I don’t blame you for fleeing. It’s valid.
Lamella, lamella, lamella. (It sounds like the beginning of a song.) I first came across the word in a book about the psychotherapist Jacques Lacan. Lacan describes lamella as a terrifying metaphorical mucous that threatens to envelop us, that flies off when we are born as we enter language. According to him, it is related to the knowledge we will die, or the desire to die, or our organic matter’s insistence that we should die with its (he insists) unavoidable, internal conflict between inertia and excitement. For Lacan, lamella cannot be represented. It is the horror of mortality, which the gendered subject can never escape (a threatening Other).
Except, that is not the only way to think about lamella. Is it a more feminist reading that rejects the reduction of human life to the level of cells or quanta? Or a humanist reading? Or a feminist-humanist reading? Or else, a rejection of secularism? Can we position ourselves, our societies, differently? Towards becoming rather than towards entropy?
LAMELLAE.org includes images made with or else blended with or placed in relation to artificial intelligence (AI) output. A book called Obstetrics for Nurses by L Zabriskie (1960) informs the AI generator or the fragments of narrative that occasionally emerge or intrude.
LAMELLAE.org is a website without a proper menu. If it makes you feel lost and frustrated, on the verge of giving up, I am providing this link, a point of departure to nearly every page on the website (although, as the becoming of the website is a performance, I am updating it often, so please forgive me when I fail to keep up with this promise). It will open in a new browser window, so you can always return here, should you get caught in a cul-de-sac. As you click through the LAMELLAE.org website, you may find yourself back on this site or page, or even on one of the other nodes I inhabit across the web, but you should always be able to return to the site via the links I’ve embedded.
Although the website can be viewed on a phone, it works best on larger screens (a failing I am struggling to counter).
Note: This page is being updated and edited regularly as the project evolves. I promise I won’t make predictions or come back and change something to pretend I guessed a major event in advance though…
*”Art-working is different from creativity. Art-working is never about aesthetics alone. Art-working is swerving on the edges of creativity and aesthetics, at the crossroads between aesthetics and ethics, at the level of proto-ethics.” (Ettinger, 2020: §10)
Refs:
Ettinger, B. (2020) ‘Beyond the Death-Drive, beyond the Life-Drive: Being-toward- Birthing with Being-toward-Birth; Copoiesis and the Matrixial Eros—Metafeminist Notes’, in P. de Assis and P. Giudici (eds) Aberrant Nuptials: Deleuze and Artistic Research 2. Leuven, BELGIUM: Leuven University Press. Available at: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/detail.action?docID=5983407 (Accessed: 11 October 2022).
Zizek, S. (2006) How to read Lacan. London: Granta. Available at: http://www.vlebooks.com/vleweb/product/openreader?id=none&isbn=9781847085405 (Accessed: 19 June 2022).