Whoever said that work exhausts the body is completely right except for one thing: the body has always something to give. Give. Take. Give. It’s a real hang up.^[1]

Substantive: work for the body, akin to what rhetoric is for speech, deferring to it over and over again (that’s the story: a desire for something always finds an opponent: it scrutinizes and weighs up the distance between them in terms of a field of operations, it flings itself into that gap, without the slightest subtlety, but then what form of seduction is subtle. A Polish writer once asked me what philosophical sense does seduction have. I answered: it doesn’t have any, that’s its philosophy).

Substantial: surplus. Give and take copulate effectively thanks to the funny conjunction. But this is a story of another time. Modern times. What is, let’s face it, canonical Fordism. You place your trust in a relationship of apparent exchange, the circularity of give and take that used to sustain the system of barter, now magically incorporated into the concept of the salary. The flaw, what’s missing, is that the salary as an equivalent between what is given and what is received is only possible ideologically or chimerically. The battle was fought, no holds barred, for the surplus.

Let’s accept for a moment that history weighs on bodies. That they hang differently throughout history. They know and ignore everything. (This is how some people define time in the present, an instant floating in the dark). Knowledge is pain, and ignorance pleasure. Both demarcate the field of operations. Can the body then, as an operator in these circumstances, escape from the determinations of the weight of history? It’s possible: the body, tortured by the tension between pain and pleasure, the body which is at once passive and active, male and female, abstract and figurative, refined and convoluted, structural and ornamental, is constructed in secret, like instating plastic arts, a subculture of sorts, made from the detritus of the world of culture, a realm of formless myths, of dried-up passions, of compensation and, naturally, of the unworkable, of surrender and of knowing how to fall. This presupposes an unquestionably defiant intelligence. Which, in itself, is no mean feat.

Pablo Marte

^[1] Of the 300 workers sacked by GM in Figueruelas in 2004, 158 described the blow and the despair caused by the redundancy with the image of a soft toy hanging in the grips of a claw machine. ‘Hanging’, ‘hanging be a thread’, ‘left hanging’ or ‘dependent’ and ‘pending’ or ‘dangling’ were, generally speaking, the words used.