witnesses

 

Historians in search of a method in the early twentieth century adopted a motto first: Cicero’s “Ne quid falsi audeat, ne quid veri non audeat historia”- which has been translate in various ways, like "Let him dare to say nothing false, nor fail to say anything true.” Unlike the study of, say, horses, the human historian is dealing mostly with humans who are always saying false things, and always believe, in one or another circumstance, false things, and who often have reasonable suspicions about saying true things, either because they are inconvenient and endangering, or because they invoke causes that are either utterly opaque or utterly incredible.

Yesterday I, an inhabitant of Paris since 2010, went for the very first time to visit Versailles. I went, I should say, in my first year in Paris to Fontainebleau, and I have gone back many times. Similarly, I have visited many of the famous Chateaux along the Loire. Versailles, however, spooked me. The King it celebrates, Louis XIV, is on my list of evil rulers. I am, by nature, a Fronde-ist, and that autocratic, bewigged harem keeper arouses an interior howl of protest that touches all things Quatorzieme.

Nevertheless, visiting it with Adam and A., I was suitably bowled over. After a while, though, the magnificence becomes rather sad. It is a palace that few people, few kings and queens, could inhabit with any comfort. It seems so utterly stripped of intimacy. Unlike Fontainebleau, there is no Renaissance behind this profusion of painting and sculpture; the nymphs have departed, replaced by grand effigies of nymphs.

Which is very unfair.

However, the melancholy of the place really hit me in the “war” room, which, with its paintings of Napoleon’s battles, of General Rochambeau at Yorktown, etc., didn’t exist in the Roi Soleil’s time, or at least with these paintings. What paintings! This vast wing is hung with paintings of battles that are on canvases taller than I am and wider than a big sofa. All are of battles won by the French. Hence, I believe, no Waterloo, no Sedan, no flight from Paris as the Nazis advanced.

A battle is an ontologically difficult thing – named usually for a place where it iconically happens, even if it happens in reality in many places at once. From the Bhagavad-Gita to The Charterhouse of Parma, the combatant and the combat have formed an uneasy duo, a witness to the mystery of events.

Moving across the room, overshadowed by these towering scenes of decorous slaughter and horseback glory, one longs for peace, for a much less bloody kind of pastoral. To traverse that room is to become, briefly perhaps, a pacifist.

In 1929, a book was published by a French-American historian, Jean-Norton Cru: Temoins – Witnesses. It provoked a scandal in France as intense as Remarque’s novel provoked in Germany. It asked about the combatant’s experience in histories that spoke about war from the point of view, exclusively, of the commanders and politicians, of those outside the charnel circle of combat. For Cru, the « Stendhal » paradox has been cruelly misunderstood.

When Fabrice del Dongo, a 17 year old idealist, “wanders through” the battle of Waterloo without finding it, so to speak, the paradox has been interpreted to mean that the combatant, the skin and bones and senses on the field, is disqualified as a witness to the battle as a whole – we must leave that to the commanders. Cru believed that Fabrice’s experience was, on the contrary, with its fragmentation, gaps in information, and zigzags exactly the battlefield experience history was failing to transmit:

“These questions, I asked them, like many another soldier without a doubt, from the day when, in 1914, the contact, the brutal shock of formidable realities of the the war reduced into bits my bookish conception of the acts and sentiments of the soldier in combat, a historical conception that, naively, I believed scientific. I then understood that I did not know war with a total ignorance of its foundation, its truth, all that which is applicable to every war, and that this ignorance brought in its train the ruin of all the opinions from whence it was derived.”

In this moment, Cru believed – and in this he was, perhaps unwittingly, a cousin to the modernist artists of his generation – that the problem was in imposing a totality on the mass of voices and consciousnesses, rather than letting that totality emerge from the mass of voices and consciousnesses. Just as Dublin on June 14, 1904, was the emergent structure of its dreaming and interior monologuing inhabitants, so too was World War 1 an emergent structure that command and the state claimed and defined by inverting the order of reality.

Cru’s equivalent to Fabrice del Dongo’s 18 June 1815 experience was Verdun, where he was posted on Jan. 17, 1917. He was part of a squadron relieving another squadron, which had been ordered to dig a trench. The trench, the new squadron found, was undug.

