Night thus emerges as a political as well as aesthetic figure: it is the condition for a democracy of immanence, where every fragment of existence can appear without subordination.This democracy of night is fragile, precarious, easily foreclosed by the return of day and its demands. But in its fragility lies its force. Night shows us that another relation to existence is possible: one without hierarchy, without teleology, without transcendence. The wandering of Giovanni and Lidia is not only personal but emblematic of this nocturnal democracy, where even faltering, unresolved relations are allowed to exist without judgment. To affirm night is to affirm the equality of all appearances, all presences, however fleeting.
Where the Enlightenment libertine was once positioned as the satirical disruptor of Church and State, Serra’s figures are too late, liberated after the collapse, not before. They are post-libertine, caught not in rebellion, but in the ruins of pleasure’s dialectic. Serra’s libertines are not rebels; they are exiles from their own bodies. Their gestures, grotesque, tender, absurd,are no longer performed for seduction or domination. Rather, they seem driven by inertia, caught in a state beyond desire. This is where Serra departs from the cinematic lineages of Pasolini or Sadean adaptation. Unlike Salò, Liberté is not allegorical. It does not stage perversion as critique. It simply refuses narration altogether.
This democracy is non-declarative, non-teleological, and non-subjective. In it, the human does not act as a modern citizen, revolutionary, or bearer of rights, but as what he calls the “human-in-the-last-instance.” We will argue that this form of democracy is best understood through the logic of civil eschatology: a mode of inhabiting the end of time without apocalypse, without salvation, and without deferral. In place of philosophy’s decision and theology’s redemption, Laruelle introduces a form of lived sufficiency, where the generic human is neither subject nor agent, but a stranger to all political syntax.
Jacqueline de Jong demanded a ludic society not in aesthetics alone, but in structure: non-hierarchical, anti-teleological, erotic, improvisational, childlike without being childish. Not the neoliberal Disneyland of “experience culture,” but the dangerous, unpredictable terrain of play as insurrection.
Trilectics must be lived, not diagrammed.
This is not a model to be mathematized or reduced to a system. Jorn’s trilectics is a method of becoming, not a theory of knowledge. It asks us to embrace contradiction, play, and non-linearity as the core engine of transformation, rather than anomalies to be resolved.
Night thus emerges as a political as well as aesthetic figure: it is the condition for a democracy of immanence, where every fragment of existence can appear without subordination.This democracy of night is fragile, precarious, easily foreclosed by the return of day and its demands. But in its fragility lies its force. Night shows us that another relation to existence is possible: one without hierarchy, without teleology, without transcendence. The wandering of Giovanni and Lidia is not only personal but emblematic of this nocturnal democracy, where even faltering, unresolved relations are allowed to exist without judgment. To affirm night is to affirm the equality of all appearances, all presences, however fleeting.
Where the Enlightenment libertine was once positioned as the satirical disruptor of Church and State, Serra’s figures are too late, liberated after the collapse, not before. They are post-libertine, caught not in rebellion, but in the ruins of pleasure’s dialectic. Serra’s libertines are not rebels; they are exiles from their own bodies. Their gestures, grotesque, tender, absurd,are no longer performed for seduction or domination. Rather, they seem driven by inertia, caught in a state beyond desire. This is where Serra departs from the cinematic lineages of Pasolini or Sadean adaptation. Unlike Salò, Liberté is not allegorical. It does not stage perversion as critique. It simply refuses narration altogether.
This democracy is non-declarative, non-teleological, and non-subjective. In it, the human does not act as a modern citizen, revolutionary, or bearer of rights, but as what he calls the “human-in-the-last-instance.” We will argue that this form of democracy is best understood through the logic of civil eschatology: a mode of inhabiting the end of time without apocalypse, without salvation, and without deferral. In place of philosophy’s decision and theology’s redemption, Laruelle introduces a form of lived sufficiency, where the generic human is neither subject nor agent, but a stranger to all political syntax.
Jacqueline de Jong demanded a ludic society not in aesthetics alone, but in structure: non-hierarchical, anti-teleological, erotic, improvisational, childlike without being childish. Not the neoliberal Disneyland of “experience culture,” but the dangerous, unpredictable terrain of play as insurrection.
Trilectics must be lived, not diagrammed. This is not a model to be mathematized or reduced to a system. Jorn’s trilectics is a method of becoming, not a theory of knowledge. It asks us to embrace contradiction, play, and non-linearity as the core engine of transformation, rather than anomalies to be resolved.