The Centrists can never be beaten, especially when they are beaten and other journalistic chestnuts

 Well, I must say, Starmer is surprising me. The task of the Labour leader, Starmer said to himself, is to be even more laughable than the leader of the Tories. And he's done a bangup job! I loved the Labour campaign. The Tories were talking about spending more on Northern England. Well, Labour saw through that and saw that what the people in the British rust belt really wanted was: more respect for the flag! Its the cultural issues that count! Starmer's proposal that the state build a royal yacht for the Union Jack and let it cruise around the sceptered ile, where lucky yokels on the shore who spotted it could kowtow, hit the sweet spot. Unfortunately, the peeps of England didn't seem to get the message, and Starmer came through again, promising to take responsibility for the itsey bitsy loss of 88 council seats and then fired the woman who he'd thrust aside in the campaign anyway, Angela Rayner, in the hopes of hiring a guy - you know, on the guy's rule! rule, which has really brought a nostalgic tear to the eyes of the Westminister crowd - who wouild echo Starmer's thoughts.

In the clown v. clown election that Labour is obviously preparing for, Starmer has shown Johnson just how far he is willing to go. Now, onto very very clever remarks in the House of Commons which will get Guardian coliumnists all in a twist! Delicious, and I am sure it will win Labour some wink wink at the club even from those tough Telegraph columnists! Oh, and remember, the losses for the next decade are: on Corbyn! or Rayner, one or the other. Never on the obsolete Eton club that is running Labour into the ground.

FREEDOM, FREEDOM, FREEDOM, yeah, FREEDOM

 

 

 

Hommage to Aretha F. 

Zombies don’t seem to shit. And they are absolutely null as lovers. In my cosmos of pop horror, we have, at the top, the aristocratic vampire, then way down in the middle manager region, the serial killer, masked or unmasked, and finally, at the bottom, the lumpen prole zombie. Of course, the zombie originally had some dignity, some whiff of the escaped slave, the marooned undead, but that was before it became a mere target, as dramatically interesting as a dartboard.

 The most interesting thing about the current takeover of pop culture by the zombie is: how it represents a certain despair about freedom. Freedom, which was so important in the Cold War that nuclear missiles were built to defend one or another conception of it. In other words, freedom was so important that human beings, or certain of them, were willing to extinguish the human race for the sake of it.

The missiles are still there. They exist, now, at the periphery, in their cobwebs, and doubtless, like the fabled gun in Chekhov’s notion of drama, they will go off at the last act. But it won’t be, I think, because of freedom, or somebody’s idea of freedom.

 In the Golden Age of the Free World, the idea of freedom entered into the way people thought of their lives, acted in their lives, fashioned their sense of the civil existence. In the U.S., it was as if the nuclear bet committed the people to a certain demand – the end of the world as we know it had to be worth it. It couldn’t be simply a power grab – although in the back of the consciousness of the intellectuals, this was certainly a dark possibility. There was a flowering of interpretations of freedom, from the existentialist variety down to the Rawlsian bureaucratic variety.

 In the U.S. and Western Europe, freedom’s performative style was set by formerly marginalized, subaltern groups – notably blacks, women, gays, and the formerly colonized. The third world in the first world, the organizations all the security organs – the FBI,CIA, military goons and the police – were afraid of. Ah, the years of the urban guerilla! You can read about it now in a thousand extinct “underground” journals and newspapers, digitalized in all their groovy wavy gravy. The assumption all were going under was: freedom is a universal. All peoples have always valued freedom.

Anthropologists, however, were not sure. There was a school – and not only on the right – that held that freedom was a unique product of ancient Greece.

 Which gets me to David Snell’s book: Flight and Freedom in the Ancient Near East.

 Snell targets the Greek-o-centric story about freedom, from the direction of Mesopotamia.

 “Material from ancient Mesopotamia, ancients outhern Iraq, allows one to suggest something more radical, that the Greek understanding of freedom was not a unique and miraculous phenomenon,but one that can be paralleled elsewhere. I am not prepared to survey every known culture and language group,nor do I think that such an effort would be helpful. Rather I wish to pursue a test case in some detail because a great deal is known about Mesopotamia.”

