of the twentieth Century; Nietzsche was one of the nineteenth century's most influential prophets of atheism. Even so, Barth and Tillich did not simply read Nietzsche; they encountered his ideas head on and even used them in the exploration of their respective theologies. This article discusses the different ways each thinker addressed Nietzsche, and what this encounter meant for their theology.   .pdf