If the Great Rain that washes away the traces of Jack’s murders-an echo from Elijah’s story in respect to both, the rain but also the slaughtering of Baal’s priests-is an omen, then it is omen confirming that the gods have looked favorably upon his “sacrifices.” So Jack offers his sacrificial victims at the altar of to kalon. No temple, however, is consecrated without a sacrifice (literary, “to make sacred” from sacer and facere), that is, without the shedding of blood. The body-temple and the temple-of-bodies as an image ( eidolon) of the body is precisely what the Greek world knew under the name of agalma. It would not be too risky, therefore, to venture the suggestion that the house that Jack builds is not anyhouse but rather a temple(hence his opening remarks on the architecture of cathedrals) dedicated to the gods-even if these are gods who are more pleased by aesthetics than ethics. 12:27), namely, of the Church, so each of our bodies is itself a church, a temple in which God dwells (1 Cor. Like each of our bodies, borrowing again from Paul, is a member of the body of Christ (1 Cor. The body that becomes a part or a member of the Jack’s house is a body that is itself a house. Isn’t it the body, our body, that body we inhabit, our habitation, our house? Jack’s house organizes the various bodies of his victims by replicating and reproducing, only in a “higher” level, the body’s organization of its various members and, like the body, Jack’s anthropomorphic house is an organism of its own, even more so since it is entirely constructed by organic material. The house that Jack built is not the house of language, signification, representation ( that, as we shall see, is the house that Verge/Virgil built), but the fleshly house made by the human bodies kept in his freezer. Sophistication “loath(s) a diagnosis you can just write in letters.” Perhaps Jack would prefer a diagnosis incised, as Paul writes in his Letters(and in letters) “not with ink,” “not on tablets,” but “on the flesh of the human heart” (2 Cor. If, however, the tool of the Sophist’s art is language and for the philosopher “language is at once the house of being,” Mr. Sophistication delights to play on occasion. Sophistication.” That sophia – in “sophistication” is the same as our familiar sophia of the philosopher and the Sophist-two roles that Mr. After all, Jack himself signs his murder by the artistic pseudonym “Mr. Verge’s scornful characterization of Jack as a “theoretician” does not miss the point. Aristotle calls metaphysics an architectonic science. The architect is the first among the builders but also, he is the builder of what comes first, of the archē, of the beginning. Jack is an engineer and an aspiring architect. In other words it has a kind of will of its own and by following it, the result will be the most exquisite.” It is the jack, and not Jack, that builds Jack’s house-the house that Jack is. In the brief diatribe on the architecture of Gothic cathedrals that Jack gives at the beginning of the film, he concludes with the following statement: “I often say that the material does the work. The car jack determines what sort of a building Jack’s house will be. This car jack is the foundation upon which Jack’s house is to be built as much as the means by which he builds it. The material Jack uses as the instrument for his first in a series of murders was a car jack. After all, all creation, production, and construction must begin with matter. From the beginning it was a matter of material.
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