 

                             2.

 

I, the great King Tabarna, have taken the grinding stones from the

hands ofthe female slaves and the work from the hands ofthe male

slaves, and I freed them from contributions and corvee. I have

loosened their belts and given them to the Sun-goddess of Arinna,

my lady.

The fashionable term in the litcrit world at the moment is fugitive. I associate the fugitivity thematic to Fred Moten, but the term is part of a semantic field involving flight that started in the Cold War era. Such ur-Cold War texts as Anti-Oedipus and Mille Plateaux took an eclectic approach to concepts, and stole the lines of flight and territorial notion from the ethology at hand – which, on the right, was popularized by writers such as Robert Ardry. It is out of such materials that the canonical Cold War notions of freedom have been reconfigured.

This re-emplacement of freedom opposes the conceptual structure that posits the notion of  positive and the negative liberty a la Isaiah Berlin. The latter, of course, negative liberty, the freedom to be left alone, was used to attack the former, which was the freedom to thrive in relation to the increasing wealth of one’s society. That attack defined the “Free World” in general against the Communist world. We keep on rocking in the free world by defending ourselves from the state and pulling ourselves up from the bootstraps without state interference. The intellectual structure created by the Cold War liberals has slowly become less plausible in the neo-liberal era. I find it fascinating that the New York Review of Books, one of the great organs of Cold War liberalism, has recently published attack on both   the idea of the counter-enlightenment (by Kwame Appiah) and the idea that positive and negative liberty really conceptuallly divide the discourse on freedom (by Pankaj Mishra). Surely for those oracle watchers looking for shifts, this is one – as significant as the #metoo  driven fall of the Old Boys.

I don’t claim that Daniel Snell has been moved conceptually by Deleuze and Guattari, but it is true that his book, Flight and Freedom in the Ancient Near East, presents us with a different geneology of freedom that echoes the, ahem, position of freedom now. To be all serious as shit about it. Snell takes aim at a tradition that locates the “Western” conception of freedom in Greece, and that still goes by the bannering notion of freedom announced, in the Classical Liberal era, by Lord Acton’s 1877 essay, Freedom in Antiquity. Acton defined liberty in high Victorian terms: "the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion." Which is a fine definition. But is it anthropologically pertinent?  The history of the project of tracing freedom from Antiquity to the Modern Age seems to be, as well, the history of defining what the “West” is. The West is a construct that is both different and universal – its the conceptual infrastructure of colonialism. By a retrospective annexation of ancient Greece, the project moved forward to other, more contemporary, annexations.

Snell does not dispute the interesting Greek articulation of freedom. He ponders  the etymology of eleuther – the Greek for free. – which some etymologists connect to leudhero, belonging to the people. Snell prefers, however, another etymological suggestion – that the word is related to the future of to go, eleusoma. In Sumerian, the word for freedom, amargi, is related to movement: return to mother. Which gives us andurārum, returrn to an earlier status. It is the turning and returning, the movement, that interests Snell.

Snell’s idea is that freedom, in the Mesopotamian context, has to do with escape – fugitivity – and debt. Although early Mesopotamian societies did sponsor slavery, the majority of the laborers were serfs. Freedom, for the Mesopotamians, is imbricated with debt. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors was the ultimately emancipating principle. To put this programmatically (and hyperbolically), jubilee precedes emancipation.

This is a line of thought that is echoed by David Graeber in his book on debt. It is a line of thought that rearranges the field, so to speak. To cut along the joints of the concept of freedom, here, we do not look to definitions deriving from the Victorian sense of property, or the Eighteenth century fetishism of contract, but we look at the real, felt bonds of ordinary existence, with an emphasis on bonds – debts – and the way enslavement and escape are related as two parameters of the socially lived experience of freedom and its lack.

The “return to the mother” as an image for escaping debt is certainly a little surprising from the psychoanalytic point of view, but from the feminist critique of patriarchy, it makes for an intriguing intersection between an economics founded on debt and credit – our current situation – and overturning the domination of phallocentric rules.

