avital ronell

I'm going to be writing for bookandfilmglobe.com as a book editor. Anybody who has an idea for a review or an article should query me! rogergathmann@gmail.com

And this is my latest, about avital ronell, teachers' pets, the culture wars, the state of the humanities, and the impunity of John Searle.

the wasp summer

Me on the wasp summer in Berlin.

against the "legitimate right of a people to self-determination"

I had a twitter exchange with a man who accused me of being an anti-semitic shithead because I did not recognize the legitimacy of the Jews right to self-determination.  I called him a general shithead and accused him of being the anti-semite. Things went from there, in the usual twitter way.

However, if I had not felt like insults were in order, I might have surprised him by saying that I am opposed to the principle of self-determination period. I think that every nation state that grounds its legitimacy in ethnic identity is on the road to fascism. Sooner of later such a state will either have to re-constitute its legitimacy or become a racist state, and as such, begin suppressing criticism and begin the process of institutionalizing second class citizenship.

The principle of the nation state was, up until the 1840s, I’d say, almost never identified with some ethnic group, rather than with a royal family, or a religion. The Atlantic revolutions identified something different, what Rousseau called the popular will. But that will was not identical to being, say, White male and protestant – even though the U.S. was, of course, founded by White Males who were predominantly protestant and often slave owners.

The romantic state, as I’d call it, changed this formula by up-fronting ethnic identity. Germans for Germany, Italians for Italy, etc. Yet this formula was by no means unproblematic. First, there were definitely Germans outside of Germany – the state Bismark made – and there were definitely Germans who weren’t ethnically German inside of Germany. Secondly, the same wave that resulted in the founding of these states resulted in some quasi-democratic form of governance – a Reichstag or Parliament – which gave non-ethnics certain rights to political expression and pathways to governance.

We know how the story went in Europe.

In the U.S., the person who did the most to amplify and internationalize the “self-determination” talk was Woodrow Wilson. Indeed, Wilsonian language is still used when the claim is that Jews – or Palestinians, or Hutus, or Japanese, etc. – have a “right” to self-determination. Although the fact that Wilson was a racist president, which was repressed by the old, liberal mainstream view of American history is now out in the open, we don’t see how that racism permeated his internatlonal outlook. But the man who thought Birth of a Nation was a historically accurate film was the same man who thought ethnicities had special rights. Through the Wilsonian lens, the founding of the U.S. was especially a matter of White Christians. The Pat Buchanan/Trump view of American history is a direct descendent of the Wilsonian ideology.

The romantic nation-state seems to follow an inexhorable logic, in which the very liberatory culture that accompanied the founding of the state is sooner or later alienated from the power establishment that runs the state. That power establishment, in turn, begins to attack that liberatory culture as anti-German, or anti-Italian, or anti-American – or anti-Jewish, or anti-Palestinian. Not to get all Hegelian here, but the history of the last two centuries does seem to show that there is a logic here, or at least, that the structuration leads to similar results.

This all seems obvious to me. But maybe it isn’t obvious to everybody. I don’t know.

Treptow Park

 We went to the Soviet war memorial at Treptow Park expecting Soviet kitsch. It turned out to be a curiously moving site. The memorial is most noted for a giant statue depicting a soldier with a sword, holding a baby, or being held by a baby, which surmounts a smaller stone space, a sort of hypertrophied hut.  The soldier faces (at a field’s distance) two pinkish red marble walls, which are separated by a space. There is a series of steles depicting various scenes of war and peace that make their way on the edge of the field between the wall and the giant statue.

None of this seemed in bad taste, or in some non-synchronicity with the event commemorated – the massive war between the Soviets and Nazi Germany that ended in the ruins of Berlin in 1945, when the German army finally surrendered.

In the 90s, it was considered in bad taste to prefer the Soviets to the Nazis. The moral equivalency argument, which had started on the far right in Germany, triumphed after the wall fell.

Of course, that is utter bullshit.

I’ve been reading Anthony Beevor’s account of the final push and the “battle of Berlin” since I’ve been here. Beevor’s account is famous for finally putting into the scales the massive number of rapes committed by the Soviet troops. This was a moral advance in historiography: military history has almost completely avoided the subject of rape, even though rape has been weaponized in all wars.

However, along with the moral enlightenment comes a certain puzzling moral blindness. While fully willing to lay the blame for the rapes on the Soviets, Beevor doesn’t spend much time pondering the terror bombing of the German cities, and in particular, Berlin. In the moral calculus, the Nazis and the Soviets get very bad marks, while the allies fall back into that comfortable category of military history, the advance of a number of divisions. In fact, though, those Allies were advancing through civilian casualties of at least 600,000; they were advancing through the deliberate destruction of cities, and their residences, which were all openly part of the Allied war plan, much more so than the Soviet quasi-approval of rape.