“The poor guys had tried, but even though they have finished other work in easier terrain, they couldn’t begin to penetrate this conglomerate of stones and dirt, all frozen together, as compact as concrete. Remember the rigors of that winter. On our arrival, the virtual trench was assigned to us and we were told that the whatever it takes of the corps had been so energetic that the work had been dubbed finished – in counting on warmer temperatures to permit digging the trench. But the freeze persisted. »

Thus, on the maps used by the generals, a trench existed because the trench had been ordered. Against this was the reality of the territory facing the men in Cru’s squadron, where the trench did not exist, and could not exist, in spite of the squad’s efforts, due to temperature and terrain.

Who, here, was lost? The grunt or the commanders?

“Our division inherited firstly the miseries of those poor soldiers : in the course of six days on the line, I lost my entire squadron, a quarter of the men were killed or wounded, three quarters were evacuated due to frostbite.”

Cru operationalizes a recognizably Cartesian dualism between the spirit and the body, but turns the cognitive hierarchy upside down: it is the body that knows, while the spirit loses itself in abstraction.

Cru was not a Marxist. But he wrote a book that significantly altered historiography, introduced the ways and means to write a history from the bottom up. A modernist history, if you will, and one that will never be plastered on the walls of wings of palaces.

 

Nemesis and the ultimate game

 

“Come on pretty boy
Can't you show me nothing but surrender”

Economists call it the Ultimate Game. James Surowiecki gives a good description of it:

“Take two people. Give them a hundred dollars to split. One person (the proposer) decides, on his own, what the split should be (fifty-fifty, seventy-thirty, or whatever) and makes the other person a take-it-or-leave-it offer. If he accepts the deal, both players get their share of the money. If he rejects it, both players walk away empty-handed.

The rational thing for the second person to do is to accept the offer, whatever it is, since even one dollar is better than nothing. But in practice this rarely happens. Instead, lowball offers are almost always rejected. Apparently, people would rather throw away money than let someone else walk away with too much. Other experiments illustrate the same idea. Essentially, people are willing to pay to punish those they think are free-riding or acting unfairly, even when doing so brings them no material benefits.”

The Ultimate Game has been known since the beginning of civilization. Among other things, the Iliad might be considered to be a poem about the Ultimate Game. Naturally, it is presided over by a divinity, in this case, the goddess Nemesis.

It is curiously stirring that Herder turned to Nemesis-Adrastea in 1787, two years before the French Revolution (of which he was, at the beginning, an ardent supporter – and continued, even after the Terror, to feel was a necessary and ultimately good thing), at the very peak of the culture of enlightened hedonism.

Classicists today still find Nemesis a puzzling figure. She was a double goddess, or a goddess with two aspects. Herder’s essay on Nemesis is an attempt to understand this mystery – and to understand it on behalf of bright Nemesis, the fair goddess, mother of Helen.

The psycho-social heart of his essay is about happiness and indifference. He tries to understand how one deals with another’s happiness and unhappiness. In particular, why is it that “we sympathize more immediately and strongly with the unhappy than the happy”?

“And so the lightest kind of Nemesis was born, that is actually not envy, not jealousy, but a kind of indifference, that allows us no pleasing fusion with another. By raw spirits this breaks out in cold repulsion [Unwillen]; and the more the other shows off his happiness, the less he understands how to put a pleasing disguise over his advantages, the more he arouses, when not envy, yet repulsion against himself. For even those who would grant him his happiness, become indignant over the fact that he doesn’t enjoy it more wisely and know how to be measured in his enjoyment. This Nemesis lies in all hearts; it was even, as the Greek idioms show, the first that the language and mythology observed. It is, when it wildly breaks out, a daughter of the night, the companion of quarrels, hatred and schadenfreude; in brief, the Nemesis, who Hesiod describes in his Theogony as an evil Goddess. In noble spirits on the other hand, just this cold observation of the ethos of others in their happier hours preserves its pure essnce, and since it mixes neither with pain [Leide] or with pity [Mitleiden], it thus becomes the sharpest point in their scale of judgment. This is the good Nemesis, that looks on, cold and indifferent; but it also must be assuaged or reconciled, then it is an incorruptible judge of virtue and truth.

