The Underground Reader

 

There is a certain type of reader – the Jew in Europe, the African-American in the States,etc. – whose relationship to literature, to the great novels, essays and poems, is mediated by the humiliations inflicted even by the so called great writers on the Jew and the African-American, etc. in image and abstract; humiliations that are often casual, often astonishing low points in their writing, byproducts of a certain conformism to social norms, an overlooking or blindness to historical injustices, of the thoughtless acceptance of accumulated capital’s accumulated suffering. Here is a puzzle: the author, that distant and yet intimate source of the text, becomes for the reader a problem of the reader’s own complicity in humiliation: hopeful that the higher liberalism will win out, the reader, this extraterritorial reader, this reader who finds, in the community of readers, that he or she is not included in the general “we” of the gentle reader, finds themselves in an ethical dilemma: are they to accept, even here, the all too familiar relationship of abused to abuser? And we know, we know too well, that abuse is not all lumps, that it is a labyrinth of generosity and violence. Like any of the humiliated and the wounded, the abused reader will take the course of becoming the best close reader – for in a life in which one is dodging blows, the humiliated party has to become, as a matter of survival, a great reader of physiognomy and the smallest signs and tics of the abuser.

One of these readers I am imaging existed in Czarist Russia. He is a figure who appears in the outskirts of Doestoevsky studies – his name is Avraam Uri Kovner. He fled the Jewish community in Czarist Russia when he was a young man, committing himself to the program of positivism, science and enlightenment – from which point of view he severely criticized the piety and practices of the Jews. At the same time, he was proud to be Jewish and he was a biting critic of anti-semites.

As this critic, he modelled himself on Pisarov – the scathing materialist whose essays were never translated, as wholes, in English, but who survives in the Anglosphere as the man who claimed that good pair of shoes had more value than the greatest poem. Yet Kovner had a vast respect for Pisarov’s opposite – Dostoevsky. And as he saw his life spoiled by a crime he committed, he also saw himself rather eerily doubled in the figure of Raskolnikov.

The fait divers goes like this: Kovner took a job at a bank as an accountant. He saw that the bank was making money through the squeezing process of usury and fraud. He also, at this point in his life, In Leonid Grossman’s “Confessions of a Jew”, his account of Kovner, he uses an epigraph from Crime and Punishment to entitle what happened: “that the extraordinary man has a right… to leap over certain obstacles, especially in cases where, for perhaps the fulfilment of an idea that is important for all mankind, this is necessary.” All mankind, of course, is always represented in this extraordinary man – he somehow received their votes.

The story begins like a good Dostoevsky story. In 1871, Kovner found himself on the outs with the Jewish community, for whose newspapers he used to write, and on the outs with the other journals he wrote for, which were being closed, in that year of the Paris commune, as being too radical. Pluse he – oh saints and martyrs@ - wanted to write a novel. I do know that feeling. So he found a lodging in Petersburg. To quote from Kovner’s letter to Dostoevsky:

“In the first months I rented a room in the household of the poor Kanngiesser family… They consisted of a mother, who was a poor widow, the elder daughter and two younger daughters and a son, who was apprenticed as a glovemaker’s assistant. When I learned that they were Jews, I thought about fleeing; but then I saw, that these people were poor and honorable, and I meant a certain income for them, so I stayed out of pity. Later I learned that Sophia Kanngiesser had lost her father four years ago, and that her mother through the course of things had gained some money. In a word, it was horrible misery. I strove with my energy to help them, as much as I could. Sophia could not yet read and write and asked me to teach her. Out of gratitude she, who had never let anyone near her, become affectionate to me. In a word, she fell in love with me.”

Of course, this novelistic situation was animated not just by love, but by sickness: Sophia suffered from some lung ailment. Everything falls horribly into place. Through an advertisement in a paper he used to write for – Voices – he finds a job in a bank. The job pays fifty rubles a month. For that, Kovner has to suffer the humiliation that the bank’s managerial staff consider him a pity hire and treat him as such. Imagine, Raskolnikov having to count out money and bow his head to a bunch of bank officials out of a novella by Gogol! And all the while the coughing of his girlfriend resounding in his ears. Between the miserable pay, the sickness of his girlfriend, and his earlier dreams of being a great writer, Kovner breaks down. The break comes, of course, after Sophia, gasping for breath, tells him: I can’t live without you! And faints.

How to pay for everything. This is the world of urban capitalism in which Kovner and Dostoevsky live. Dostoevsky became a gambler. Kovner, stepping over the barrier put up by lesser men to impede lesser men, defrauds the bank. As Grossman puts it: “The logic of Raskolnikov, cutting as sharply as a knife, bored through the thoughts of this unhappy reformer and hypnotized him even as that cursed illusion had bewitched the Petersburg student. In both cases the same persuasion that the planning is not a crime. In both cases the same calculation: on one side the senselessly squandered, irredeemably pent up sources of life and action, and on the other side young, fresh powers, that are unnecessarily destroyed, everywhere and in their thousands… In both cases the same moral temptation: isn’t a single, insignificant crime redeemed through thousand of good acts?”

Kovner stole. Kovner fled. Kovner disguised himself. Kovner was caught. Kovner was tried, and condemned. It was in his prison cell that Kovner wrote his first letter to Dostoevsky, challenging him as though he were a character come alive: and lo and behold, Raskolnikov is Jewish. As Kovner wrote: “First of all, I am a Jew – and you are not overly fond of Jews (I will speak about this later, however).”

