and the document was sweet in my mouth

figaro.

Je le sais tellement que si monsieur le Comte en se mariant n'eût pas aboli ce droit honteux, jamais je ne t'eusse épousée dans ses domaines.

suzanne.

Hé bien! s'il l'a détruit, il s'en repent; et c'est de ta fiancée qu'il veut le racheter en secret aujourd'hui.

A nobleman renounces certain of his rights. Then he reasserts them, according to ancient documents which, he claims, gives him the right to the first night with the bride of his servants.

A man goes up a smoky mountain. He comes down with two stone tablets, upon which YHWH has, himself, written a pact – a covenant. The covenant, like the nobleman’s, makes requirements of YHWH’s servants that reach into the very depth of their private lives. The man is angered to see that the the people he left at the foot of the mountain are now dancing around an idol. This violates the first rule of the pact YHWH has made with his people - although since the people have not even seen the pact, one wonders how this covenant could be violated. The man dashes the stone tablets to the ground. And thus, he must return to YHWH to ask for the contract again. What is written on the stone tablets, exactly, is ambiguous, as the writer of Exodus and Deuteronomy gives conflicting accounts. It is as if there is some zone of blurring that prevents the contract from being read precisely.

A group of men and women live in the jungle. The physically stronger men are always attacking and killing the others, or capturing the women. The physically weaker men do what they can – curiously, they don’t form a pact among themselves as weaker men and ambush the strong. Instead, a pact is made with a strong man – the knowledge of pact making being, it seems, innate. Where is this pact? What tablet is it carved on? What does it say? We don’t ask this. Here, the zone of blurring is more in the nature of complete obscurity. It is a pact of gesture, apparently. There is no writing, but there is the pact. It is called a social contract.

A man sits at a table. Around him are gathered his twelve disciples. He takes a cup of wine, and says that this is his blood, and that they should drink it. He takes a loaf of bread, and he says this is his body, and that they should eat it.

Oh pacts, devil’s pacts, contracts, covenants, copies, mishnah! Where do you end, and where do I begin?

…
Up until the sixties, Freud was a constant reference in the social sciences. Yet, as early as 1920, Kroeber, in a review of a translation of Totem and Tabu in American Anthropologist, had pretty much torn the book apart, patiently demonstrating the out of date views (totemism as a function of exogamy), the misinterpretation of evidence – as Kroeber points out, Freud’s list of totems is cherrypicked and his list of the social functions accorded to it in the literature homogenized beyond what the evidence can bear, and the ahistorical scene setting (Freud’s appropriation of Darwin’s primal horde idea has no real geographic and temporal coordinates), and yet admitted that the book was too suggestive to be undermined completely by these errors. In 1939, Kroeber wrote a retrospective in which he claims that Freud had said he, Kroeber, had treated the book like one of Kipling’s Just so stories. In particular, Kroeber found the remarks on ambivalence and the remarks on mourning and anguish to be valuable, and in 1939 he made a very American distinction between what was fantasy in Freud – the killing of the father by the primal horde – and what was scientifically valuable – some form of the Oedipus complex. Already at that time, however, Malinowski had reformulated the OC to fit the Trobiand Islanders and their family configuration, so that the father substitute – the mother’s brother – played the role of the father. The Ortigues, in the sixties, published Oedipus in Africa in which they reported, from their clinical practice in Senegal, further modifications of the OC, refusing, at the same time, to generalize over all of Africa (the title of their book notwithstanding).

-- Freud himself thought that his two key books were Totem and Tabu and the Interpretation of Dreams – the latter being the founding text of the analysis of individual psychodynamics, the former being the founding text of collective psychodynamics. As Deleuze and Guattari observed, Freud’s work, like Marx, is a venture in universal history. But universal history in Freud's version plays itself out with a few twists. – one presaged by the romantic notion of “survivals”, bits of primitive lore and usage that still exist, in some modified form, within modernity. In Freud's version, the equation between the savage and the ancient Greek is enriched. New figures emerge, especially the threefold constellation of the child, the neurotic, and the primitive.

This leads, however, to further twists. For by Freud’s logic, there is a continual assault on the normal, which exists only as the result of a mythic catastrophe, or inversion: the slaying and eating of the father. His book, in the end, undermines the position of the norm by undermining the story of rationality. The story told by civilization about itself, or rather, by the civilized about civilization, which is a story that is not separate from civilization itself. Pacts and the bodies they form tend to merge, or tend, at least, to have erased boundaries that separate them one from the other.

In Totem and Tabu, the transposition of the savage to the place of the civilized is an explicit theme: there are a number of references to Kant’s categorical imperative, which is, in a sense, a pillar of the Enlightenment, as a tabu.

the crusoe complex

Let’s begin with a news item far from Vienna, or the 17th century. This was the beginning of Justus Wolpers post on freakonomics today:

I was reading John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row last night, and I was really struck by how the following passage speaks to the forces behind our current economic predicament:

“It has always seemed strange to me,” said Doc. “The things we admire in men — kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding, and feeling — are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest — sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest — are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first, they love the produce of the second.”
The usual cheap shot after citing a literary figure would be to argue that modern economics can’t possibly grapple with such issues. But it can. The incentives that Steinbeck describes are the incentives described in standard economic models. Agency theory is almost entirely devoted to developing mechanisms to deal with the fact that private and social interests often diverge; information economics tells us a lot about when these incentives are active; and behavioral economics tells us how people balance the opposing forces Steinbeck identifies.”

To which the first response in the comments was this:

“The reason we’re caught in this “only greed and self-interest produces anything or can make people successful, but it leads to dishonesty and causes harm to others!” is that we don’t distinguish between fair, mutually beneficial self-interest and dishonest self-interest where the risk is in someone else’s hands, at someone else’s expense. All the benevolence in the world won’t do the work that a greedy businessman can do, but that greedy businessman needs to be risking his own assets.”

My response to this comment was to rub my eyes. Does anybody seriously believe that the greedy businessman hatched out of a moonegg? No, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker were all once children. They lived in families. They got fed by either benevolent or not so benevolent parents. They did not, mewling infants, earn their keep. In fact, the family of the greedy businessman was often there, throughout his early life, lending him their connections, showering him with their money. And though, from 20 to 30, he or she might have cut a great swathe and been a great swaggerer, it is more likely than not that the greedy businessman has a home, a spouse, kids.

The whole understructure of the economy is, and will always be, based on these communal, familial, emotional, ambivalent ties, and none other. Ties of love and hate, which precede all economic epiphenomena. I am stating mere platitudes here. And yet, of course, when you read the commonplaces of the economists, and those, like the commenter, who live in the world of commerce, you would come away with a quite different idea of life trajectories – it is as if they were all products of a harsh and brutal orphanage. They all have Crusoe-fied themselves in that this is the story they tell. It is a story that is contradicted at every step by who they are, what they do, where they came from. Retrospectively, they cast the autistic net of rational choice or some such folly over the life they came out of, but this is gossamer of the most spurious type, a spider web thrown over social phenomena to try to make it cohere with fantasy.

It is the fantasy of contracts and pacts that has been puzzling me. Amie rightly has pointed out to me how odd and unmotivated all this contracting seems - although the contracts always do seem to be followed by destruction of the contract. Christoph Haitzmann makes several contracts, or posts several bonds (for his body and soul) with the devil. And yet, since he keeps tearing them up, what, exactly, is their function? This multiplication of contracts is not confined to the satanic realm – indeed, the ten commandments, which are, besides being rules, a covenant – a bond, a contract – are written in stone by God’s own hand – and promptly broken in anger by Moses, who comes down from Sinai and catches his people dancing around a golden calf. Moses has to go to God again, and God graciously agrees to write the contract one more time.

The contractual view, the view which provides the grounds for believing that it is the greed of the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker which is at the base of our economic life – instead of the love and hates of those that raised all three in the oikos and will so continue, world without end, amen – is a view of a kill and a killing from a text, but what a funny text. A text that comes into view and disappears. That bi-locates. That is written, figuratively or literally, in blood.

Bely's scream

Orientation

A poem, first. Blok’s The gray sky is still beautiful

And cold lights in the gray sky
Clothed the tsar’s Winter Palace
And the armored warrior in black won’t answer
Until dawn overtakes him

Then, reddening above the watery abyss
Let him lower his sword more gloomily,
To lie dead in a useless struggle
With the savage mob for an ancient fairy tale.

And a story. I found this in Mochulsky’s biography of Andrei Bely, which is, unfortunately, the only one in English.

In 1921, after Blok had died, and Bely was trying to get out of Russia, Bely gave a lecture that was supposed to be on Blok’s poetry. Maria Tsvetaeva was there. She wrote that in the middle of the lecture, Bely lost control and began to scream: “From starvation! From Starvation! Gout from starvation, instead of overeating!” and then he went on to his no doubt astonished audience:

‘ I have no room! I am the writer of the Russian land, and I don’t even have a stone on which to lay my head… I wrote Petersburg! I foresaw the downfall of tsarist Russia, I had a dream of the end of the tsar in 1905!… I cannot write! It’s a disgrace! I must stand in line to get my ration of fish! I want to write! But I also want to eat! I am not a spirit! For you I am not a spirit!.. But I am a proletarian… Lumpenproletariat. Because I am all in rags. Because they did away with Blok, and they want to do away with me. I will not permit it! I will scream until I am heard! A-a-a-a!…’

I will not permit it.
It was on ancient fairy tales, and their bloody destruction, that we have built this artificial paradise. And it will not last. It is dying in our bloodstreams as I write this. And in the sky, the tree branches, in the great migrations. So: what was it for? All this happiness.

