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Showing posts with label Dante. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dante. Show all posts

Friday, April 25, 2014

DIVERGENT: Shai Woodley and Theo James - What Real Beauty looks like

Theo James as Four in Divergent
Yes he is beautiful. The performed role of Four introduces the new masculine. What man can and could be.

Shai Woodley as Tris in Divergent
Tris is not pretty.
She is not sexy.
She is not cute.
She is not hot.

Shai is simply beautiful.

Tobias runs from Abnegation to Dauntless.
Beatrice runs to Dauntless from Abnegation.

In his fearscapes Four calms his breathing and heart rate. His approach is passive. Four advises Tris to calm her breathing and lower her heart rate. Deal with what's in front of you. Be brave.

Tris actively deals with what's in front of her, to confront and eliminate it so the simulation moves to the next one. An active approach.

Interesting inversion

Yosarrian  in Catch-22: “I’m not running away from my responsibilities. I’m running to them."

Rebecca Schwart/Hazel Jones in The 

Gravedigger's Daughter: Where we're from is nowhere, Mister. But somewhere is where we are going.

Or shall we just read Beatrice through Dante who first saw her when she was nine. As a woman she had the highest reputation of goodness and charity as did her father. Completely selfless. He loved her all his life. She accompanied his imagination through the Circles of Hell and to Paradise, always guiding him with her strength and goodness. 

Beatrice comes to a Circle of Hell which is Dauntless to rescue Tobias.

Greek form of TOBIAH. This is the name of the hero of the apocryphal Book of Tobit in many English versions of the Old Testament. It relates how Tobias, with the help of the archangel Raphael, is able to drive away a demon who has been plaguing Sarah, who subsequently becomes his wife. 

Dante's  Beatrice dies when they are both around 25 years old. Dante cannot be consoled and he writes poetry about death as in Medieval times love and death were joined - Courtly Love. For 2 years afterwards he has an infatuation with a "woman in a window' to whom he writes poetry. Beatrice will reproach him for this in his writing. Then Dante will go into local Florence politics until he is exiled with a threat of death over him. (Both of them had been betrothed as children to others and married others.)

...but the government was still essentially middle-class republican. At the head were the three priors, drawn from the major guilds and housed across the way from the Alighieri hose, in the Tower of Castagna. (p. 71 Dante by R. W. B. Lewis)- I found this floating sign interesting although unimportant.






Saturday, April 19, 2014

DIVERGENT REVIEW on Nietzsche's INSCRIPTION OF THE BODY (Baudrillard, Deleuze,Foucault)

Tris sees Four's tattoo for the first time right after she has been in Four's Fearscape - and so do we

We have seen Marcus come at Four with his leather belt to beat him in multiple selves - a nice wave to The Matrix. We now know that Marcus has beaten Tobias/Four since a young child and Four is paralyzed with fear of him as he regresses to a young child when confronted by him in his Fearscape - (my new word for it.) 

We are not told any more details, but the scene is allowed to resonate in our minds.When you are beaten your body/mind is inscribed as the two are inseparable, in a relation with each other.

We know Tobias's back was beaten because the welts and wounds would not be visible there.The tattoo is announcing the beatings to the world if the world sees.The beatings are revealed and concealed.The belt sliced around to his arms where the tattoo becomes stripes.

A tattoo such as this INSCRIBES the body/mind again. The MEMORY of the constant beatings is inscribed. The memory produces CONSCIOUSNESS of the original inscription. As repetition reinforced the memory of the pain, the tattoo reinforces the memory of what it emotionally and mentally means to you. 
Tris begins to touch the tattoo
The understanding and resonance of touch. Abnegation foregoes touch except in rather indifferent ways. Tris is taught that touch means something. By experiencing the lack of touch, the desire for it and its importance to you increases your awareness of it. Tris is aware of every time Four has touched her in coaching her. His touch is indifferent. Her reception of it is eroticized. She touches Four's tattoo with great tenderness and curiosity. Why all of the factions?



Because Four does not just want to be one person but all of them. We can imagine the child wanting to be imaginative, intelligent, brave, honest, happy and selfless and being beaten for showing any of those indications. His will to knowledge/power has been stifled with beatings. Tris's will to knowledge/power has been snuffed out by her family and her love for them, also an effective way to drive them underground. To repress them in the Inscription of the Body. And Tris's Body/Mind has been reinscribed at Dauntless to be sure. Abnegation, just as all of the other factions, is about Obedience. Staying inside the Dominating Discourse.



For Tris to touch Four with such awe and tenderness is the awakening of eroticism for Four. He turns and kisses her and touches her wanting more. It is then Tris stops him and says, "I don't want to go too fast."


Woman is not equal to man except in the Order of Production. In the Symbolic Order of Seduction, woman is OTHER. Tris does not have a fear of intimacy. That is a clinical term that belongs in the Order of Production. We know she is a virgin and has had Four in her imagination since she met him at the net. She has been unknowingly seducing him. SEDUCTION cannot be produced. It does not figure in the Order of Production - Baudrillard.

Reading through Lacan DESIRE/LACK is a relation. Tris wants to experience desire, not sexual satisfaction. And she wants Four to experience desire. Does she know this? Doubtful. But intuitively she does. This is where that philosophical term the unknown/knowns intercedes, that term Rumsfeld so befuddled himself with. It means that there are knowns you know which you are unaware that you know. Without Lack, there is no Desire.

By going slower Tris will experience longing, desire, waiting, and contemplation of the beloved object and the deepening of self-awareness. Badiou says that love is a challenge, a risk, a jump into the unknown. This is Tris turned into a lovely metaphor. This was Twilight. This is not Hunger Games.

But by going slower Four will also experience these deeper feelings. This is where Four resonates with Dante and his beloved Beatrice, his lifetime muse, whom he only saw once or twice on the street and whom he never knew. An apparition sort of who guided him through the circles of hell. Four's Beatrice will rescue Four from the dungeons of hell.
Step back: the pattern in the tapestry
won’t tell itself till more of it is made.
Although it’s eighty-seven in the shade,
we have to work this hard making the hist-
ory we need till, trusting it, we’re free
to kiss each other better than when we
imagined kissing when we hadn’t kissed.
I would say the same is true on waiting to experience sex.