I myself have no doubt that the right side won in WWII. Whether it should have been fought at all is a question that goes back to WWI – the truly unnecessary war. If Vladimir Lenin had been the head of Russia in 1914 rather than Czar Nicholas, or if the governments had listened to the socialists, led by Jaures, and its radical wing, led by Trotsky and Lenin, WWI would never have happened – which would have meant that WWII never would have happened. Instead, the momentum of the 1900s and 1910s, which was with the Left, was broken, never to be fully recovered again.

Beevor, I should make clear, feels that the campaign of rape is morally important without feeling, therefore, that the Soviets and the Nazis were morally equivalent – which I take to be, logically, the idea that it would not have made a moral difference if the Nazis had won. 

Of course, the argument that the radical right made in the 70s in Germany, which you can now see casually sprayed across the New York Review of Books, as if it were obvious, was the argument of America First in 1939/1940. A group with which, I believe, Trump’s father was involved. But the same bien-pensant liberals who find Trump shameful have gone along with finding Trump historically justified. Such is the price of keeping in place a neo-liberal order that has to justify itself with larger and larger historical revisions. Otherwise, one has to question how we came to a place where the top ten percent own more than the bottom seventy percent, and how the top 1 percent own more than the next nine percent, and so on. Put it on a graph and label it: world-historical fuckup.

But I digress. The Soviet memorial is a quiet place, much quieter than the argument I am making above. There is something to be said for the aesthetic continuity of muscularity between the fascists and the communists. In the U.S., we confine the bulging muscles to the comic book and to action movies. But the monumentality, the bowed heads, the sense of human waste and exhaustion – this is what the memorial, in its entirety, conveys well. I expected something triumphal. What I found was something elegiac.

One of the more memorable spots in Berlin.

Walter B. and me

Me on Walter Benjamin's lost Berlin here: http://bookandfilmglobe.com/creators/dreaming-of-walter-benjamin-on-walter-benjamin-platz/

on titles

Adam has made up a game. He comes up to me and in a confiding whisper he says, Dad, do you know what the title of my next book is going to be? So I guess, sometimes. I say: the toothpaste vampire. Or I say, The monster that ate the donuts. Then Adam will tell me. The books Adam is going to write are all scary stories. Horror stories. He is in the throes of a love affair with being scared; and especially, being scared by R.L. Stine. The goosebumps series, the innumerable spin-offs – Adam just loves them. J’adore R.L. Stine, he’ll say. The titles he comes up with are Stine-esque, if not stolen outright from the master. Like: The Werewolf of the Swamp. Sometimes I’ll remind him that the title is already taken.

Yet Adam isn’t totally wrong. Titles exist in a strange no-man’s land in IP law. Although trademark claims are made for businesses (some Chicago restaurant was in the news recently for, absurdly, sending threatening letters to all organizations using the word “Aloha”, which the restaurant claims as trademarked), there seems to be a lot of elbow room in the title field. You can look up a popular title-ish word – say, Possession – and you will find half a dozen novels with that title. On the other hand, you will only probably find one Mansfield Park, or Mrs. Dalloway. It is hard to tell, in this labyrinth of the claimed and the unclaimed, what the rules are.

Even  though I do not remember talking about titles with Adam, his fascination with titles mirrors my own. I am a title dreamer. I love to jot down potential titles for books or articles, and I can almost see the future spirits of those books or articles flock around (spirit, is this a book that may be, or that must be?). There is a poetry of the title – and, of course, where there is poetry, there is mostly bad poetry. Many, many bestselling books bear embarrassing title names, adducing blue, infinitely, passion, love like a barker with Tourette’s syndrome (hey, is that the title of a future detective novel?).  These title suffer from Hallmarkitis, and even when they get good reviews, it takes a certain pause before one can pick them up.

But whose titles are these? We think of the title and the book as signed by the same maker. In fact, titles are where agents and publishers like to play. They are always suggesting that titles be changed, because they have a belief in what is marketable that is quite odd when you think that they are always calling for something totally original – as long as it is like everything else. The vulgar version of the death of the author has some strong evidence when it comes to titles.