I will scream until I am heard.

To fall into the hands of the lord is a fearful thing

The word comes, and like a misbegotten fetus, it tangles itself in its own feeding tubes and dies. The word comes, and it takes up its place in the midst of meaning that that primitive, the monkey handed mind, would so like to put down, make materialize, bring out of nothingness into somethingness – and yet those other words aren’t there, and the word lacks the mind’s private conversation.

I wrote this post yesterday evening, and I re-wrote it this morning. And I’m re-writing it again, against the curse on all violations of the law, first thought, best thought. The curse is one of a certain gloominess of aspect, a certain loss of freshness, a lack of the look of spontaneity.

My quotes from the little known Justus Moser have to be more connected to the trails we have danced or sneaked down. In particular, to the persistence, in these notes, of the theme of the closed economy. The peasant economy summarized by George Foster like this:
“In fact, it seems accurate to say that the average peasant sees little or no : relationship between work and production techniques on the one hand, and: the acquisition of wealth on the other. Rather, wealth is seen by villagers in the same light as land: present, circumscribed by absolute limits, and having no relationship to work. One works to eat, but not to create wealth.”

A leitmotif in this work is that the separation of the “old’ and the “new’ worlds, the pre-Columbian attitude in intellectual or cultural history, needs to be smashed. The opening up of the world, literally, dissolved one of the great defining features of peasant culture. The dissolution of peasant culture may well be the most important fundamental thing that happened in the last four hundred years, underneath every other feature of modernity.

Moser’s importance, in that story, is to express, in Enlightenment terms, a great tradition explanation for the closed social system that, in effect, is out of synch with the movement of the great tradition in his time. He was expressing, if you will, the way the great tradition had impressed itself upon the closed world. Even as that world was giving way – and certainly it was, certainly, as people like Charles Tilley have pointed out, capitalism of a primitive kind, with the centralizing features of factory life described by Marx, was already present in the countryside in France, England, Prussia – it was, of course, still dominant, and well able to interpret itself.

This is not of course the first time I’ve written about satanic pacts – they keep coming up. Just as the contract as a text object keeps coming up. When the peasants of the Cauca Valley in Colombia baptized their money with their children, or when Balzac’s Raphael makes his wish on the talisman made out of wild ass skin, they are, in a sense, giving us a sense of the life of the contract before the sharp differentiation of the written and the body. The text itself is part of the body – in the case of Haitzmann, the contract with the devil is written in, or signed in blood – if of course it was written at all. Freud claims that there was never a text object there to begin with. That the life of the name I sign on the thing that I sign should become my double is, perhaps, an image of the social contract (a contract like Haitzmann’s pact with the devil in that it is a mindforged thing) upon which we should reflect.

Okay, this is done. Now, onto what I wrote this morning.
...

Justus Moser wrote a number of fragments about serfdom. They are all oriented by the desire to show how the feudal structure began, for Moser was enough of a child of the enlightenment that he believed in the efficacy of the origin story. His editor sort of mashed them all together in his collected works, under the title, On Serfdom.

Moser begins by taking a defensive tone, writing that while all right thinking people now abhor feudalism, they fail to explain why it ever existed in the first place.

Moser explanation of the ancient institutions is advanced under the principle that a people shouldn’t be supposed to be simply stupid. This remark is directed against the predominate Voltairian tone concerning superstition taken by the philosophes – but Moser’s wording is startlingly similar to the remark in Wittgenstein’s notes on Frazer, made one hundred fifty years later:

“Already the idea of wanting to explain the practice – for instance, the killing of the priest king – seems to me to miss the mark. All that Frazer does is make it plausible to men who think as he does. It is very remarkable that all these practices are finally so to speak portrayed as stupidities.
But it will never be plausible that people did all this out of stupidity.”

Unlike Wittgenstein, however, Moeser doesn’t think that the practices are simply there, and the point is to describe them. They do have a rationale, and that rationale can be unlocked by means of a speculative reconstruction of the first feudal act, so to speak. Yet he ends up telling us a number of origin stories. The story that is most consistent with his point is one set at the beginning of the world. Abraham – “or whatever the name of the fellow was who owned the first large flock of sheep’” – allows his shepherds to herd their flocks with his while they tend the entire flock. The result is that the sheep of the shepherds fatten while Abraham’s sheep decline; the sheep of the shepherds flourish while Abraham’s sheep are seized by wolves; Abraham’s sheep sicken, the shepherds’ sheep do not. Finally, Abraham’s wife, making an Eve like appearance, said to him:”Husband, if we don’t change this, we will become poor, and our shepherds rich.” Abraham agrees. He not only forbids his shepherds to herd their sheep with his, he forbids them from owning sheep. ‘Everything that the servants produce should belong to me as Lord.”

Moser varies this story with other produce and other households, in all of which the paterfamilias must either prey upon the servants or be preyed upon. The dynamic of predation is the dynamic of hierarchy – every higher level demands of every lower level a certain symbolic disarmament of its ability to prey, until we reach the king’s position. Thus, to fall, in Moser’s schema, is to fall among wolves – you either keep your level or you expose yourself to attack and dismemberment.

Moser, like Freud, as we will see, justifies his theory by referring to ‘traces’, survivals: “From whence does it come then, that so many traces of serfdom are found in all states where the people live by means of agriculture?”

Now here, indeed, is father substitution in which ambivalence is inscribed in the system. The good father is a father at all due to the fact that he is a predator. Moser expressly compares the children of the paterfamilias to the servants. To fall, in this system, is a dreadful thing, and hard to see the end of.

And so we come to the de Certeau.

eternal sucklings of the world unite

In 1779, Emperor Joseph II was contemplating a second wave of land reform, removing certain burdens from the peasantry. Habsburg officials in Vienna conducted a survey among the empire’s official’s in the field, including Justus Moeser, who is, surely, among the counter-enlightenment’s greatest lights, along with his friend Friedrich von Gentz. Moeser was an administrator in Osnabrück, and responsible for the reforms there. Technically, Osnabrück was not a Habsburg territory, but Moeser had a reputation for understanding the incredibly complex structure of legal obligations that bound together the peasants and the masters in a relation of Horigkeit – dependence. Jonathan B. Knudson used the discovery of Moeser’s response in the state archive in his book about Moeser:

‘He states at the beginning: “serfdom (Leibeigenthum) is a notion which can be eradicated by a carefully conceived theory or better [which] can be regulated, so that it is beneficial to the state; and I have ventured to eliminate it without either lord or peasant noticing [what was taking place]. … Moeser was able to speak of abolishing serfdom without anyone noticing because he felt that serfdom embodied a concrete set of social and economic relationships that could be reformed, after which an independent peasantry would exist regardless of the label.” [134]

The dream of invisible emancipation is one of the keys to the conservative response to modernity.

So successful, in one way, was that invisible emancipation that Freud, in his search for father substitutes, overlooked the object and intent of Haizmann’s contract with the devil. This isn’t to say that Freud’s sense of the paternal is not at work here – after all, the contract with the devil is a gift of blood – literally, in terms of the ink, and figuratively, in terms of the declaration of “serfdom” – Leibeigentum. It is one of Deleuze and Guattari’s claims, in the Anti-Oedipus, that psychoanalysis has employed the sexual template to reduce a power relationship to natural terms; and that, in so doing, psychoanalysis reflects a certain high capitalist stage of universal history.

‘Perhaps he himself was only a poor devil who simply had no luck; perhaps he was too ineffecgtive or untalented to make a living, and ws one of those types of peope who are known as ‘eternal sucklings” – who cannot tear themselves away from the blissful situation at the mother’s breast, and who, all through their lives, persist in the demand to be nourished by someone else. – And so it was that, in this history of his illness, he followed the path which led from his father, by way of the Devil as a father-substitute, to the pious Fathers of the Church.”(Freud, 50)

Next, I want to look at Michel de Certeau’s essay about … Freud’s essay.

I, Christoph Haitzmann

We come to know him as a man who fails in everything and is therefore trusted by no one. – Freud, A demonic neurosis from the seventeenth century

Ich Christoph Haitzmann unterscheibe mich diesen Herrn als sein leibeigener Sohn auf 9 Jahr. 1669 Jahr” .

I shouldn't entitle this post I, Christoph Haitzmann – although what I should and shouldn't do, what I am tempted to do, and how I fail to resist temptation, can be seen not only in the title but in grain of Haizmann's life itself – since that long dead painter is not going to come to life again under my fingers, nor his shadow, his fiction, his mask. Instead, I’m going to consider Freud’s notion that Christoph Haitzmann could be analyzed as a neurotic. In fact, Freud’s notion – which not only has its place in universal history but depends on the series of equivalents (the savage = the infant, sacred gestures = neurotic personality types) that are the circus figures of universal history – is one of the touchstones of the twentieth century. It puts the discovery of the unconscious in the light of a whig history – a progress. Freud’s most famous remark about history seems, on the surface, extremely un-whiggish. He said that the revolutions of science progressively displaced man – the Copernican revolution displaced the earth from the center of the universe, the Darwinian revolution dissolved the difference between man and animal, and the Freudian revolution displaced the consciousness from the center of the human.