“An early example of the concern for freedom appears in a royal

inscription from pre-Sargonic Lagas that may be dated around

2500 B.C.E. The ruler Enmetena boasted that he "canceled

obligations for Lagas, having mother restored to child and child

restored to mother. He canceled obligations regarding interest bearing

loans." His language plays on the literal meaning of the

term for the freedoms he was establishing in that he mentions

restoring children, the etymological origin of the term for freedom or "canceled obligation."

 

These notions of freedom seem much more relevant to our daily lives as we crawl out of the ruined year of plague. Perhaps it is time for our political philosophers to catch up with Enmetena.  

people are good

 

Randall Jarrell’s The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner begins with these definitive two lines:

“From my mother’s sleep I fell into the state

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.”

 

All of the Cold War’s children were not tail gunners or on bombing crews, but we all experienced the belly of the state. My corner of the belly was Clarkston, Georgia, where we moved when I was ten. Clarkston was a minor real estate speculation built around a sleepy Southern ville, experiencing the Atlanta Metro boom of the 1960s, as Northerners moved South and Southern natives moved into the metro area, or the metro area overtook them. In 1973, I was in  9^th grade English, and was absorbing, with all my classmates, a Cold war curriculum that was heavy on novels like Lord of the Flies and short stories like “the Lottery”. A student from pre-World War II days might have been a bit surprised by this reading list. Why these seemingly dark tales?

One factor, I think, was the center-right worry about social democracy and communism. Beginning in the fifties, in the U.S., Buckley’s conservatives fronted a debunking of what they called Pelagianism. I believe it was Eric Voeglin who boosted this obscure doctrine from its place in the 3^rd century encyclopedia of heresies and installed it as the key to modernity. Pelagianism combined disbelief in original sin and belief in human perfectibility. Although Cold-war liberals were investeed in schemes to improve the human lot, they, too, drew the line at utopia – particularly of the Communist variety. This was called “tough-mindedness” around the New Frontier set. The lesson of Stalin was this: in seeking utopia, the communists ran rough-shod over human nature, and in continuing stubbornly to seek perfection, they plunged into an eliminationist ideology that produced horror. The hippie communes of the sixties, which confronted this ‘tough-minded’ mindset, were spotlighted in the news as a sideshow, places of flawed thinking. Charles Manson was the inevitable Q.E.D.

Out of this combination of ideological elements came a preference for books that premised the selfish and authoritarian tendencies of all human beings, down to the kids. Original sin was saved! This became a powerful subtheme in popular culture as well, providing a nice dramatic arc for hundreds of movies and tv shows. It could be seen, at once, as an indictment of the bland suburban lifestyle and the idea that human beings were good.  The latter truth, conveniently enough, could be redeemed through capitalism, where vice (except the vice of envying the rich – this vice was bluebeard’s locked room, don’t go in there!) could become virtue. Sex appeal, which in the Christian context could be cause for casting out your own eye, could be sublimated into a car or a cigarette brand, employing thousands.

We children  of the Cold war are old, and cold, and our fur is ratty and nearly shed. We still live in the belly of the state, but the state wants us to take “risks” and is addicted to the financial sector. Etc. However, the old poisons still remain with us. I have a hard time sweating out the Cold War ideology. People will always take advantage, and you have to go around armed – this is the most popular narrative line of our time. Original sin, dressed up in urban locals, is hipster irony now. Eric Voeglin, whereever he is in the afterlife, must smile about that. Although, granted, he was never much a smiler in life.

 

A footnote on European Maoism

 

“The PPS, established a September 9, 1967 in Vevey, broke off from the Swiss Communist Party (marxist-leninist). According to article 3 of the statutes, the PPS was open to orientations of the left: “socialist, progressive, Maoist, ... etc.” In spite of this unusual political openness, the Spark, the party’s organ, insisted on the Maoist orientation of the party...

Many members of the OAS, as well as former officers of the SS, adhered to the PPS in Vevey...”