A masterly, a Dostoevskian parenthesis, that one. A challenge on every level. Which will be carried onward in various of Kovner’s letters, to which Dostoevsky responded, in his ongoing column, Diary of a Writer, with a defence of anti-semitism that Kovner pretty easily tore apart – from the standpoint of being one of Dostoevsky’s great readers. In the response to Kovner’s letter, Dostoevsky indulged in the usual banalities of banking and evil Jews gulling innocent Russians ad nauseum, juxtaposing these passages with Dostoevsky’s ideal of the omni-human. The blatant contradiction was fingered by Kovner, and that must have hurt. But the sting did not wake Dostoevsky out of his anti-semitic trance.

Kovner’s standpoint, his existential point of view as a reader, fascinates me. I am a great reader of Dostoevsky myself. And of T.S. Eliot, and of Ezra Pound. But I am not a Jew, nor a Gypsy, nor black. I’m your standard white American, a mongel mix of German, Welsh and what have you picked up on the emigrant trail. I was patched and pealed in the suburbs of Atlanta, which sprang up in the sixties with an influx of white people from the North, although gradually, over the decades, becoming more multi-cultural, more interesting, less my facial white bread.. Somehow, though, through the years, I became a sensitive – which was the name given in the early twentieth century to certain paranormal freaks, mindreaders and telekinetics. I could, at least, see how the alien reader, the one written out – Jews in Dostoevsky, women in Bellow and Roth, blacks in the bulk of White American literary classics, gays from Shakespeare to Mailer, etc. – will and must stake their claim, and in doing so dive into the “written out” part, play the fool, here, erupt as the obscene and the censorious. This is called wokeness, now, by the readers and writers who pretend that a little hemming and hawing will make, has made it all better. Who want to go back to a suitably bandaged teaching. An exercise in tergiversation unworthy of the culture that is supposedly being defended.

Ah, but this is egotism on my part - how much of a sensitive am I, really? - and not of interest.

You say you wanna revolution - so stuff it up your ass

 

Liberation today has four or five pages about the situation of the opposition in France. Le Pen's fascists are gaining in the polls, the left, on the other hand, is doing their crumbling act. Macron's Apres moi le deluge is going to bear fruit, at this rate, in a French government much like Italy's. Fascism. In our screwy post cold war view of history, fascism was defeated in 1945. But actually, the U.S. helped fascism survive into the seventies, and it had a strong presence all around the Meditteranean the 60s, with Greece, Spain, Portugal and Turkey all having more or less fascist governments. Adenauer's government full of the far right or worse. One notices that this was also the time of the revival of the Left - in Germany and in France in the seventies - and the second wave of economic reforms that made life better for the working class majority.

Everybody has their diagnosis. Mine, to be brief, is that the "left" is caught in the rhetoric that successfully created a number of social democratic institutions from the 30s to the 80s. That rhetoric was heavy on change, revolution, and an avant gardiste position. In the face of neoliberalism, however, which as easily assimilated "revolution" to its lingo as its billionaires assimilated "revolutionary avant garde art" for their private collections or storage houses in Switzerland - it is time for the left to appeal to what has been gained. In short, to slip the yoke of the rhetoric of revolution and speak of maintaining the heritage of social democracy that has made life better for all. Not good enough for all, not equal enough given the current rebarbative circumstances, but a past to fight for, a heritage of hope instead of slavery and oppression. To extend this point to the frivolous "anti-woke"/woke" dichotomy - I think the woke culture, which I am absolutely for, needs to work on how to deal with massive shame. That shame is a lively thing - that shame is all over the current economic system, and the favoritism of an upper mostly white class that make it so blandly and blindly evil in the lives of the majority of people. Having never properly understood the shame of slavery in the U.S., having never really mourned it, the U.S. political system is stuck with shame in its gullet. The moment of shame and the moment of legacy - the legacy of resistance, of building up social democracy, of what was gained in the post-war period - are dialectically joined. This is the reason conservatives are so avid to destroy discussions around the 1619 project, or african-american history teaching in general. In France, the same elements are in the mix. The left - Nupes, the ecolo and socialist groups, etc. - have to present both a conservative program of retaining what we, the vast majority, have - for instance, the social security system - and what we need to preserve it - expanding it to serve all the people in france, immigrants and non-immigrants (who are often two generations, or even one, away from some immigrant ancestor). The forces of shame and glory - a glory that isn't reactionary, but progressive - have to be evoked constantly. Let the neolibs keep their "revolution". Make them eat it.