And how does one most honorable reconcile it? No otherwise than that one makes oneself the observer of one’s happiness and ethos; look there, the goddess with the measuring rod and bridle, who drives away black envy. She drives it away since she hats all passionate presumption and binds the presumptions of men with her bridle; and in this way alone does the good Nemesis defeat the evil one.” [141]

His biographer, Haym, writing in the 1880s, calls this essay an “archaeology of antiquity”. As LI has already pointed out, the appearance of an essay on Nemesis in the time period that saw the first fine extension of happiness from a mere passing feeling to both a norm concerning one’s total life and a norm concerning the political and economic arrangements of the social life already signals a certain dissent. This is Haym’s judgment:

“There is nothing so distinctive as the fact that just at this time, in the 80s, Herder was mightily grasped by this symbol. It is the symbol for the beautiful equilibrium into which with his being he committed his activity and art as a writer. This symbol could not have been predicted by the writing of his earlier period. After the thrusting and enthusiasm, the numerous incidents that lacked measure and that stepped over the line, in which his views, his appearance, his ambitious striving, his unbridled hate and love itself, his style, the whole way of being and art in which he moved, he was now at the point of recognizing the mean, adherence to noble forms, submission to necessity, to decorum, like Goethe, and expressed this with the appropriate words, as Goethe did with other words. He had to pay homage to Nemesis after his Sturm und Drang period had passed as Goethe had already, after traveling through Switzerland in 1779, wanted to erect an altar to Fortuna, Genius and Terminus.” (329)

 

The realistic narratives of the great novelists of the 19^th century are all written under the sign of Nemesis, which is a mark of their insight into the myth of realism – which floats within our uncertain emotional vocabularies.

 

Nemesis, I feel sure, will outlast us.

 

Marianne Moore teaches Sunday School - Proverbs 9

 Marianne Moore teaches Sunday School

Proverbs 9

Stolen waters are sweet, and as for bread eaten in secret

Well, don’t eat it, children, it will spoil your appetite.

Wisdom is a woman I know well

And of the ball she is not the belle

But she will do for the famous occasions

where on the high towers she’ll don her hard hat.

She’s not afraid to clamber onto the Wonder Wheel:

a “real thrill like you have probably never had before

—at least not at this great height!"

But to get back to sense and sentence

- Bobby and Betty don’t slouch like that

These chairs are made for backs straight as a baseball bat

Which must be true in order to hit true

And drive home from third base the stranded runner.

This phrase, here, is a lifelong lesson:

“the knowledge of the holy is understanding”

Although understanding, notwithstanding

Is sometimes itself hard to understand

But this you will find, as I have found,

Is sound.

“If thou be wise, thou shalt be wise for thyself:

but if thou scornest, thou alone shalt bear it.”

Both, notice, are solitudes. We all have that choice

Wisdom or mockery,

But in either case you’ll be lacking company

Essential company. Wisdom is a tough nut

and she doesn’t put icing on her adages

but tells you life comes without bandages.

I’d like to tell you that you should avoid

The foolish woman who sitteth at the door of her house

But I think some of you will become that dame

And others will marry her all the same.

And maybe we should ease up a bit on her

To make wisdom and mercy concur.

- Karen Chamisso

Elia meets Karl Marx at the South Sea House

 

 

When Charles Lamb, a scholarship boy at Christ’s Hospital, was fifteen, one of his patrons, Thomas Coventry, had a discussion with a City merchant, Joseph Paice, concerning the boy. According to Lucas’s biography of Lamb, Coventry, a bearish plutocrat of the pure 18th century type, said to Price, ““There is a lad that I placed some years since in the Blue Coat school, now on the point of leaving it, and I know not what on earth to do with him.” “Let him have the run of the counting house till something better offers,” said Mr. Paice.” (71)

The conversation of such men was like unto the grinding mechanism of fate, and they shaped Charles Lamb’s entire professional life from that moment on. Or rather, they shaped one of the outstanding facts about Lamb: he made his money as a clerk. He was first with Mr. Paice at the South Sea House, and then went into the accounting department at India House.

