The Performing Self [antikvár]

Preface Reproduced on the dust jacket and paperbotmd book cover is an unfinished sculpture of Michelangelo, one of the four "Captives" displayed at the Accademia in Florence. The body is emerging from stone, the right leg, thick and pow^erful, is straining up as from the elements that imprison it; the left arm is raised, the elbows forw^ard, and the hand and forearm push at what would be the back of the head. Except there is no head. Where it wotild be is instead a heavy block of stone. So that it is as if the arm and hand, with awesomely sustained and patient exertion, were trying to push off the imposing weight which imprisons the head. The communicated effect is not of aspiration but of some more elemental will toward the attainment of human shape and human recognition; and opposed to this labor into selfhood is nothing so sophisticated as the repressiveness of human agencies. There is instead an altogether less remediable and more stubborn force of natiu:e: the imagined head cannot be conceived except as part of the material that will not willingly yield itself to the head's existence. These are possible impressions, and while they are not, as vu