However, all of this displacement, these successive discoveries of human finitude, operate at the same time, in the same project, of humanizing nature, controlling the world, destroying any barrier erected by superstition or belief to man’s enjoyment of the world. Again, as with Foucault, reading backwards helps one see that the positivist version of progress requires an odd division between man, prey to superstition and thus prevented from exerting his knowledge and technique to make himself happy, and man, the object of study, whose cosmic delusions of grandeur must be demystified.

Freud, of course, as we all know, is the supreme inheritor of the alienated marginals of the happiness culture. At the same time, his engagement with universal history is flawless positivist. It is vulgar in Marx’s sense of assuming a relation between the present and the past that is purely quantitative. In the present, we know more. In the past, they knew less. In the present, we can look back and understand what was enacted, what was expressed, how relations were forged, how symbols and images worked, confident that our enlarged knowledge absorbs, without residue, their past and lesser knowledge.
The case of Haizmann came to Freud’s attention in 1922-1923. The painter’s file was discovered by a Dr. Payer-Thurn in the archive of Mariazell. The file consisted of a report of Haizmann’s possession, and a diary of the painter.

Haizmann came to the Mariazell monastery from a nearby town with a letter from the town’s priest, explaining that the painter, who wasn’t resident in the town, had started to convulse within the church. It was soon determined that the convulsions called for an exorcist. It turned out that Haizmann had been tempted by the devil nine times, and had once signed a contract with him in the painter’s own blood. The devil had taken the contract, but – when Haizmann repented – he’d appeared as a great dragon at midnight in the Sacred Chapel on the Eve of the Virgin’s birthday, and returned the contract.

Freud shows less interest in the contract than the devil. The reason why soon becomes obvious. Haizmann’s time of visitation from the devil came after the death of his beloved father. The devil, in fact, visited him in different guises. Some of the guises were painted by Haizmann in his diary, including one in which the devil is “amply” bosomed. Freud lists a few of his dealings with the devil, including one in which the devil accuses him – like some librarian – of having damaged a book on the black arts that the devil gave him.

Freud quickly spots a system of father substitutions here (It should be noted, I’m quoting an English translation that isn’t mine):

“It does indeed sound strange that the Devil should be chosen as a substitute for a loved father. But this is only so at first sight, for we know a good many things which lessen our surprise. To begin with, we know that God is a father-substitute; or, more correctly, that he is an exalted father; or, yet again, that he is a copy of a father as he is seen and experienced in childhood – by individuals in their own childhood and by mankind in its prehistory as the father of the primitive and primal horde. Later on in life the individual sees his father as something different and lesser. But the ideational image belonging to his childhood is preserved and becomes merged with the inherited memory-traces of the primal father to form the individual’s idea of God.” (in Capps, 46)

How do we go from God to the Devil? God, it appears, moves towards an ideal that is incompatible with certain features of the primal father. And there thus ensues a split:

‘We have here an exampleof the process, with which we are familiar, by which an idea that has a contradictory – an ambivalent – content becomes divided into two sharply contrasted opposites. The contradictions in the original nature of God are, however, a reflection of the ambivalence which governs the relation of the individual to his personal father. If the benevolent and righteous God is a substitute for his father, it is not to be wondered at that his hostile attitude to hiss father, too, which is one of hating and fearing him and of making complaints against him, should have come to expression in the creation of Satan.” (47)

One father, two deities. Or rather, one father and a memory trace of a primal father. And yet, this substitute, God, and this substitute, Satan, seem to be defined by some logic beyond the substitution. For why make two figures out of an ambivalence?

Enough for today.

making my bed of snow

And you wrap up his tired face in your hair
and he hands you the apple core

I’ve been contemplating my posts on Foucault. I like trying to combine thinking and writing in the daily format, where the writing is all about having no shock absorbers, and the longer term project, where all arguments, rhetorical feints, themes, tropes, tricks, hedges, and surprises have been milled through the thick shadow of reflection. The shadow I cast inside, my beloved, the shadow that no sunlight reaches, but only a lunar and lunatic glitter.

The Buddhists are right to compare the mind to a monkey.

So I’ve been contemplating my posts on Foucault with the shock of thinking through the Other, basso profundo O, that German import. I came upon this truth before I understood its meaning – which is of course the method of the monkey, the illuminated monkey. Although am I really saying anything more, deviating from the standard intellectual history that would make Hegel’s dialectic between the master and the servant a founding moment of our modernity?

If, however, we look at the Other as part of a system that unfolds as the human limit is dissolved and human finitude becomes the ground of the possibility of thought (which are not contradictory moments, but moments that express the two fold nature of man’s domination of the world, the wedding of the universal and universal history), then Hegel’s story is not of a struggle for recognition, but a story of new limits. We pass in review the savage, the animal, the slave, the woman, the proletariat, the peasant – and we find the faces, the many faces, of Nemesis, for this is the space into which this review is invited. It is here that alienation from the culture of happiness and the humanization of the world has its redoubt.

I cannot say, beforehand, that there is some incommensurability between Man and these losers. I suspect infection, however.

But to return to Foucault – I do not so much doubt the rupture Foucault describes as the linearity of the units he is using to describe it – the age, the epoch, the century, the ‘occidental’ culture. I prefer the move that Foucault makes in the seventies – where these unities are dissolved into fronts, mobile, diffuse, often overrun. It is the unities that Foucault is using, which come from the stock of universal history, which often make the reader of Les Mots et Les Choses –especially if that reader is even more a reader of the White Mythology – pause. A false sound comes from the bell.

The Other comes in bits and pieces – there’s no invention of it here, no sudden act of creation. That is simply the impression one gets from the point of view of universal history. Suddenly, a specter is haunting Europe. The Other is not so much resistant to the grid of the Great Tradition, with its obsessive knowing, than invisible to it. The Other, in other words, finds itself in another zone, a zone defined by the adventurer – by the possibility of adventure. In the world of the Great Tradition, adventure dissolves and is allocated to other vocations; in the world of the Little Tradition, the adventurer is a threat, either for good – the saint – or for evil – the witch. But the adventurer has his or her own zone, a zone under the sign of discovery, and here communication is, at its most primary, the exchange of intersignes.

Is this what I meant?

A round of 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. Dear Boss,
I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha. ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn't you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife's so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good Luck.Yours truly
Jack the Ripper
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
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.

Enlightenment, education and song

In the Styrian town of Leoben on a cold Christmas night in the year 1773, the believers in the town’s church beheld an uncanny sight: a man, dressed from head to foot in white, came into the church. The white clothing was inside out, exposing the seams. The man knelt at the altar and during the whole service seemed to be engaged in intense prayer. At the end of mass, he left with such haste that he forgot one of his white canvas shoes. Being shoeless, he was easily caught, and being caught, he was brought to the attention of the authorities. The name of the man was Jacob Kirschmueller, and he confessed that he was attempting a supernatural experiment. He’d heard that on Christmas day, the witches were out. If you went clothed all in white and knelt at the altar, you would see the devil, who would also be kneeling at the altar with his witches. At the changes in the mass, the devil would take off his cap. That was the moment to act – if you grabbed the cap, the devil would have to deal with you. Kirschmueller testified that in spite of the white, and in spite of freezing, he did not see the devil. He was very upset about this. The authorities, according to my authority, Fritz Byloff, were no longer the superstitious judges of yore. They’d been enlightened, or replaced, by Joseph II. Instead of burning him at stake, they condemned him to three days arrest, a fast, and a course of lessons from the vicar. His crime, they said, was being frivolous and stupid. Byloff uses this as an example of enlightenment – from belief in the devil to belief in the dumbness of the belief in the devil. “Reason triumphed.” (Byloff, 84)

Thirty years before, reason wasn’t so triumphant. Leoben was surely one of the towns in which, in 1734, the Jesuit college at Graz determined to make an evangelical effort. Peasants had been striking, coming into Graz and demanding less coerced labor and relief from the poaching laws, which was upsetting the establishment. A detachment of soldiers had dispersed the peasants. There were rumors of crypto-protestantism in the hill villages around.

In response, this would happen:

Jesuit organizers… customarily entered a town or village, erected a stage in the square, and proceeded to preach to their audience for a period lasting from eight to fourteen days. The via purgativa and the via illuminata et unitiva constituted the two phases of the mission. In a typical example of the former, a Jesuit, tied and bound with rope, appeared on a stage strewn with bones or pictures of hell. To illustrate the tortures of hellfire, he laid his hand on a red-hot coal or displayed a skulll while preaching to his audience. If the via purgativa was a lesson in damnation, the via illuminata et unitiva illustrated redemption through the Eucharist. Here the Jesuits administered general communion to adults or first communion to children. (James Van Horn Melton, 1986)

Van Horn Melton’s theory is that in the 18th century, Austria experienced a shift from an image to a literary society. But the intermediary to this shift (beyond the politics of secularization) was a certain combination of theatricality and music. In 1774, Empress Maria Theresia became the first monarch in Europe to make schooling mandatory for children. Although the school system was spotty, by the 1790s, in Bohemia, there was a system in which 2/3rds of all school age children were actually attending school – Melton says that this might have been the best system in Europe. At the same time, what was taught and who was qualified to teach it was unclear. At first, the qualification looked for in a schoolteacher was singing. “A major part of the school day was often taken up by the singing of hymns. The parish school in the Silesian town of Ratibor, where two hours a day were devoted to singing in 1740, was far from atypical. The English musicologist Charles Burney, a traveler through Bohemia in 1772, was struck by the dominant role of music instruction in Bohemian parish schools.”