Lamb is one of the exemplary clerks of literature. He wrote about it; he lived it; he chafed within it, he knew the chair, desk, and great books where the figures flowed down the page, representing empire and time. He worked in the ruins of one colonial venture – the South Sea House – and in the midst of the short flourishing of another – the India House – during a period in which the merchant class was in need of the science of political economics and was getting it from the likes of James Mill (India House) and David Ricardo (merchant/speculator). In fact, the India House and its successor, the India Colonial office, was a site associated with some of the great Victorian intellectual families – the Mills, the Stephens, the Stracheys. Under its wing, Macaulay sortied out to India and laid the foundation for the application of utilitarianism to law, a work completed by James Fitzjames Stephen.

In a footnote to H.W. Boot’s informative article, Real incomes of the British middle
class, 1760-1850: the experience of clerks at the East India Company (1999), Boot defines the term clerk like this:


“… it conjures up Dickensian images of oppressed men on meagre incomes struggling to
maintain respectability. In fact 'clerk' was a common appellation applied to a large group of occupations ranging from the poorest menial clerk who never earned more than 100 pounds per annum to men who carried the highest administrative and financial responsibilities in government, commerce,and finance. “

Lamb’s first Elia essay is a portrait of the clerks of South Sea house. The characters are, evidently, composites, but the survey of this “Noah’s ark’ of ‘odd fishes’ catches the monumental ritual and economic importance of the desk and the counter, which become symbolic centers of the life story. What the bed is to the libertine, the desk is to the clerk. In each of his profiles, Lamb divides the life into out of office information hobbies (and eating), and in the office propinquities (and eating). As in Bartleby, one notices the strong place of food in the office. Food not only provides the energy for labor power – it provides a sensual outlet to another world, one that is not chained to the desk. In the same way, the hobbies are rather like the larger shadow the clerk casts as he makes his way out into the candlelit hours of his free time. “John Tipp”, for instance, is an amateur musician, and has a life as one, with other amateur musicians. But he also has another life: “But at his desk Tipp was quite another sort of creature. Thence all ideas, that were purely ornamental, were banished. You could not speak of anything romantic without rebuke. Politics were excluded. A newspaper was thought too refined and abstracted.”

The major portion of Lamb’s time as a clerk was spent at the India House. He was received there on April 5, 1792, in the accounting department. At that time, according to Boot, the India House was one of the biggest employers in London, paying 1,730 persons to keep the books, supervise the docks, guard the sheds, etc. In Lamb’s case, he gave a five hundred pound bond and agreed to work there for three years on probation, at the end of which he was to receive a salary, which began at 40 pounds and rose, the next year, to 70. He spent exactly thirty three years there, and was released early, with a handsome retirement, no doubt due to his writing and his celebrity. In one of the great Elia essays, The Superannuated Man, he describes the event of his retirement in terms of time. As a clerk, he had Sundays off: “but Sundays, admirable as the institution of them is for purposes of worship, are for that very
reason the very worst adapted for days of unbending and recreation. In particular, there is a gloom for me attendant upon a city Sunday, a weight in the air. I miss the cheerful cries of London, the music, and the ballad-singers—the buzz and stirring murmur of the streets.”

He also had vacation: “But besides Sundays I had a day at Easter, and a day at Christmas,with  a full week in the summer to go and air myself in my native fields of Hertfordshire.”

From his letters, one finds that Lamb had more free time than that – but as a composite portrait of the clerk’s life, this is representative.

After his retirement, Lamb describes the experience of freedom – freedom that is not political, but existential: “I was in the condition of a prisoner in the old Bastile, suddenly let loose after a forty years' confinement. I could scarce trust myself with myself. It was like passing out of Time into Eternity—for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have his Time all to himself. It seemed to me that I had more time on my hands than I could ever manage. From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me.”

Let me depart from Lamb here, and bring into the picture Karl Marx’s writing about the agent of circulation, which has given rise to a lot of controversy among Marxist economists. On the one hand, in Capital II and III, Marx develops his notion of ‘unproductive labor’, by which he simply means those activities that are defined in terms of the circulation of the commodity, bought from the producer, and put on the market to be bought either by a consumer or another merchant or refiner. Marx also throws into the definition of unproductive labor those things appertaining to surveillance, management, etc. There has been a lot of controversy because the principles of the definition of unproductive labor, in Capital, are slightly at variance with the principles laid down in the Manuscript on Surplus Value from the 1860s. I myself think that the division between unproductive and productive labor is confused by taking the static view of it – in the course of time, an unproductive branch of labor can generate a producing infrastructure, while productive labor in some branch can, of course, become extinct, due to its being made obsolete by technology.