Jesus, Salome and playing the dozens

 
Yesterday, it being Easter, we read the account of Jesus’s resurrection in Mark. Mark is not my favorite gospel, but I like the rawness. I like the side references to witnesses, as though Jesus was seen as a fait divers, a story in True Detective.  Mark’s is truly the tabloid gospel, and it has a tabloid ending, complete with various provincial, cultish promises by the risen Jesus. For instance, that you can take up snakes and they won’t bite you – which is not exactly the most useful quality one can imagine –  that you can heal the sick and cast out demons – which is again a nice thing, but not exactly cosmically important - and that anyone who doesn’t believe is condemned. On the whole, Mark’s story seems to just miss the occasion.
This time, I read the names of the women who come to the tomb and find the rock rolled away and realised how strange they are. “When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body.” In the King James version, which has the sound, the vibe for me, the sentence reads: “And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him.”
When I was a boy in my Southern Baptist bible school, I dutifully learned that there was twelve disciples. They are painted by Leonardo, they are proverbially twelve in our phrase and fable, and I did not think about it. Of course, more aware of gender as I hope we all are, we know that the actual count is at least 15, as the above women should  also be counted as disciples. They seem to have ventured more, in following Jesus from Galilee, since wandering women were, in an Eastern Mediterranean society like Judea, viewed with an evil eye.
Salome, according to a study of 247 recorded names of Jewish women in Palestine in the century around Jesus’s life, was the name of 61 women, and Mary was the name of 58 – almost half of the women, then. But this Salome – not to be confused with the dancer so beloved of the decadents – is a floating signifier in the mythos. There is some tradition that she is Jesus’s stepsister, if you buy the story that Joseph was married and had kids before, as a widower, he met Jesus’s mother, Mary. Others call her Mary’s sister, which would make her Jesus’s aunt.
She is given some odd lines in the apocryphal writings. The oddest is in the Gospel of Thomas: “Jesus said, "Two will repose on a couch: one will die, one will live. Salome said, "Who are you, O man? Like a stranger (?) you have gotten upon my couch and you have eaten from my table." Jesus said to her, "It is I who come from that which is integrated. I was given (some) of the things of my father." <. . .> "I am your female disciple." <. . .> "Therefore I say that such a person, once integrated, will become full of light; but such a person, once divided will become full of darkness.” This passage, admittedly, sounds like the first draft of some Leonard Cohen song. It probably has to do with the notion of the androgyn, the overcomer of the sexes – a right pertinent person in this age of persecuting the transsexual. Lets just say that the Gnostic Jesus would not have approved of the latter.
Clement cites some text which some scholars believe was originally in some version of Mark. This is another enigmatic dialogue. The banter between Salome and Jesus has a certain screwball comedy speed, as if they were doing the dozens:
“Salome asked the Lord: “How long shall people die?” He answered: “As long as you women bear children.” Salome said: “I did well then in not bearing.” The Lord answered and said: “Eat every herb, but that which is bitter do not eat.”
This, I suppose, makes a little more sense when projected against the dictum that there is no giving or taking of husbands and wives in the Kingdom of Heaven.  But it makes most sense if we suppose that by this part of the road movie, Jesus and Salome have a question and answer patter down. “As long as you women bear children” seems less magisterial than wisecracking, and Salome’s answer, mutatis mutandis, would def find a place in a Preston Sturges’s Lady Eve.
I’m playing the rimshot here. Hope all had a happy Easter.

Marat and the underground

 

Création difforme de la société, Fille sourde de cette mère aveugle. Lie de ce pressoir, Marat c’est le mal souffert devenu le mal vengeur… "
- Victor Hugo


Of all those revolutionary lives in the 1790s, Marat's has the most symbolic narrative arc -- a hider in the sewers, a brief triumph over his enemies, the moderate Girondists, a death in the bathtub, apotheosis in David's famous picture. Its symbolic perfection is exploited both by those who find Marat a saint and those who find him an ogre. To Taine, he was obviously insane with delusions of gradeur – le delire ambitieux. To his Marxist biographer, Earnest Belfort Bax, he was, as he entitled himself, the “people’s friend,” although untutored in the ways of class – a transitional figure, in short, which nineteenth century Marxists loved the way Darwinians loved fossils of mammoths and pygmy horses. I think he is a prototype of that essentially modern figure, the Underground Man. After all, he literally did hide underground – in Paris’ sewers, waiting out a hunt mounted for him by the police. While hiding from the police is nothing new, there is something very interesting about Marat’s legendary descent into the sewer. He himself exploited it for its mythic resonances – as though he foresaw the romantic aura that would attach to it in the nineteenth century. On November 2, 1792, Marat writes:

“Freres et amis, c’est d’un souterrain que je vous addresse mes reclamations. Le devoir de conserver, pour la defense de la patrie, des jours qui me sont enfin devenus a charge, peut seul me determiner a m’enterrer de nouveau tout vivant pour me soustraire au poignard des laches assassins qui me poursuivent sans relache.”

[Brothers and friends, I am sending you these protests from the underground [literally – from an underground tunnel]. The duty to preserve myself for the defense of my country, with the days that I have left, are the only reasons that have determined me to bury myself once gain, alive, in order to remove myself from the dagger of cowardly assassins who pursue me without letup.]

 This is unbelievably stirring, if you have the right historic sense for it. On a popular level, this is the release of a voice that will be exploited throughout the nineteenth century, in novel after novel. This is the Comte de Monte Cristo. This is the attitude of Les Miserables – or part of the mix of elements Hugo put into that novel. The more sinister undertone, in English novels, is borrowed by such covert master villains as Holmes’ great antagonist, Moriarity. And that voice will continue on in the twentieth century in film and comics, the dividing line between the hidden hero and hidden villain expressing the new moral uncertainties of politics in the age of capitalism – which is also, intrinsically, the age of contesting capitalism. In fact, Marat’s enemies didn’t believe a word of the underground story. “We know that Marat was in England, in consultation with Pitt, when it was believed he was hidden in the underground in Paris,” wrote Fantin des Oudards in 1801 – when the denigration of all Marat stood for had been going on for some time. To be in the underground could mean that you were anywhere – only the Shadow knows.

When Marat defended himself against the attacks of the Gironde in the convention, he stood up, shouted for silence, and told the assembled members: “one cannot hold an accused man under the knife like you do! Do you want to cut my throat? Cut my throat, then!