That the great figures of the Austrian enlightenment are the composers, Haydn and Mozart, is perhaps not so surprising.

In the next couple of posts, I’m going to look at the Austrian enlightenment – how it got out in the fields – a bit. The connection between the enlightenment, the metaphor of human time (childhood/adulthood) that became very popular as a model for describing it, the two degrees of separation between Kant and Mozart, and the closing of the most powerful Masonic lodge in Europe in 1792.

A midnight reputation

I have extensively outlined what I saw at the crossroads at midnight. It was nemesis. It wasn’t rock n roll.

In looking at the birth of man, the man of the human sciences, Foucault’s thought crosses the thought of the human limit, in spite of a vocabulary that would seem to be moving in the other direction. Let me say something about that movement. What I mean is that, instead of seeing the human limit dissolving under the stress of the great transformation to capitalism and the turn to a new system of emotional norms, Foucault has been arguing that the classical age saw no human limit, but rather dreamed the happy infinity of the encyclopedia; and then the shutters came down, and the threshold of modernity, the line of our beginning, formed, and that line is distinguished by its discovery of human finality.

In a sense, what is alien to the main and what is the main are two parts of a complete whole. The three lines of alienation from the happiness culture share characteristics with that culture nonetheless. However, alienation has been to the crossroads. At the crossroads, at midnight, when the spirit of ilinx descends on the dry and the dusty savant, the loser, the hanged man who is struggling in the invisible chords of the rope he wove himself – this is when Nemesis becomes the other.

Here is what Foucault writes.

The unthought [impensé] (whatever name one gives to it) is not lodged in man like some squatting nature or a history which may be stratified there, it is, by relation to man, the Other: the fraternal or twin Other, born not of himself, nor in himself, but at his side and at the same time, in an identical novelty, in a duality without recourse. That obscure shore that one all too willingly interprets as an abyss in human nature, or like a fortress that has been singularly lock bolted by his history, is tied to him in a really other fashion; it is at the same time exterior and indispensable to him: a little shadow carried by man emerges in our knowledge, a little blind spot from which it is possible to recognize him. In any case, the unthought served man as a silent and uninterrupted accompaniment since the 19th century. Since it is not in sum anything other than an insistant double, it has never been reflected for itself in any autonomous mode, of that of which it was the other and the shadow, it has received the complementary form and the inversed name; it has been the in itself in the face of the for itself, in Hegel’s phenomenology; it has been the unconscious for Schopenhauer; it has been alienated man for Marx; in Husserl’s analyses, the implicit, the unactual, the sedimented, the non-effectuated: in any case, the inexhaustible doubling which is offered to the reflective understanding as the confused projection of what man is in his truth, but which also plays as well the role of a assumed foundation from which man must construct himself and reference himself up to the point of his truth. It is that this double, however, near, is yet the stranger, and the role of thought, its initiative proper, would be to approach where it is nearest its own self; all modern thought is traversed by the law of thinking the unthought.”

This is great stuff, fabulous stuff. I like the way this man deals the cards. Foucault’s genuine midnight status comes from the fact that he provides the moment in which he can be read backwards. Here is the place to start.

crossroads

J'ai sodomisé un louveteau. Avec le manche d'un marteau - Sexy Sushi

In a famous letter to Benjamin, rejecting the first version of his Baudelaire essay, Adorno wrote that, in the essay, “a power of illumination is almost superstitiously attributed to material enumeration”. Adorno went on to explain what he meant: "The empirical affects the blank of theory… The theological motive, to name things by their name, is transformed into the awestruck representation of simple facticity. If one wanted to put this drastically, one could say that the work had settled in the crossroads of magic and positivism (Kreuzweg von Magie und Positivismus). This place is under the spell of a witch (verhext). Only theory can break that enchantment.” (from Von Wussow, 51)

Adorno is dealing out a hightoned diss to his former maitre. However, this is a backhanded methodology devoutly to be wished by all true illuminati and Red Riding hood fans. In the mashup of Michelet's the Sorceress and Das Kapital, this is what you get, baby! Any greenie can recite the sociologist’s rosary: correlation is not causation. But that greenie gets no farther when asked the two logically succeeding questions: what, then, is causation? And what is correlation?

In fact, causation has to be correlation – plus something else. And as for what correlation is… Perhaps the answer to that only dawns on the person who is dealing with correlations dense enough to allow for crossroads. For it is from the crossroads that magic and positivism both take on a shape, take on a conceptual form, signal to each other.

And who are these masters of the crossroads? Benjamin, Toussaint L’ouverture. Atibon Legba. Who appears as a stooped old man, a clever peasant, a holder of a secret degree in asinine wisdom.

Azima Legba
Ouvri barrier po’ moin

One feels this crossroads in Les mots et les choses. It seems to follow Foucault through the book, even as Foucault’s description of the great tradition with its unities – the age, the ‘occidental culture” - seems curiously like the ethnography of Kafka’s Castle bureaucracy. These pulls to one side of the crossroads or another are particularly powerful in the structure and origin of the human sciences which he proposes in Chapter 10, with the erection of one threefold structure – the science of life, the science of economics, the science of language - covering the field of the positive sciences, and the science of man existing, as it were, in the margins and interstices – at the crossroads – on each level.

Foucault's episteme of the Same

Perhaps due to Foucault’s fastidious avoidance of the “philosophy of the subject” – which, as he wrote in his essay on Canguilhem, went through Sartre and Merleau-Ponty – the notion of the Other is as absent from The Words and Things as it is in the episteme of the 17th and 18th century.

Yet a witchy reading of Foucault would find that the absence of the Other is the prerequisite of the episteme of representation – in fact, the social function of that episteme (not a concern of Foucault’s in this book) is that it blocks the notion of the other.

This is the kind of lion’s paw statement that should trail the spring of a leonine book, not a mere less than thousand mouselike words.

To say that there is no room for the Other in the seventeenth and eighteenth century seems to deny the monument to Friday that I have been piling up, finding the figure of the savage entangled in the most unexpected, the most ‘Western’ of discourses – for instance, in the rediscovery of Greece by Winckelman; our principle, after all, has been as without, so within. The libertine in exile in Amsterdam writes of the libertine Huron in New France, whose people are being taught by Jesuits to humble themselves before the discoveries of the natural philosophy while villagers in outlying districts in France are being discouraged by their priests to read the natural philosophers, under pain of official visitation.

But, to use the terms of French philosophy, these figures are all related to the Same. It is the Same who comes into being as nature is freed from those sanctions controlling knowing and use that made it something other than our nature. It is under the sign of the same that the savage can be interpreted in terms of deficiency.

What happens to crack this system of interpretation – what epistemological mutation, to use Foucault’s phrase, occurs to bound the Same?

Here, one needs to register some criticisms. It is a well known criticism of Foucault that he gives no cause for these mutations – causes seem to fade into the background. This, however, is less worrisome to me than the idea that these mutations are homogeneous across the cultures of Modernity. In fact, by linking them with a temporal marker, he implicitly homogenizes the epistemic field of the West. Myself, I can’t see these mutations as anything but partial and fragmentary. I particular, I think the episteme of representation lasts a lot longer in the Anglosphere, and consequently the “human sciences” – those sciences that, I would contend, arise not because man appears, but because man comes into relation to the Other – are given a distinctly different turn in Britain and the U.S.

But it is time to quote the man. My translation, of course. I’m going to look at the last two chapters of the words and the things. This is from the last chapter.

“The first thing to observe is that the human sciences didn’t receive, inherit a certain domain that was already drawn, marked out perhaps in its totality, but left fallow, and that they would have the task to elaborate with concepts that were finally scientific and methods that were finally positivistic; the 18th century didn’t transmit to them under the name of man orof human nature a circumscribed exterior space, but still empty, that it would be their role to cover and analyse. The epistemological field which the human sciences proceed through hadn’t been prescribed in advance; no philosophy, no political or moral option, no empirical science of whatever kind, no observation of the human body, no analysis of sensation, of the imagination or of the passions, in the 17th and 18th century, encountered something like man; for man didn’t exist (any more than life, language and work); and the human sciences had not appeared when, under the effect of some pressing rationalism, some non-resolved scientific problem, some practical interest, one decided to pass man (whether or not he liked it, and with more or less success) onto the side of the objects of science, in the number of which he has perhaps still not proved that he can absolutely be ranged; they appeared on the day when man is constituted in the occidental culture at the same time as what must think and what there is to know. There is no doubt that, certainly, the historic emergence of each of the human sciences occurred at the instance of a problem, a requirement, an obstacle in the theoretical or practical order; it certainly required the new norms that industrial society imposed on individuals in order that, slowly, over the course of the 19th century, psychology constituted itself as a science; it also required doubtlessly the threats that since the Revolutin had weighed on the equilibrium of society, and on that even which the bourgeoisie had installed, in order that there appeared a reflection of the sociological type.”

