All that Fall by Jérémie Foa or: voices from the pit

 

1.  The process by which a historian becomes a superstar is determined by the zeitgeist - that is, by factors that are often outside the scope of the discipline itself. In the seventies, the zeitgeist was with the microhistorians. The old liberal panorama, which was built around European “discoveries”, still had juice – in 1983, Daniel Boostin’s The Discoverers was an enormous best seller – but it was taking hits in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, the rescuing of women’s histories, black histories, the anti-war movement, the inward turn that marked the 70s lifestyles of the bourgeoisie. Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms in 1973 and Ladurie’s Montaillou in 1975 were the markers of a turn towards the histories of the obscure. Back to the people was no longer just a slogan, but a methodological imperative.

2. The obscure are, traditionally, the mass upon whom history is made, not the makers themselves: the screen for the movie. This is a strong remnant of what was once, in Europe, a very stable class structure, with the nobles on top. The noble as the hero of history still trails behind it many many popular histories. Whereas the statistic as the hero of history trails behind it much academic history. The obscure, though, between the statistic and the hero – they are hard to voice.

3. Among the very obscure are the massacred. Our dead rely, for the most part, on the family to keep them dimly alive, ghosts that sometimes populate the stories we tell each other. Without ghosts, is there even such a thing as a family? And though literacy has injured this monopoly the family has on the past, it has not at all destroyed it. For instance: my boy knows about my great grandfather Louis because I have told him stories that were passed down to me from my parents and grandparents. Louis still exists, dimly, in the extended Gathmann family; and not so much elsewhere. Yet if the Gathmanns were wiped out, would Louis walk after death, or would his ghost story be extinguished? Who, after all, would be interested?

4. This is the ethical component of the micro-history.

5. Jérémie Foa is not an internationally known historian – yet. In France, though he is relatively young, he has already been the center of a special issue of the Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine for his book, named after a Beckett play: Tous Ceux qui Tombent: Visages du massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy. Surely someone somewhere in Anglophonie is translating this book. Which is on the same frequency as Ginzburg’s The Night-Battles, in as much as it is an effort to disinter the voice, the experience of the obscure.

6. Saint Barthelemy’s massacre of French protestants started in August, 1572, in Paris, and spread to the major towns and cities of France in the fall of that year. Formally, it is much like the massacres in Bosnia and Rwanda – it is a genocide of circumstance. It arose from the assassination of the Protestant admiral, Gaspard II de Coligny, who, while tying his shoe in his room,  was shot dead by a Catholic fanatic, one Charles de Louviers, who aimed at him from across the street. This happened on August 22. Almost immediately afterwards, the tocsins sounded in the streets of Paris. Come out, come out, whereever you are.

7. Foa’s approach is not so different from that of the detectives in the TV show, The Wire: it is a matter of casting a broad associative net, finding properties, bystanders, property documents, marriage documents, memoirs of survivors and brags of the murderers. After one has a denser sense of what was happening on the street, and in people’s lives, at the end of August in Paris, or the end of September in Toulouse, or elsewhere, the event with its amorphous edges comes into focus.

8. An example of the method is Foa’s uncovering the itinerary of  one of the great Prot persecutors, a man named Thomas Croizier, who boasted of killing four hundred Protestants that August. Many of the victims were taken out  and, alive or dead, dropped in the Seine. By sheer legerdemain in the archives, Foa found property records for one of the drop off points for the mass murder, a place known as the Vallèe de la Misère, since obliterated by Parisian urbanists, but located in 1572 at the foot of the Pont du Change near Notre Dame – about a half a mile from where I sit, typing this. And by looking at the property records, Foa found that Croizier was a part owner of one of the houses there – more or less confirming a “legend” from the Prot martyrology about a house with a red door where many were taken, their throats slit, their bodies plopped into the river – thus “cleansing” Paris of a heretical stain.

9. Foa is not afraid of allusion, of rhetoric, of a high style that can include bits of René Char and quotations from Derrida’s Archive Fever. But this style works for him in creating a way of historiographic “listening” – taking seriously the work of Arlette Farge, the strong advocate for a history that is aware of voices. In this vein, Foa also pays attention to recent work on genocide. He quotes from Helene Dumas, a sociologist who has written about the Rwandan massacres, finding her comments pertinent:

“At the heart of social intimacy in its affective and topographic aspects, with regards to killers and victims, is the fearsome question of the reversibility of the ties forged in the time before, when neighbors, friendship, religious practice and even family ties are mechanized as so many means favoring their tracking down and execution.”