It was always knives and blades with Marat. In a famous passage in a pamphlet he composed, Are we done for, he wrote that France must lop the heads of five or six hundred traitors to be free. From this figure arose a legend, spread by Michelet, that Marat had demanded one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, or finally two hundred thousand and seventy heads. In Dostoevsky’s Russia, the figure settled on, the proverbial figure, was one hundred thousand heads. Belinski, the liberal radical critic of the czarist regime, spoke of his thirst for a form of Marat’s justice in Russia – a retrospectively sinister phrase, much picked over in the Cold War. Marat himself, in his fight with the partisans of Manon Roland, lost the first round. His head was demanded by soldiers roaming the streets of Paris. A huge caricature of Marat, hanging from a noose, was hung up outside the café of the Palais Royale, and the man himself went into hiding – in, legend has it, some cave, some catacomb.

The ugly men of the Revolution! Mirabeau with his skin disease, Marat with his, Robespierre – in caricature, always depicted with a greenish skin. Michelet wrote of Marat as a non-human monster:  

“That yellow thing, green in his closes, his bulging grey eyes yellow… A kind of batracian, to which genre he surely belongs, and not to the human race. From what swamp did this shocking creature come to us?” Of course, one must know of Michelet’s feminism, his peculiar feminism, to see how the man slain in his bath by Charlotte Corday would call to everything in Michelet’s nature.

Nevertheless, this combination of monstrosity, irritation and the underground plants itself in the European culture of the late nineteenth century with a rare aesthetic force. A model of social rage.

I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man. Something is wrong with my liver.

In the mood for some Russians

 

I’ve been in the mood for the Russians – and so thought it was time to re-read Notes from the Underground. So I looked up Peaver and Volokhonsky’s translation, and by the second sentence I knew exactly what Janet Malcolm was talking about when she said these translations were not awful, just bland – and thus worse than awful.

The mouse-man says, in the (corrected)  Constance Garnett translation I read when I was a teen  – I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man.

Peaver and Volokhonsky bobble the sentence, one of the great sentences, by turning it into: I am a wicked man.

The Russian word is zloi. Other translators have used “angry”. That is a rather broad emotional term to start off with, without the bite of “spite”. The French translation by Bernard Kreise,  is “méchant”, which is mean or spiteful. Resa Von Schirnhofer, a friend of Nietzsche’s, reported in a memoir that she talked to Nietzsche about Dostoevsky in 1887, and he told her he had compared the French translation, L’esprit souterrain, with the German translation, and found the French better. L’esprit souterrain is a strange book, for the Notes don’t begin until page 156. The book is “translated and adopted” by E. Halperine and Charles Morice, and by this they mean that they have translated The Lodger or the Landlady and amalgamated it with The Notes from the Underground. Nietzsche’s sense of the  Notes – or the journal of a man beneath the floor, as it has been translated as well – was distorted by this presentation. Even in the Halperine and Morice translation, though, the spiteful – méchant – presents itself as the narrator’s defining characteristic.

The Halperine and Morice translation was read not only by Nietzsche, but by Gide and Bataille. One of the duties of the translator, to my mind, is to understand how a work has inserted itself into our general culture – a duty signally failed by Pevear and Volokhonsky.

I was glad to see, looking about, that Gary Saul Morson went to town on the issue of spite and P and V’s cackhanded translation in the Pevearsion of Russian Literature. It is a nice scalping.

“What has wickedness got to do with it? The underground man is constantly turning on the reader, taunting him, putting words in his mouth, answering objections to things he hasn't yet spoken of. During that pause between the first two sentences represented by the ellipsis, it's as if he were thinking: "So, you think I want your pity, and allow you to condescend to me? Well, I'll show you I don't give a damn what you think! I'm a spiteful man, so there!" As the best Dostoevsky critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, put it, the underground man is taking a sidelong glance at his listener, cringing in anticipation either of sympathy or contempt, and exaggerating so as to leave him deniability should someone pin him down by believing him. His prose is all loophole. Garnett caught that tone well enough for generations to experience it. P&V don't seem to have heard it.”

Luckily, I think that the P&V train, which seemed to be crushing Russian lit in the 00s, that awful decade, has not had the monopoly power it once seemed to hold.

Spite is, to my mind, such a characteristic Dostoevsky word – and such a characteristic temperamental call in the culture of pre-World War one Europe – that when I read the first paragraph of the Peaver and Volkhonsky translation, I went elsewhere. Then I looked about at the commentary on translating Dostoevsky and found that the issues are usually about whether a translation is literal or not, whether there are mistakes in grammar or not, but not ever about the effect of previous translations – about the reception that has already encoded Dostoevsky’s work in Germany, France, England and America. To be méchant, or spiteful, was, above all, not to be happy.  