Now, in one way, I might say, Foucault is merely applying the kind of philosophy of science to the human sciences that has been applied to, say, genetics – a philosophy that is anti-reductionist and anti-whig, so to speak. The language here is remarkably provocative. Before the burning of Moscow in 1812, the mayor, Rostopchin, who was infuriated by the retreat of the Russian army, apparently posted placards with apocalyptic warnings and sayings – Foucault drops that same apocalyptic tone into the burning of the intellectual history of the Enlightenment. There is no “encounter” with something called man. There is no life, there is no work, there is language. Dropping the modifying phrase, ‘concept of’, he bank shots everything off man – for of course, man here is the very base of the system. Concept is not strong enough, or so Foucault apparently believes, to convey the practical and theoretical consequences here, since concept would imply the very Hegelian structure which is set up in the nineteenth century. In other words, it would be an anachronism.

Of course, the problem is that the practical consequences have been muted in this book. Unlike Foucault’s work on the madhouse and the clinic, and later, on the prison, this history is surprisingly traditional in pursuing its themes in terms of a classifying, analyzing discourse, seemingly disembedded from the system of power in which it takes place. Power, which we think of as Foucault’s great theme, enters here only as a marginal theme, a few rills in the background. If it had been introduced, I think we would mutate the mutations – we would have to account for a modality of knowing that is left out of Foucault’s story: discovery.

Addendum to the funeral announcement for Man

Struggling and juggling to do work this weekend, I could not follow up on my plan. And I still can’t, but I can announce my plan, which is the next turn in my thread, or my stairway to heaven, or my deathmarch, my peach, my light of love, my ghost, the tombstone I carry around my neck. As Mallarme, disguised as Dr. Seuss once put it, oh the places you will go!

I’ve been thinking about why it is that the l’age classique I’ve been presenting seems, on the surface, to reverse everything in Foucault’s Les mots et les choses. I don’t see that reversal as a contradiction, but a turning inside out – just as you can turn a coat or a shirt inside out. Of course, turning inside out doesn’t have a proper place in logic, or a name in dialectics, but it does in the theory of play – ilinx. And where I have grabbed Foucault’ narrative and turned it inside out is, I think, just at that place where he announces the birth of man and his coming disappearance. For, in my endless bedtime story, the end of the eighteenth century, the laying down of the foundations of the culture of happiness, is about another birth, which by Swedenborgian bilocation might be the same birth: the birth of the Other. To my mind, this is what was busy being born as the guillotine came down on the Ancien Regime.

But I have no time to defend this thesis today. Rather, I simply wanted to yank Foucault’s thesis, give it a thorough pull, and in that gesture (which contains all the dualism of Petit Chaperon Rouge and le Loup, of course – the path of pins and the path of needles being to the initiated eye the same path) turn it inside out.

this beatitude comes in terror

It would be impossible to film this. It would be impossible that is to score the film to a proper time. There is the rhythm of time given by the historian, with its units – “the age”, for instance – of varying duration in which the content somehow determines the boundaries of the unit, and there is the real time, which opens up, upon being represented, to an audience who must trade their own real time for it, and there is slow mo and fastforward, which operate on the object of representation, the film, to create a difference in the content that picks up things unseen in real time.

This is a site and an occurrence. The site is London in the eighteenth century – a time cue. Three things happen. One, William Hogarth publishes The Four Stages of Cruelty in 1751. It is another of Hogarth’s series of etchings, this one depicting Tom Nero’s inevitable ascent into murder. The first of the etchings depicts acts of cruelty to animals. The Tate has a succinct description of the etching: “The worst abuse is being inflicted by Nero, who pushes an arrow into the anus of a terrified dog being restrained by two other boys. Another youth is distressed by what Nero is doing and attempts to stop him by offering a tart. To the left of Nero, a boy draws a hanged man on the wall and points at him, underlining the inevitable: that Nero’s behaviour will deteriorate further and cost him his life.” Lichtenberg will write about these etchings. So will Kant, in his most extended consideration of animals as the Analoga of humans in the lectures on moral philosophy, where he writes, for instance, that “when, for example, a dog has long served his master truly, so that is the analogon of service [Verdienstes]; for this reason I must reward it and sustain the dog until the end, when it can no longer serve.”



Two, in 1745 or thereabouts, in Princess Street, Emmanuel Swedenborg has his first vision. This post is about that vision… But wait…

Third event, if we want to call these things events: John Long publishes his book, John Long’s Voyages and Travels in the Years 1768-1788 in 1791, and in one paragraph, he quietly introduces a new word into the English language:

“One part of the religious superstition of the savages consists in each of them having his totem, or favorite spirit, which he believes watches over him. This totem, they conceive, assumes the shape of some beast or other, and therefore they never kill, hunt or eat the animal whose form they think this totem bears.”

Explaining this savage belief, Long delves into civilized history:

‘This idea of destiny, or, if I may be allowed the phrase, “totemism”, however strange, is not confined to the savages; many instances might be adduced from history to prove how strong these impressions have been on minds above the vulgar and unlearned. For instance one in the history of the private life of Louis XV, translated by Justamond; among some particulars of the life of the famous Samuel Bernard, the Jew banker of the court of France, he says that he was superstitious as the people of his nation are, and had a black hen to which he thought his destiny was attached; he had the greatest care taken on her, and the loss of this fowl was, in fact, the period of his own existence, in January, 1739.” (112)

Long himself was assigned a totem, the Beaver. It was tattooed on his body.

So, let us turn to Swedenborg. Two totemic quotes, incised in this non-space, to begin with:

It often happened to me subsequently, he said, to have the eyes of my spirit open, to see in full daylight what happens in the other world, and to converse with angels and spirits like I speeka with men.
- Jacques Matter, 79

This path is difficult, secret and beset with terror. The ancients called it ecstasy or absence,- a getting out of their bodies to think. All religious history contains traces of the trance of saints,- a beatitude, but without any sign of joy; earnest, solitary, even sad; "the flight," Plotinus called it, "of the alone to the alone"; Muesiz, the closing of the eyes,- whence our word, Mystic. The trances of Socrates, Plotinus, Porphyry, Behmen, Bunyan, Fox, Pascal, Guyon, Swedenborg, will readily come to mind. But what as readily comes to mind is the accompaniment of disease. This beatitude comes in terror, and with shocks to the mind of the receiver. – Emerson, Swedenborg, the mystic

Swedenborg was the son of a bishop, an expert on metals (just as Newton worked at the Royal English mint , Swedenborg was apparently called in by the Swedish treasury to work on the silver purity of the coins), and a general polymath. Long after his death, his posthumous papers on the brain were published. Together with the Animal Kingdom, a book he published in the 1740s, these, according to Charles Gross, in his history of the neuroscience of vision, show that somehow, Swedenborg made certain deductions about the division of labor of the brain that were amazingly prescient. He not only suggested the existence of neurons, but made a number of pronouncements that were confirmed only much later:

Swedenborg’s view of the circulation of the cerebrospinal fluid was not surpassed until the work of Magendie, a 100 [sic] years later. He was the first to implicate the colliculi in vision, and in fact the only one until Flourens in the nineteenth century. He suggested that a function of the corpus callosum wasw for “the hemispheres to intercommunicate with each other.” He proposed that a function fo the corpus striatum was to take over motor control from the cortex when a movement became a familiar habit or “second Nature.”

This is all the more remarkable in that Swedenborg seems not to have dissected or at least experimented himself. It has been speculated that he observed Pourfour du Petit’s experiments on dogs in Paris. But there is no hard evidence for this. (128-129)

What we do know is this. Swedenborg, at some point in the 1740s, traveled to London. Being a wealthy and famous savant, honored in Sweden with a seat in the Parliament, his travels were always apparently punctuated with visits to other savants and important people. This is what he told a director of the bank of Sweden. He had come back to his lodgings for the night. He ate with a great appetite that evening. Then, he experienced a disconcerting thing. His apartment seemed to fill with fog. The floor seemed suddenly covered with reptiles. “I was all the more taken by the fact that the obscurity kept getting thicker. However, soon it thinned out, and I saw, distinctly, a man sitting in one of the corners of the apartment at the center of a lively and radiant light. The reptiles had disappeared with the shadows. I was alone, and you can imagine my horror when I heard him, the man, in the kind of tone that would inspire terror, pronounce these words: Don’t eat so much. At these words, my view was clouded again. Little by little it came back, and I saw myself alone in my apartment.” (63)

Now, it is easy to understand the terror. If this happens to me tonight, I will be a raving lunatic tomorrow. But why the words, don’t eat so much?

It is a very strange way to enter into the numerous heavens and hells that surround us, and through which Swedenborg was able to communicate, like some kind of code going through the corpus callosum.

It wasn’t until the next day, when the man reappeared again, that he explained that he was god, and that Swedenborg was his man for writing down the proverbs of heaven and hell.