However, the reflections on commercial capital and money – Warenhandlungskapital and Handlunggeld – are decisive, and sociologically apt. This segment can be treated as an independent unit in the collective system of circulation. Looked at in terms of social phenomenology, Marx makes this Hermes place – the place of pure metamorphoses in which what happens is, in a sense, that nothing happens. When the producer realizes his surplus value by selling to the middleman, from the proceeds of which he again purchases labor power and material to continue producing, the middleman, the Tiresias of capitalism, has only begun. He has expended his capital, either borrowed or taken from his stock, to buy products wholly for resale. There is evidently no magic in this, and yet, like the producer, in the ideal case, the successful merchant realizes a profit. While the merchant’s employees are exploited just as the factory hands are, the merchant’s employees do not create the kind of  surplus value that comprises productive capital. And although they may be formally exploited just as the worker is, there is a sociological difference that does drive a real divide between them.

About this, there is much to say. But for the moment, notice that for Marx, this commercial segment is subordinate to the true producers, the manufacturers. If the commercial segment becomes too important, accrues too much economic power, the manufacturer can, theoretically, erase the middleman and encroach into the merchant’s territory.

In fact, though, the dream of getting rid of unproductive labor – dreamt most recently by the advocates of the New Economy who projected that the computer maker would simply sell the computer on the internet, the automaker would sell the auto on the internet, etc., etc. in a happy deflationary spiral satisfying both customer and producer – does not happen.

Instead, as many Marxist economists (Sweezy, Moseley, Wollf) have pointed out, on many dimensions the composition of developed capitalist economies shows that unproductive labor – both in terms of surveillance work and in terms of circulation – becomes increasingly important in developed capitalist economies on several dimensions: for instance, in the number of people employed in unproductive labor and the amount of the investment of the GDP in unproductive branches of economic activity. In 1987, Edward Wollf estimated that as much as 40 percent of employees were unproductive laborers.

The peculiar sociological characteristics of this segment impress themselves upon the dynamic of this segment – for it is from this segment that most knowledge work, most representational work, has branched out.

It is here that the economic rationality of the classical type – homo oeconomicus – emerged, and plausibly describes the kind of strategies that make up the landscape of commercial metamorphoses. At the same time, it is here, too, that the alienation from the time of one’s life has found expression in the aesthetic sphere – in fact, thematically dominates the aesthetic sphere. This is important in as much as the population of the aesthetic, or cultural industries – driven originally by the necessity of closing the discontinuities that can arise in this segment of circulation when demand lacks or there is an oversupply of goods – overlaps the population that sits at the desks of the counting houses. The media that they have produced is the semiosphere in which all are now bathed, worker, housewife and clerk.

 

 

The A.M.E delivers its soul: or just say no to crushing Gazan children in the rubble

 

Surprising news from the states! Myself, I thought there were only two gospels there - the gospel of hate and the gospel of prosperity. And that Christianity had faded from the national fabric, never to be seen again. But the Bishops of the A.M.E have actually shown a Christian concern with slaughtering children to the honour of Baal - or in other words, the ongoing genocide in Gaza - and have had the gall to suggest that the U.S. not contribute to tearing apart kids, slaughtering patients in hospitals, and starving to death the general population. Obviously, this is wholly anti-semitic - anti-semitic in the line of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekial. Also anti-semitic, according to the new paragons of Israeli ultranationalism, is the entire liberal culture of diasporic Jews.

 

Out of their own mouths.... No sane or moral person could argue that the murders committed by Hamas justify seven children killed for each person murdered. However, those who argue this obviously have no concern whatsoever with the murdered, and - to use Ezekial's words:

 

"When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thine hand.

 

19 Yet if thou warn the wicked, and he turn not from his wickedness, nor from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity; but thou hast delivered thy soul.

