Da domus

Jean Delville, 1929, The School of Silence
Fonte: Artmagik

“What domesticity regulated — savagery — it demanded. It had to have its off¬stage within itself. The stories it tells speak only of that, of the seditio smouldering up at its heart. Solitude is seditio. Love is seditio. All love is criminal. It has no concern for the regulation of services, places, moments. And the solitude of the adolescent in the domus is seditious because in the suspense of its melancholy it bears the whole order of nature and culture. In the secrecy of his bedroom, he inscribes upon nothing, on the intimate surface of his diary, the idea of another house, of the vanity of any house. Like Orwell's Winston, he inscribes the drama of his incapacity before the law. Like Kafka. And lovers do not even have anything to tell. They are committed to deixis: this, now, yesterday, you. Committed to presence, deprived of representation. But the domus made legends and representations out of these silences and these inscriptions. In place of which the megalopolis displays, commentates on them, and explains them, makes them communicable. It calls melancholy being autistic and love sex. Like the way that it calls fruges agro-alimentry products. Secrets must be put into circuits, writings programmed, tragedies transcribed into bits of information. Protocols of transparency, scenarios of operationality. After all, I'll take it, your domus, it's saleable, your nostalgia, your love, let me get on with it. It might come in useful. The secret is capitalized swiftly and efficiently. But that the secret should be a secret of nothing, be uncultivated, senseless, already in the domus, the megalopolis has no idea. Or rather, it has only the idea. Whereas the secret, because it consists only in the timbre of a sensitive, sentimental matter, is inaccessible except to stupor.

I wanted to say only this, it seems. Not that the domus is the figure of community that can provide an alternative to the megapolis. Domesticy is over, and probably it never existed, except as a dream of the old child awakening and destroying it on awakening.”

LYOTARD, Jean-François (1991) - Domus and the Megalopolis The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, Stanford University Press