“Don’t eat so much.” The sentence seems to come out of Gogol, or Kafka. That it is in the highest degree banal, and in the highest degree terrifying – that it seems to attach to no symbolic system (though Matter does try to find one), is what makes it so uncanny; this is the tyrant’s banality, which the courtier endlessly interprets. It is like the story about Potemkin with which Benjamin introduces his essay on Kafka. In that story, Potemkin is in one of his depressed states, confined to his room, and won’t sign any paperwork. The council, meeting in an antechamber to his room, is in an uproar, when a lesser functionary, Shuvalkin, tells them he will easily set things right. He takes the papers and boldly goes into Potemkin’s room, sees the great man sitting in the half darkness, biting his nails in a threadworn sleeping outfit, and presents the papers to him for signature:

“Shuvalkin stepped up to the writing desk, dipped a pen in ink, and without saying a word pressed it into Potemkin’s hand while putting one of the documents on his knees. Potemkin gave the intruder a vacant stare; then, as though in his sleep, he started to sign – first one paper, then a second, finally all of them. When the last signature had been affixed, Shuvalkin took the papers under his arm and left the room without further ado, just as he had entered it. Waving the papers triumphantly, he stepped into the anteroom. The councilors of state rushed toward him and tore the documents out of his hands. Breathlessly they bent over them. No one spoke a word; the whole group seemed paralyzed. Again, Shuvalkin came closer and solicitously asked why the gentlemen seemed so upset. At that point he noticed the signatures. One document after the other was signed Shuvalkin… Shuvalkin… Shuvalkin.” (795)


The devil is in the banal, and the devil may be the Lord. Such is the rule of ambiguity in the great cosmic tyrannies. Indeed, Swedenborg’s journeys through heaven and hell have that same mix of the celestial and the utterly banal, from what I have read of them. The law of analogies is unfolded without any more to do than Swedenborg took in unfolding the laws of the brain. One wonders whether, in fact, after all, perhaps Swedenborg’s analogies were all travels in the brain… the brain… the brain…

But to our donkey business. As is well known, Swedenborg believed that we are all doubled – our images exist in another realm, and their images are us. He could converse with those images. But there is a twist to his belief. There are three heavens, but every heaven corresponds to a part of the human body. And every part of the human body is a society of angels. We know what part of the body this society is by its position in regard to other societies of angels. In a sense, this is a vast fractal, the body composed of self-resembling bodies, and so on to infinity. The substance of these bodies seem to be a sort of entelechy of affection, and affection connects man, beast and plant. What distinguishes man and beast and beast and animal in this scheme is not reason, but degrees of affection, with man being closer to the center – God – and plants being further out.

Although this retains the traditional hierarchy, it retains it in a much different way than Kant. In fact, it is similar to Mary Douglas’ notion of how meals gain their meaning – “ The smallest, meanest meal metonymically figures the structure of the grandest, and each unit of the grand meal figures again the whole meal – or the meanest meal. The perspective created by these repetitive analogies invests the individual meal with additional meanings. Here we have the principle we were seeking, the intensifier of meaning, the selection principle. A meal stays in the category of a meal only insofar as it carries this structure which allows the part to recall the whole. “ (1972, 67)

Enough and too much for today!

the donkey's enlightenment

There’s a very good post about literature and sociology at the American Stranger, followed by a comments section about the same. At the tail end of the comments section, Chabert and I engage in a little methodenstreit.

And there’s a very flattering post about Limited Inc up here. What Duncan says about the oscillation between a rhetoric of violence and a rhetoric of loss hits home. I’d like to write a little more about that in a post on News From the Zona.

… Now, on with the thread…

Between Bruno and Nietzsche, the ass goes underground. Bruno’s donkey, who is brother to Cornelius Agrippa’s ass – in a noble lineage going back through Apuleius all the way to Balaam’s steed – refuses to speak. Although there are indications, an underground asinine code, that the ass’s point of view hasn’t entirely lost its power. For one way of reading Kant’s project of reconstructing the interior human limit would be to highlight the cold cold shoulder he gives to the ass. Or to the animal kingdom, where instinct always finds its purpose – the happiness (Gluckseligkeit) of the creature. And where instinct reigns and no self-consciousness flares, we discover that the animal is always and will always be a means for the rational creature. Why is a little obscure. Kant, certainly unlike the caricature Cartesian, did not think of the animal as a clockwork – although the mechanic arrangement of the organism was, of course, a valuable way of understanding the living thing.

Now, myself, I find a certain anxiety here, about this instinctive creature, this all too means oriented means. If we are to reconstruct the interior human limit and strip out the superstition that erected Nemesis rather than freedom as its guardian and definer – a freedom that finds its essential expression in the universal form of our maxims - then here we are, in the city of sausages, with little choice but to send the non-universalizers to the abattoir.

Or such at least might be the tale being spun in the Great Tradition. However, while the ass’s partisans might have given in to the collapse of the exterior human limit, and gaze, now, on a world of means, they dug in their heels, a bit, on the interior limit.

One of the partisans of asinine philosophy in the 18th century is Swedenborg. This poses a problem for me, in as much as how does one approach Swedenborg? He was a graphomaniac’s graphomaniac. One doesn’t just dip in Swedenborg, anymore than you take a header into the mid-Atlantic from some ship – vast flows will drown you. The muchness of the man who conversed with angels and went through all worlds is too much muchness for me.

So I am going to take as my guide Jacques Matter’s book on Swedenborg, Emerson’s essay, and a few other bits and pieces.

Guides to cine-world

I’m lucky. I have two guides to the movies. One of my guides, Masha Salazkina, just published her book on Eisenstein, which I helped edit. All should buy it, or actually, make a library buy it. Masha has an incredible movie archive in her head – her book is, among other things, a protest against the idea that Soviet cinema developed under the sign of some exceptionalism. The baroque that Eisenstein found in Mexico is, by a thousand micro-ethnographic threads, connected to what he was doing in Russia.

In her work, Masha displays this great synoptic vision of world cinema. She knows the secret history that connects Brazil to Cuba and Cuba to Rome and Rome to Moscow.

My other guide is Amie, who is one of the constant commentors on LI. I owe Amie for my deepest movie experience – Bela Tarr – and to owe someone for Bela Tarr is to have an infinite debt in one's intellectual/spiritual account. I’d go on and say some things about Amie’s ideas, except I hope someday she will be expounding them on her own blog, and then in her own book. Although one of these days I might go on and do it anyway.

Amie told me that if I wanted to write about the abattoirs of Paris, I should see the Franju film, Sang des Bêtes. She warned me, however, that it wasn’t a film for the easily grossed out. Well, I am not a person who blanches because I see an animal being killed and butchered and eaten, since the bodies of herds of cattle, henhouses full of chickens, pods of fish, and numerous pigs have passed through my body. Cell of my cells, these butchered skinned blooded beasts.

All of which poses, or should pose, the great question: how can this be right?
To which the short answer has to be: it isn’t.

Franju calmly drives home the short answer. The film is short, and after the camera and the narrator’s voiceover – this part is narrated a woman – gives us a sense of where La Villette is, we get down to business. La Villette was intentionally sited by Haussman in a recently annexed banlieu of Paris in the 1860s, which was populated by immigrants and poor workers. Even when the slaughterhouses were opened, they were out of date, compared to the new, hygienic German abattoirs, the latter with their on-site doctors and running water at all times. La Villette was trichinosis city in comparison. So, back to the film, we follow a blonde horse into the gates of a courtyard and watch the man leading it take out a pistolet, apply it to the horse’s forehead, and down the animal goes. It doesn’t take ten seconds before a blade is slicing through the horse’s neck, letting out a steaming, rich flood of blood. It is at this point that we realize, uncomfortably, and for some viewers probably unbearably, that we are in for the killings.

About which, more later. The film is here dubbed in English, and here is the French

Killing 2

“Remember, Cridle, those oxen,
blonde giants, dumb, looking upwards to heaven
whilst receiving the lash: it seemed to me
like I was feeling it too – Oh, Cridle, our business is bloody.”

Such are the words of meat goods king, Pierpont Mauler, in Brecht’s 1930 play, St. Johanna of the Stockyards. Meanwhile, in Lyons, the mayor was welcoming a new invention in the municipality abattoir: a “pistolet de l’assomage”. The inventors of this instrument, Jean Duchenet and Karl Schermer, wrote a summary of the benefits of it for the patent office: “The present invention has for its object a system of using a downing pistol (pistolet d’abatage) of which the automatic function and enhanced security renders the usage very practical and completely inoffensive. The manipulation of this tool is completely harmless. Its maneuvering capability is easy, rapid, and its automatic functioning is protected from all accidental deterioriation. With this machine, the slaughter of animals becomes instantaneous. It gains precious time for the butcher, who can proceed immediately, conveniently, and without danger, to stripping the animals.”

Catherine Remy, from whose article I am quoting, explains: if one pushes the idea a little, it is the idea of a combat, or at least of a dangerousness of the animal, that is here evoked and is at the same time combated. … Eduard Herriot, the mayor of Lyons, went and was the first to introduce the pistol, all in underlining explicitly its humanitarian character. For example, in response to a letter sent by one of his co-mayors, E. Herriot qualified the pistol as the “least barbarous means of slaughter.” (60)

If Kant saw the collapse of the human limit, his response was certainly not to rethink the animal. In fact, the animal is – because it is without self consciousness – always and universally a means for Kant. A means for the one who holds the place delimited by the rational existence: the person.

Kant probably did not go down to see the livestock brought into the old slaugherhouse on the Pregel in Konigsberg. It was a very old site. Konigsberg had a lively butcher’s guild. They used to parade gigantic sausages on New Years day. In 1601, they carried a sausage that was almost 1000 ells long and weighed almost 900 pounds, according to Johann Hübner (1762).