Certain titles, though, seemed signed by the author. Mrs. Dalloway. Sense and Sensibility. The Great Gatsby – okay, I included the last one as a ringer, because this was not Fitzgerald’s first pick for the title. But he was persuaded away from Trimalchio in West Egg, thank God. Some titles give off an odd and enigmatic light – they are the answer to a riddle that is posed by the book. Supremely, this is the case with Ulysses. Joyce doesn’t tell you, hey, this book translates the Odyssey in some ways to a June day in Dublin. But the title tells you something is up. I remember the Modern Library classic, with that huge U – that stately, plump U – which I loved, and which might have kicked off my love of titles.

The medievals derived title from Titan, according to Thomas C. Stillinger: “According to Servius the term tutulus (title) comes from Titan, that is, the sun, either by a process of diminishing or by comparison. It is said to come through diminution because the lifht of that work is small in relation to the whole sun; by comparison [because] just as the rising sun gives light to the whole world, so the title illuminates the work that follows.” Thus, Nietzsche’s Morgenrote is a sort of entitled title, and the rays illuminate the whole disparate system of the numbered. But does every book deserve to be a planet upon which a sun, or title, rises? Are titles necessary? Should this little scrawl have one?

on

Elizabeth Nietzsche: the original Trumpite!

Weirdly enough, amidst all the reporting about the conspiracy theories of Trumpites and their ferocity against the “fake news”, nobody is making the obvious connection with Nietzsche’s sister.

So I guess it falls to yours truly – again! – to take up the task.

It all goes back to a visit paid by Harry Graf Kessler to Nietzsche’s sister in 1921. Cut. Here we need to paste in a description of Harry Graf Kessler. This guy was the Zelig of his time. He knew everyone, from Hindenberg to Georg Grosz, and he was everywhere. He was rich. He financed avant garde art, hobnobbed with communists, and got himself the fuck away from Germany once Hitler took over. He put it all down in his diaries, which are fascinating even if you don’t know all the characters. If you want to know what the Cabaret era was like – the giant Kit Kat club of European artists, scroungers, heirs and heiresses, communist journalists, pacifists, sex reformists, nudists, psychoanalysts, surrealists, etc. – read In the Twenties, the translation of his diaries. End of paste, back to:

Nietzsche’s sister! As every fan of Nietzsche knows, his sister, Elizabeth, was despicable on every level. A Wagner groupy – wife of an anti-semitic conman – object of Nietzsche’s own contempt – and keeper of the poor goof once he went supposedly crazy just because he mistook a beaten cab driver’s horse for Richard Wagner – and I’m with him on this one. His last decade was spent in a gloomy catatonia, while his sister enjoyed, unexpectedly, the celebrity that came with his books. Nietzsche caught on, but he never got to enjoy being the fin de siècle’s favorite kind of dynamite.

End of story, horrible woman, who like many horrible people, lived forever. She even lived up to the 1930s and got to welcome Hitler to her Nietzsche museum.

Now, back to the early twenties. At this time, radical right soldiers and cops roamed the streets, attacking leftwingers, and killing quite a few. The courts, which the Weimar government did not reform, were filled with sympathetic judges, who let them off. As so often, look to the judicial system for nourishing reaction.

But the rightwingers didn’t like being identified as murderers. One of the rightwingers killed Germany’s minister, Walter Rathenau, because he was a social democrat and a Jews. Hence this vignette:

Afternoon with Frau Förster-Nietzsche. A very unrefreshing political conversation, that she introduced when she told me she feared for my life from the side of the Bolsheviks “who also let Rathenau be murdered”. This absurd nonsense, which Ludendorff in an interview with the ›Daily Express‹ loosed upon the world a few days ago, is, for her, an undoubted fact, because “assassination is not a German kind of thing”.

Thus tasteless lies are now disseminated by old German nationalist ladies, in order to shield themselves from the taint of murder! I told her my opinion, which led to a rather excited argument, without diminishing in the least her belief on the purity of the German nationalist soul or shaking the idea of the communist masterminding of Rathenau’s murder.

I introduced into the conversation the fact, among others, that firstly, the righ radicals have up to now murdered around five hundred Leftist activists since the Revolution [which kicked out the Imperial government] came to a close. Were all these inspired by the communists or the Bolsheviks? Secondly, that we have never seen a Bolshevik provocateur tried for the murder of a rightwinger, or even be named in any case. Thirdly,  that even the countless weapon reserves of the “German Security and Resistance Union”, the “E Organization”, etc. must then be derived from Bolshevik plotting, since they were also involved in the intention to attack and murder.  

One is ashamed to have to contradict such absurdities. The good old woman spoke about the rightwing radicals only as “we”! “

I imagine similar conversations have been held in many a household, as sane family members confront the good old fox watchin’ parents.

I think Trump needs to shout out Elizabeth Forster Nietzsche. She was his kind of woman.