Travelling through the republic of wolves: Dom Juan and Little Red Riding Hood

Contra Deleuze, I am more interested in the tree than the rhizome, the tree that my ape ancestors climbed, and that my hominid ancestors, in Europe, worshipped, chopped down, feared when there was a mass of them stretching for hundreds of miles across the country, and went across the globe to encounter, Paul Bunyan axe in hand, on the shores of the New World. I myself, as a boy, was an ardent climber of trees. The bark that would come away, the ants you would find, the life of the thing, hiding in the top branches. I like to think that the way I misread the story of Fontenelle in the forested park at Mésangère is a deeper sign of the times: that Fontenelle, in explaining to Madame de la Mésangère the orbits of the planets, carved their figures into her beech trees. Not rhetorical figures.

Of course, the tenuous connection of friendship and family, the linking of one Rouennais to another, doesn’t quite explain or justify my sense that l’esprit geometrique and the Perrault’s tales, or the tale of Beauty and the Beast, form a dialectically joined complex.

And what are those tales? I want to go deeper in the woods with this question. Those who pursue literature, or intellectual history, seem to be going down a different track from those who pursue folklore, or ethnography. I like it when those tracks merge, or when you can’t tell if they have or not.

Jean Perrot makes a case, in his essay, L’appropriation et le jeu avec le conte, ou pourquoi
Le Petit Chaperon Rouge? that Perrault’s tale was overdetermined not only in being a mixture of the servant or peasant’s old tale and the courtly overlay, but, Perrot claims, also as a sort of suggestion that arose from Perrault’s rivalry with, and admiration for, La Fontaine. The latter was Boileau’s friend and thus would have been Perrault’s enemy, theoretically, in the battle between the ancients and the moders. Perrot’s case rests on a reading of the extraordinary travel letters that La Fontaine sent his wife in 1663, when he accompanied her uncle, Jacques Jennart, into internal exile in Limoge.

Perrot points to a parallel – a possible appropriation – between certain features of those letters and Perrault’s tale, which was published in 1697. The letters are Perrot’s third “tableaux”, pictures of situations that are not proofs, but suggestions. For Perrot, like Perrault’s heroine, does go down a trail of suggestions:

“Accompanying the uncle of his wife, exiled in Limousin, La Fontaine exhibits his impressions of the journey to his spouse in letters dated from 25 August to 19 September 1663. Significantly, he is going to cross the landscapes of Nivernais, the same in which Paul Delarue has gathered the popular version of Little Red Riding Hood. His confidences, which are far from being confessions and which participate more in the exchanges between Valmont and Merteuil, allow us to see a pronounced taste for the observation of pretty women. In the first letter he writes: “The tell us, among other marvels, that many of the first rank bourgeois women in Limousin wear capes of a dried rose color with hoods of black velour. If I find someone of those capes which cover a pretty head, I could amuse myself in passing, and solely for the sake of curiosity.”

Before I go further into Perrot’s comparison, let me present my own parti pris: I think the letters Perrot cites are much more likely connected to Moliere’s Dom Juan, which was first put on in 1665. As Perrot makes clear, the letters were written to be circulated among La Fontaine’s friends, which would certainly include Moliere and people in his circle. Perrot’s claim I think is a bit tenuous, hanging on that hood. And yet I like the idea that at the source of both Dom Juan and at least part of Little Red Riding Hood stands perhaps the finest, and surely the slyest, French poet of the 17th century.

To go forward, then, a bit with Perrot’s citation of the letters. The letters are written in a prose that often breaks into rhyme. In the first one, La Fontaine praises the woods of a property near Clamart where they stopped to rest, “with the darkness of a ten centuries old forest”. This wood, though, seems to have been very cultivated, and formed part of a landscape with a garden. Going through the alley in the woods, La Fontaine is filled with rococo visions of fauns, and of Pan – a domesticated savagery. The next letter, however, gives us a contrast – for here La Fontaine describes going through the valley of Tréfou. In the coach was a countess, La Fontaine, Jacques Jennart, another woman, and presumably some servants:

I can’t think about that valley of Trefou without trembling,
It is a dangerous passage too,
A site for thieves, for ambushes and to hide
On the left a woods, a mountain on the right side
Between the two
A path very narrow
The mountain is covered
with boulders like those
of our little Domaine.

Even though we were all humans in the coach, we climbed out, in order to relieve the horses. As long as we were on the road, I only talked about the usefulness of war: in effect, if it produces robbers, it occupies them too, which is of great benefit to the entire world – and particularly for me, who naturally feared to meet them. They say that they swarm in the woods we were passing through – this isn’t good. Really, they should burn it down.

Republic of wolves, asylum of brigands
Do you really have to exist in this world?
You favor the evil
By your thick, deep shadows
They cut the throats of he who Themis, or gain,
Or the sightseeing impulse, makes journey from his soil!”

Later, La Fontaine’s party passes into Estampes, which has been sacked in the wars of the Fronde and is still burnt out, although they find lodging. The next day they go through Beauce, and this happens:

“boring countryside, and which, outside of the inclination that I had to sleep, furnished us with a very pretty subject. In order not to go to sleep, we put an argument on the carpet: our countess was the cause, for she is of the Religion, and showed us a book of du Moulin; M. de Chateauneuf (this was the name of the footman) took it up, and told her that her religion was worthless for several reasons. First, Luther had I don’t know how many bastards, the Hugeuenots never go to mass: at last he advised her to convert, if she didn’t want to go to hell: for purgatory was not made for gentlefolk like her. The woman from Poitiers then began on the scripture, and asked for the passage in which Purgatory is mentioned. While all this was going on, the Notary was singing and Mr. Jannart and I were drowsing.”

Finally, there is this passage, which Perrot cites to find a parallel with the wolf in Perrault, and which I will cite for my own purposes – a passage much further on, in the letter written when they were approaching Limoges. Perrault tells his wife about the inn they enjoyed at Bellac:

‘Nothing pleased me as much as the daughter of the innkeeper, a pretty enough young person. I teased her about her coiffure: it was some kind of hood with ear flaps, the cutest thing with a border of gold ribbon about three inches wide. The poor girl, thinking that she was showing off, when to find immediately her ceremonial hood to show me. Once you pass Cavigny, they speak only quasi-French; however, that girl understood me without trying too hard. … As mean as was our niche, I allowed myself a very sweet night. My sleep was not interrupted by dreams as it usually is: however, if Morpheus had brought me the daughter of the innkeeper, I don’t think that I would have sent her back; but he didn’t do it, and so I passed.”

In my hasty researches, I have found nobody who has remarked upon the many elements here that find themselves in Moliere’s Dom Juan. There is, first, the marvelous girl who speaks quasi-French, much like the peasant speech in the play; there is the entrance into a dark forest, a republic of wolves; there is the dispute between the servant and the master – or in this case mistress – about religion. And there is the curious twist in the play, where Dom Juan and Sganarellle are violating a code even more sacred then marriage by fleeing a duel - this is the motivation for the trip through the woods. And yet, in the woods, when they come upon some robbers, Dom Juan shows extraordinary courage. Similarly, the trembling La Fontaine is, after all, accompanying a man in disgrace and writing letters about it that he knows will be read in the highest circles.

I have the highest regard for that play of Moliere’s – higher than most people. La Fontaine and Moliere both frequented circles in which libertine notions – Gassendi’s philosophy, and Epicurus’ – circulated. It is easy for me to believe that Moliere hid some jokes in this play, jokes that La Fontaine would discern. That, twenty years later, Perrault would recall those red hoods – that is, I think, a little harder to swallow. But it does make sense that the Red Riding Hood, La Fontaine, and Dom Juan would be joined together in traversing the wood of the Republic of Wolves. Which gets me, at last, to the woods.

natural kinds and the seven ages of man

In Jacques’ speech in As you like it, he delivers this well known commentary on the seven ages of man:

Jaq All the world’s a stage And all the men and women merely players
140 They have their exits and their entrances
And one man in his time plays many parts
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms
Then the whining school boy with his satchel
And shining morning face creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eye brow. Then a soldier
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard
150 Jealous in honour sudden and quick in quarrel
Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice
In fair round belly with good capon lined
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part.The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon.
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side. His youthful hose well saved, a world too wide 160 For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice
Turning again toward childish treble pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth sans eyes sans taste sans every thing.

The speech has, of course, long ago passed into cliché – and yet if one reads it closely again, it revives in the mind, because it really is brilliantly constructed and creates, in amazingly few words, a panorama reflecting the deep beliefs of the early modern bourgeoisie. It does all this by taking a then common age typology, although not the only one: the ‘seven ages of man.’ One notices that the criteria by which each age is individuated is taken from both nature and the social. In a sense, it is exactly in this form that we classify the negative and positive emotions. The seven ages are not what philosophers would call natural kinds – in that the classificatory scheme that separates and defines one age from another is not generated by ‘natural’ characteristics within the age taxon, but is defined – except in the very beginning and at the end - by characteristics external to the taxon. That externality is what gives the speech its striking and busy visuality – it is as if Jacques were pointing to various tableau vivant. But this externality also insinuates itself into the tableau, reminding us always that it is a tableau of “players”, who are minimally defined by their entrance and exit. This is even true of the infant “Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms”. It is, of course, easier to understand the other theatrical dimension of the other players, because one has the sense that age is represented by the player with an appropriately theatrical consciousness. And that player’s consciousness – which begins at the low level of mewling – ascends, as the tableau succeed one another, to become more and more prominent and frozen, until it returns to the infant’s state of pure play – when the player, an old man, is almost consumed entirely in the thing he plays entirely. It is in this way that the history is strange, or estranging, and eventful without being particularly full of events. The events, too, have their entrances and exits.

The seven ages conception was in competition with other divisions of the life cycle – such as the Three ages – but all responded to the logic of allegory. If there were seven ages, they had to correspond to the seven planets. If there were four, they had to correspond to the four humors. And so on. A conceptual motive articulated itself in this world of allegory: that the world was a unity. It was, every bit of it, created by God.

