An illustration (or a one-scene play) [or an anecdote] on the issue of resemblance and material:

The problem of similitude presents itself with jagged clarity when a lactose-intolerant human subject must ban cocaine from their substance-repertoire; texturally and materially similar to powdered milk (a popular medium to “cut” or “extend” the drug’s volume), the atopic-user must eschew both, threatened, eternally, by a death-by-bloating, rather than a death by the chemical and ecstatic. 

Here, we are presented with a negation by a relation - if the first object is forbidden a priori, the second object is only forbidden by its link with the first. In this case, the first is forbidden due to a toxic antagonism against the body. The second, is only forbidden through its formal quality (an image). An impossible task. Imbibed materials occupy an unsteady middle ground insofar the material must pass through the channel of the body to fully conceptualize it, but yet, we can grasp at its qualities purely through form and likeness (a world of images). The taboo passes through one material to the other, overlapping, and settling on (image). The body knows, the material knows, the image disavows both, desire multiplies and a gossamer thread links all things, threatening to unmoor them.

Elsewhere

To grasp a person is to strip them. Perhaps, unlike inert material, a person can only exist as an idea. Hot breath, labor time, the performance of it all — every texture must be dissolved. Rather, a person must become a composite or aggregate or flattened surface, both inextricably knotted together and malleable.

Perhaps, a person, like inert material (when reduced to image), being the subject of doubling through relation, can become a thing of productivity. 

“I want you”

“Stop.”

“I want you and I will have you”

Two (or more) effigies burnt in the service of the third — whether this act of transference is blessing or an affliction is an undetermined variable. 

In either case, time and distance purifies all things and, eventually, all passages become charnel grounds.

— Leo Cocar