But because there was a municpal abattoir, it wasn’t necessarily up to date. The ones in Berlin were notoriously noxious, polluting, and filthy. The floorboards rotted with the perpetual rain of blood from the slaughtered beasts, and sometimes the butcher, arm upraised and ready to strike, would be as surprised as the beef cow when the floor boards gave way, tumbling them both into the stifling darkness below the slaughterhouse. Who knows what was down there. In 1810, the city closed them, so that once again, butchers would slaughter animals on the street. On that same date, however, Napoleon famously ordered an abattoir reform, setting municipal slaughterhouses out in the suburbs, and hiding the killing and stripping of the beasts.
This was a much admired move. In London, beasts were run up Oxford street to the Smithfield Market until 1850. Britain was the home of the first organized anti-cruelty effort, but Londoners could see, every day, how the cattle and sheep and pigs were run. They had to be beaten into making their pilgrimage. However, with trains and with cooling equipment, things started to change. In Dresden, by the 1890s, the municipal slaughterhouse was so clean and sweet that tours were made of it, and the tourist could, after seeing sausages being made, take refreshment in a garden restaurant. Apparently, none of the smells carried. Of course, these slaughterhouses became famous for another reason in 1945, when Kurt Vonnegut and a bunch of POWs sheltered in one from the U.S. bombing attack.

The beast and the rational being, then, were much more shoulder to shoulder in 1781, when the Critique of Practical Reason was written, then they were even fifty years later. As the meat market grew, the meat making disappeared.

Amie has turned me on to Franju’s Sang des betes, a movie about abattoirs. It is on YouTube. I’m watching it tonight.

KILLING 1

I have my bare feet planted on the rug. I am at my desk. Suddenly, I feel something ticklish run over my toes. This immediately draws my attention away from the document I am reading. I look under the desk. Behold, a cockroach.

In my apartment complex, the man who sprays poison comes around once every two months. Usually, then, I enjoy an environment in which, silently and without me having to think about it, vermin die. They die out of my sight. I imagine the spray is some kind of pyrethroid. The poison operates on the cockroach’s central nervous system, causing repetitive firings – thus the jiggly behavior, Nerve blockage then ensues. The effect of the pyrethroids causes sodium channel modification, and in some insects the nerves will burst. Temperature changes can modify the effect. To sum it up, “the depolarizing nerve blockage caused by prolonged sodium influx into nerve axons is the primary cause of pyrethroid toxicity to insects.” So say Huber,Masler and Blakrishna in Cockroaches as models for Neurobiology. About 800 million dollars is spent in the U.S. each year to put down the German Cockroach. Thus, a gigantic, silent poison rain comes drifting down, and still, the thing that tickled me has evaded it.

Forcing me to take action. Already,obviously, the bug is confused. It senses a leaping up and down of a large and dangerous presence. So it shuffles forwards, and finds to its horror that there is some kind of thwacking, falling entity in that direction, which calls for reversing direction. It promptly does so and seeks a dark place, in which it remains for a half a minute, getting its bearings. Its little hairs are on high alert. It is sensing different zones of temperature and light. Then it makes a dash for home – which would probably involve climbing down a pipe, or going through a duct that is cut in the apartment for hvac air passage. The last thing it senses is a space to rush over and then it feels, along every nerve and through its thorax, its carapace, and legs the greatest pressure it has ever known, a tremendous and impossible flattening, as if all it had ever lived for was a lie. And then nothing.

‘The desire to control the indoor climate with air conditioning units to mitigate extremes of temperature, moisture, and airflow sets the stage for several cockroach species to infest and inhabit homes. The presense of some domestic species in dwellings, such as the German or brown banded cockroaches, is often a sign of poor sanitation or substandard housekeeping.” (Lockley, Ledford)

fair play for bull-baiters

In 1800, a bill was proposed in the House of Commons to ban bull-baiting. In bull-baiting, a bull was tied to a stake and dogs, often bull dogs, were set upon it. Sometimes, the dogs succeeded in killing the bull, sometimes the bull succeeded in killing the dogs, and most often, the bull and the dogs came off wounded.

The bill was defeated. Even so, it produced enough of a stir that a French academy asked a prize question about whether animals had a right to not being treated barbarously.

Another animal cruelty bill was introduced in the Parliament seven years later by Erksine, the well known defender of Tom Paine. It too was defeated.

Both defeats were mainly due to the eloquence of William Windham. Windham was one of Burke’s Whigs. He served as a minister in Pitt’s war government. He was, evidently, out of sympathy with the French Revolution. Yet the speech he made against banning bull-baiting is a document that defends the pleasures of the rural poor in explicitly class conscious terms; in almost the same terms, Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son in law, denounced the anti-vivisection movement in Britain in the 1890s.

Windham begins by dismissing the argument that bull-baiting has a corrupting influence on the character of the spectators by using himself as an instance: he saw two bull-baitings in his youth, he claims, and has not, since, seen any signs of cruelty or corruption. He then gets to the heart of what he thinks is wrong with the legislation by making it an issue of the culture of the common people:

“A great deal has lately been said respecting the state of the poor, and the hardships which they are suffering. But if they are really in the condition which is described, why should we set about to deprive them of the few enjoyments which are left to them? If we look back to the state of the common people in those countries with which our youthful studies make us acquainted, we find, that what with games, shews, festivals and the institutions of their religion, their sources of amusement and relaxation were so numerous as to make them appear to have enjoyed a perpetual holiday… “ Then he imagines what the poor in the country might say to the reformers: “Why interfere with the few sports we have, while you leave yourself and the rich so great a variety? You have your carriage, and your country houses; your balls, your plays, your operas, your masquerades, your card-parties, your books, your dogs, and your horses to amuse you – On yourselves you lay no restraint. – But from us you wish to take the little we have?”

Windham is objecting, as becomes apparent, not just to interference with bull baiting, but to the tendency to regulate the amusements of the poor for their own good. And in so opposing the bill, he speaks up for that countryside culture:

“In the exercise of those sports they may, indeed, sometimes hurt themselves, but could never hurt the nation. If a set of poor men, for vigorous recreation, prefer a game of cudgels, instead of interrupting them, it should be more our business to let them have fair play.”

This is the note of Hazlitt and Cobbett – and not what one might expect from a reactionary. Nor this: ‘The advocates of this bill, Sir, proposed to abolish bull-baiting on the score of cruelty. It is strange enough that such an argument should be employed by a set of persons who have a most vexatious code of laws for the protection of their own amusements. I do not mean at present to condemn the game laws; but when Gentlemen talk of cruelty, I must remind them, that it belongs as much to shooting, as to the sport of bull-baiting; nay more so, as it frequently happens, that where one bird is shot, a great many others go off much wounded. When, therefore, I hear humane Gentlemen even make a boast of having wounded a number of birds in this way, it only affords me a further proof that savage sports do not make savage people. Has not the butcher as much right to demand the exercise of his sport, as the man of fortune to demand that of hunting?”

Move forward, now, to Lafargue, who begins: “The bourgeois have the tenderness of angels in regard to animals: they feel a closer relationship to the animals than they do to the workers.”

Lafargue is not only following, unconsciously, in the path of the Burkian Windham, but in the path of Marx, who, in his list of the paragons of bourgeois humanism in the Communist Manifesto, includes societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals. Lafargue finds it infuriating that an English law allows the police to interfere with a scientist experimenting on an animal, and while allowing companies to experiment on their human clients with products mixed dangerous impurities or the like, all to save a bit of money in production:

“John Simon is an English factory inspector. He has studied the tortures to which the tender hearted bourgeois submits children, women and proletarian men in the capitalist prisons, in order to steal the fruits of their labor. He denounced them with a courage never known to the radicals. In his discourse [to a recent congress], he established that there exists two categories of experiment. One practiced by the physiologist on certain animals. The other practiced on thousands of men by speculators. For an example, he cits the classic experiments of Professor Tiersch on mice in order to discover the mode by which Asiatic cholera propagates, and the popular and well known experiment which was practiced during two cholera epidemics, of 1848-49 and 1853-54 on a half million inhabitants of South London by a certain commercial company who supplied these districts with polluted water.”

However, Lafargue is not only concerned with science – although it is interesting that the a defense of the amusements of the common people has transformed, in the course of the century, into a defense of science. He also uses Windham’s example of bird shooting to indict the bourgeoisie for committing acts of cruelty for their own amusement whilst banning acts that repulsed them among the lower orders.

Only by seeing that the dispute over animals and their treatment has deep roots in the common life, a life that was being transformed all over Europe, can one make one’s way, here. There is a delusion that we can get a clear political guide from understanding the pattern of our semantic binaries. They seem to group themselves before our eyes. We look at the history of the word, person, we see a sort of semiotic equivalent of the theodicy here, we think that we can make sense of the civil wars hidden in the word. We say, look at these oppositions deriving from this word that is originally a simulacra of the face, the face as an exchangeable object. Look at the number of semiotic transformations we can touch upon: of the relationship between the face and the body, the clothed and the naked, the man and the woman,, the elite and the common, the man and the beast. But when we look at how these things are imminently constituted and experienced, we find that things are not as we imagined them to be.