The Hermann Roehl translation, which was made for Insel in the early 1920s, uses the word schlecht – thus, a bad man. Roehl’s was just one of the translations in those years. E.K. Rahsin – a pseudonym for Elizabeth Kaerrick – also translated a number of Doestoevsky’s works. Kaerrick was closer in spirit to the  Dostoevskian age than Roehl, who was a philologist with a concentration on ancient Greek. Kaerrick, on the other hand, could have had a walk on role in the Demons. She and her sister met the great impresario of Russian literature in Germany, Moeller van der Bruck, in Paris in the 1900s. Van der Bruck married her sister and persuaded her to translate Doestoevsky’s works for Piper. Piper was also involved in translating Mereshkovsky, who gave Kaerrick a hand in her translations – which is like a laying on of hands of Russian literature itself. These people formed a nest of gentlefolks with very Doestoevskian vibrations, always working on the margins, finding jobs, finding cafes, finding love affairs. From early on, van der Bruck was a convinced adherent of the Sonderweg – that Germany was, like Russia, not part of the  West.  I have a small and messy theory that part of the anti-colonialist discourse comes out of this impure source – the casting off of the “West” by certain German conservatives, up through Heidegger.  If you want to understand Germany’s radical conservative strain, 1906 is an important date – that was when Rahsin’s translation of the Demons was first published. Moeller van der Bruck is best known outside Germany, I should say, for coining the phrase “the Third Reich”, which of course had a long and horrendous history. But that phrase came out of the last years of his life, when he had abandoned literature for radical nationalism.

Spite. Wicked. Mechant. Schlecht. Zloi. So much depends on these faceless middlewomen of culture. So much of my own intellectual life. I owe you, Constance Garnett.

Fear of the People: a geneology of Macron's ultra-liberalism

 

In Marie Helene Baylac’s aptly named “The Fear of the People, a history of the First Republic, 1848-1852, there is an account of one of those highly charged and very theatrical events that distinguish the 1848 revolution – which in spite of being the revolution of writers (Marx, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Sand, Hugo, and last but not least, Marie D’Agoult, whose history of that moment should be retranslated and introduced by some muckety muck for NYRB books – who will inevitably refer to D’Agoult as Franz Lizst’s lover and the mother of one Cosima, who married another famous composer, Richard Wagner) is not a revolution much loved by historians. A flop, they say. Such hopes, ending in Little Napoleon!

The scene takes place at the Hotel de Ville, which is around 10 blocks from where I am typing this. To set the scene, Louis Phillipe, the last king of France, had fled, and a new republic had been proclaimed , at least in Paris. One of the notable figures in the provisional government was Alphonse Lamartine, a romantic poet and, it turns out, an ultra-liberal. He was in the company when, on February 25^th, a worker with a rifle, at the head of a delegation of workers, barged into the room at the Hotel de Ville where the provisional government was meeting and addressed them, demanding “the organisation of labor, the right to guaranteed employment, and a minimum assistance assured for the worker and his family in case of sickness, and to save him from misery once he could not work.” Lamartine rose to the occasion: “You would have to cut off my hand before I would sign that!” Three days later, Lamartine addressed the assembly with even more stirring words about the horrors of undermining the free market in labor, again offering himself as a martyr for the cause: “You can set me to face the mouth of a cannon but you will never get me to sign those two words associated together: Organisation of Labor!”

The phrase is associated with Louis Blanc, who wrote a best-selling book of the same name. Blanc is a socialist of the kind still recognizable on the French left. Baylac quotes a speech he gave which defines, to an extent, the nebulous concept of organisation of labor: “… does liberty exist there were the conditions of labor are such that they are hammered out between the master who stipulates the wage to profit by it and the worker who stipulates in order not to die… one of the thousand tragic incidents that are engendered each day by the immense anarchy of universal competition?” In Blanc’s vision, the state would insert itself in the manifestly bad deal for the workers by creating national workshops and moderating competition. The demand for organized labor was, to an extent, a demand for unions – but this was still a vague organizational notion.

Lamartine is, I think, the true begetter of that strain of social moderation and ultra-liberalism that has found its latest puppet in Macron. One can imagine Macron throwing himself into some hysterical pose to face down the unruly masses – organisation of labor indeed! The combination of police-heavy tactics, a throwback to the French governments of the seventies, if not the Greek colonels of the 60s, and the confidence that the people, like children, will just settle down “after the dust has settled” – the Macronites have a quasi-obsession with the “dust settling”, which is about their entire experience with such things as garbage collection and manual labor – is reminiscent of Lamartine, although not as poetic – the poetry in Macron’s circle is produced by McKinsey consultants, and they earn more for their odes to privatization than Lamartine could ever have dreamed.

I have a feeling, where I sit, that the weight of fatigue has shifted – that the unions, the young, and the seventy percent that oppose the “reforms” are on the retreat. I hope I am wrong – and I know that this retreat is not an extinction of anger, but a sense that the government is sealed against the will of the people. I don’t see the French going gentle into the next period, giving away the national treasure of a social security system for Macron’s beaux yeux. But I also don’t see the Left taking advantage of this moment. Which leaves Le Pen.

And yet, Le Pen has her problem too - someday, somewhere, she  is actually going to have to speak about the French social security system, which her hardcore supporters have fought furiously against for fifty years. This is a dilemma she is helped over by a complacent French media, but these are questions that can't be delayed forever. 

Inactual observations, or how relevance nailed my ass

 

In one of his notebooks from the 1880s, Nietzsche, who was re-reading his essay on the Use and disadvantage of history for life (the second of his Untimely Meditations – although I like inactual for unzeitgemassige), jotted down one of those lightning bolts “How little reason there is in being as old, and as reasonable, as Goethe!” It is one of those lines that deserves to be haloed with a laughter, something like Johnny Rotten’s guffaw in God Save the Queen. “Is there room in science for laughter?” Nietzsche had asked in The Gay Science – and tacitly, he put himself forward as the answer to that question.

