2023
https://www.etablissementdenface.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/DELAYTODAY-web2.pdf
2022
I have a cough that doesn’t really stop for a while now. It was worse when I first arrived, hocking up phlegm, throat ripping repeatedly, no longer used for speech but something else. Working on my abs at least, crying as a result of the head becoming over-pressurised, senses overwhelmed, streaming tears not knowing, stinging the neck and ears. I did manage to travel here without many eyebrows raised. Painful holding it in, composing oneself, praying, not to have a coughing fit on the border police. It becomes unbearable because chronic. Coughing begets coughing. Holding it in protects the throat I’m told, yet is untenable. Sleep is elusive when you can’t lie horizontal and the smallest tickle heralds hours of unrest. Silence is not something you can command. During my first weeks here I lived with Mi, a drag queen, and Me, a lesbian poet, in a rundown decade-old sharehouse. I wonder what they thought of me those early days. In my dim ground floor room (...)
--Excerpt from Eleanor Ivory Weber, "The structure of looking", Stefano Faoro: The young fascist militant, Kunstverein Nürnberg–Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft and Institut für moderne Kunst, Nürnberg 2022
2022
Could we say that the limit of repression is the truth of weakness? And although weakness has been coded as being without value, this is also essentially a changeable truth that fears nothing. Neuroses may form around this limit just as they may not. This indeterminacy is fundamental. It is why the neoliberal offensive against repression does not alleviate the psyche’s pain. (...)
Is it possible that this threshold where repression reaches limit can be worked with, is plastic? If we consider repression a rather useful tool for maintaining a psychic and libidinal equilibrium, albeit tentatively, it can perhaps equally be abused as a tool for proliferating phobias. The determining factor is how the tension points are coded between the subject and its world, which is always being written. Here I’m thinking of the repressive mechanism’s limit (its weakness – is it a resistance to weakness?) in light of the politics of fear that dominate. The political theorist Donatella di Cesare calls contemporary Western democracy ‘phobocracy’. Is it possible that consistent interrogation by the imperative to free oneself, be oneself and sell oneself, causes repression’s threshold to recoil and become less effective? We can imagine it as a muscle wasting through lack of enervation, which results in accentuated private phobias which appear ‘natural’, but are strategic. And as generalised recoiling occurs, it is accompanied by a rise in paranoid and phobic neuroses, which in turn mutually reaffirm one another. We would need to analyse how repression’s musculature might be grown differently; to limit the rising power of phobia, whose predominant form is the ideal of safety without negativity espoused by finance: endless growth, no loss and no weakness.
--Excerpt from Eleanor Ivory Weber, "Summer Summary: Malabou Doesn't Say", Paradis, Claude Balls Int, Marseille 2022
2021
https://meanjin.com.au/blog/australian-others-penal-logic-and-the-pandemic/
2021
Knowledge resides in the world. Knowledge is not a good or good. It is not bad. It doesn’t have quantity. It is not a property of anyone. It is the property of no one. There is not a place where knowledge is increased, accumulated and counted. Having (more) is not answering, soliciting, giving, meaning. There is no guarantee.
No. This is not a stuff, what I give you without having it to give. It is not a matter to be counted and apportioned and traded. There is no more and no less. It is always more and less than what is expressed. The danger of knowledge overdetermining life is materialised in accumulation.
--Excerpt from Eleanor Ivory Weber, "Letter", Ghislaine Leung: Portraits, Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach 2021
