Crystalline Memories: Another Consciousness, Another Sensibility
Crystalline Memories: Another Consciousness, Another Sensibility

Summary/Abstract: This essay is an exploratory investigation into the aesthetics of force and sensation, and an experimental “pragmatics of becoming” in The Beast Trilogy, a science-fiction graphic novel trilogy of Enki Bilal, a French-Yugoslav artist. The study is, first, inclined to transgress the rigid boundaries of logics of identity in favor of attuning to the processes that unfold new and affirmative approaches to the production of subjectivity-the approaches that consist of the processual dynamics of human and non-human bodies in “coagulation” or assemblage with each other. Next, it explores the graphic novels and Enki Bilal’s art as a pure being of sensation, a body that performs, a material capture, that is, a perception-consciousness formation, in which way contributes to the aesthetics of sensation. In making a plea for the non-unitary, multiple and complex subject of an intruder and in exploring Bilal’s capturing of the purely passive, receptive force of sensation on the aesthetic plane of composition, this essay embraces the embodied materialism, Irigaray’s sensible transcendental and Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism. In keeping with Deleuze and Guattari’s diagram of the landscape of subjectivity and the particular emphasis on their “affective forces” of materiality, and starting with the perspective informed by contemporary feminist writers, the paper engages with the notions of sensation, difference, time, memories, love, violence and otherness to suggest that his art is the machine of expression that embodies sensation, and extends it beyond, through a process that entails abandoning a dogmatic image of thought for an affective production of intruder assemblages and imperceptible becoming-x that further foster the intruder consciousness reconfigured through corporeality, and thus fabrication of a creative symbiosis of reason and the imagination premised on sensation.

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