Yet how much did this unity, this allegorical system, penetrate into the pragmatic age classifications of everyday life? Jacques ‘schoolboy’ was not, of course, recognizable in every household in the Europe of the seventeenth century. The rustic clown, the serf, the lowskilled urban artisan didn’t necessarily go to school at all. To reconfigure the types to represent the clowns would not have been very hard – but did the clowns think in terms of these ages? Shakespeare’s contemporary, Henry Cuffe, in The Differences of The Ages of Mans Life (1607) noted that Aristotle setteth down three ages, each of which is characterized by an endogenous, natural property having to do with our human ‘juices’ – for we are indeed, in this view, trees full of sap, or withered. There’s the green age, man-age, and old-age, in this schema. “For such is the nature and disposition of our body, that by the continual combat and interchangeable dominon of the ever-jarring elements it often changeth its primary constitution.” [Quoted in Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and masculinity, 74) Cuffe was of Bacon’s school, in looking to nature as the root of all things, but nature did include the planets and their evident effects. Thus, he did not finally accept Aristotle’s schema, but came up with one of his own.

I’d contend that the natural kinds of ages do not determine, except at the margins, social age classification – which is indisputable as regards such elements of our natural constitution as, for instance, sex, which is ringed about legally by a tangle of age premises that have little to do with the humors, or planets, or hormones, and much to do with something called consent. It is for this reason that ages have a certain poetry, one which reaches through the entire strange and eventful history of the course of life and shapes such seemingly non-poetic practices as housebuilding and medicine.

Here’s a recommendation from Ficino, writing in the 15th century, in his De Vita:

“Immediately after the age of seventy and sometimes after sixty- three, since the moisture has gradually dried up, the tree of the human body often decays. Then for the first time this human tree must be moistened by a human, youthful liquid in order that it may revive. Therefore choose a young girl who is healthy, beautiful, cheerful, and temperate, and when you are hungry and the Moon is waxing, suck her milk; immediately eat a little powder of sweet fennel properly mixed with sugar. … Careful physicians strive to cure those whom a long bout of hectic fever has consumed, with the liquid of human blood which has distilled at the fire in the practice of sublimation. What then prevents us from sometimes also refreshing by this drink those who have already been in a way consumed by old age? There is a common and ancient opinion that certain prophetic old women who are popularly called "screech-owls" suck the blood of infants as a means, insofar as they can, of growing young again.1 Why shouldn't our old people, Why shouldn't our old people, namely those who have no [other] recourse, likewise suck the blood of a youth? a youth, I say, who is willing, healthy, happy, and temperate, whose blood is of the best but perhaps too abundant. They will suck, therefore, like leeches, an ounce or two from a scarcely-opened vein of the left arm…”

This kind of recipe opens a vein of speculation in the puzzled reader. What is being restored, here? As the relation between youth and age is one of the great polarities of the happiness culture within whose mad triumph we stumble on the roads from the artificial paradise today, the social fact of age classifications and relations has to be a great part of the story of modernity.

Kant and Hamann

There’s a story related in Manfred Kuehn’s Kant. When Hamann finally moved back to his native town from Riga – breaking off his engagement with the daughter of the man he was working for, the merchant Behrens – he began to express opinions much different from the enlightened ones that he had left Konigsberg with in 1752. At that time, as he wrote in a letter to his father that he was being driven from the narrow society of Konigsberg because it stymied his ‘freedom to think and to act, our highest privilege.” He was, he said, forced into a “kind of life in which I can grow neither morally nor intellectually,” whereas in the wide world, with cities like Berlin, he could prove himself to his father’s satisfaction.

But he came back to take care of his father’s house with a different sense of what growing in morals and insights meant. This disturbed his friend Kant. When Johann Christoph Berens visited Konigsberg in 1759, Kant and he got together and decided to pay a visit – to make a sort of enlightened intervention – on their friend Hamann. On July 12, Hamann wrote his brother that he and his two friends broke peasant bread at a tavern in a suburb of Konigsberg, “Between us,” Hamann wrote, “our commerce doesn’t have its former familiarity, and we impose upon ourselves the compulsion to avoid all allusion to the same.”

I wonder, given Hamann’s new and ferocious interest in the bible, and in particular, in Job, if he mentally classified these enlightened souls as Job’s comforters.

What had happened to Hamann was simple and complex. He’d gone to London on a mysterious mission for the Berens House in 1757-1758, and not only failed in his mission, but had fallen into an old habit of lounging – Mussigang – and had made friends with a man who, he discovered, to his shock, was being kept as the lover of another, more powerful man. The rumors that reached Hamann had tempted him to open a letter that he’d been entrusted with by his friend – for obscure reasons – and Hamann had read for himself a somewhat obscene love letter. Alone, tormented by – as we know from his memoir of his early life – sexual desires (like Rousseau, Hamann makes a special note, in his memoir, of the boy who taught him how to masturbate), and broke, Hamann sank into one of the funks that seemed to overcome him periodically. Like the protagonist in Hunger, he subsisted on barely a meal a day, plus coffee. Then one night - the 31st of March, 1758 – Hamann opened the book of Genesis and read the story of Cain and Abel. He fell into a revery over the words, “The earth has opened its mouth to receive the blood of your brother”

“I felt my heart begin knocking, I heard a voice in the depths sigh and moan, as the voice of blood, as the voice of a slain brother, who wanted vengeance for his blood, when I commenced to stop up my ears against myself and soon did not hear – even as Cain did unsteadily and fleetingly. I felt all at once my heart swell, it poured itself out in tears, and I could no longer – I could no longer conceal from my God that I was the fratricide, the fraticide of his only begotten son. God’s spirit continued to work in spite of my great weakness, in spite of my long resistence, which I had employed up to now against his testimony and contact, revealing more and more to me the secret of divine love and the beneficence of belief in our blessed and only savior.”

That voice from the subterranean depths of London shattered his belief in pre-established harmony, or the advancement of knowledge, and turned him into a resistor, what we would call a reactionary if, in fact, such a call made sense in 1759, with absolutism heralded by enlightenment. Hamann felt himself called to Job’s side – and it is a great historical symbol that he happened to be friends with Kant, and communicated with him even after that failed intervention. He was never going to convince Kant that the world had ever opened up its mouth to him. On the other hand, he was never going to return to any kind of orthodoxy – any church. Hamann, like many disparate figures convinced that they were called to prophecy, fully accepted the consequence of the Enlightenment critique of institutions.

Like a prophet, too, Hamann had a disability – he had some kind of speech impediment. A stammer of some sort. He went to a quack in London to have it healed, but the quack was too ludicrous and too expensive for Hamann’s taste and pocketbook. Instead, Hamann threw that speech disability into his writing, and began a campaign of deliberate obscurity against the lightfilled flow of 18th century writing. In order to redeem prophecy in his time, he thought, he needed to reawaken the prophet’s old weapon of a rhetoric that shook with private, apocalyptic meanings – as though the blood of Abel were being gargled in the mouth of the earth.

Travelers

Travel? One need only exist to travel. I go from day to day, as from station to station, in the train of my body or my destiny, leaning over the streets and squares, over people’s faces and gesture, always the same and always different, just like scenery.
…
‘Any road, this simple Entepfuhl road, will lead you to the end the World.’ But the end of the world, when we go around it full circle, is the same Entepfuhl from which we started. The end of the world, like the beginning, is in fact our concept of the world.” – Pessoa

It is well know that Kant couldn’t be budged. He never saw a city bigger than his Königsberg. His friend, Johann Hamann, did – as did Herder, and Lichtenberg. The philosophe was, usually, a traveler. But in a sense, Kant was one of the great clerks. I admit that it would distort the metaphysics of the Critique of Pure Reason to make it the equivalent of Bartleby’s, I prefer not to – an almost perfect definition of the noumenon! – but there is something definitely going on, here, in the cultural underbrush.

Königsberg was an important city, historically and symbolically, for Prussia. Kant, who like Kafka, later on, loved his travel books, was able, without budging, to experience Russia when the city was occupied for five years during the Seven Years war – a time when Cossacks camped in the countryside and a low intensity struggle broke out in the East Prussian marshes. It was Kurt Stavenhagen who pointed out, in the 40s, the liberation that accompanied Czarin Elizabeth’s troops – in ironic contrast to Friedrich’s enlightened tyranny. Although Kant did not get his wish during this time to be promoted to professor, he apparently enjoyed the company of the Russian officers, along with other townsfolk – Königsberg had a very nice occupation. When it was re-taken, Friedrich refused to step foot in the town.

I don’t have time, today, for more than a quotation. One is Kant’s description of Königsberg from a footnote in the preface to the Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view. The preface concerns worldly knowledge. Kant could be accused of not having any, never having gotten out into the world. This is his reply.

“A great city, the middle point of a kingdom, in which the landscollegia [offices] of the Government itself are found, which has a university (for the cultivation of sciences) and is as well a port for maritime trade, which flourishes on a river that rises out of the interior of the country as well as with bordering various countries of different languages and custom – such a city, as for example Königsberg on the Pregel, may well be taken as a proper place for the expansion of the knowledge of men as even that of the world; where this, even without traveling, can be gained.”

a Begriffsroman

Begriffsgeschichte begins in genius and ends in banality. Although there are times, sweet, rare times, when that order is reversed.

I’ve been pondering two things, lately. One is Kosellek’s Future’s past, which is a history of how the future was conceived in the past – how the horizon of expectation is construed - as well as a meditation on the whole enterprise of a "history of ideas". I’ve been thinking of how it is possible to elaborate a history of the third life, and how to avoid the mistake into which all fall of conceiving history as a series of heads reading a series of books. This, of course, misconceives both head and book. We are talking about the inspired sensorium, and we end up talking about 'influence'. Improvements on this improbable picture often consist of rather vague references to class, by Marxists - who will happily go back to the heads reading books picture when talking about Hegel's 'influence' on Marx, etc.

And by these stages, by this blindness, the angel of Detail is driven from the City of the Mind.

I want the Angel back.

