Limited, Inc.

Berthold Brecht wrote a small essay, meant for covert distribution in Nazi Germany, entitled Five Difficulties with writing the truth. Thank God that we don’t live in Nazi Germany. Thank God that we don’t live in present day Yemen, which is being systematically starved to death by our ally, Saudi Arabia, using weapons sold to it by the U.S., France, the U.K., etc. Our bad time is different. Anyway, though this essay has been translated, I thought I’d try doing the intro paragraph and the section on “Mut” – having the spirit for something, the quality of being spunky. When we hear about the bravery of women who are accusing powerful sex abusers of their crimes and violence, we are in the realm of Mut. I’ll call it pluck. Pluck, according to the OED, went through an interesting etymological journey to arrive at the colloquial term, as they call it, for having boldness or courage. The word pluck comes from a mass of Germanic and Latin words implying untangling, peeling, unfeatherin

The panic on the right about the taking down of the Confederate statues derives from a sense of time that is shared by the left: this is the time that Deleuze, in Logic of Sense, refers to as aion. Aion, for Deleuze (following the stoics) sees the present as a fiction, dividing infinitely between the past and the future. Chronos, the rival temporal schema, sees the present as the only time. The past is composed of presents that have been superceded by other presents and the future will be composed of presents in the same way. Chronos is imminently the time frame of liberalism. We can manage the past, as an obsolete present, and see how it leads to the now. The now is neither haunted nor iffy. However: against the liberal interpretation, the left sees the razing of the Confederate statues as opening up the past that exists in the Now, in connection with other pasts. For instance, the past of sexual harassment, which of course also has its statues. In the Democratic party

Who among us has not felt intimations of a certain permanent nausea, a nausea of the brain cells, during this ice age of reaction in which we live, cocooned in the ephemerally invulnerable systems erected since the beginning of the Cold War, feeding our intellects on our irritation and imaginary apocalypses? Imaginary, I say, for us – not for, say, your average Yemeni.  And of course, for those who have eyes to see, the minor apocalypse – to give it its true historical scale – of an American middle class that has been persuaded, in the age of Reagan, to cut its throat and think, while it is lapping up its own blood, that it is enjoying the very champagne of capitalism. 

 The obvious objection to the pure formalist’s notion that biography has nothing to do with the artist’s work is that, indeed, biography provides the unifying link that gives you one distinct level of your units of analysis. We don’t jumble together War and Peace and Sense and Sensibility, on this level, but put Sense and Sensibility in that unit called “Jane Austin’s work” and “War and Peace” in what we call Tolstoy’s work,  and so on. To compare “Jane Austin” to “Leo Tolstoy” is to reference these unities. When we don’t have those unities, in fact, we get worried. We want all of Plato’s works to be by Plato, and Shakespeare’s to be by Shakespeare, and since the mechanism of publication in Plato’s and Shakespeare’s epochs did not color within the lines and give us straightforward attributions, we have scholars mightily working on the sidelines to either purge the units comprising their works or add others to them. Not surprisingly, these scholars refer to … the agreed corpus of Sha