Liturgies of Repetition: A Preface to the Prologue of the Baphomet
2008; Volume: 41; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2165-2678
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Literary Analyses
ResumoPierre Klossowski's last prose narration, The Baphomet, is form for portraying violent repetition. Within it, there recur the memories, instruments, and rituals of rape, murder, torture, and public execution. Klossowski pictures the recurrence through simulacrum of Scholastic theology and its accompanying liturgy--or, rather, though theatrical theology, Scholasticism that deploys the tableau vivant as sacrament. Its tableaux reach of course beyond the scenes of present life. They add to the traumas of living bodies the suffering memories of souls beyond bodily death souls whose mis-relation to their dead bodies frustrates their ascent. They are condemned to wait and to repeat, to rehearse. Repetition is the divine dispensation for their spiritual region. Even their heresies treat of it. Any Scholastic theology likes to understand later heresies as returns of older ones. In The Baphomet, heresy is fated illusion about the repetitions in bodies and souls. At the center of these tableaux, as at the center of orthodox Christian Scholasticisms, there appears desired body--suspended, violated, completed. Ir looks to be promise of escape, but it is also the emblem and motive for repetition. In the simulated theology of The Baphomet, seems to mean no more than momentary suspension in this enticing and uncanny body, this simulacrum of the divine and demonic, this inevitable reminder of old ecstasies and outrages. Or else salvation is only writing and drawing the body over and over again. Klossowski's text appears to close in upon itself in obsessive desecrations. But to read it in that way is to commit simplifying heresy--and one that Klossowski anticipates. His form is in fact the form of liturgy. Klossowski published complete text of The Baphomet in 1965. (1) The book enjoyed brief notoriety when Roger Caillois resigned from the jury that awarded it Prix des Critiques. (2) Caillois claimed that his objections were stylistic and formal--rather than, say, moral. The dispute was enough to occupy some pages in newspapers and journals of letters. In the end, it proved easier to write about the scandal than about the book. Since the controversy, The Baphomet has found surprisingly few readers in part, no doubt, because of its hermetic obscurity. The text is verbal picture that resists description, refuses ekphrasis. Any attempt to retell it falls into its narrative snares--into its solicitation and parody of repetition. The Baphomet is divided into three parts that correspond to three times--though the break between the second and third is deliberately elided. Figures return and events are repeated or memorialized across all three. The first part, labeled Prologue, occurs during the fall of 1307, in the weeks immediately before the attack by the king of France on the Knights Templar. When he wanted to expropriate the order's properties, King Philip the Fair found it useful to intertwine charges of heresy with charges of sodomy. Accusations of priestly or clerical sodomy were scandalously familiar, hard to disprove, and severely punished. They were also easily interchanged with charges of heresy: every heretic is suspected of perverting bodies--et e converso. As the compiler of the prologue notes, the charges concerned a monstrosity that in the eyes of the epoch seemed to have rather more sorcery than luxury (Baphomet 9-10). (3) if historians now regard the king's charges as political fictions, Klossowski retrieves them into deliberately disjointed chronicle of idolatrous and sodomitic crimes at single Templar house or commandery. The Baphomet's second part unfolds beyond bodily time in purgatory or limbo of disembodied souls preparing for judgment. Its figures are drawn from various periods, but its central episodes refer to the fate of the Templar order and the particular incidents narrated in the prologue. The text cuts back and forth between visionary or hallucinatory episodes occurring in differently tensed spaces, on separate stages. …
Referência(s)