But this is a desire easier to express than to realize. Which brings me to my other topic: a nest of gentlefolk in Rouen: Pierre Corneille, who lived on Rue de la Pie; the family of his sister, the Fontenelles, headed by a solid bourgeois lawyer, who lived nearby, on Rue de Cordier; the Pascals, who lived on Rue des Murs-Saint-Ouen. The Pascals evacuate for Paris in 1639 – why? Because, apparently, Etienne has been frightened by the violence in the countryside. For one must remember the countryside – and Rouen’s dependence on it, and its fear of it. And one must remember the weather. According to the Histoire Sommaire et Chronologique de la Ville de Rouen, there were some extraordinarily cold seasons from 1630 to 1650 in France. Repeatedly, in the spring, icebergs would be spotted, floating down the Seine. Sometimes they were big enough to break bridges. The crops, of course, suffered under the excessive cold, the flooding, and the wars – the continual wars of the Court, for which money had to be pressed out of somebody’s hide.

However, this is a tale for later. Let us leave it that the Pascals fled a Jacquerie led by a mythological Jean Nuds-Pieds, whose name appeared on a poster that appeared on April 11, 1639, in the town of Saint Lo, proclaiming a new order – or, actually, in peasant style, a return to the old order.

But this nest of gentlefolks extends over time. Taking Fontenelle as my central figure, I can also trace other connections all the way up to Leprince Beaumont, in the 1730s. For instance, the brothers Jacques and Guillaume Scott, who at some point arrive in Rouen (from Scotland? They are, at least, protestant) and start some kind of business. Exactly what that business is remains a mystery – M. Bouquet, who wrote about them in the Journal de Rouen in the 1860s, at first described them as makers and sellers of vinegar. Vinegar was sold by peddlers on foot, in Paris, and presumably in Rouen. The descendents of the family must have found that description not to their taste, so M. Bouquet retracted his statement in a later article. For us, the important thing is that Guillaume grew wealthy enough to buy himself into the nobility. His son married a woman with a famous name: Rambouillet. Marguerite was the daughter of Mme de la Sabliere, whose Hotel Rambouillet hosted a famous literary set in Paris that included, most famously, La Fontaine. She was also interested in philosophy, and a friend made her a book to guide her through the philosophy of Gassendi. We are, we are in the heart of the heart of it all. But the heart is distributed, the heart is here, and then it is here. To the confusion of literary historians since, Mme de la Sabliere was also named Marguerite, which has led to many errors – the Lamartines of history – in accounts about La Fontaine and about Fontenelle. Guillaume, by that time, had bought a property in a small village outside of Rouen, Mésangère, and Marguerite Scott went by the more grandiloquent name of Madame de la Mésangère. Guillaume had the discretion to die when his widow was still young, twenty four, in 1682.

And this happened – we know from a future biography of Fontenelle by Thomas Le Cat, a Rouen doctor who happened to write for a magazine edited by another Rouennaise, Marie LePrince de Beaumont, in the eighteenth century.

Apparently Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle returned to Rouen in the 1680s, after having spent some time trying to make it as a writer in Paris, and lived in his father’s house at the Rue de Cordier – although he could have spent time, as well, in his father’s two houses in the country, in the forest of La Feuillie.

While contemplating his options, the Fontenelle apparently made himself at home in Marguerite de la Mésangère’s house on Rue de Gros-Horloge, which was quite famous in its day. And it is here that he read her the book he was working on – a dialogue concerning astronomy entitled Entretien sur la pluralité des mondes. Her servant happened to be in the room, and at the description of the woman in this dialogue, she smiled. Which disconcerted Marguerite de la Mésangère – she was a widow with a reputation, and did not want to be gossiped about because of Fontenelle’s book. So he changed certain cues in the text – for instance, the color of the female character’s hair. As well as making certain changes to disguise the garden in which the discussion takes place, which was the Parc at Mésangère.

So – in what Begriffsgeschichte is the smile of that chamber maid captured?

There’s more to the story for me. Fontenelle was not a huge fan of the country, and in his essay on the eclogue, he made cutting remarks about the baseness of peasant life. Yet he wrote a few – for Marguerite de la Mésangère – and carved them in her beech trees in the great Parc.

I’ve been thinking of how this must go into my book, and how the only way to include a discourse on astronomy and the smile of a chamber maid and the verses carved into the beech trees of a Normandy estate and the posters of the mysterious Jean Nuds-Pieds and the horrible winters, which were not so horrible, perhaps, to a boy in Rouen, imagine his hand helf firmly in the gloved hand of his father as they both watch repairs being made on the bridge, and the ice skaters on the river, and the warning issued by the Jesuits that school boys were appearing with mysterious sorcery tracts and the rumors of discontent and Fontenelle’s father’s stories of the violence of the Fronde (his brother in law, Pierre Corneille, had taken the King’s side, and been rewarded) is to give myself up to the capacious embrace of a fiction that truly enters the banal and the heavenly, that forges for itself keys, that becomes a Begriffsroman, that feels the looming presence of the forest at the birth of l’esprit geometrique and the long retreat of the woods – not the retreat of the gods, so much as their revolution – during Fontenelle’s long, long life.

La Belle et La Bête

As Sophie Allera points out in her excellent casebook on La Belle et La Bête, editorial scrupulousness has never been a priority among those who publish fairy tales or other matter intended for children. And thus small changes percolate, coming up from under the surface like bubbles in a child’s fizzy drink, evolving new words from misprints, upsetting the rattletrap apparatus of punctuation, and of course suffering from the heavy hand of what is tellable to children and what is not, a set of norms that has changed even in my time. Thus, the story that appeared in La Magasin des enfants in 1756, an apparent transformation, itself, of the beast of the 300 some page baroque novel by Madame de Villeneuve, is not only about metamophosis (and it is in shapeshifting that one encounters at least one of the gods, as I pointed out in my last post), but is its product. What would Jeanne Marie Leprince de Beaumont (who has so disappeared to history, until recently, that you can read accounts in which she is airily described as an aristocrat) have thought about all this? There was an older view of LePrince de Beaumont in which she figured as nearly protestant – after all, Rouen, where she was born, was a stronghold of Jansenism, and she did move to England after annulling her marriage to her husband, a supposedly notorious libertine. She was known in her time for her indefatigable pen – and though, as Restif de la Bretonne pointed out, Voltaire borrowed from La Belle for the ‘denouement d’un de ses plus agreeable ouvrages’ (Le Taureau Blanc), his remarks about her are typically dismissive – he wrote of “one Madame de Beaumont-le-prince who makes a type of catechism for you ladies”.

My last post presented a case for Hermes as the god that Calasso neglects in his mention of the forgetting of the gods in 18th century France, and for dilating a bit on the paradox of the introduction, at the same time, of the modern and the fairy tale, a theme I return to from time to time. Allera writes: “This book proposes simply to show that, as obscurely distant as are the sources of La Belle et la Bête, it was a tale of the Enlightenment, of which the properly literary fortune begin in France under Louis XV, when it knew many printed versions that placed it at the center of aesthetic debates.”

In her comments to my last post, Amie pretty much said what I am going to say here. However, this is Sunday morning, when “Complacencies of the peignoir, and late/
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair” are allowed – as well as, I suppose, complacencies in the reading of la Belle et la Bête. Take not away my redundancies! For surely, in an easy entretien, they are no crime.

I’ve read somewhere – was it in Barthes? That the eighteenth century was the last time that a writer could put pen to paper and placidly expect to write well. This may be more nostalgic than true – it is certain that the eighteenth century produced enough dull sermons that if you plunged into them, the splendor of the dying l’age classique might seem a bit rusty. However, it is certainly true that Leprince de Beaumont’s story is so beautifully written, in a sort of sweep, that one is hardly aware of it at all. I’ve thought about this even more since watching Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête – which also has a mythic sweep, even though, at every moment, one is aware of Cocteau. In a sense, though - to give Calasso credit – there is a higher awareness of myth as myth in the high modernism of the twentieth century. The ethnography of the last hundred years has been absorbed by the artist. There is a moment of pure plot in the Beaumont version after the merchant has been condemned to death by the beast for stealing a rose (with that marvelous piece of dialogue, that Cocteau retains, in which the beast, responding to the merchant’s plea of monseigneur, pardon me, cries, I am not monseigneur, I am the Beast; I don’t like compliments. Cocteau has the beast repeat this as the merchant forgets himself and calls him monseigneur again – and this, against the background of the beasts of the twentieth century, and so much vain pleading in the prisons of the GPU and the Gestapo, makes absolute sense) – yes, anyway, after that terrific scene, Beaumont backtracks:

“The good man did not plan to sacrifice one of his daughters to this vile beast, but he thought, at least, I will have the pleasure of embracing them one more time. He thus swore to return, and the beast told him he could leave when he wished: but he added, I don’t want you to return home emptyhanded. Return to the room in which you slept, you will find a great empty strongbox, you can put as much as you want into it, I’ll have it brought to you.”

This is an essential plot point – for that strongbox contains the fortune that redeems the merchant and his bad daughters. But Cocteau – as I say, more mythic in this instance - annuls this moment. Rather, the merchant is ordered to depart immediately. And not having any wealth, his daughters do not marry a beautiful man and a man full of esprit – the negative complements of the Beast.

Beaumont’s narrative, here, reaches out to the novel and conte – it is indeed a fairy tale of Enlightenment. Belle, for instance, is a reader – and unlike the prudish Furies of respectability who will later seed fairy tales with sad encouragements to female piety and stupidity by warning girls away from reading, Belle is given to us as a girl who is all the better for her reading. This attaches our story, by that most Marchen-like of bonds, the invisible thread, to Beaumont. According to her biographer, Genevieve Artigas-Menant, in the first issue of the journal that Beaumont edited from London, she commented on herself:

In 1750, at 39, having lived in London for two years, this French woman of Rouen published a monthly journal of forty pages from the printing house of François Changuion, Juvenal’s head, near Fountain Court in the Strand. The announcement that opened the first number in January exhibited a humorous portrait of the “author female” who confesses that she would rather “write a book, including the preface, and even, if it comes to that, a dedicatory epistle, than place a ribbon”, adding: It is my decided incapacity for that sublime science which forced me to go out and find less elevated occupations.”