To know another person on a deep level is to know things about that person, their habits, their residence, their stuff, their other connections.

10. Foa notes that in the accounts of survivors, it wasn’t the tocsins sounding, the civil alarms which rang out, that signified murder. Rather, it was the tapping at the window, the ringing of the door chimes, the voices outside going aunt? Uncle? Or a nickname, which roused the sleepy resident and got them to open the door on the unexpected crowd outside, equipped with knives and axes, who quickly moved in. I was reminded of that terrifically horrifying scene at the beginning of Jenny Erpenbeck’s End of Days when a crowd moves in to lynch some Jews:

“Her husband tried to see who was throwing the stones and recognized Andrei. Andrei, he shouted out the window, Andrei! But Andrei didn’t hear him — or pretended not to, which was more likely, since he knew perfectly well who lived in the house he was throwing stones at. Then one of Andrei’s stones came hurtling through a window pane, passing just a hair’s breadth from her head, and crashed into the glass-fronted bookcase behind her, striking Volume 9 of the leather-bound edition of Goethe’s Collected Works that her husband’s parents had given him as a gift when he finished school. No breath of air disturbs the place, / Deathly silence far and wide. / O’er the ghastly deeps no single / Wavelet ripples on the tide. Hereupon her husband, filled with rage, flung open the front door, apparently intending to seize Andrei by the collar and bring him to his senses, but when he saw Andrei running toward the house with three or four other young men, one of them brandishing an axe, he slammed it shut again at once. Quickly, he turned the key in the lock, and together with his wife tried to take up the boards that always stood ready beside the door, waiting for just such an emergency, taking them and trying to nail them over the door. But it was already too late for this — where were the nails, where the hammer? — for the door was already beginning to splinter beneath the blows of the axe. Andrei, Andrei. Then she and her husband ran up the stairs, banging on the door behind which the wet nurse sat with the baby, but she didn’t open the door: either because she didn’t understand who was asking to be let in, or because she was so frightened she was unwilling to open it. The woman and her husband then fled to the attic, up one last steep flight of stairs, while down below, Andrei and his men were already bursting into the house. On the ground floor, the intruders smashed the remaining window panes, ripped the window frames from the wall, knocked down the bookcase, sliced open the eiderdowns, smashed plates and jars of preserves, threw the contents of the pantry out into the street, but then one of them must have heard her and her husband trying to lock the attic door, for without stopping on the second floor, the men now raced up the stairs…”

11. It should be noted, in this year, 2026, that the genocidal wannabes around Trump know about this reversibility in their guts. They were sure that a little push, the ICE in the street, would activate a popular massacre of immigrants and people of color – this was the whole point. They openly derided empathy, those connections that keep us from using our knowledge of the other to track them, to take their stuff, to drag them out, to put them in the truck and never see them again. So far, though, this has been a massive failure. What works on Twitter doesn’t work in the street.

12. This time.

13. One of the interesting sidelights in Foa’s book is a pre-history of revisionism. Holocaust revisionism, with its weird nitpicking of details, its false frame of references in which a sort of mathematics can be applied (how many people could fit into a crematorium?) was preceded by Saint Barthelemy revisionism. One Abbe Jean Novi de Caveirac, in 1758, published just such an account  of the massacre. Caveirac attacks, for instance, the figure of 1100 murdered by alluding to a document that shows eight gravediggers were employed to bury the bodies, and by seeing how long they took before they were finished with their work, proves to his own satisfaction that the murdered must have amounted to a mere hundred or less. “It is almost impossible for eight gravediggers in eight days to bury 1100 bodies.” Case closed.

We can recognize, here, the ancestor of the denialism that recently, applying bogus stats and gut feelings, has swept the alt right about COVID: turn out nobody died of COVID!

14. Bones, buried in the ground, turn up. For instance: when the Eiffel Tower was constructed in 1887, the evacuation of the foundation revealed a mass grave. It was at a strata that indicated that these were bodies from the massacre. The bones were removed, for the most part, the concrete was poured, and the Tower was erected. What visitor to the Eiffel thinks of the massacred upon which the Tower has, in part, its footing?

Answer: nobody.

Right?

Peter Baker crawls out from under his rock

 Vacay is over. Trieste, I must tell you all about Trieste!

But then there is coming back to this period of absolute shittiness. I'm nominating absolute shittiness as the name for whatever this is. It is not post anything, it is what comes out of your post-erior.