When one grows old – I am putting myself forward as that “one” – and one is as inclined to reason as a cow is to chew its fodder, it is good to remember how unreasonable it is to reason in the first place. It is good to remember that history serves, ultimately, life – and that the nexus between the two has never been satisfactorily resolved by either the mighty – Goethe – or the low – myself. Another note that Nietzsche jotted down as he was making up howlers about Goethe concerned the purpose of the Inactual observations. It was a bait to capture the attention of similar minded readers.

“At that time I was young enough to go fishing with such impatient hopes. Today – after a hundred years, if I am allowed to measure time according to my own scales! – I am always not your old enough to have lost every hope, and every  patience. How strangely it sounds in my ears when a gray old man presses his experience into these words.”

Nietzsche’s inactual observations are the presiding spirit over Georges Didi-Huberman’s giant book, Imaginer Recommencer, which takes in, in typical Didi-Huberman style, an encyclopedic ensemble of history, art and philosophy to make its point: tracing our modernity, or our culture of the modern, back to the Weimar culture of the 1920s, which was Nietzschian for both the left and the right.

The subtitle of Did-Huberman’s book is: ce qui nous souleve, 2. Soulevement is in the air, here in Paris, given the strikes and demonstrations. It is a song in the manif, although the echoes of that song are more melancholic than positive, more 1848 than 1789.   We are rising up, is the atmosphere among the bien-pissant – the pissed off and the disenfranchised. I am one of the pissants, here, and from my perspective, these demonstrations, this crisis, is about time. Human time, which was drained into Capital and recuperated, partially and painfully, by the social democratic initiatives of the twentieth century. Time, which divides into youth and old age, which casts a varied pall over different sectors and employments – for instance, over the garbageman, who is expected to devote more than forty years of his life to his smelly, untouchable job – which as we know, under the new regime of retirement, means no retirement, since death, the end of the garbageman’s time, is the more likely outcome to the new rules.

Which is fine for the rulers, who live in a different time, who reward themselves copiously with the finest pensions the state can offer. Who “work” all the time – at lunch, over a fifty euro meal, in conferences in Switzerland with big name capitalists, and of course at night, with their lovers-assistants, all on the highend dole.

My own dallying with the inactual began, I suppose, in high school, under a different set of parameters: the cry in the seventies was for relevance. Instead of learning fusty poems by Longfellow, we were plunged into, say, Walden 2 – or at least that was the book we read in Humanities class. Or into Atlas Shrugged – that was a book I was assigned and failed to read, the unrelieved one-dimensionality  of Ayn Rand’s imagination repulsing me. I was consciously mostly of how many letters, sentences and black black print each paperback  page bore – which I suppose is the non-reader’s feeling about books in general. They assault the senses, giving nothing to the eyes and making the body feel straitjacketed. Which is why you want to eat when reading a massive paperback tome. To give the tongue some leaway, at least, as the book closes the lid on you.  

So I chose non-relevance, and was quite happy with my choice until the advent of Internet. I dropped out of the inactual with a bang in the 00s, when suddenly social media and the digitalisation of everything enforced relevancy like a motherfucker. Plus, of course, the era of Bush, the Vulcanite Bush, the realization that we were going to be really, really stupid in the 21^st century. I was a little witness to the fact that greatness – measured in global effect – can be combined with idiocy to produce catastrophes that will be with us the rest of my life. Everything has been under the shadow of that period, 2001-2009 All the squandered opportunity, the death of the Holocene, the wasting of millions of lives, the neolib glee.

Lately, I’m in an odd place – both angry and suspended in the overwhelmingly relevant and longing for the inactual, for larger projects and maybe even hope.  

Hope. What a word.

Therapeutic nihilism and us

 

In these days of evil on the telly – and on the computer screen and in the climate shift, etc. etc. – my mind has been drifting towards the topic of therapeutic nihilism. In a sense, when peeps say we can imagine the end of the world more than we can imagine the end of capitalism, they are positing some natural power in capitalist arrangements that is powerfully reminiscent of the state of medical science in 1844, when the Viennese doctor, Josef Dietl, published his manifesto in the Zeitschrift der K.K. Gesellschaft der Aerzte zu Wien that proclaimed the proper scientific limits of medicine.

“Why don’t we demand of our Astronomers to turn the days into nights, of our physicians that they turn winter cold into summer heat, our chemists that they turn water into wine? Because it is impossible, that is, because it is not grounded in the principles of their sciences, and because astronomers, physicians and chemists are upright enough to confess that they couldn’t do it. But then, why do we demand that our doctors heal lung diseases, dropsy, arthritis, heart disease, etc.? Are these demands somehow grounded in the principles of his science? Absolutely not!”

The list of diseases is impressive, and impressively, we don’t have a “cure” for arthritis, for instance, even today. But the twentieth century not only saw the invention of airconditioning, turning summer heat into winter cold, but an amazing structure of therapies that could address the body’s ills in a manner undreamt of by Dietl.

In 1844, this world of cures – or therapies that could alleviate illnesses, such as insulin for diabetes – seemed extremely distant. It was an unimaginable world.  Dietl’s nihilism was a reasonable belief that the cure was an area not of science, but of chance. However, this did not mean doctoring was substantless: “The doctor must be valued not as an artist of cures, but as a scientific researcher [Naturfoerscher].

I often take this stance towards Marx. The communism he strove for depended, of course, on the thoroughness of the capitalism that he diagnosed. In a strong sense, it arose out of it, like … well, like the response of the body to a disease. The analogy is inexact, however. This body is the disease, and its cure is a new body, arising from the old one. Resurrection.