Already the humorous inflection, which betrays the negative impress of respectability and all its demonic voices, voices more powerful than the beast. Surely Beaumont is in the lineage that extends to Jane Austin and beyond.

But one last remark about the Cocteau version of Beaumont’s story. While in Beaumont, the beast’s animal nature is reflected by the sigh, the rending sigh he gives each time he asks for Belle’s hand, and is refused, the two hundred years that had passed had brought about an understanding of the genius of details. Cocteau takes the animal and gives him animal traits – and it is here that, I must admit, the movie is superior. When the Beast laps up water, and goes on all fours loping across the field – here myth and detail, myth and rationality, are joined. Not for Cocteau a beast who can hoist a glass of wine.

But both versions join together in the end. When the Beast is transformed into a prince, in Beaumont’s tale – as Cocteau notes in his diary of the movie – Belle, for a second, looks around for the beast. It is the beast she has learned to ‘estime’, not this prince. Belle, to the end, is a woman of the soundest instincts.

Calasso, my antipodes!

I’ve been reading Roberto Calasso’’s Literature and the God’s, and getting that antipodal feeling. So close, and so far, we stand in the invisible community, the third life.

Calasso, at the beginning of his chapter on nymphs, remarks that the “gods manifest themselves intermittently along with the ebb and flow of what Aby Warburg referred to as the mnomic wave.” Later, Calasso points to the position of the eighteenth century on that wave, ‘where the lowest point was probably a moment in eighteenth century France when, with a breezy and derisive self-assurance, the childish fables of the Greeks, the barbaric Shakespear and the sordid biblical tales were all dismissed as no more than the work of an shrewd priesthood determined to suffocate any potentially enlightened minds in the cradle.” (28) Nevermind, for a second, that Shakespeare’s barbarism was derived from Racinian classicism, which took its charisma from the sense of Greek theater given by Aristotle, or so it was thought – that theater obeys certain rules. Still, I want to tussle a bit with this point. In fact, France figures in a special way in Calasso’s book – it was even in France that, in 1802, the God’s returned, when Hölderlin, returning from Bordeau, wrote to his friend Böhlendorff: “As they tell of heros, I can say that Apollo struck me down.” (10)

To dicker with Calasso about the gods is generally a losing proposition, as no contemporary writer is so god-immersed. However, in this tale, it strikes me that Calasso is following a little too closely another tale, a brilliant one woven by Nietzsche, which reduces the gods to Apollo and Dionysus. However, that reduction, however it worked for Nietzsche and for Calasso, does not tell the story of the whole spectrum of the gods. Let me beg a place, for instance, for Hermes. Hermes in the eighteenth century.

Hermes, trickster/writer, who does not leap upon us with the dazzling masculinity of Apollo – or should I say a masculinity so fraught that it is not contained within the mere male. Hermes, on the other hand, appears from the beginning as the god who understands, above all things, the track and how to turn one. For when Hermes is born, according to the Homeric hymn, he jumps out of his mother’s belly and hurries off to steal Apollo’s cattle. Now Apollo, coming out to find his cows gone, investigated the matter, especially after he saw a bird and understood the augury – that the thief was divine. But when he found the tracks of the cows, he cried out: “Oh oh! Truly this is a great marvel that my eyes behold These are indeed the tracks of straight horned oxen, but they are turned backwards towards the flowery meadow. But these others are not the footprints of man or woman or grey wolves or bears or lions, nor do I think they are the tracks of a rough maned Centaur; whoever it be that with swift feet makes such monstrous footprints, wonderful are the tracks on this side of the way but yet more wonderful are those on that.” For Hermes, even as a child, wore the characteristically odd winged sandals.

And as Hermes invented the letter, he put in it, at the very center, the animal track – but it is a track that can be turned. This is always the writer’s first and secret trick, his bit of Houdini. While Voltaire may well have been breezily dismissive of Shakespeare, and of the myths, this was not the grinding, mechanical dismissal of a nineteenth century positivist. Voltaire, that trickseter, was preparing fires and eatthquakes of his own.

But to return to my antipodes – Calasso, while relying on the line of myths that keep coming forward in painting after painting – the while of girls who offer themselves, infinitely, to adorn Rococco landscapes and who surely lie bareassed for Boucher and mount on a swing for Watteau – seems to miss them in the fairy tale.

And yet – it is a strange fact, one that casts a secret shadow, that the moderns, in their struggle with the ancients, opened the door to the fairy tale in European literature. Right at the beginning of the eighteenth century. And surely, here, Calasso misses a trick, for isn’t this the beginning of a fairy tale?

Nymphē means both “girl ready for marriage’ and ‘spring of water’. Each meaning protects and encloses the other. To approach a Nymph is to be seized, possessed by something, to immerse oneself in an element at once soft and unstable, that may be thrilling or may equally well prove fatal.” (31) Change the joke and slip the note, remember that the tracks within the letter may lead you elsewhere. In Hermes’ enlightenment by fairy tale, what is fatal is certainly at play, and there is always a nymph: Barbe bleu, La belle et la bete, Ricdin Ricdon. But seizure, immersion, terror are the elements at play here, and the forest is still near. The woods of the New World, the woods of Normany, the woods into which, as I have been reading, the peasants of Rouen fled when, at the end of a peasant revolt led by a mythical Jean Nupieds a century before – Rouen, that city from which Fontenelle, and Pascal, both emerged – Fontenelle, whose book against the sources, On the Oracles, is balanced against his dialogues for a new generation of nymphs interested in catching l’esprit geometrique.

I think Calasso has turned a blind eye to Hermes because, at the base, he is convinced that materialism killeth, and that the cold hand of the statistical freezes history. He does not want us to further contribute to the decline of the world from the sweetness which was once inherent in it, and for this reason he has, in the end, no use for Marx. But Marx, who could read the tracks from blue book to blue book and out into the industrial wilds, is my Hermes.

Underneath the skull

There’s a story about Georg Büchner. While he went from Darmstadt, where he was born, to Strasbourg when he was eighteen to study medicine, by law he had to return for his third year of study to Darmstadt, which he did. He returned to his parent’s house. His father was a well known doctor, a figure who took the enlightened side in town politics. The kind of father that, as critics in the 80s saw it, was similar to the liberal fathers who raised the children of the sixties generation that joined the RAF. Enlightened self interest was the limit of their enlightenment, the horizon. This is a story about Georg Büchner, who already had thought about political events in Strasbourg, which was recovering, or part of which was recovering, from the last revolution (and part of which was plotting the next one); and, evidently, he was also thinking about writing. Which he had a knack for, a knock for, a knock in the brain for. And so the twenty year old Georg Büchner sat in his father’s house. He sat at a desk and, to his father’s knowledge, studied anatomy. He scanned anatomical drawings. When his father saw him at his desk, he was studying anatomical tableaux, much to his father's satisfaction. Imagine Dad making time to talk to you. To talk about his early days as a doctor. To talk about what we know now. How exciting. What we will know. A century of progress. But when his father left the room, Georg, apparently, took out the materials he was really working with. The materials that went into the play he was writing. Danton’s Death.

A striking image, na? Under the picture of the skeleton, under the Handbuch of surgery, the book - well, what book? about Danton. And certainly this is a story that has been employed in the many stories, essays and poems about Büchner, who has figured as now the committed artist, and now the very image and form, as Karl Krolow put it, of “left melancholia.” The impress of that skeleton, of the skin and bones and what we know now, the heart intestine brain, on the revolution that proposed to free skin, skeleton, brain, heart and guts from the chain of obsolete custom, the oppressions of obsolete masters.

But an image, too, for the Human Limit. The symbols, the intersignes cast up by history, all the cracked looking glasses of all the servant girls, all the Buck Mulligans. I have, evidently, strayed from the true path of drawing on the literature of boredom to cover the report of good doctor Brierre de Boismont, an essay that exists as a predecessor to all the studies of suicide from all the suicide notes, a term that didn’t exist until the twentieth century. And that elbowed its way into conceptual existence by way of the police file and the forensic psychologist.

It is at the point of this written matter that discourse, the discourse upon which Boismont has been looking with a glance that his maitre, Esquirol, would disparage as a moraliste’s – for as Boismont himself points out, Esquirol was very much in favor of segregating the science of psychology from the essays of the moralistes – begins to take on a more satisfactory pathological coloration. It is not that Boismont quite understands how ordinary ennui, which he characterizes now as a modern development, and now as a universal human factor, it is not that he understands, quite, how it becomes malign.

For he can’t quite say that boredom actually causes some suicides. Oh, he takes the notes and letters he has accumulated and extracts causes of suicide, but it is an exercise which begs the question: is the suicide capable of diagnosing himself? And, in fact, even granting that boredom could be a driver of suicide, or mixed in with the chagrin, the repetition, the endless distancing of the realization of expectations, couldn’t it also be the case that boredom keeps one from suicide? For suicide, as an act, plunges the actor, if successful, into death – which the bored person might regard as quite as boring as life.

Paradise: the most modern thing of all

I sometimes get the feeling that, pursuing my set of themes in this blog, I tend to emit a volcanic eruption of instances and hints that bury the points, instead of doing what I should do, what I, as an editor, am always urging on others: taking the points and putting them, all shiny and new, in the shopwindow.

So let me take hold of the point that has been in travail and woe since I took up Kierkegaard: boredom. The point can be put like this: whereas, in the ancient world, and in the Christian world, the taming of the passions and the life that was liberated from the press of necessity by the discipline of askesis was a holy life, or, at least for the Stoics, a natural one, in the culture of happiness, this life is one constantly beset by boredom. In the worlds ruled over by fate or providence, worlds in which, in the end, there was a celestial balance to bow down to – worlds, that is, under the impress of the limited good – lifting necessity through a purification of the impressions or an impoverishment of the desires did correspond to a true insight about the world. We should remember, as well, that passion was felt, in these worlds, within the system of humors, within the structure of characters and temperaments. Not so, however, in the world in which Chronos, or growth, had displaced all other horizons. Chronos the capitalist, who revolutionized the world through trade and exploitation. This is a world so different in its orientation and instincts that it has been imposed on the disbelieving populaces of the world at the cost of millions of lives. However, in this world, for , at first, the circulating labor class, the non-necessary necessity – boredom – became a real social experience, a sign and a symbol, a puzzle.