- Journal du Valais, Nov. 16, 1978

One of the more peculiar stories of the 60s and 70s in Europe is the unlikely collaboration between the so-called Maoists and the European far-right.  The Sino-Soviet split did not perturb the alliance, tacit or otherwise, between the Communist parties of the Western European states and the Soviet Union. But the official Communist parties did not absorb all the left-leaning demographic. For some of the Ultras, Mao was a much more attractive figure than Brezhnev or Kosygin. Surely communism couldn’t end up as a bunch of meaty faced men in bad suits waving at the tanks and soldiers marching through the Red Square like your standard issue superannuated world war II vets! For the breakaway Maoists, the Soviets and the official communist parties were obviously the real enemy of the revolution.

This was the thinking of some on the left. On the far-right, Mao’s revolution also held a peculiar fascination, due to the fact that it seemed to have been the product of the shock tactics of the urban guerilla. The far-right, since the days of the Cagoule in France and the Putschist in Spain had made a cult of shock tactics. Mao seemed, to this group, a very inspiring model. Plus, the war on the intellectuals that Mao was preaching in the sixites was music to their ears. This was the right spirit! There had long been a China cult among some of the far righties – Ezra Pound was not alone in finding Chinese philosophers a stimulant. Julius Evola, that weirdest of far right gurus, was not only a great fan of tantric yoga but, as well, of certain Chinese classics. Saddle the Tiger, his sixties book that preached to those “men who were a different race from the people of today”, was illustrated – in the french paperback edition – with a Chinese print.

Temperament, at a certain high temperature, beats ideology hands down: ideology just becomes an expression of a certain combination of psychopathological elements. And so it is that there always a certain exchange of positions among ultras that seems, on the level of reason, inexplicable. The person who advocates blowing up buildings to show the Man today has a good chance of becoming the person who advocates blowing up buildings to show the Feminazis tomorrow.

The Maoist ultra-rightists are a footnote in histories of the Cold War: but they are a bloody enough one. They did not make much difference in Europe, although the splinter Swiss Maoist party, the PPS, did help the neo-fascists blow up a public plaza or two in Italy; but they made a big difference in Africa during the time of anti-colonial struggle. The PPS became a front used by the PIDE, the Portuguese secret police formed under the Salazar regime and active not only arresting dissidents in Portugal and giving them a good torture, but also in the Portuguese colonies of Guinea, Angola and Mozambique.

 The Salazarist regime was overthrown in 1974 in what is called the Carnation revolution, a course of events that much disturbed Henry Kissinger. The specter of Eurocommunism has long been relegated to the Exorcist’s book of practical jokes, but back in the day it definitely vibrated in the collective serotonin of  D.C. foreign policy circles. The soldiers who overthrew the regime raided the deserted office of something called Aginter-Press on 13 de  la Rua Prasis, Lisbon, which turned out to be the nexus and vulture’s nest of a paranoid’s nightmare: an organization of CIA cutouts, Gehlen pinheads, Nazi and neo-Nazi zombies, and OAS militants – the latter having earned their spurs as torturers in the Algerian war and as handlers of plastique in the subsequent war against their arch-traitor and villain, De Gaulle – which brought together assassins, false paper mooks, intelligence agencies and the fascist paramilitaries in a loose network  of spy versus commie. Among the papers found in the Aginter archives were documents inventorying the money trail to the PPS – which eventually resulted in the Portuguese government  inquiring about the PPS officially.

I should reveal a parti pris: I despise the Maoists who briefly strutted their stuff in the late sixties and seventies, especially in France. After a suitable period of being street fightin’ leaders, they all discovered Solzhenitsyn and became New Philosophers, from which it was a hop, skip and a million television appearances to becoming neo-cons and cabinet minister whisperers. Some of them and their students are now busy cretinizing the airwaves in France, beating the Islamo-guachiste horse – Macron’s way of out Le Pen-ning Le Pen. What a ride – straight down the toilet bowl. And out of all that group, not once even an interesting book! At least the old thirties fascists had brilliant writers like Leon Daudet and Celine. But I digress...

