Ekphrasis: Orfeo Trovatore Stanco

Giorgio de Chirico, "The Mute Orpheus" (1950)

Emma Catherine Hoff (Age 8 - 12/6/20)

After Giorgio de Chirico

An ambassador.
He has no mind, no face.
He sits back in a daze.

Like a dog,
loyal
to anyone who commands him to do anything.
But with no mind.

No, he stoops lower than a dog.
He is not human anymore.
He wears a breastplate—
for every moment he is ready for a battle to lose.

People treat him like a toy,
a robot.
Yet there are no people.

Where he sits is not a city,
but it has walls.
It has no hope,
yet it has strength.
Perhaps the walls have hope, the ambassador thinks.

The walls could talk.
Or could they?
They talked to him.

He knows he is nothing.
He wants to give himself away.
Leave the curtain and chair, and enter the darkness beyond,
where he will have to suffer nothing.
But then the walls would be alone.

Does he already suffer nothing?
He is alive and not alive.
How does he think?
He is alive and not alive.

Like a tree
he stands still, not quite able to grasp the knife
that he could put to his breastplate
to ruin the mechanisms that hide there.
To be gone
from an awful world he is already gone from.

from Wikipedia

Ekphrasis or ecphrasis (from the Greek) is a rhetorical device indicating the written description of a work of art.[1] It is a vivid, often dramatic, verbal description of a visual work of art, either real or imagined. Thus, "an ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art."[2] In ancient times, it might refer more broadly to a description of any thing, person, or experience. The word comes from the Greek ἐκ ek and φράσις phrásis, 'out' and 'speak' respectively, and the verb ἐκφράζειν ekphrázein, 'to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name'.

The works of art described or evoked may be real or imagined; and this may be difficult to discern. Ancient ekphrastic writing can be useful evidence for art historians, especially for paintings, as virtually no original Greco-Roman examples survive.

Excerpt from Slavoj Zizek' "The Parallax View: Towards a New Reading of Kant"

...And it is because of this gap between in-itself and for-itself that capitalism needs formal democracy and equality:

“What precisely distinguishes capital from the master-slave relation is that the worker confronts him as consumer and possessor of exchange values, and that in the form of the possessor of money, in the form of money, he becomes a simple center of circulation—one of its infinitely many centers, in which his specificity as worker is extinguished.”⁶

What this means is that, in order to complete the circle of its reproduction, capital has to pass through this critical point at which the roles are inverted: surplus value is realized only by workers in totality buying back what they produce. This feature provides the key leverage from which to oppose the rule of capital today: is it not natural that the proletarians should focus their attack on that unique point at which they approach capital from the position of buyer and, consequently, at which it is capital which is forced to court them? “/…/ if workers can become subjects at all, it is only as consumers."

Notes:
6. Kojin Karatani, "Transcritique. On Kant and Marx", p. 290.