As I’ve tried to show, this experience is seized upon by philosophers, writers and psychologists in the first half of the nineteenth century, who all seem to find boredom a very modern affair. And, in fact, in the realm of non-necessary necessity, they revive an old trope – paradise. Boredom is a special concern in paradise, and paradise itself, it turns out, is the most modern thing of all.

The influence of civilization on madness

Alexandre Brierre de Boismont is one of the touchstones of research on boredom and suicide. Baudelaire read his essay on l’ennui – or at least references it in his notebook. Foucault, in his lectures on psychiatric power, mentions de Boismont’s clinic at Saint Antoine, in which the doctor consciously familialized his relations with his patients – they were to consider him a father, and his wife a mother. Elizabeth Goodstein recognizes him, in Experience without Qualities, as the doctor who is most associated with modernizing “the modern topos of ennui as a disease of civilization.” [129] Boismont himself, in his essay on l’ennui, taedium vitae, refers to a talk on the “influence of civilization on madness” that he gave in the 1820s. Boredom – or something like boredom, something like Langeweile, something like tedium, something called l’ennui – was at the center of Boismont’s contention. Boismont was born in Rouen in 1797 (where his father, on his birth certificate, is listed as vivant de son revenue”[Goldstein, 387], and studied in Paris, where he mixed with Esquirol’s circle. He had, by the 1840s when he published his study of l’ennui, plenty of clinical experience in Paris, mixing with the most advanced clinicians.

Boismont’s historical analysis of l’ennui is not just the background of his theory, but an inseperable accompaniment – for Boismont needs to show, at least, a quantitative change in the incidence of l’ennui over time. He traces the disease back to Seneca, then through the church fathers and, rapidly, through the middle ages. From Boismont’s point of view, the interesting thing is the connection between l’ennui and suicide – it is suicide that allows us, so to speak, to medicalize the feeling. But because all incidences of boredom don’t result in suicide, there must exist a, so to speak, non-pathological variant of l’ennui. And is this effected by, even created by, ‘civilization’? It is interesting how he deals with this point when he comes to the seventeenth century and, so to speak, thrusts l’ennui into the heart of French history:

“In the seventeenth century, l’ennui gnawed at the heart of Louis XIV and it was this wound that madame de Maintenon was charged with ceaselessly dressing. But as that celebrated woman represents the triumph of private life, and as that private life, says H Saint Marc Girardin, fell into the sloth (l’oisiveté) of the palace, she had the disease of l’ennui in such a way that madame de Maintenon at Versailles was at the same time the heroine and martyr of private life. What a martyrdom I suffered, she said at Saint Cyr after the death of Louis XIV, in her conversations with madame de Glapion, and in what straits I passed my life while they thought I was the happiest woman in the world!”

In Boismont’s account, private life may be the supportive milieu for l’ennui – but it was the eighteenth century that invented the carrier: philosophy. And it was a woman, du Deffand, who was the exemplary victim and heroine – who was gifted, or injured, by the ability to see to the empty bottom of all things, and who called this vision “l’ennui”.

Boismont’s views in 1850 have been circulating among other doctors and popularizers even in the 1830s, so it is not historically fantastic to conjoin, here, this notion of a philosophical disease and the remarks Büchner puts in Prince Leonce’s mouth. Let’s tie l’ennui a little closer to politics – in a speculative mode, under the conditional. What, after all, is wichtig? What is this emptiness of Deffand’s? These are not simply speculative issues – for Boismont and for Büchner. Or I should say that speculation, here, has a strange material power. In the French revolution, the question of what – and who – was important was asked with an intensity, and produced an activity, that distinguished it from the American revolution. In the latter, the problem of what was important was settled: the settler was more important than the indian or the slave, and his importance was measured by his rights, which were inalienable. But there came a moment in the French revolution, a moment of social eeriness, a moment of terror, where it was not at all clear what was important, and to whom, and what the measure of importance was. This eeriness is still something that jumps out from our histories, and draws its dividing party line among the historians.

But again – what is l’ennui? In Boismont’s essay, it is not only a disease of modernity, but a recapitulation – a negative recapitulation – of the revolution. The torch of terror is not led by hope, here, but by hopelessness. There is no key to liberty in l’ennui.

To mix Kierkegaard with Boismont, in l’ennui, freedom loses the motive to repeat itself.

Another name for boredom might be: fatelessness.

the visions of the bored

Was die Leute nicht alles aus Langeweile treiben! Sie studieren aus Langeweile, sie beten aus Langeweile, sie verlieben, verheiraten und vermehren sich aus Langeweile und sterben endlich aus Langeweile, und – und das ist der Humor davon – alles mit den wichtigsten Gesichtern, ohne zu merken, warum, und meinen Gott weiß was dazu. Alle diese Helden, diese Genies, diese Dummköpfe, diese Heiligen, diese Sünder, diese Familienväter sind im Grunde nichts als raffinierte Müßiggänger. – Warum muß ich es gerade wissen? Warum kann ich mir nicht wichtig werden und der armen Puppe einen Frack anziehen und einen Regenschirm in die Hand geben, daß sie sehr rechtlich und sehr nützlich und sehr moralisch würde?

What don’t people do out of boredom. The study out of boredom, they pray out of boredom, they fall in love, marry and multiply out of boredom and finally they die out of boredom… and, this is the funny thing – do this all with the most important faces, without seeing, why, and God knows for what purpose. All these heros, these geniuses, these imbeciles, this saints, these sinners, this family men are fundamentally nothing more than refined loungers. But why do I know this? What can’t I take myself seriously and dress the poor doll up in a frock coat, with an umbrella in his hand, in order for it to become very proper and sober and moral? – Leonce and Lena

I began this interlude in Strassburg, 1831. Büchner, 18, arrives there in November, in time to get involved with the student greeting of the Polish hero, R. Of course, the greeting was produced not simply to show sympathy with Poland, but contempt for the former liberals who were now forming a centrist group, Since the editor of Büchner’s works first drew attention to this letter in the 1870s, it has been interpreted in ways to shed light on Büchner’s radical politics, and this has become the Leitfaden in Büchner studies – is this the young man, so ardently longed for, standing in the sun with his gun? Or is this another poseur? But I am interested in the way that Büchner, even at 18, saw double – he saw that politics was ‘important’, and he saw that it was theater – and that he cast this vision over the whole of life. Is this double vision the characteristic propositional attitude of the bored? Belief and non-belief, a binocular attitude that does not negate itself, but does not take itself ‘seriously’?

Defending myself against the materialist attacks of my conscience

Now we're gonna be face to face
As I lay right down in my favorite place


When Emile Tardieu published his book on L’ennui, a reviewer in the Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane in 1905 reproached him for taking much of his data from the belles letters, which “proves little.” Today’s Tardieus, notably Elizabeth S. Goodstein, in Experience without Qualities: boredom and modernity, also references, besides such writers as Tardieu, of course, the same writers Tardieu mentions, from Senacour to Flaubert and Baudelaire. Goldstein is an infinitely cleverer methodologist than Tardieu, and defends herself by taking up the thesis that if we are to look for affective changes, or changes in the interpretation of effect, in a culture, we should look in the discourse – we should look in the rhetoric, our collective sensorium for the registration of mood.

I, too, am going down this route, and I’m not quite satisfied with the unanchored discourse defense of gathering evidence among the literati. Rather, I think there are good sociological reasons to say that discourse itself changes in modernity – that a greater space is taken up, materially, by the “third life” as a result of urbanization and literacy, which thrust into the everyday life of the people a more crowded and changing visual and symbolic vernacular – books, signs, songs, paintings, vaudeville, and of course the technologies for reproducing the ‘work of art”. In Dostoevsky’s The Devils, there is a joke about the fact that one day, public opinion ‘appeared’ in Russia and became subject to discussion in Stepan Verkhovensky’s little circle. Engels in the Position of the Working Class discusses public opinion, similarly, as a semi-institutionalized force in the advanced countries. Discourse is not some abstract universal, but a form subject to variation and tied down by a thousand Lilliputian strings to everyday life. And as it was commodified, industrialized, massified, there is no doubt that its producers – its clerks – were aware that there was a new power under their fingertips – if they only knew it. Nietzsche was certainly not crazy to think that, in spite of selling a couple thousand books, he was dynamite – the feeling that one has written something that will be read, that bears its audience with it into the future, is in one way a very clear response to what was happening to ‘discourse’.

There is, of course, another aspect to the expansion and entrenchment of the third life. As I have often pointed out – go back to the post on November 21, 2008, for instance – what demographers discovered in the sixties and seventies – the shift in the composition of the Stem-household in Northwest Europe, in which males no longer brought their wives home to the patriarchal manse – created a discontinuity in bio-social time that became “youth”. Look at the aliens in the artificial paradise, so many of them are marked by bachelorhood – Baudelaire, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard. Youth, which becomes, on a large scale, identified with the third life – with learning to read, with reading, with, among the members of the circulation class, reading as a identity shaping event – is both symbol and audience, here. The novel of apprenticeship, Moretti’s central novelistic form, reflected the golden age in which it was to be read.

Happiness, as we have pointed out for the last three years, is a total social fact. To a certain extent, boredom, l’ennui, Langeweile, is too. Tardieu, who we will look at later, found it at the root of modernity itself. I have a more complicated story than that.

The court rests.

Places and people: bored Europe

The year 1831 in Strasbourg, according to the city chronicle written by Charles Staehling, saw the return of reaction after the liberal revolution that had put Louis-Philippe in power. Strasbourg had been a hotbed of liberalism under Charles X; its chief notable, Frederic Turckheim, had allied himself with Benjamin Constant. But in 1831, Turckheim, who had been appointed mayor of the city by the king, tried to deflect the liberal momentum, for instance by advocating the disbanding of the national guard, and then, when that didn’t work, operating to elevate reactionary officers. Of course, the university – and especially the medical students – were notoriously to the left. Surely they took part in the charivari that greeted Turckheim in the summer of that year, when he and his associates – the respectable middle class – took to calling themselves the Juste-Milieu, after a phrase of the King’s.