We all know how the resurrection belief has worked out – it has become a master trope in our metaphoric imagination, but it has less of a grip on our sense of the real future. Although, of course, literally billions  of people believe that it will, more or less literally, happen.

In the case of our political economy, it is easy to see that most economists are even more mired in a nonsensical world of cures than that of Dietl’s colleagues. To believe that you cure inflation with unemployment and then you heat things up until unemployment sparks off inflation is to have the most primitive sense of the general economy. It loses sight, in fact, that the economy is not a master but a servant – a servant of the social whole. Its only reason, its only footing in humanity, is to make the quality of human life better. It it doesn’t serve that purpose, kick it to the curb, start over. To rephrase slightly the slogan of the Wat Tyler rebels: “First we’ll hang all the economists.”

In fact, as it proved, therapeutic nihilism was not so nihilistic as all of that. Diagnosis eventually lead to water being turned into wine, or at least to an Austrian physician discovering blood types in 1901 and blood transfusion becoming a real thing after the discovery of anticoagulants, research that was hurried up because of (natch) war, as in World War One. Turning water into wine was nothing compared to transfusing blood properly and easily to a patient, but the creep of blood blood blood in the twentieth century mapped the creep of cure cure cure. Diagnosis, the left hand, found cure, the right hand.

A hopeful story. We are not mired in a world of therapeutic nihilism forever. We don’t have to accept that.

Saving the heritage: France's system of retraite

 

Lucie Mazauric was a museologist of the rarest sort – a Radical Socialist (along with her husband, Andre Chamson), a resistor, and a key member of the “circus” – mi-clochard, mi-aristo, as she puts it – who hid France’s museum treasures, its Da Vincis and Delacroixes, from the Nazis. In Ma Vie en Chateaux, she gives an account of this adventure: the finding of places of safety, the gathering of equipment to guard the treasures, especially fire-fighting equipment, the getting trucks together to convey it, on short notice, from one place to the other.

“But this happy specialisation, even as it filled us with pride, didn’t prevent our trucks from becoming ever more dirty at every new displacement, and our personnel ever more tired. We trailed after us a miserable baggage that gave us the air of travelling, not too prosperous, jugglers. In the end, the cases were worn out, the nails were lost, the gas was hard to find, the wrapping had lost their initial freshness. However, we buckled the buckle, the paintings were returned to their hanging places nail by nail, the sculptures pedestal by pedestal, and we had to marvel at it all.”

I have this feeling about that other French treasure: the social security system. A work of eighty years. While the Macronists are destroying it now, out in the street, with the air of down at heels jugglers, our protestors, our strikers are determined to save it. And we will have it back, every nail and pedestal of it, so to speak. I don’t believe France will lose its heritage because a lot of jumped up suit, clustered around their suited and rolexed Ubu Roi, have decreed it so.

Vive La France!

the great American sarcastics

 

Although listings of the top 100 novels or authors or movies or albums or whatnot are often contrived and set at large in the world as the most shameless kind of clickbait, we rarely have listings of the one hundred greatest sentences, or lines. I think that one of the greatest and most influential sentences of the twentieth century is the one at the beginning of England Your England: “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”

Orwell’s sentence had, I think, a tremendous influence on the whole WWII generation of American writers. In a literal sense, this situation, turned around, is the whole songline of Catch 22. Yossarian very correctly thinks someone is trying to kill him – precisely because he is one of the highly civilized human beings trying to kill other human beings, from civilized to not yet toilet trained, in the cities he is dropping bombs on.

Kurt Vonnegut’s entire style was based on seeing in this alienated way – that is, alienated from the not-seeing required for patriotism, hierarchy and the whole cultural extent of the defence of liberal capitalism. It is a seeing that Carlo Ginzburg, in an essay on the proto-history of estrangement, brought back to a very old stoic discipline – the kind of disenchantment by the real in which Marcus Aurelius instructed himself.

Here's a marvellous bit by Kurt Vonnegut that seems to have dropped out of Orwell’s sentence and landed squarely on American culture in the last half of the twentieth century.

“Reading is such a difficult thing to do that most of our time in school is spent learning how to do that alone. If we had spent as much time at ice skating as we have with reading, we would all be stars with the Hollywood Ice Capades instead of bookworms now.

"As you know, it isn't enough for a reader to pick up the little symbols from a page with his eyes, or, as is the case with a blind person, with his fingertips. Once we get those symbols inside our heads and in the proper order, then we must clothe them in gloom or joy or apathy, in love or hate, in anger or peacefulness, or however the author intended them to be clothed. In order to be good readers, we must even recognize irony—which is when a writer says one thing and really means another, contradicting himself in what he believes to be a beguiling cause.

"We even have to get jokes! God help us if we miss a joke.

"So most people give up on reading.”

One of Orwell’s essays is called, self-flatteringly, In front of your nose, as in “seeing what is…” There Orwell speaks of the trouble, the absolute bother, it is to see what is in front of you. Orwell, like anybody raised as he was raised, could see what was in front of his nose as long as he was facing in a certain direction among a certain sort of people – mostly of the masculine flavor. But what he did, at best, was see that this is, exactly, how he saw. It is, in fact, exactly how I see – and must re-see and re-see in order to see at all. There was a rightwing trend, a few years ago, for “stoicism”, with stoicism confused with masculinity, as defined by the Skull and Bones club. That isn’t stoicism at all. Stoicism is for slaves, as Nietzsche saw, and in as much as Marcus Aurelius could become familiar with it, it was a technique that royally dethroned him.

