HG: Is the impulse to know alot, or is the impulse to copy things that strike you?
JMB: Well, originally I wanted to copy the whole history down, but it was too tedious so I just stuck to the cast of characters.
HG: So they’re kinds of indexes to encyclopedias that don’t exist.
JMB: I just like the names.
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the names with which a subject surrounds itself are not indiscernable. But the external witness, noting that for the most part these names lack a referent inside the situation such as it is, considers that they make up an arbitrary and content-free language. Hence, any revolutionary politics is considered to maintain a utopian (or non-realistic) discourse; a scientific revolution is received with skepticism, or held to be an abstraction without a base in experiments; and lovers’ babble is dismissed as infantile foolishness by the wise. These witnesses, in a certain sense, are right. The names generated - or rather, composed - by a subject are suspended, with respect to their signification, from the “to-come” of a truth.
-an early discussion (from the January 1983 issue) between Basquiat and famed Metropolitan curator Henry Geldzahler. from Interview magazine.
-badiou b.e. 398
(Source: beingnothing)