Maurice Angulhon, in “Le sang des bêtes. Le problème de la protection des animaux en France au XIXème siècle”, claimed that, unlike the 20th century, the entire onus of the movement to protect animals from cruelty, especially domestic animals, was aimed at preventing human cruelty. Windham, in fact, is responding to a similar claim in England – the spectacle or practice of cruelty to animals among the working classes will lead to either crime or a dangerous propensity to political rebellion. Surely this is true, to some extent, that the chief organizers for the protection of animals were animated by a “curious mixture of profound humanism and social fear.” For instance, under Napoleon, the traditional way of butchering an animal, which was done in the full view of whoever wanted to watch in Paris, was regulated so that it occurred in special abbatoirs. Just as the ladies wore red sewn into their necklines as a memorial of the guillotine, so, too, this prohibition could be seen as another, more fearful homage to the guillotine: “in dissimulating the blade of the butcher one contributed perhaps to avoiding the blade of the street jury.” (85) Industry and animal husbandry were much more visible, nonetheless, in cities where the flow of traffic was measured by the horse, and where the knacker’s trade in sick and dying horses, which were often sold off and starved to death, flourished.

It is easy to read this whole history as one to which we find the master key in the struggle of class with class. But Windham’s politics should be a caution that more than class advantage, or class projection, is at play here.

kant, the inevitable

Kant starts from two places in the Critique of Practical Reason. The first beginning is with the good Will – that most un-Socratic of moral entry points. The only thing that is unreservedly good is the good will. And then we start again. This time, we start with this existence (Wesen) endowed with Reason. This existence is introduced to us, firstly, under no name at all. This makes me think of the many names that I could list for this existence - “man”, “human”, “character”, “subject” , ‘agent”, “actor”, “self”, “soul”, “person”, etc. – each of which is endlessly involved in the discourses of the human sciences, each of which – unlike, say, the pieces of a chess game – is ascribed no fixed amount of power by some canon of rules, but rather is preferred and gains its power according to the state of the human sciences at any one time – which is to say that the rules, here, are further back. If an introduction is a way of putting together a name and a face, then we aren’t really introduced to the rational creature, here, at all. It is a feint, using a satiric tone made familiar from writers like Voltaire.

But what we can gather is that whatever name we eventually attach to this creature, and whatever it is made of – Carbon based, silicon based - what makes it happy is not the major question confronting the practical reason. However, it is, as it were, the question that dogs the creature, much in the way Faust is followed by a black dog at the beginning of the poem.

It is in Kant that the relationship between the culture of happiness and the collapse of the human limit – seen from the inside – comes into Hi Def focus.

In fact, from my perspective - an old man in a dry month, being read to by a boy, waiting for raain - Kant is engaged in trying to reconstruct the human limit here.

Of the names I’ve listed above, one name seems of central importance: person. A nineteenth century Kantian, Adolf Trendelenburg, wrote a much quoted article, “The History of the Word Person”, which poses the question: where did this word person come from? He starts off by showing how important the word was, quoting Kant’s Foundation of the Metaphysic of Ethics: “In opposition to the concept of the thing, Kant says in the Foundation of the Metaphysics of Ethics (1785): ‘a rational being (Wesen – existence) will be named a person, because its nature already exhibits it as an end in itself, that is, as something that may not simply be used as a means, and in so far as this is holds, limits the exercise of arbitrary force against it, and makes it an object of respect.” (Kant-Studien, 1908, 2).

He then goes back to multiple ancient sources for person. The first is persona, the mask. What is odd about this is that the mask doesn’t have a brain. It would seem eminentlyto be a thing, a Sache. He gives us one etymology of person that emphasizes something else about the mask: “Ona in Latin means full – “so designates persona per se one, the fullness out of itself, as to the person of Christ is designated the fullness, the pluroma.”

Trendelenburg points out the use of the Greek equivalent, prosopon, in Stoic writing to mean playing a role – but in the sense of the role nature, or Tyche, has thrust upon a person. Epictetus, for instance, writes that if nature has thrust lameness upon you, then you are to “play” lameness. All the world’s a stage.

Another field in which the persona unfolds a meaning is in law. At first, in Roman Law, persona was a mass noun, referencing all humans – as opposed to beasts. However, in the Institutes of Justinian, this collectivity was modified. Slaves were defined, like beasts, as aprosopon – non-persons. Finally, much later on, in Leibnitz’s use of person (which occurs in his legal writings), it again takes on the meaning of the human vs. the beast.

Looking at this from the perspective of both the question of nudity and the question of the personhood of beasts – which we took up in our post about Bernardina’s essay – the word person encodes an interesting manifold of binaries. Especially noticeable is the opposition between face and body, and the parallel opposition between human and beast. Ah, the civil wars in a word.

Looking with 72 senses at Kant

“…commencez d’abord par me dire combien les hommes de votre globe ont de sens. — Nous en avons soixante et douze, dit l’académicien, et nous nous plaignons tous les jours du peu. Notre imagination va au-delà de nos besoins; nous trouvons qu’avec nos soixante et douze sens, notre anneau, nos cinq lunes, nous sommes trop bornés; et, malgré toute notre curiosité et le nombre assez grand de passions qui résultent de nos soixante et douze sens, nous avons tout le temps de nous ennuyer. — Je le crois bien, dit Micromégas; car dans notre globe nous avons près de mille sens, et il nous reste encore je ne sais quel désir vague, je ne sais quelle inquiétude, qui nous avertit sans cesse que nous sommes peu de chose, et qu’il y a des êtres beaucoup plus parfaits.” – Voltaire, Micromégas

Philip Almond, in Adam and Eve in Seventeenth Century Thought, reviews the idea that other planets contained other living beings, which he thinks is one effect of the Copernican revolution. I have made the case that Cyrano de Bergerac’s inhabitants of the Moon owe a lot to the inhabitants of the New World. The discovery of the New World and the continuing discoveries being made in the 18th century in the South Pacific had the effect, on the learned in Europe, of destroying the notion that the knowledge of the world revealed by the traditional disciplines was complete. Extraterrestrials were an annex to that history of discoveries. A sort of dream compromise was struck between Utopia, More’s island in the Pacific, and the discoveries of astronomy. Almond quotes Robert Burton’s argument that if the Earth is a planet whirling about the sun, then the other planets must be like Earth in having inhabitants. Huyghens was also of this opinion. Fontenelle – that modern ultra – argued for the thesis in his Entretiens. In his second conversation with the marquise, he writes that ‘since the sun is now immobile, has ceased to be a planet, and the earth which moves about it, has begun to be one, you will not be so surprised to hear that the moon is an earth like the latter, and that apparently it is inhabited.” Fontenelle is often called a delightful writer. He was, at least, a flattering one, tempering his knowledge to the gestures of salon gallantry, the social convenance of volupté in which the moment of learning that a thing is such and such a way is identified with the thing’s being such and such a way – as if our discovery was an essential condition of the object’s being. In this way, he produced a rococo Genesis that is not for all tastes.

Not, for instance, Voltaire's, who makes fun of the whole strolling in the garden, talking with the marquise thing in Micromegas. Voltaire not only hits out at Fontenelle in Micromegas, but also at Pascal, who for Voltaire was always the arch-enemy. That Voltaire accuses him of being a mediocre geometer is, from a man who was as uncomfortable with mathematics as Voltaire, a rather usurping gesture. But the point here is to bring to earth Pascal's 'anguish' in the face of the infinite. In the goings and comings from planet to planet, the infinite simply becomes the tall and the taller, and even on the edge of the universe the picaresque narrative rule applies - every sage finds his buffoon.

Other writers – notably Lambert in Germany and Thomas Wright in England – use the as a basis to enquire into the constitution of the heavens. Kant reviewed Wright and knew Lambert.

As the interior human limit dissolves under the blows struck upon it by Enlightenment materialism, the extraterrestrial, or something that fills up a space that is comparable to the human, emerges. The notion of another rational being, neither God nor man nor angel, is not long in presenting itself in the Critique of Practical Reason. And it does so in terms that are surprisingly close to Micromégas:

We assume as a principle that, in the natural disposition of an existence organized, so to speak, purposefully, so as to be alive, we will meet with no feature (Werkzeuge) that is not most appropriate and suitable to that end. If in an existence that had reason and will, the actual end of nature were its preservation and well being – in a word, its felicity, it would have badly executed this intent by selecting this creature’s reason to be that intent’s overseer. For all the actions that it has to carry out to meet this intent, and the whole rule of its behavior would have much more exactly been enacted, and this end would have been more securely maintained, by instinct, than could happen through reason. And should the latter be allocated to the favored creature above, it would have had to serve him only in order to make observations of his fortunate material disposition, to admire, to enjoy, and to be grateful to the ever so benign cause of it; but not to have its desires submitted to this weakened and delusion-prone guide in order to blunder into Nature’s intent. Nature would have forthrightly confided to instinct the taking over of not only the choice of ends, but also of means. (6-7)

This paragraph is certainly in a philosophical treatise, and is meant to be appropriate and suitable in tone towards that end. And yet, it uses a rhetoric, a tone, that bears the distinct stamp of that most Enlighenment of genres, the philosophical satire. We are hyperaware that the words ‘man” and “human” are avoided here, and we are hyperaware of the satire’s bent for negative space, the way it grabs the eraser, the way it produces disjunction in order to create conjunction. No subject here, but instead, an existence, (Wesen) a creature (Geschöpf), as if we must begin with the language stripped down to a certain anatomical level. And if the satirist casts a distinct shadow over the page, hasn’t there always been a relationship between the moralist and the scold? And even, in philosophy, the stripping advice of the stoic. There is a degree of freedom in this paragraph, in other words, that is derived from something other than proofs and arguments.