I've been re-reading Robert Coover's The Public Burning, a genius novel from the era of genius American novels, the 1970s. The book is narrated, in part, by Richard Nixon, and tells of his ardor for Ethal Rosenberg as she is about to be electrocuted in Times Square. One of the bits that I really love is that Time Magazine is the national poet laureate of these here states, and so Time articles about the Red Menace and American Democracy and Our Boys In Korea are spaced out as poems on the page.

In the absolutely shit war at present, the NYT has thrown itself into the role of poet laureate. The NYT sees that underneath it all, America is just a democracy supporting country. And shucks, so well intentioned! In a thumbsucker by one of the NYT's heteronyms, Peter Baker (of course! they have developed this persona well, from Bush asskisser to Trump apologist - a fiction worthy of Pessoa!), we read these heartfelt lines in the elegy entitled: Wars Often Lose Public Support/Over Time.

Trump Started This

One

Without Much

we read: "Even some Americans sympathetic to the goal of toppling the repressive, terrorist-sponsoring government in Tehran find it difficult to embrace Mr. Trump as commander in chief." Really, the "repressive, terrorist-sponsoring government in Teheran" reaches the pathos of TIMES poems in the 1950s about the glorious trial of the Rosenbergs:

it

was a

sickening and

to americans almost

incredible history of men

so fanatical that they would destroy

their own countries & col

leagues to serve a

treacherous

utopi

a.

The Peter Baker heteronym has been in this business for years. Who can forget the odes to George Bush, a man of superhuman strength and vision? Which were wrapped up, in the end, by Baker's great 2013 Epic, "THE FINAL HEARTFELT CONFLICT THAT ENDED THE BUSH-CHENEY PARTNERSHIP, which has been compared to Dumas's classic Three

Muskateers, except there were two of them.

“Not since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger// had two Americans in public office collaborated with such lasting effect as/ George Bush and Dick Cheney.

In the aftermath of the Sept 11 attacks/

they confidenty steered America through its most traumatic years since Vietnam/ erecting a nationa-security apparatus that their successors have largely adopted and prosecuting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that/ members of the administration take pains to emphasize, toppled two brutal regimes.”

The Peter Baker heteronym is obviously representative of NYT's approach to all problems abroad, mainly caused by people abroad being abroad, and thus not being Americans and tending towards brutality and terrorist-support, unless we bomb the shit out of them, kill their kids, and point out such models of amity and freedom-lovin' as our allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

And here we are again!

The part where we are fucked

 The beginning of this pirate raid is going to plan, with Democrats assuming the Daschle position – a sort of pro-Israel whiffle bound to please their owners, the donors, while so irritating their voters that they will stay at home – and the media doing its best to present a united front of American patriots who have been itching and moaning to bring their opinions about the proper governance of Shiraz to fruition – and who among us has not noticed that Americans drop everything when they can dream, aloud, about the best qualified undersecretary of culture in an Iranian government of our choice! Why, it makes discussions of the price of gas positively petty!

That 58 percent of said Americans in the latest poll are opposed to the war will make no nevermind to the American press, which from the Free Press to the NYT, including the Elllison networks and beyond, will select only those Americans properly appreciative of Iranians dancing in the street in the joy unleashed in the fact that, at last, a foreign power is willing to drop bombs on their girls schools.

In the circs, it is good to look back at the golden year for freedom lovers everywhere, 2001. We all remember how it rolled out: a president who stripped away the awful Clintonites, forever going on about terrorist attacks, in the period after Bush’s inauguration; the man himself poo-poohing the CIA warning he received in August, knowing many Saudis, all of them rich and generous, himself and willing to trust those guys; the attack; the media and Daschle-ist response, which was not that we had the stupidest puppy ever for Prez, but instead, that we were ruled by a superhero!; the warning to the Taliban (and a policy happily summed up as a very glorious thing indeed, by the poet laureate of American foreign policy, Tom Friedman, as “breaking things” – the tantrum as an endall in itself!) to hand over Osama bin; The Taliban’s response that they’d give him up to a third Islamic power, like Morocco (which was the closest the U.S. ever got under Bush to actually laying hands on Osama bin, not something that the American establishment, with all that Saudi money at stake, wanted to happen); the farcical invasion, employing a comically small U.S. force, allied to a rapehappy congery of warlords, presided over by a General surveying the whole thing from a base in Florida; the happy battle of Tora Bora, in which the U.S. sent a message by bombing the entrance of the cave system not the rear (it would have been unseemly to have just said, escape by the rear you dingbat, we need you around to be a threat on tap!); Osama bins flight on a magic pony, to who know where, just so hard to find that guy!; and finally, the assembly of much of the Taliban high command at Kunduz, with U.S. troops surrounding them, who were evacuated by plane by Pakistan with the tacit consent of the Bushies; all in all a glory that we need to revisit in a speeded up version!

