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themselves in certain directions that only they are able, collaboratively, to establish. This is called dwelling, literature, philosophy, media, politics, art, and culture. This establishing, which is always provisional, entails taking an exposed position that orients one within the absolute opening of exposure. It is a windbreak, a lean-to against the wind and weather. To be exposed is to experience aesthetics: a perception, a sensibility, a concocting, and a reading. This is mortality. How much of the solar wind can one withstand? How does one untangle the night from the day? What sort of stellar shadow is cast by the lean-to in which one lives? Exposure exposes itself as the torsional edge of a seam.
Taking a position—risk management and the calculability of a bet—is to pause for the merest of moments in a pose. Glance at the camera. Wait a moment and see if the exposure is right, see if any shadows disturb the boundary of the frame. There is no indemnity against the intrusion of ghosts, and what protection there is always entails the risk of a double-indemnity in which everything is lost. In the far corner of the studio there is a scrim on which one can scribble a quick note so that others will take account of one, remember one’s passing, but even that is not guaranteed. One should drop the pose now, if desired, and take another position. Establish your identity and just be yourself. It is the most natural thing in the world.
Exposure marks the skin of philosophy, technology, literature, painting, cinema, institutions, and history, all of which turn themselves inside out toward the world and show themselves as the play of chiaroscuro along the infinite edges of the screen of the scrim. The world appears as a vanishing, vanishes as an appearance. The air is full of specters. This is the earth, the place of human habitation. The ex- joins the un- and the re- as a part of the constellation of prefixes that operationalize the (dis)jointures of being. Perhaps, though, that is just a bit too much? Not quite enough? As you please.
Theodor Adorno has commented that “only polemically does reason present itself to the knower as total reality, while only in traces and ruins is it prepared to hope that it will ever come across correct and just reality” (“Actuality of Philosophy” 121). These traces are constitutive