And this is a scene from the year of the juste milieu, preserved in amber by Staehling:

“The brasseurs of Strasbourg sent to Paris three delegates, MM. Schott of the Tigre, JJ Lauth of the Chain and Wagner of the Ostrich in order to complain about certain vexing measures of indirect taxation. Presented by the baron Athalin, deputy of the Bas Rhin, they were admitted to an audience with the king who, says the journal, welcomed them with much beneficence and expressed very flattering sentiments for their department.”

The juste milieu could not hold from the very beginning. The king and the restauranteurs, brought together by a Balzacian baron, are a sort of omen that the order cannot last. The Lord, it says in Revelations, spews the lukewarm out of his mouth.

But even if the liberal momentum was stopped, romantic nationalism, with which a certain liberalism was associated, wept its tears that year for the aborted revolt in Poland. A Polish general, Ramorino (who, it turned out from evidence supplied later, had probably been paid off by the Russians) was feted in Strasbourg as he passed through on his way to Paris. The liberals mixed up sentiment for defeated Poland and sentiment for the defeat of liberalism in the celebration accorded to the general. Which is where I will start this parenthesis. With a letter written by an 18 year old medical student that detailed these events to his parents: Georg Buechner.

More Kierkegaardian notes - for Mr. T.

I’m going to range a bit in these notes.

A. the real paradise

In a footnote to the Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard references a theory propounded by F. Baader about the Fall – namely, that the Fall must be seen under the category of temptation. Baader is one of those German thinkers who toil up the back staircase to the Castle, unlike Hegel, and thus is praised for his “usual authority and vigor” – and yet here, Kierkegaard can’t go the extra step with him: “Baader seems to me to have neglected some intermediate elements. To pass from innocence to error by nothing other than the concept of temptation risks giving God, in his relation to man, almost the role of the experimenter, and in this way neglects the intermediary, psychological observation, for after all, the intermediary is concupiscentia.” [Translation from the French translation]

There is, here, an echo – a repetition interrupted. Kierkegaard’s scenario, again and again, consists of two men and one girl. The game is played in two moves, which are allotted to the two men: the first man observes the other man and woman – as Constantin Constantius observes the young man in Repetition. Eve is erased rather quickly in the Concept of Anguish – whereas, for Constantius, the young girl is a kind of “bait” for the young man. In the latter scenario, the young man “falls” for the young woman – in the scenario of the Fall, Adam falls, in a sense, for desire itself. The point for the experimenters is not to elicit a response from the girl, but from the man.

The second move in the game is allotted to the young man – or to Adam, although Adam does not write letters. The young man views the girl under two contrary impulses: to love her, or to flee from her – the latter being, indeed, the essence of the former. The young man in Repetition does not annul the girl – as Eve is erased in the story of the Fall – but he substitutes, for annuling her, fleeing from her. He does not, however, fall into Constantius’ experiment. Remember, Constantius proposes the course of fleeing her by deceiving her into thinking that he – the young man – is actually a libertine. Constantius even finds another girl – a working girl, of course, a shop girl, in a boutique – a milieu Kierkegaard must have known about. Indeed, his mother was, in a way, a shop girl. This erased Eve was supposed to be a decoy upon which the young lover was to – leave no mark. But Constantius’ plan was fouled by the young man’s sudden departure.

So much for a scenario that seems – suddenly – to have appeared, with God as Constantius, at the very beginning of human history, and that keeps lacing itself into and out of Kierkegaard’s works, .

B.
However, this footnote, and the first part of The Concept of Anguish, should also revive in the reader – or at least revives in the not so indefatigable writer of these lines – a memory of the very beginning of this thread. It was a post about Kant, from Kant’s lecture on Anthropology, which I threw in as a curve ball from the left field bleachers – and yes, I scatter my references like iron filings and hope to god that some magnet, some theme, will reveal the rose bloom in the field of force –in this case, the field that consists of the culture of happiness. I am operating with the biggest magnets.

Here, again, is the quotation from Kant.

“The question of whether Heaven and not been more provident in caring for us by providing us with everything so that we didn’t have to work is certainly to be answered no; from men demand activities (Geschaefte), even such that include a certain element of coercion mixed in them. Just as false is the idea that if Adam and Eve had remained in Paradise, they would have done nothing but sat together and sung arcadian songs and observed the beauty of nature. Boredom would certainly have martyred them as well as it does other men in similar positions.”

C. The notes for the reply to Heiberg.

They always come in pairs. Sainte Beuve and Baudelaire. Heiberg and Kierkegaard. Wagner and Nietzsche. Goethe and Kleist. Snake eyes. One’s special, one’s irreplaceable misunderstander.

When JL Heiberg published his review of Repetition, Kierkegaard, naturally sharp-eyed about his own work, noticed that Heiberg most likely didn’t read past page 40 – oh, one gets sensitive about these things after you publish a bit, you read not simply with your eyes, but with your nervous system! – and that his remarks about repetition were almost heaven sent – the purest platitudinous fool’s gold from the bourgeois heart. As for instance in this passage:

“Repetition that is not mediated through subjectivity into something higher than itself is boring and devoid of spirit.” And this: “The author, who was merely seeking repetition, should not have repeated his journey to Berlin. On the other hand, the repetition of reading a book… can heighten and in a way surpass the first impression, because one thereby immerses oneself more deeply in the object and appropriates it more inwardly.” [From Soren Kierkegaard: Social and political philosophy, 92]

However, although Kierkegaard replied in his papers, he never published the reply in his lifetime. Luckily, the Hong translation of Repetition includes the whole lot.

I will fasten upon one passage.

First, one has to note that the entire reply is traversed by an irritation that amounts to the thought underneath the thought. It is not unimportant, this irritation – no, it is highly characteristic of the aliens to the happiness culture. That alienation is the result of a process – of a long discipline in creating in oneself a perpetually thinking sensitivity, something contrary to the long discipline in dulling the senses that is the circulation worker’s way of getting through the day. Kierkegaard was never a clerk, but he was the son of a man who started out as a clerk, and he has the soul of a clerk who casts everything off – who allows himself, like Bartleby, to experience time running out. Time running out is the special province of clerks.

Kierkegaard didn’t publish these notes, as I say, because … well, as any author knows, to go back and explain your text is to kill it and then offer yourself as the chief mourner at its wake. And the old rule applies: the corpse bleeds in the presence of the murderer. Similarly, the text leaks its meaning at the wake. All the parts, so carefully put together, begin to decompose. And yet – perhaps – this is the thought that strikes the author just as he begins to mourn– perhaps this is what it was built for! It is that thought which turns mourning into style, and a particular kind of style – feverish, hectic, crisis-ridden.

In any case, we will put that image aside and go to the passage, which begins:

“When applied in the sphere of individual freedom, the concept of repetition has a history – in as much as freedom passes through several stages in order to attain itself.” Heiberg, insisting on the dialectical, will get it.

The stages are three.

(a) “Freedom is first qualified as desire – being in desire. What it now fears is repetition, for it seems as though repetition has a magic power to keep freedom captive once it has tricked it into its power.”

This stage echoes Adam’s plight – yes, the Fall is behind it all, with erased Eve in train. When error, or sin, leaps into the world, it takes the form of desire. But of a particular desire – one that does not feel the spiky press of need in its back. Rather, it feels the press of no need at all in its back. In short, it feels the first intimations of boredom. This open up an entirely unexpected hole in the homogenous surface of whatever paradise (Divine or artificial) is at hand. In this sense, boredom and freedom are twins, conceived at the same time.

And need one be reminded of capitalist Europe, with its great Mordspiel of commodities and its new organization of labor into more and more specialized routines? Upon which the circulation laborer sits, endlessly billing.

The second stage, too, seems to point to the Adamic narrative. “b. Freedom qualified as sagacity. Repetition is assumed to exist, but freedom’s task in sagacity is to continually gain a new aspect of repetition. People who in freedom do not stand in any higher relation to the idea usually embellish this viewpoint as the highest wisdom.” Here, repetition takes us back to the experiment, and its strange links with temptation and seduction. Yet Kierkegaard had a strong desire to couple the sage with the buffoon – or to, at least, understand how the pair had so strangely gotten uncoupled. And remember, too, that the buffoon is linked, originally, in Moliere’s play, with Don Giovanni. Kierkegaard did not like the play, but he did understand I think that Don Juan is, by a process of transformations, present in Doctor Faust.

And this is enough for this post. I’ll put the second part up tonight.

…

“But since freedom qualified as sagacity is only finitely qualified, repetition must appear again, namely, repetition of the trickery by which sagacity wants to fool repetition and make it into something else. Sagacity despairs.”

The oppositional point of view, the alien in the artificial paradise, in as much as it accepts the mantle of the sage, has signed its concession already, made itself available for plug-n-play in the institution. When Kierkegaard constructs the series temptation-seduction-experiment, it finishes with the comedy routine, an exploding cigar, a bucket of paint thrown in the public’s face (as Ruskin said of Whistler), or the hectic style of… well, Constantine Constantius. And Edgar Allen Poe’s narrators, and DeQuincey’s Opium Addict. In modernity, the buffoonish decision to make comedy into a routine, to make irony into a repetition, is made in separation from the institutionalization of sagacity. While the dialogue between sage and buffoon which once constituted the two poles of philosophy has dissolved into two separate trajectories, still, each feels the call of the other. Each feels, somehow, the trivialization that attends their split destinies.

Bringing us to the third stage.

(c) “Now freedom breaks forth in its highest form, in which it is qualified in relation to itself. Here everything is reversed, and the very opposite of the first standpoint appears. Now freedom’s supreme interest is precisely to bring about repetition and its only fear is that variation would have the power to disturb its eternal nature. Here emerges the issue: is repetition possible? Freedom itself is now the repetition.”