We remember, fondly, that the media during this point in time was careful not to report news that they accidentally found out about, like that Kunduz matter – this would depress your average taxpayer, who would not see the Rumsfeldian cleverness of it all! Far better to report the news on things two to three years after you find them out, so that nothing could be done and we could forget what happened.

We can speed through the rest – the U.S. war against the tally high command that our U.S. ally, Pakistan, to whom we were giving billions a year, had airlifted out, as per above; - the jailing of random Afghanis, and the delicacy with which we let our Afghan warlord allies rape and steal; the famine which we all just forgot; and one of my fave memories, the way the Bush administration promised a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan and then (oopsy!) put $0.00 down on the plan in their 2002 budget. Because words, as we know, are much more important than acts. After all, in the beginning was the word, and the rest you can pocket in bursts of money as a subcontractor, privatizing the whole deal!

Down this road we hop again. That is, our power elite. Out here in the countryside, though, where upper middle class libs and their AI invested friends assure us it is all redneck racism, we are not so sure. In fact, we are sure the war with Iran is the worst kind of shitstorm available, ignorant peasants that we are. But the political people saying this are surely extremist. What we want to do is listen to podcasts from the Third Way, torture transpeople, and guarantee the safety of Israel all the way to Valhalla!

I title this part of American history: how we became so fucked.

Untitled by Karen Chamisso

 

Untitled

 

I, too, stumbled with Raskolnikov

hatted in the dusty street

the sun’s eternity hanging

like an accusation in my pupils

 

and cursed the oppressors of the people,

and cursed the people, oppressed.

Rapist drunks loll

In their vintages in the ditches.

 

The money lend who opened the door

- I was her, too

- as  the ax split open my head.

Last thought: don’t kill, mister

 

My crippled sister hiding in the closet

- my wounded eternity, my bled and fled identity

absorbed entirely in

this impotent flash.

 

- Karen Chamisso

A Cold War Trope

 

Sometimes, a phrase, an image, a reference, a term will catch one’s eye, revealing – not with the flag-like pomp of a theme, but like a firefly in the back yard as evening falls – some moment in history, some corner of the vast dark we call public opinion or the forces of history, which is not so much lit up as flickered up, unshadowed a bit. The master tracker of such firefly ideas is Carlo Ginzburg, who has shown how they can twist and turn – or be twisted and turned – over the longue duree, and how they can be connected, the historian’s construction being the promise that some living thing, some beat, is actually there. Parataxis promises continuity, our ellipsis waits for the pencil that draws the line between dot “a” and dot “b”, we feel the breathing of influence, but not, oh never, the palpable push of cause.

It is one of those ideas that I have been toying with ever since I caught it, again, in Nabokov’s lectures on Russian literature. Specifically, this is what tugged at my eye, or perhaps I should say ear – since I seemed to confront an echo here. An echo of something I had heard before.

“ In the sixties and seventies [1860s and 1870s] famous critics, the idols of public opinion, called Pushkin a dunce, and emphatically proclaimed that a good pair of boots was far more important for the Russian people than all the Pushkins and Shakespeares in the world.”

Nabokov here is repeating in condensed form an argument he had put in the mouth, or rather in the book, written by his character Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev in The Gift. The book, a mock biography of Chernyshevsky, stamps its way through Chapter 4 of the book. Although mock is the tone intended, the prose often descends into mere dismissal and scurillity – it would really be worth comparing, someday, Nabokov’s pillorying of Chernyshevksy in Berlin, 1937, where much of the book was written, with the Stalinist denunciation of bourgeois writers, since the choice of insults seem to converge, and there is the same microscopic skewing and vengeful hewing of the writer’s corpus – in both senses. At one point, Nabokov makes fun of Chernyshevsky’s physical awkwardness in the Tsarist labor camp he was condemned to – which even his admirers might blanche at, this being written at a time when physically maladroit intellectuals were being processed in labor camps both in Germany and the Soviet Union.

In the Lectures, he informs his poor students that Pushkin was condemned equally by Tsarist dunderheads and radical ones – which is an argument one could make, rather easily, about Nabokov’s own judgments (Thomas Mann was condemned both by the Nazis and by VN).Of course, my argument that there is something of the Stalinist purge in Nabokov's caricature of Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s is also making a rather sinister parallelism – borrowing the moral opprobrium we devote to the one and applying it to the other.