The PPS was founded by one of those gargoyles that only the sixties could toss up: one  Gerard Bulliard. Bulliard was a product of the Vevey boxing scene, which was apparently competitive enough to send a contingent to Moscow in 1959. Bulliard liked what he saw, and immediately converted to communism. But his experiences back in Switzerland with the communist party could not appease his thirst for a more thrilling Marxist-Leninism – this was a man who wanted a revolutionary KO now. After a trip to Albania, Bulliard, who was fond of founding international revolutionary fronts, which allowed him, after a while, the further delight of expelling heretics from these same international revolutionary fronts, founded the PPS and became not only welcome at the Chinese embassy in Berne, but also welcome to covert meetings with various secret policemen of all types – the Gehlen type, the Portuguese type, the Italian type. The PPS became a front for crooked stuff. It’s newspaper, l’Etincelle – named after Lenin’s paper, the Spark – specialized in denouncing the Soviets, the students, and the Jews. Especially the Jews. Perhaps this shows the influence of one of L’Etincelle’s “journalists”, Robert Leroy. Leroy trailed a colorful past behind him: a member of the Charlemagne SS brigade in the war, a group of French volunteers who fought with the Nazis on the Eastern front; an associate of the plastiqueurs of the OAS; and an agent of the PIDE. L’Etincelle had a couple thousand readers, but that didn’t prevent it from making Leroy the paper’s “correspondent” in Africa, where he interviewed African revolutionaries (who believed they were being interviewed by a Maoist paper) and sharing information with the PIDE. Many of his interviewees were either assassinated or escaped assassination after he interviewed them. Coincidence!

After the Salazar regime was overturned, Bulliard, apparently, turned to other pursuits: fortunetelling, for instance. A good summary of his life was written by Jean-Philippe Chenaux for Commentaire.

"Me, Gérard Bulliard, said Bulliard, I am announcing my death on April 22, 2009, at the age of 82 ...". This unusual ad that appeared on the 24-hour mortuary page (April 28) left more than one reader stunned. Does not the deceased go so far as to publicly confess two "cute sins", "a good trend for" petticoat "and" good food "? The most disturbing thing is when this lover of ladies' thighs insists heavily on his "loyalty in friendships", "loyal friendships" which allowed him to "keep morale up to the end". These must be “post-sixty-ninth” friendships, because Gérard Bulliard made himself known from 1964 to 1969 by his repeated political infidelities and as a great excommunicator of “comrades” at the head of the smallest party. Communist of Western Europe.”

Bulliard is a footnote. At least in Switzerland. FRELIMO in Mozambique might have other ideas.

 

Tove Ditlevsen's Copenhagen Trilogy - a note

 

The program era killed the proletarian novel.

Or perhaps, it died when the cold war turned to modernism. Whatever the causes of death, the corpse seems to be largely unmourned. The disorganization of the working class has extended into our multi-media moronosphere – it is rare thing for a sitcom to feature even a lower middle class protagonist. The suburbs and the professional class won. And specialization won – who among us believes that the garbageman may be reading Marx, or even Upton Sinclair, on the side?

This happened in my lifetime. When I was a young sprout, the above scenario would not have been artistically implausible. I myself, working as a janitor at a Sears Warehouse, spent my breaks reading Wittgenstein, as the dock guys played dominoes. To my mind, the slap of dominoes and the Philosophical Investigations still belong together.

