Tertium non datur. El tercero excluido
This paper retraces the relationship between Louis Bec’s work for the Bienal de São Paulo Sulfanogrades (1981) and his book with Vilém Flusser, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis (1987). Looking back at the first three exhibitions of the Sulfanogrades in France in 1976, and the subsequent text produced by Flusser for this matter, Orthonature. Paranature, it seems clear that a large part of the vocabulary and many of the ideas contained in Vampyroteuthis Infernalis had already been formulated by 1976, due to the close and regular exchange between Bec and Flusser. In Bec’s and Flusser’s oeuvre the distinction between art and science, nature and culture, animal and human, or truth and fable, is defied and exposed as the wrong way out of the old dilemma of the excluded third, or tertium non datur. Both spheres overlap, rather than being mutually exclusive, and the space of overlapping is no other than that of epistemology. If the Sulfanogrades remove agency from both the human subject and the animal object, ultimately giving all subjective agency to biology, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis exposes a true theory of the human as an inverse vampire, a new model for contemporary artists.