However, in making the master Pushkin a scarecrow for radical dunderheads, Nabokov can’t really make the parallel lines meet - one being a matter of secret policemen, the other being a matter of newspaper articles. But such is the wonder of art: due to a trick of the eye, they can be made to seem to.

Here is the author in Nabokov's The Gift: “When Chernyshevski or Pisarev called Pushkin’s poetry “rubbish and luxury””..

Is that a quotation I spy?

It is. But that meticulous man, Nabokov, seems here to have been caught in his own dream, letting the quotation gently drift there, where it seems to be on the verge of emerging from the pen of Chernyshevsky or Pisarev but… ends up emerging from the hybridization of them.

In actual fact, a quotation is like a kite – it can’t get up into the air unless there is a solid figure at one end of it. Usually this figure runs around a bit, works up a sweat, and finally – the kite, or the quote, is aloft. But not here. For all Nabokov’s love for “divine details”, this quote, in quite a philistine way, is simply daubed in, and we will decide later who was on the other end of it. But the Lectures on Russian Literature shows that the plight of our quote has worsened, and now there is a host of shadows on the other end of the diminishing of poor Pushkin, who – we are to suppose – is much better for the Russian people than boots.

This unattached quotation – how it manages to fly through the literature on Russian writers during the Cold War era! What is interesting is not only how it varies in being attributed to this or that figure, but how the quote itself can’t decide between Pushkin and Shakespeare. In Marc Slonim’s An Outline of Russian Literature (which, coming out in 1959, may have been cribbed by some of Nabokov’s students before he quit Cornell), it is Pisarev who, in a parenthesis, writes “A pair of boots is more useful than a Shakespeare play.” Blok, in writing about the critic Gregoriev, states that he never “tended to the idea that “boots are higher than Shakespeare,” which is proclaimed (directly or indirectly) in Russian criticism from Belinkski and Chernyshevskj…” – which proclamation, one wants to ask, must be, if quotation marks count at all, directly – whereas indirectly breaks us out of quotation marks and into suspicion and deduction. Berdyaev’s The Origin of Russian communism (1937), also includes the boots and Shakespeare evaluation. We are told that “Pisarev’s nihilism announced that ‘boots are higher than Shakespeare’ – an oddly phrased quote that attributes a phrase not to an author, but to an author’s ideas, as though the ideas were also writing articles and announcing values and appraising boots – no doubt in the same manner as the nose in Gogol’s story dons a uniform.

Berdyaev is followed by Leszek Kolakowski, who attributes to Pisarev the remark that “a pair of boots is worth more than all the works of Shakespeare” – an expansion of Berdyaev’s sentence, making Marc Slonim’s quote look modest. Ronald Hingley, in the 1969 Nihilists: Russian radicals and revolutionaries in the reign of Alexander II, 1855-81, dispenses with the whole problem of attribution by writing that “a good pair of boots was worth more than the whole works of Pushkin” was a common saying of the 1860s period. Common sayings, they pass from mouth to ear. From ear to mouth. Over the Samovar, in the carriage, or as one trudges with a friend over the summer dusty street in some Moscow city district. Thinking, perhaps, about one's own boots. The hole in the bottom. The nail that has come out and left the heel to flop. And one thinks of the copy of Shakespeare that one has bought at some shop. There it is, in the room, on the shelf, under the portrait. Raskolnikov waits.

I was washing myself in the courtyard that night

the firmament glowing with rough hewn stars.

On the hatchet, star light points like salt,

the water up to the top of the barrel, icy.

What we have here is a phenomenon that also occurs in currency trading in a de-regulated regime: equivalents tend to disequilibrium, as one of the parts inflates in value – which of course brings up the question if the whole works of Shakespeare are worth the whole works of Pushkin. But I will be brave and not pursue every question that jumps up in my head. Instead, I will finish this woefully incomplete collage of quotations with Isaiah Berlin in Russian Thinkers (1979) who grabs the kite by the tale, or the quote by the source, correctly attributing the phrase “a pair of boots is in every sense better than Pushkin” to Dostoevsky, and speculates that Dostoevsky might have been inspired by one of Pushkin’s letters, in which he wrote that he looked at his poems “as a cobbler looks at a pair of boots that he has made.”