I’ve been reading Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy, and as is the way of your wired reader, I have also been reading around the reviews. My review: read this fucking piece of high and glorious art this year, don’t wait, don’t hesitate. I have noticed that the reviews concentrate on the issue of gender in the books, and skip right over class. This makes some sense, given our numbness to class, but to me this is prole literature at its finest. I class the CT with two other novels – Hamsun’s Hunger, and Christina Stead’s The Man who Loved Children – both, as well, about writers. Writers before the program era. Hunger is an obvious predecessor – Hamsun’s protagonist starves in Copenhagen, living off the paltry sums he earns writing, the whole book a fugue of refusal. The Man who Loved Children is more upscale, the Pollit family being, by ancestry and education, more whitecollar – yet existing on little, as happened in the Great Depression. Stead’s sense of the way a vocation is strangled in youth, and has to strangle back if it is to survive – which is the pattern of Louie Pollit’s childhood – echoes with Tove’s own struggle, against overwhelming odds, to be a poet in a neighborhood where being a steadily employed and unionized factory worker is the ultimate good. The class lines are always blurred when you get down to the details – I think of social categories as more polythetic than absolute, if you know what I mean. What do I mean? I mean, there is a cultural family resemblance between the poorly paid school teacher, the furniture factory worker, and the secretary, even if I could well divide up the labor determinants between productive and non-productive labor.

Typically, the reviews erase the class culture in the Copenhagen Trilogy and impose the neoliberal term: poor. Poverty, as Marx realized early on, is a charity term, not a sociological one. It disguises – as it is meant to – the exploitation of low income labor, dipping it in a vaseline smear of piety and disguised culpability-mongering. Being poor is a pitiable state, as well as one that probably is the individual’s own fault. Being poor is not, and is never, a state created by capitalism in order to exploit labor for profit, that surplus value always being absorbed by the top. When you have the poor and the rich, of course the rich become individuals too – self-made individuals, so smart, so hard working! We all know how the wheels spin on this thing. Hilton Als review in the New Yorker is almost a parody of Clintonism.

“Times are hard. But they’ve always been hard. Tove’s parents met while both were employed at a bakery before the First World War. Ditlev, who was ten years Alfrida’s senior, had been sent to work as a shepherd when he was six. Social advancement was connected to economic advancement, and you couldn’t achieve either without an education.”

Of course, you couldn’t achieve economic advancement without unionism, a big theme in the book, and the connection between education and economic advancement – the era of “human capital” and giving our poors the ability to code! – occurred well after Tove Ditlevsen’s death. Tove’s desire is not really for social advancement in the first two books, it is an actual desire to be a published poet. That one’s passion for art doesn’t translate into economic and social advancement is, for our neolib era, a curious perversion, much less understandable that BDSM.

This isn’t to say that the Copenhagen Trilogy is a leftist tale. The immersion in proletarian culture is shot through with political gestures, but not a lot of political thinking. However, the world here is clearly related to an actually existing class and class consciousness. I find it fascinating that this sign system is so utterly unrecognizable – or at least not very acknowledged – now.

 

Danton's fate: notes on Lukacs, Buchner and Epicurus

 

 

 

“Philippeau, welch trübe Augen! Hast du dir ein Loch in die rote Mütze gerissen? Hat der heilige Jakob ein böses Gesicht gemacht? Hat es während des Guillotinierens geregnet? Oder hast du einen schlechten Platz bekommen und nichts sehen können?” - Herault in Danton’s Death

“Philippeau, what sad eyes! Did you rip a hole in your red cap? Did St. Jacob give you the evil eye? Did it rain during the guillotining? Or did you get a bad seat and couldn’t see anything?”

In 1939, Georg Lukacs, who was living, I believe, in Moscow at the time, published an essay about Georg Büchner with a typically tendentious Lukacs-ian title, Georg Büchner and his Fascist Misrepresentation. It was another potshot in Lukacs’s shooting war on European irrationalism, of which the leading philosophical figure was, of course, Heidegger – although as we all know, Lukacs, in his Weber days, writing things like Soul and Form, got pretty fuckin close to irrationality – thought that yearns to be appreciated for its yearning to be thought - himself. Like a cuckoo in the nest, the yearning pushes out content – but in reality, according to Lukacs, the vacuum of content reflects a plenitude of class interest.

Lukacs’ attack is on Büchner ’s alleged despair, and he alludes to the evidence for it that has been pondered by all Büchner scholars – the letter he wrote to a friend about the French Revolution, which he researched before writing the play.

