EXCERPT Criticism’s not the time to think. Think ahead of time. —John Cage to Daniel Charles Bellmer places a mirror perpendicular to a photo of a female nude. And turns it around, observing that, through the abstract split of the contact line, unrecognizable blooms of flesh emerge, or are reabsorbed back into it when the mirror travels in the other direction. The end of representation? Or representation in its modern version, where what is ‘interesting’ is no longer the full body, now denounced as a poor harmony, a false totality, poor and false because now impracticable (or in fact always impracticable, notwithstanding the brief collective phantasm of romanticism following the caesura of modernity, Hölderlin, J.-P. Richter and Hegel, and still Marx)—but the non-organic, dismembered body, flattened onto itself, folded, entwined, reduced to puddles and shreds, glued-together fragments, a non-set of partial objects stitched together in a cacophonous miracle?…