What to make of this montage? Looking at this from our sad post-Cold War perspective, we notice, first, that the Soviet aesthetic was not Pushkin averse, but Pushkin idolatrous. Soviet school children had to memorize his verse, he was statueified and feted as a part of world civilization: no member of the Congress of Cultural Freedom could touch the Stalinist praises of that poet.

Pisarev, on the other hand, was not so feted. In fact, he was rather shirked, according to the Slavicists. This is because Pisarev was an ironist and a live wire. In an essay on Heine, Pisarev’s kind of poet, he quotes a passage from the Harzreise in which Heine writes that, on a fresh morning in the mountains, the “fragrance goes to my head and I no longer know where irony ends and heaven begins.” Pisarev recognized Heine in that phrase – perhaps because he recognized himself. He wrote that he heard a “hissing” in Pushkin’s poetry, and in Belinsky’s essays, and he was himself one of the hissers.

Alas, this hissing, this zone where irony and heaven meet each other (something that Nabokov, in his secret self, was well aware of) was stripped from Pisarev, he was compounded and pounded with Chernyshevsky, and we get a caricature of Soviet ideology that might well have been the reason none of the exiled Russians much liked Nabokov’s The Gift.

In any case, a quotation that is not a quotation can fill the space of a quotation: gaslighting is an ancient art, and not just one invented on social media.

What a lordly career the phrase has had! An honored place in the book of misquotations - that book which we can put on the balance against Mallarme's book, just as hell is on the scale against heaven.

Proudhon

 

1. On January 1865, Pierre Joseph Proudhon died in a house in the Passy neighborhood in Paris. At 10 Rue de Passy, to be exact, which is now 12 Rue de Passy.  His posterity outside of France was tied, for good and ill, to the pamphlet Marx wrote against him, The poverty of philosophy, which inversed Proudhon’s book, The philosophy of poverty (La philosophie de misere). Inside France, as well as inside the greater anarchist tradition, Proudhon holds a more elevated place, as a political philosopher, a sociologist, and a writer.

Proudhon met Marx in the winter of 1844. At this time, Proudhon was a celebrated journalist. He was also the writer of Qu'est-ce que la propriété?  In 1840.  Proudhon was the child of the obscure, of those who were never the focus of the metropolitain gaze: his father was a peasant small farmer, a grape grower on the outskirts of Besançon, who lost his shirt trying to make and sell beer.  When he was eleven, he entered the college at Besançon and became a star pupil, so that he was sent to Paris on a stipend raised by some of the notables of the town. In Paris, however, he was not recognized as a genius from the provinces: from 19 until 30, he worked as a typesetter for the Gauthier printers. It was as a typesetter that he had his first professional connection to letters. In the hours left to him after his ten hour shift, he read.

Marx, that university graduate, knew that Proudhon was sensitive about being an autodidact. The young Marx was filled with righteousness, but he had the cruelty of a coddled son and a doctor of Law. He used Proudhon’s autodidacticism against him in later polemics.

2. Although the Anglophone world knows Proudhon firstly through Marx, it was Sainte-Beuve, the literary critic, who tried to write Proudhon’s biography. Saint-Beuve was collecting materials for it when he died.

It might seem odd that the critic who flattered the grand dames of the salons by reviewing their memoires (which Proust, in his Contra-Sainte-Beuve, makes much of) spent his final years tracking down the correspondence of France’s greatest anarchist thinker. But Sainte-Beuve saw Proudhon as a writer, a philosophe in the 18^th century vein.

Proudhon himself laments, somewhere, that he wanted to write like Voltaire, but always ended up sounding like Rousseau.  

3. “If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery ? and I should answer in one word, It is murder, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to take from a man his thought, his will, his personality, is a power of life and death; and that to enslave a man is to kill him. Why, then, to this other question : What is property ? may I not likewise answer, It is theft without the certainty of being misunderstood ; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?”

This is the beginning of  a pamphlet that exploded like a bomb in 1840: What is Property? It is still his most famous work – and its opening paragraph credibly ranks up there with the beginning of Rousseau’s Social Contract. That high mercury pitch, that overture to the opera.

The rankers are always after the fulfilment and not the promise – the 100 greatest books, not the one hundred greatest introductory paragraphs. Myself, I’m a promise collector, and for me, Proudhon makes the list.

But what do I know about Proudhon?