“For several days now I have taken every opportunity of taking pen in hand, but have found it impossible to put down so much as a single word. I have been studying the history of the Revolution. I have felt as though crushed beneath the fatalism of History. I find in human nature a terrifying sameness, and in the human condition an inexorable force granted to all and to none. The individual is no more than foam on the wave, greatness mere chance, the mastery of genius a puppet play, a ludicrous struggle aganst a branzen law which to acknowledge is the highest achievement, which to master, impossible. I no longer intend to bow down to the parade horses and bystanders of History. I have grown accustomed to the sight of blood. But I am no guillotine blade. The word must is one of the curses with which Mankind is baptized. The saying: It must needs be that offenses come; but woe to him by whom the offense cometh” is terrifying. What is it in us that lies, murders, steals? I no longer care to pursue this thought.”

Of course, as Lukacs pointed out, to make this letter Büchner’s final statement on the matter is unfair. Buchner wrote it – and his play – when he was twenty two. And he had already been active in revolutionary politics. . Lukacs thought that the despair of the letter was, indeed, laced through the play, but that it was absorbed by a dialectical message that formed the real political intelligence of the play. Now, say what you will about this interpretation – and, in his defense, it must be said that nobody had better reason to feel the full fatalism of history than Lukacs in 1939! so his rejection is, in its own way, a little heroic or mad – it is useful for seeing a pattern in the play, a conflict that shatters the temporary synthesis of wisdom and happiness embodied  in the image of Epicurus, the true bourgeois messiah.  As Camille Desmoulins puts it in the first scene: “Der göttliche Epikur und die Venus mit dem schönen Hintern müssen statt der Heiligen Marat und Chalier die Türsteher der Republik werden.” (The divine Epicurus and Venus with her beautiful hind end must become the gatekeeper of the Republic, instead of St. Marat and Chalier.”)

Lukacs points out that the epicurean materialism of the philosophes, which is the philosophical perspective broadly represented by Danton, can’t endure, instinctively opposes, the call to class struggle issued by Robespierre. Lukacs has two very useful grafs on this topic, if you are interested in re-reading re-reading history:

“The central dramatic and tragic significance of the figure of Danton resides in the fact that Buchner, showing exceptional depth of poetic insight, not only laid bare the socio-political crisis in eighteenth century revolutionary endeavours at its turning point in the French Revolution but – and the two are inextricably bound up with each other – at the same time portrayed the ideological crisis of this transition, the crisis of the old mechanistic materialism as the ideology of the bourgeois revolution. The figure of Danton, indeed Danton’s fate, is the tragic embodiment of the contradictins generated by historical developments in the period between 1789 and 1848, contradictions which the old materialism was not able to resolve.

The social chacter of epicurean materialism gets lost along the way. As a result of the objective situation, eighteenth century materialists were in a position to believe that their theory of society and history – and both are essentially idealist in philosophical terms – arose from their materialist epistemology; indeed they belived that they could really derive the course their actions should take from their epicurean materialism. Helvetius says: “Un homme est juste, losque toutes ses actions tendent au bien public (sic).” And he judged himself to have derived the substance of such sociality, and its necessary connection with an ethics of the individual, from Epicurean egotism.”

At which point I am reminded of one of the sayings of Epicurus: “don’t engage in politics.” Or in the Vatican sayings: “We must free ourselves from the prison of public education and politics. 

                                                                         2.

 

When Lukacs uses the phrase, epicurean materialism, to talk about the nature of the Dantonist resistance to Robespierre in Büchner’s play, he is following a theme which was taken up in the 19th century not only by Marx, but by the historians of the French revolution and of the enlightenment.