So most people give up on reading, as Vonnegut writes, because it is more work than it looks like. The slave’s inner voice is tuned in to sarcasm – because, as its etymology of “tearing flesh” tells us, the slave sees that the whiphand doesn’t rule because it is right,but because it holds the whip. The stoic see that Jesus’s admonition that we love one another and forgive our enemies elevates us above any God that condemns to the whip – to the “gnashing of teeth”, sarkazein. That God, having forgotten to forgive, has forgotten the essence of divinity, the love without limit. And in the profane world of gnashing of teeth, highly civilized human beings will spend oodles of time and trillions of dollars trying to find ever new ways to kill you.

The great American sarcastics saw that, at least, clearly. In front of their nose.  

Illegitimacy in France: Macron's bossism

 

You can hear the cop cars at night. Distant booms. In the morning, there are ashes on the sidewalk and the street. Practically, the 49,3 regime has reposed its awesome littleness in the hands of the Minister of the Interior, a man named Gérald Darmanin. A man born out of time - he would certainly have flourished in the good old days, circa 1943, 1944. A rightwinger pur et dur, he has been stirring up his forces to do their utmost - illegitimately hassling demonstrators in all four corners of the Hexagon.

You can smell the illegitimacy. It smells like smoke and tear gas.
Macron always goes below the line that you have drawn in your head - surely he couldn't be that arrogant, that blind, that clueless? Yet this product of a thousand McKinsey position papers always comes out with the boss-ist position, like a vending machine always comes out with the chewing gum when you put in the dollar in change. Unless something jams. It is a bit of a mistake to look for comparisons in politics - Macron's choreography is pure business. He's a corporation type through and through. What he would like to do in France is enact a mass layoff. Alas! Certain U.N. decrees make this impossible.
Oddly, for such a business oriented guy, Macron apparently never took the class, "how to hide your evil". So he shows it again and again. However, he has cleverly figured out how to strategize the fascists. Thus, he is always looking for some future point where it is either Macron or the fascists. Hence, the many subtext in Macronie - by which I include Le Monde - where Macronist worry that the result of all the "fuss" over the very very very necessary reforms will benefit the Le Pen fascists. Very worried, worried to tears, these Macronists. And their solution to that worry is: get behind the great man!
While this goes down like a refreshing drink among the media elite who have benefitted from Macron's tax cuts for their class, out in the street people, the vulgar crowd, want to take a big dump on it. And on the chief.
One thing to note before I end this rant: the reforms are advertised as changing the age of retirement to 64. That is inaccurate, though, for millions of cases, where the protocol for full retirement will change to 67, 68. If you are one of the people who started work at 18 and stayed with the same work - well then, you might be a lucky 64! Otherwise, good luck.
France is experiencing that part of neoliberalism called shamelessness. But the shame is comin' at you from the street, all you think tankers and nudgers!

poem by K. Chamisso

Oh poet without portfolio!
In the raplines of this city
Cell phone to cell phone
You seek some operator’s voice.
 

Control without purpose, purpose without heart
Out of the stones themselves some grotesque starts
To urge us to turn turn turn again
And change our stone stare into
Something living and lost.
But the wire in our ear is inexorable
And we’ve forgotten what we meant to say.

The plutocrat problem, or What Macron hopes to accomplish by lowering the quality of French life

 The paradox of the plutocracy can be x-rayed by the simple application of marginal utility theory. This theory differentiates between percentages of total sums of income and wealth. Thus, the quality of life that is diminished by taking away half the income of a person making 20,000 dollars a year is considerable – it would actually throw that person into poverty. The quality of life that is diminished, on the other hand, by taking away fifty percent of the income of someone who made 100 million dollars a year would be, on the contrary, zero. There would be no effect whatsoever on their housing, their nourishment, their entertainments, etc.

When we extend this insight, we can see that the plutocrat might be abstractly satisfied by the state cutting their tax burden to zero, but in truth, this will not add to their quality of life. Which is why at a certain point in the money chain they switch to the quality of power.

The quality of power of the French upper one percent has long been nagged by the successes of the French working class in the forties through the eighties. This was viewed as an affront to their entire ideology of success: the unsuccessful should be unhappy. This is often presented as an incentive, but it is really a derivative of the plutocrat’s dilemma. To increase their quality of life, when money itself doesn’t do it, one must measure it against the diminishment of the other’s quality of life. This, more than anything else, explains Macron’s social policies. To make the average person work two more years has its economic logic – surplus labor value is always a plus! – but that doesn’t really drive this train. What is desired is that the unsuccessful – that is, the non-upper class – feel that non-success. They feel it in their very bones and muscles. In this way, the upper class can feel that their own quality of life has improved on a moral scale, which is recognized by the state: the moral scale of money. It is a deep counter-movement towards the very enlightenment that “liberated” commerce. It provides relief for those who actually exist for a man like Macron – those who can afford to shell out hundreds of millions to repair Notre Dame without having to sell a single bottle of expensive wine in their cellars, without losing a night of sleep, or a vacation, or a notice in the papers. Those who can afford, as the late head of Renault did, to “rent” the Versailles for a wedding anniversary party.

This is the real battle. The odds, as any Le Monde lapdog can tell you, are on the side of the plutocrats. As Francoise Fressoz put it yesterday: “… the strong opposition of the French to 64 years is from the beginning accompanied by a sort of resignation born of experience: all the reforms of retirement are contested, but none have been put back into question.”

None up until now. Is this the magic moment?