2. Marx, in 1865, when Proudhon died, wrote a letter about him that was published in the Sozial-Demokrat. He reiterates a point he made in 1848: Proudhon was basically an economics ignoramus. A political economist, Marx thought, who tried to solve the problem of poverty through distribution did not understand that the real problem was the class control of production. Marx conceded the power of Proudhon’s pamphlet, and regarded the force of that pamphlet, the rhetoric of indignation, had its place in the history of the “left”.  “It is evident that even when he is reproducing old stuff, Proudhon discovers things in an independent way.” This included, of course, a certain logic of opposition. Marx sees this as a kind of orphan, or misfire of thought, which can only be at home once it is assimilated into dialectical materialism. Marx, in 1865, is a little distant from the young man who recognized alienation as the great byproduct and force of the capitalist system. He is distant from the Proudhon who once wrote: “Everything I know, I owe to despair.”

Proudhon used his despair. Although Marx takes it that Proudhon represented the eternal petit bourgeois attitude, he forgets that despair, its cognitive-affective place. Between an alienation from the happiness that justifies the whole system and the brute lessons of experience, the hard edge of other people’s happiness.

But this is not to diminish Marx’s insight. Marx’s grasp of the system is much greater than Proudhon’s. Marx’s problem, however, is that his grasp, which sees the whole system in a sort of historic present, resolves in the idea of revolution an evolution that could, and in fact has, long outlasted Marx’s understanding.

This is Marx:

“Proudhon’s discovery of “crédit gratuit” and the “people’s bank” (banque du peuple), based upon it, were his last economic “deeds.” My book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Part I, Berlin, 1859 (pp. 59-64) contains the proof that the theoretical basis of his idea arises from a misunderstanding of the basic elements of bourgeois “political economy,” namely of the relation between commodities and money, while the practical superstructure was simply a reproduction of much older and far better developed schemes. That under certain economic and political conditions the credit system can be used to accelerate the emancipation of the working class, just as, for instance, at the beginning of the eighteenth, and again later, at the beginning of the nineteenth century in England, it facilitated the transfer of wealth from one class to another, is quite unquestionable and self-evident. But to regard interest-bearing capital as the main form of capital and to try to make a particular form of the credit system comprising the alleged abolition of interest, the basis for a transformation of society is an out-and-out petty-bourgeois fantasy. This fantasy, further diluted, can therefore actually already be found among the economic spokesmen of the English petty bourgeoisie in the seventeenth century. Proudhon’s polemic with Bastiat (1850) about interest-bearing capital is on a far lower level than the Philosophie de la misère. He succeeds in getting himself beaten even by Bastiat and breaks into burlesque bluster when his opponent drives his blows home.”

Under certain economic and political conditions – that is the key, here. We still live under those conditions.

3. In a sense, every crisis turns on how we live under those conditions. Here I am, for instance, in 2026, looking at a period of six years in which our politics and our social imaginary, in France, in Europe, in North America, has been plunged into mourning. Mourning for the effects of COVID – buit even more, for the death of Cheap. The great moderation, the whole end of the Cold War, was predicated on doing away with welfare and substituting cheap. The great cheapness made life bearable: why go to the movies when you can download them cheaply, or even for free? Go to the fast food place and feel like you are eating in a restaurant, like the peeps in the media. If you can’t go to Harvard, you can get a Harvard tee shirt – and for so little! Buy a house for zero down, and pay through a mortgage that might go on for thirty years – but that you won’t have to worry about as you flip that house for another. Go to college and take out loans to pay for it. Cheap, cheap.

4. One of the best essays on Proudhon is by the literary critic, Albert Thibaudet. In « Proudhon, Sainte-Beuve et nous » ( NRF, juillet 1929) Thibaudet calls Proudhon a “worker of ideas”, specifying: “the ideas that are fhose of a worker, working ideas, I mean, which are made to work, to work in the mind, to work in posterity; ideas visibly and originally rooted in the faubourg du Bettant in Besançon… just as those of Rousseau’s are in the low streets of Geneva; the ideas of a hard worker, but also of a pretentious one.”

Thibaudet sees that Proudhon was a utopian who wanted to create utopia now, out of the existing details of the social.

5. It is obvious that property cannot, definitionally, be theft, if theft is, definitionally, the theft of property. It was obvious to Proudhon that both claims are true, and this led him to search for a method, a philosophical guide, to help him understand his insight. Marx led him to Hegel. Only latter did Proudhon stumble upon Leibnitz and the notion of the monad and compossibility. In this, Proudhon founds a line of thought in France that goes through Tarde’s sociology of opposition and the rejection of the dialectic by Deleuze and Guattari. A heady list of names.