Emile Dard’s biography of Herault de Sechelles (1903), for instance, is titled “An epicurean under the terror.” When Büchner’s Robespierre denounces the wealthy and the refers to people who ‘used to live in garrets and now roll around in carriages and sin with former marquesses and baronesses’, he is referring – except for the garret – to hedonists like Herault, who was followed about, as he performed his revolutionary duties, including creating a constitution that gave foreigners the right to vote, by a few aristocratic groupies. And Robespierre’s denunciation of ‘vice” and those who ‘declare war on God and property” as a way of secretly supporting the King – whether they know it or not – he is sounding an old Left theme that has become perennial - the warning against the decadent life style - but that had peculiar resonances in the Revolutionary period, when the carry over from the 1780s was so sexualized. Mirabeau, for instance, was famous for his rather famous erotica before he was famous as the revolution's first great orator. The disabused spirit of the young bucks around Danton was simply an extension of the final moment of the Enlightenment – which, contra the philosophy crowd, was codified not in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, but in Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Herault moved in the Valois circle, which met in the Palais Royale, and included Laclos as well as Tallyrand, Sieyes, and others. As Dard puts it, Herault, on his sofa, would become enthusiastic for justice, 'the sole passion that could inflame the sceptics, on the condition that it did not disturb their leisure."

O Herault! I identify.

Deconstructing the rankers

 

 

 

“Nobody will deny that in a world in which everything is connected through cause and effect, and in which no miracles ever happen, each part is a mirror of the whole. If a pea is shot into the Mediterranean, an eye that is sharper than our own but infinitely less fine than the eye that sees all would be able to trace the effect on the coast of China. And what other is a particle of light which contacts the surface of the eye compared to the mass of the brain and its nerves?” This is one of my favorite passages in Lichtenberg. It expresses a great idea, a fantastic idea, the imagery of which has a sort of hypnogogic flickering, as though Lichtenberg had magically been able to recover one of those great ideas that one has just as one is falling asleep, which are forever lost to the consciousness that wakes the next morning. 

I often think of this passage when I read someone assessing the importance of an author or event, especially when they do so to make some invidious point. I thought of this when I read the nasty and falsefooted essay attacking Greenblatt’s The Swerve by the head of Harvard Publishing, Lindsay Waters in a Boundary 2 issue from several years back. Waters essay is an excellent example of the American habit of ranking, and then of attacking the ranked for being ranked too high, as though we were all perpectually taking our SAT.  This passage, for instance: 
“English professors have been proclaiming for decades that they were disseminating subversive ideas that would shake Western civilization to its foundations. They wanted to shock and awe the bourgeoisie. Yet, look who has rocked America and the West to its core: economic theorists, bankers, and accountants—a curious turn of events. Robert E. Lucas Jr. and Thomas J. Sargent, whom I published at the University of Minnesota Press decades before they won Nobel Prizes, were leaders in the production of ideas that deconstructed the international economy. By comparison, the impact of de Man barely measured on the Richter scale.”

Poor De Man! He probably didn’t even know that the chief of the Harvard University Press had a machine that could give us a Richter reading for events! Although one suspects that perhaps Waters doesn’t exactly understand his own machine. Certainly the description of Lucas’s work has a certain distinct odor of bullshit. “Deconstructed the international economy” did he? I can’t imagine that Lucas thinks of himself as deconstructing the international economy. As far as I can tell, Lucas is mostly connected with the model of Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium and the idea that expectations of economic actors are affected by government regulation in such a way as to make such regulation broadly inefficient. I wouldn’t exactly say this rocked Western civilization to its core. On the other hand, Waters seems to have a large experience of drunk English professors – because I’ve never read a sober one, beginning with De Man, who promising to shake Western civilization to its foundations. De Man, for all his sins, saw what shaking Western civilization was all about in the 1939-1945 period. Famous for deconstructing the international economy – at the point of a gun.

However, it would shake Western civilization to its foundations if we had some richter scale for the effect of every pea that was cast into the ocean. Contra the head of the Harvard Press, however, I think we can say apriori that such a scale, and the mechanism for applying it, doesn’t exist and will never exist. What Meso-American savant would have guessed that a King and Queen presiding over a podunk peninsula were about to shake the whole order of things by financing the idea of a ratty Italian ship captain? Perhaps the apriori will be reversed when Christ and the Angels descend to earth and begin to judge the quick and the dead. But even in this case, I would bet that Lucas and de Man would be judged to have different effects on different people for different reasons. As would, say, Oprah, Dale Carnegie, and the scribe that wrote the ancient Egyptian Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor. No one scale will apply.