Abstract

Beuys’ “Fat Chair” features a lump of fat placed on a chair. The fat is a delegate of the violence of the rav, whereas the chair is the delegate of the violence of culture. The chair thus hosts the rav’s violence within the framework of the violence of culture. The fat’s alterity assumes a spectral quality, as it is not real, natural, fat but only a vestige of it, processed by the food industry and trimmed into the shape of a triangle. In the Israeli artist David Brailovsky’s artwork “The Ice Keeper,” the precultural element is consolidated in the form of ice, whereas the cultural element assumes the form of the two hands holding the ice. The ice commemorates the pre-Zionist existence of Jaffa. A binary structure is also apparent in Beuys’ performance “I Like America and America Likes Me.” The precultural element assumes the guise of the coyote, a totem animal pertaining to Native American existence that carries a therapeutic charge aimed at healing capitalist-stricken America. The chapter’s last section follows Freud’s interpretation of the Wolf-Man’s dream, in an attempt to see the dream as a site of the hospitality of the rav that is equal to art.