I’d add to that list Pasolini. Proudhon was a good Victorian about sex. He was, as well, a traditional sexist. These are the dead ends in his work – some will rightly stop at those dead ends and throw him away. For myself, what is alive in Proudhon is the product of his despair, a despair that, for instance, saw that the anti-clerical jeering of the Enlightenment philosophes and their 19^th century descendents often cashed out as a way of destroying the system of holidays, of Sundays, and demanding that the worker’s whole week, whole life of weeks, be devoted to work. It is an insight into the way the Great Tradition, the metropolitan way of thinking (using James Scott’s distinction) attacks and dissolves the Litte Tradition – turning the little sweetness of life into something bitter. This was Pasolini’s insight as well: Proudhon was in the line of those who saw that the fireflies were disappearing.

6. And, as history “speeds up”, we see, hopefully not too late – we see that we are the fireflies.

What is laughter?

 

1. Imagine naming a child after its mother’s laugh.
2. The mother’s characteristic laugh. Which is not the same as the characteristic way we represent a laugh – a haha, a hoho. These onomatopeia are grossly AWOL from the real sound of laughter. Yet as signs of that natural sign (laughter, since Occam, being treated in the tradition as a natural sign of joy – as, for instance, in Descartes), ha ha and ho ho have fed back into the pool of laughs. In English, at least, they sound much like the forced laugh, and perhaps this is because the forced laugh sounds like them. The forced laugh, in that sense, is quoting a laugh, which is representing a sound that has become, through some process of selection, the convention for the laugh. The sign, briefly, stands for itself. The forced laugh is humiliating. It is a way of being, for whatever reason, servile. Every forced laugh I have ever uttered has been cancerous.
3. Such a name, the name of this child, would confront the brute nature of the laugh and our way of domesticating it into the registry of signs and symbols. We recognize the laugh as a vocal expression, but what kind of expression is it?
4. Call the child. Let the child write down her name.
5. It is an odd kind of expression, as all philosophers have noted. Beyond the natural sign, it is not exactly a gesture – especially as a gesture is explained by a previous intention. A laugh can’t be totally governed by an intention. On the other hand, it is not totally unpredictable. Like a blush.
6. Ha Ha. Jack the ripper, if the Ripperologist say true, was very fond of that phrase in the few authentic letters from him. Although they may not be authentic, either.
7. Traditionally, the opposition is laughter vs. tears. Both are involuntary in one sense, in that the closer they are to voluntary, the closer they are to false. Ha ha.

8. I’ve seen comedians in night clubs. I don’t envy the comedian. In the club, there is a desire to laugh. A hunger. Can one be hungry for the symbolic accompaniment of an emotional state? Or is it an emotional state? It is akin to happiness, and akin to orgasm. Like many foods one sits down to eat, hungry, the experience can be of merely fulfilling a physical duty, without that note of the unusual to diversify this from any other eating experience. My favorite food. My favorite joke.

 9. The medievalist, Jacques Le Goff, has written that that Church created a great system opposing tears to laughter. The spirit of Lent versus the Spirit of Carnival. The church was a great organizer of tears. Laughter, however, has always been in a somewhat strained relationship with the Church. As with most of the great religions – Islam, Buddhism.
10. Laughter, as Le Goff points out, takes on different senses and has borne different names. The is a different name for mocking (laag)as opposed to joyous laughter (sakhoq) in Old Testament Hebrew, for instance.
11. Jean-Michel Beaudet in Laughter: an example from Amazonia, finds four types of laughter among the Tupi: men’s, women’s, collective, and caricatural, which, I think, is false. Beaudet is interested in the variations in the sounds of these laughters.
12. Helmut Plessner, in Laughter and Crying, uses these as border phenomena, between the body and the expressive, to look at the doubleness of the human body, iwhich we are, and “in which” we are. To be in, to be of, the prisoner is the prison. It is to laugh. Ha Ha. Plessner is especially impressed by the words associated with laughter – burst, explode. For him, it is that moment when the discipline of the body dissolves – the sense body of experience encounters that problem to which it cannot find any answer. This is the nature of the natural sign – to be the nature that human nature must work with. And work.
13. We will. Or we won’t. This is the human switch. It is a great simplifier. Laughter, being expression that is interjection, almost unprocessed matter – it is as if called up by a spell. A spell reaches for that switch. On. Off. Perhaps this is why laughter, for the church, seemed far from God. And closer to the devil. God has the last judgment. The devil has the last laugh. Ha Ha. Ha Ha. Ha Ha.