And here – here, mark ye, our return to the Stoic reference we see later in Deleuze:

‘If it were the case that freedom in the individuality related to the surrounding world could be so immersed, so to speak, in the result that it cannot take itself back again (repeat itself), then everything is lost. Consequently, what freedom fears here is not repetition but variation; what it wants is not variation but repetition. If this will to repeat is stoicism, then it contradicts itself and thereby ends in destroying itself in order to affirm repetition in that way, which is the same as throwing a thing away in order to hide it more securely. When stoicism has stepped aside, only the religious movement remains as the true expression for repetition.”

Through a glass darkly, this is the credo of absolute reaction, thundering against the happiness culture and its awful inability to sacrifice. Underground channels connect our aliens. For surely there is, here, a formal similarity with the moment of revolution, stirring the old corpse that lay buried under bourgeois society, the revolution that made it, that old buried thing – which may not be a corpse at all, but an ardent tunneler, the old mole. Oddly, in the semiosphere of infinite variation, the driving motif is nostalgia for the freedom buried at your feet.

Well, this should end in an anecdote. Levin, Kierkegaard’s ‘secretary”, has given us a record of his last years. Levin evidently found Kierkegaard a trial, but – at the same time – a most moochable man. His memoir sounds like something out of Dostoevsky’s The Devils.

“Once I ate at his house every day for five weeks. Merely providing nourishment for his hungry spirit was also a source of unending bother. Every day we had soup, frightfully strong, then fish and a piece of melon, accompanied by a glass of fine sherry: then the coffee was brought in: two silver pots, two cream pitchers and a bag of sugar which was filled up every day. Then he opened a cupboard in which he had at least fifty sets of cups and saucers, but only one of each sort, and said, well, which cup and saucer do you want today?” It was of no consequence, but there was no way around it; I had to choose a set. When I said which one I would take, he asked, “Why?” One always had to explain why, and then at long last we would be finished and get our cups. (He also had an astonishing number of walking sticks).”

Levin, of course, knew where this was all leading to:

“He inherited the house and ninety-eight thousand rixdollars from his father. At his death nearly everything had been spent: he had gradually consumed his fortune.”

So many walking sticks! Such fine coffee! Mes gages! Mes gages!

salle des crises

It was the stoics who first concerned themselves with the logical implication of the event – that is, they were concerned with the seeming disjunction between the realm of the quantitative and the qualitative, which were what they were left with after Aristotle’s syllogisms. The classical example is the heap of sand. There is no one grain of sand that ‘crowns’ the heap, – it does not emerge as a thing to be analyzed quantitatively, its structure opening up, its covering – dermis, hide - transparent, to our pullulating pluses and minuses.

Of course, these are the issues that became famous, again, in the eighties and nineties with chaos and then complexity theory. But the event is the secret rail that many a fumbling soul has squeezed in the dark, going up the back stairs in the Castle. Lichtenberg, somewhere, remarks that the proportion of the corpuscle of light to the eye was similar to the proportion between the Meditteranean and a leaf that has fallen into it – and just as the corpuscle contributes, in its infinite smallness, to the face of the beloved or to any of our visual images, the leaf, for all we know, may create a disturbance in the water that effects the waves coming in on the China coast. Once we have dispensed with the usual metrics of the quantitative, we’ve entered a realm in which what is small and what is large, judged by effect, can’t be predetermined by our biases. We must wipe the impressions on the slate of the mind clean.

Deleuze’s chapter on the problematic begins with the stoic theme of the event – the ideal event. Deleuze, from the beginning, had been influenced by Emile Bréhier’s reconstruction of stoic logic, from which he drew upon to sketch out the nature of the event, one of the great themes in the whole of Deleuze’s work. He is drawn to events like addiction, schizophrenia, revolution – events in which the perspectives given us by addition and subtraction are unsatisfactory, insufficient, and morally degrading.

The event, then, for Deleuze consists of singularities that escape the domain of the quantitative – and yet have a distinct insistence in the world. These he calls ‘singularities”. He quotes Peguy about singularities in history – crises, critical points – and nears, in his language, the kind of talk that the complexity school, in the eighties, adopted as their own:

Péguy saw profoundly that history and the event were inseparable from such and such singular points: “there are critical points of the event as there are critical points of temperature, points of fusion, of congealing, of boiling, of condensation; of coagulation, of crystallization; and there are even, in the event, those states of superfusion that do not precipitate out, which don’t crystallize, which are only determined by the introduction of a fragment of the future event…” And Péguy knew how to invent an entire language, among the most pathological and aesthetic that one could dream of, for telling how a singularity is prolonged in a line of ordinary points, but also takes itself up into another singularity, redistributes itself in another set (the two repetitions, the bad and the good, that which enchains and that which saves).”

I should point out, here, that crisis was not only a term of art in early modern medicine, but – among the Mesmerists – became the supreme event, the moment when the cure of animal magnetism produced its convulsive or deranging effects on the body of the patient. Though I have yet to find any commenter remark upon the connection between Kierkegaard’s use of ‘experiment’, and its connection with seduction and temptation (which I will try to get back to later), there is a certain invisible ink, here. I smell it. I taste it. I am a great licker of pages. Crisis, is, of course, one of the great Kierkegaardian terms.

To return to Deleuze – while other philosophers have clung to the secret rail, Deleuze – and this is the thrill of reading him – seems to switch on a light. One that nobody has bothered to switch on before. In the midst of a sometimes puzzling language, taken from anywhere – having no problem with mismatching vernaculars if that is what it takes – Deleuze explains the seemingly chaotic nature of the event by putting it, ideally, under the reign of another temporal order – Aion. It is in that order that the problematic comes out of its shell, so to speak – no longer is it a subjective difficulty, but it is the horizon of the event itself.

And here I will pause for a yawning parenthesis, to write something about Repetition and freedom for the next post.

the ninth series: the problematic

There is a passage in Nordentoff’s book, Kierkegaard's Psychology, written in the 1940s, that assures readers that when Kierkegaard writes of experimental psychology, he was not speaking of "the rat cages of the laboratory". This is very true; but it is also, from the perspective of a materialist intellectual history, sadly insufficient. That is, the transposition of a contemporary sense of experimental psychology to Kierkegaard’s texts doesn’t really explain Kierkegaard’s relation to the experiments of his own day – the experiments of Baird, the coiner of the word hypnosis – or the experiments Baird references in his chapter on “Nervous Sleep” (beautiful phrase) that were performed by the royal commission in 1783 to evaluate Mesmer, and that were repeated in 1838 to evaluate the cures of animal magnetism. This is too bad – as Jacqueline Corroy has pointed out in an article on the history of experiment in psychology, there was, from the beginning, a large allowance made in psychology for trickery – for deceiving the ‘subjects’. And since Kierkegaard’s own great psychological experiment with regard to Regina Olson involved deception – one would like to know what, exactly, Kierkegaard could have known of psychology.

Yet, in this post I am going to do something that might pick up that same wild anachronistic strain in interpretation – that is, I am going to use a chapter in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense to make some sense of the image of the experiment, and its relation to the world of made experience that characterized the increasingly industrialized capitalism of the West in the 19th century. The artificial paradise, as I call it, boosting Baudelaire’s title.

So how do I justify this? It seems to me that the encounters staged by philosophy occur on a different level than those staged by, say, psychology. This is not to say that they are, ultimately, independent of context, but they are freer within contexts, they have a greater range. Of course, philosophers think they have the freest range, in which they are much like those chickens whose thighs and breasts are wrapped in plastic and Styrofoam for your discerning shopper – they mistake free range for immortality. They never do know what hit them. But then again, does any of us?

The ninth “series”/chapters in the Logic of Sense is called: of the problematic. Oddly, Goethe’s essay about the experiment doesn’t say very much about problems. It is, rather, as if the scientist, falling out of the natural attitude, is solely concerned with the kind of observation that takes him out of himself, into the world of phenomena, where what a thing is, and how it connects to the totality of what is, does not present itself to him as a problem.

However, where the problem is located plays a similar role in Deleuze’s chapter as where repetition is located played in Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard made notes for a reply to Heiberg, who reviewed Repetition and condescended to point out a few of the author’s mistakes: most notably, that repetition “belongs to the world of natural phenomena, and it is a mistake to transfer it to the world of spirit.” (286) Kierkegaard was irked; on his reading of Heiberg, this distinction isn’t even honored by the critic. On the other side, the problem, as Deleuze points out, has often been said to be a mental construct: “… a long habit of thought which makes us consider the problematic as a subjective category of our knowledge, an empirical moment which only marks the imperfection of our progress (demarche), the sad necessity we lay under to not know in advance, and which disappears in the knowledge we obtain. However the problem is buried by the solution, it nevertheless subsists in the idea which relates it to its conditions, and which organizes the genesis of the solution themselves. Without that idea the solutions wouldn’t make any sense. The problematic is at the same time an objective category of knowledge and a genre of perfectly objective being. « Problématique » qualifies precisely ideal objectivities. Kant was without doubt the first to make of the problematic not a temporary incertitude, but the proper object of the idea, and thus as well an indispensable horizon for everything that eventuates or appears.”

This notion has been extremely liberating for me – in that it is not the unconscious of history I want to blindly fondle, but the problems, the obscurely felt problematic. This confusion about where in the famous ontological divide the problem, or repetition, should be put is not the only reason, however, that I find Deleuze’s chapter pertinent to Kierkegaard.

Get better, Infinite Thought

One of our favorite bloggers, Infinite Thought, is infinitely sick from various medieval maladies that we didn't think still existed. But who knows about Wiltshire? Thurber, of course, had an aunt who contracted Dutch Elm disease and wilted to death - so you can never tell what is waiting to get you!

Anyway, we are posting five songs for Nina's health:

1. Bored - Deftones. Which must be how she is feeling, between bouts of deathgrip pain.

2. Biggie and Lil Kim. Another. I was going to put a Tatu song here, but ... I couldn't find one that worked. Whereas this dialogue is in its own way... What it is.

3. Kapital - Trubetskoy. A cheer you up Marx-y song, what could be better?

4. London Hates You - the Kills

5. And naturally - Here comes sickness - Mud Honey. Which used to go together with intoxication and cars for me - but not any more! I listen to it very quietly and soberly.