 

 

When a righteous man doth turn from his righteousness, and commit iniquity, and I lay a stumbling-block before him, he shall die: because thou hast not given him warning, he shall die in his sin, and his righteousness which he hath done shall not be remembered; but his blood will I require at thine hand.

 

21 Nevertheless if thou warn the righteous man, that the righteous sin not, and he doth not sin, he shall surely live, because he is warned; also thou hast delivered thy soul."

 

Ah, the undelivered souls of the "Western alliance". Twittering like mad on all the major media, from the NYT to Fox news. Stumbling blocks all.

Montpellier and my backpack

 I'm in Montpellier - my second fave city in France - and I'm thinking this morning of Joseph Conrad. Joe, as I call him, had a bag lifted from him when he and the family were temporarily living in Montpellier.

My own bag does not contain the manuscript for The Secret Agent, but it did hold a nice red scarf, my favorite, and my red and yellow notebook, into which I had scribbled an amazing maze of notes concerning the three stories I've been trying to write.

I wore this backpack when Adam and I made the usual routine at the Oddyseum, on the outskirts of town. The Oddyseum is Adam's favorite (well, unitl les Halles in Paris grew a Krispy Kream store, which now fills Adam's dreams with fat American donuts), There is an arcade in the cinema - with an excellent Walking dead video game. There's an old fashioned pin ball game, at which Adam is an old hand. And there is an air hockey table. The furniture, basically, of heaven. Plus, the mall has a Frozen Yogurt stand, where for a few euros you can get an amazing amount of toppings, including disgusting multi-color Strumpts, a candy you suddenly cease being able to put in your mouth after the age of fifteen.

Prelude, this, to the experience of putting down all my bags, including the backpack, so that I had a free hand at air hockey. Adam had some bad luck - he usually beats me pretty solidly. The victories must have gone to my head, cause I set down my cool backback and in the aftergame talk I drifted away from the bag. When I drifted back, it was gone. So, if some boy from Montpellier bursts upon the publishing world with a very complex story about Princesse Jacqueline de Broglie, I'm gonna scream PLAGIARISM! and feel very au courant, since plagiarism is everybody's fave subject lately.
But I have a feeling that the booster of my backpack unceremoniously dumped the notebooks in a trashcan.

I feel sorry for the Princesse.

Intersigne: at the crossroads of magic and positivism

 

In a conference on his friend, Villiers de l’isle-Adam, Mallarme speaks of “an exceptional story at the extremity of which is a tomb.” This story, for Mallarme, is typical both in its subject and in the “outsider” place of its author: it is “an enlargement of the Shadow”. The story is called L’intersigne.
The Breton folklorist Anatole Le Braz, in La Légende de la Mort (1893), used a similar reference to the Shadow to define intersignes: Comme l’ombre projetée en avant de ce qui doit arrive – “as a shadow projected in front of what must arrive”. Intersignes, in Breton popular culture, are coincidences or strange events that advertised a coming death. “Intersignes announce death. But the person to whom the intersigne is manifested is rarely the person threatened by death.” The person to whom the intersigne is manifested possesses a gift, but not one that can be obtained by teaching. You must have the “gift of seeing”. “Within this privileged category, those who are ranked first are those “who have passed through holy ground and have come out of it before being baptised.” For instance, a baby who is carried over the ground of a cemetery before being baptised will have the gift of an expanded sight. “Those who deny intersignes receive as many as those who have the gift. They deny them uniquely because they don’t know how to see nor understand them; and they don’t want to understand, at all, nor see anything of the other life.”

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam wrote his story, Intersigne, in 1867. It was eventually included in the collection, Cruel Stories, in 1883, with some editorial changes. Villiers was a native Breton, and evidently had received his knowledge of the phenomenon orally.

It is a “weird” tale of  Xavier de la V…,  who feels suddenly compelled to visit his friend in Brittany, l’abbe Maucombe, who lives in a remote parish of Saint-Maur. Xavier de la V., as we later learn, has every reason to stay in Paris, since he is in the midst of an important law suit. But he feels physically compelled to visit Maucombe, who he has not seen for years. He uses the excuse of hunting. Maucombe and his housekeeper welcome V., who finds himself afflicted with an almost epileptic case of vision – he sees the house, his room, even his friend, for brief moments, in a state of extreme estrangement.
« Is this really the house that I saw just a moment ago ? What age denounces to me, now, the long fissures between pale leaves ?  - this building had a strange air - the tiles illuminated by the rays of the agony of the evening burned with an intense light - the hospitable portal invited me with its three steps; but, in concentrating my attention on these grey stones, I saw that some had been polished, and that traces of letters chiselled in them still remained, and I saw that they came from the neighboring cemetery – whose black crosses appeared to me on one side, about a hundred steps away. And the house seemed changed to the point of giving me the creeps, while the lugubrious echoes of the hammer-knocker, that I let fall, echoed, in my trance, in the interior of this place like the vibrations of a funeral bell. “
Part of the genius of this story is the relation between text and title, Intersigne, a strange word to the reader. It is never explained, never even mentioned in the text. It rides the text, rather, as a sort of fate or curse. The title is felt in the story that V. tells, but is never literally within that story. Which, in short, is that V. has been, in effect, summoned to L’abbe Maucombe’s abode in order to see these things, in these moments; and to have a dream, or vision, of a priest handing him a coat. The dream is realized – L’abbe Maucombe accompanies V., who the day after his arrival wants to flee the house (it is here that we learn that he is in the midst of an important lawsuit), out to the road leading him back to the nearest village, where V. has left his coat – and,due to the rain, lends him his, L’abbe Maucombe’s, own coat. A coat that, as V. learns at the end, that accompanied the priest on his journey to the holy land and “touched the Tomb.”
He learns at the end, too, of course, from a letter, that L’abbe Maucombe died two days after his visit, from a cold caught in the rain of the day he accompanied V. to the road. V. was, in effect, not only the see-er of the death, but its proximate cause.

2.

The term intersigne drifts through a certain literature of folklore and parapsychology, and ends up in some interesting places. The philologist and scholar Louis Massignon, who started out as a Christian mystic and ended as an Islamic one, uses it in a few places in his works to designate a mystically charged coincidence. In Massignon’s work, the intersigne is not just an event of some kind prefiguring a death – it is a name for all significant coincidences – correlation without seeming cause. The notion of cause is not, of course, abandoned – rather the causes aren’t seen, because the witnesses lack the gift of seeing. This gives the mystic a neatly outlined historical place – the mystic can sense in the coincidences that present themselves in symbolic circumstances the overall causes – either the work of God, or the work of some transcendental pattern.

Things get interesting, to me, when the intersigne is taken up as a methodological prompt by Roberto Calasso in his great, reactionary book, the Ruin of Kasch. This is a historical “fiction” that adopts the intersigne as the structure underlying the message, which is a very 1980s, end of the Cold War message: our evils stem from the French revolution. It is a de Maistre hopscotch from the guillotining of Marie Antoinette to the Cambodian genocide of Pol Pot.

Of course, Calasso can’t be entirely reduced to the anti-modern paradigm. Like de Maistre, he is full of paradoxes and special information – he is a great knower of the Upanishads and ancient Greek texts, as well as pockets of European, and especially French, history. Like Carlo Ginzberg, he is fascinated by the savage within the European persona. Almost always when the term “the West” is employed, it refers not to the vast mass of urban and rural peasants and their beliefs, but a very minority group of power brokers, adventurers, scholars and writers. This is a highly distorted picture of the many cultures within Eurasia, from Danish sheepherders to Sicilian sulfur miners. What is said about the Nahautl – for instance, the belief that humans can transform into animals – could be said for respectable bourgeois living in Normandy in the 17th century.

In this sense, the fall of the ancien regime was a colonialist project, with the colonized now being the peasant, the shepherd, the tinker and the tailor, ruthlessly enrolled in rationalism’s project. Or Capital’s – although Calasso takes a very reactionary view of Marx.

I love the passage where Calasso shows his hand, embracing a methodology that is reminiscent of Benjamin’s methodology in the passages, through Adorno’s eyes: at the crossroads of magic and positivism.

“A gnostic history, which we lack, is largely made up of “intersignes” (as Massingon called them), unusual warnings, coincidences (as historians call them, to avoid them), erratic forms, buried relics, physiognomic marks, constellations latent in the sky of thought.”

A gnostic history, a jigsaw puzzle, a frolic of dialectical materialism.