Making experience

The experiment as mediator [Vermittler] of object and subject.


Notice, first, the word Vermittler – in an essay written in 1791, when the philosophical language that has come to characterize modern European philosophy, the language that Hegel employs, has not yet made itself irresistibly felt. It is in the egg. Goethe, who was extraordinary at picking up the faintest traces of an intellectual trend, is not so far away, here – the other shore is glimpsed. But still, in this essay Goethe works in the available Enlightenment thematic and uses a recognizably conversational vocabulary, even though he is turning against the Enlightenment idol, Newton, as well as against the reductionism of Enlightenment science. Remember, the Enlightenment was capacious enough to contain Swedenborg and Mesmer. Remember, remember – there is no capturing what the age sets loose.

The essay begins with Goethe’s notion of the natural attitude of Man towards objects [Sache]. Objects either please him or repulse him – on the affective level – or they are useful or dangerous – on the level of interest.

Goethe sees that this natural attitude won’t do for science – which will always bear the marks of its break from the natural attitude. Science is unnatural.

“Those undertake a far more difficult task whose living drive strives to observe the objects of nature in themselves, and in their relation to one another, for the sake of knowledge: for they soon find themselves lacking the measure [Massstab] that could come to their aid when they observe things in relation to themselves. They lack the measure of being pleased or displeased, of attraction and repulsion, of use and injurt; they have to entirely renounce these things, they must seek and investigate as indifferent [gleichgueltige] and even divine beings what is, and not, what pleases.”

Once we have established that the scientific interest, unlike the natural attitude, must dispense with the usual measures of judging and classifying objects, Goethe notices that we have to find a measure for individuating and combining our objects. “The further we advance these observation, the more we combine objects among themselves, the more we practice this observational talent.”

Goethe approaches a problem here that has recently attracted a lot of attention in the sociology of science – namely, how the scientist is shaped. Instead of assuming that the scientist is simply made by the knowledge he accumulates, his institutional credentials, Goethe – preceding Daston and Galison’s account of the epistemic “virtues” in which the scientist as a social figure becomes distinct from the virtuoso, the savant, the enthusiast – distinguishes the “clever” man, who observes and recounts facts, with the more difficult path of the true scientist:

“Only when the observer, even applying this sharp judgment to the testing of secret natural relationships – when he is in a world in which he is equally alone, watching his own steps, guarding himself before any hurried movement, having his goal continually in his eyes, without letting himself slip into the way of some useful or dangerous circumstance all unobserved; when he thus there, where he cannot easily be controlled by someone else, must be his own strictest observer, and must be suspicious of himself in his most enthusiastic: thus everyone may see that this is the case, how strong these requirements are and how little one can hope to wholly fulfill them, whether one applies this to now to oneself or now to others. Yet these obstacles, one might even say this hypothetical impossibility must not keep us from doing our best, and we will at the very least come furthest when we seek to imagine for ourselves a means in general, by which the most notable men have expanded the sciences: when we exactly examine the deviations on which they got lost, and one when after them, often for centuries, squadrons of scholars have followed them, until later experiences for the first time introduced the observer to the right path.”

Goethe’s language here is later picked up by Nietzsche – whose work in the 1880s associates, in high Goethian style, mistrust with the observer, and especially a mistrust derived from the history of the observer’s capacity for falling into Abwege – byways, deviations. This, of course, always presses on experience. Against the deviation, Goethe of course suggests the Versuch – the manufacture of experience. Observation, here, moves from a moment in which, as the scene of observation enlarges to contain the observer, the object of observation is in danger of being lost, to a moment in which the observer, as it were, constructs an experience that allows him or her to disappear. Seemingly.

The experiment is made out of experience, with the intention of being observed. It is here that Goethe joins together the special sociability of the scientific attitude with the especial anonymity of the experiment. In fact, the experiment is, ideally, not only based on its potential repetition, but depends, for its result, on the cleansing of the bias that may inhere in any one observer’s position. Goethe remarks that in his own work on colors and plants he has noticed that friends or companions have often remarked on this or that aspect of a phenomenon that Goethe himself has overlooked. One of the fictions that necessarily accompany the experiment is that some ideal collectivity will observe all aspects of the phenomenon. That collectivity links science with a sort of erasure of authorship:

If, for us, naturally attentive people are so useful, how much more general must the use be when instructed people work hand in hand! Already a science is in itself such a great matter, that it bears many people, even if it cannot support at the same time support one equivalent man. It has been observed, that knowledge, like an enclosed but living water, by and by lifts to a certain level, that the most beautiful discoveries are not made so much through people as through the times; as discoveries of very important things are often discovered by two or more practiced thinkers. If thus we owe so much in this first case to society and our friends, we will in this case be owing even more to the world and the century, and we can in both cases not recognize enough how necessary are communication, aid, memory and contradiction to keep us on the right path and bring us forward.”

Goethe points the contrast here with art – which, in this essay, is treated as a thing that must originate and make itself in the conscious of the artist alone, until it is ready to be presented to the world – and the world’s knocks. This is a contrast Goethe will later retract. I mention it as a hint of the discord that exists between experiment as an aesthetic and as a scientific term.

But to return to made experience: the experiment cannot be wholly squeezed from the time or its attendant spirits; the made intrudes even on its own unmaking. In the crowd of observers, there are those who would connect experiment to experiment without returning to the bosom of experience itself.

I’ll end this with a long quotation:

“The value of an experiment, be it simple or combined, consists mainly in the fact that, under certain conditions, with a known apparatus and with required skill, it can be brought back into existence every time that the conditioning circumstances allow of being reunited. We rightly admire human understanding, when we also only superficially regard the combinations that have been made for this purpose, and observe the machines that have been invented and, we can truly say, are being invented daily.

But as valuable as every experiment, viewed individually, may be, its value is only maintained as long as it can be united and joined with others. But even to join together and unite two experiments, that have some similarities with each other, requires more strictness and attention as can even be demanded from the strictest observer. Two phenomenon can be related one to the other, but yet not so nearly as we believe. Two experiments can seen to follow one another when between them there must still stand a great series in order to bring them into the right connection. One can’t thus emphasize enough, not to conclude too hastily from experiments: then by the transition from experience to judgment, from knowledge to application, it is as in a pass where all the inner enemies of a person lay in wait. Imagination, impatience, hastiness, self-satisfaction, stiffness, thought forms of pre-conceived opinion, comfort, frivolity, fickleness and however the whole squadron with their followers may be called, all lie here in their secure places and will, unseen, overpower the practical worldly man as even the quiet ones, the observer who seems to be secured against all passions.”

Notes on where the hell I am so far

My intent, with this Kierkegaard thread, is to bring forward certain changes in the way boredom is experienced – or articulated, or signified – in the 18th and 19th century. Boredom, which, as we saw in Kant, provides a strange motive when needs are satisfied – boredom, a nameless suffering that would even afflict Adam and Eve in paradise, in as much as Adam and Eve are constituted as human beings save for the knowledge of good and evil. Surely in the artificial paradise, built on the surplus value squeezed out of the industrial system under the reign of capitalism, premised on viewing the world under the sign of substitution, whether of commodities or humans, all in the service of the abolition of the human limit, must, if Kant is right, produce boredom in ever greater amounts. And thus let loose a motive that plays a lesser role in the society of the limited good.

In Kierkegaard’s Repetition, repetition is not linked explicitly to boredom – but to a certain impossibility to repeat. But taking repetition otherwise, taking it in relation to the routines that link one substitution to another in a great invisible code, we have another sense of repetition and its effects altogether.

In this world of motivations that are other than that of need’s perpetual pursuit of satisfaction, of routines that become tedious to the human product caught in their meshes, experiment, which both affirms repetition as the principle of validity and – in the aesthetic stage, to use Kierkegaard’s terms – offers an image of the never-before, takes on a poetic life which escapes the philosophers of science and the critics who use the word trivially. Experiment has somehow escaped, in its nubs, the historian – although surely here is matter for the Gnostic historian, vowed to Marx and the witch, to batten on.

Goethe's essay on experiment

I’ve been thinking about Goethe’s essay about experiment – Der Versuch als Mittler von Objekt und Subjekt – in relation to my recent, dogged circling about Kierkegaard’s ‘experiments’.

Kierkegaard might have read it – it was published in 1790, and then in Goethe’s scientific works – but then again, he might not. Kierkegaard’s mature work is directed against not only Hegel, but also against Goethe – representatives, both, for the system of modernity, with its elimination of the religious ‘stage’, against which Kierkegaard fought.

And yet, Kierkegaard’s very use of the term experiment shows – as he must have known – that he fought from within the net, the vast net of the Great Transformation, the net beneath the Artificial Paradise. Roger Poole quotes a passage in a memoir of Kierkegaard written by his friend, Hans Brochner, who wrote:

“ I once walked through a whole street with him while he explained how one can make psychological studies by so putting oneself en rapport to passer-by[s]. As he explained his theory, he put it into practice with almost everyone we met. There was no one on whom his glance did not make an obvious impression. On the same occasion he surprised me by the easy way he took up a conversation with all sorts of people. In some few talks he picked up an earlier conversation and carried it forward to a point where he could pick it up again as opportunity served.” [167]

Oh, these city walks!

Je vais m'exercer seul à ma fantasque escrime,
Flairant dans tous les coins les hasards de la rime,
Trébuchant sur les mots comme sur les pavés
Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps rêvés.

Further on in his account, Bochner uses the word “experiment” to describe these walks. And here we should recall that the early modern idea of experiment was closely linked to the term, experience. The introduction of observation – of an experience for the sake of experience, like a card game played for the sake of the game – brings us, I think, to the roots of Kierkegaard’s attraction to the word – while at the same time the “experiment” is always ironic, rather than scientific.

In fact, Kierkegaard, in spite of putting Repetition under the sign of the psychological experiment, seems incurious about the category of the scientific.

Goethe, of course, was not. He was, among other things, a scientist, which is why his essay on the experiment is infused with his own experience – and takes up, from the beginning, the deep connection between Versuch (which can also be an Essay) and Erfahrung.

I don’t have time today to do justice to Goethe’s essay. Later.