A Karen Chamisso poem

 

The little vessel went down down down the hatch

And like the most luckless blade turned up

Bobbing on the shore’s of the Piggy’s Eldorado.

 

She had built her story out of bits of a maze

Pursued in the dodgier reaches

Of old issues of  Vogue. Haven’t we all

 

Been there? Untying our stays

Peering at the damage fading

In the mirror’s aristocratic depths

 

Our little vessel – vessel of blood, vessel of bile,

Vessel of flesh, vessel of lips, nails, all the peripherals –

Sees that rise and shine won’t cut it.

 

But what else is there?

- Karen Chamisso

A vanishing act: repressive desublimation and the NYT

 

We are in the depths of the era of “repressive desublimation” – Angela Carter’s genius tossoff of a phrase – and Trump’s shit video is a marker of an unusually explicit kind.

This is why the establishment media, desperate to make Trump seem presidential – which is of course the mission that their owners have set for them – are so oddly off track.

In particular: I’m looking at you, NYT. In a gesture as comic and as bewildering as the NYT’s glorious reportage about 18 year old Mamdani’s form to enter Columbia University (he wrote he was Ugandan since he was from Uganda and thus was an African (horrors!), a scoop they received from a neo-Nazi hacker who broke into the Columbian university computer system and boosted confidential docs - the NYT, now, chose to pretend that No Kings was just some quantity thing, like college students swallowing goldfish in a fifties frat – unworthy of their sovereign regard.

This has the effect of making them seem unworthy of their subscribers regard.

A bluesky-er, Thomas Ley, has done the service of putting together two NYT pages. Here’s the Charlie Kirk racist festival front page:

And here is yesterday’s page, as 7 million to 8 million people were protesting all over America.

Freudians among us will notice the headline in yesterday’s paper: The Vanishing Act. Indeed, now, would you like to tell us a little bit about your feelings for your mother after the unfortunate open curtains incident, NYT? Here, stretch out on this sofa..

Ah, the years of Mamdani are gonna be superfun!

Nervous nellie liberals and the top 10 percent

 The nervous nellie liberal syndrome, which is heavily centered on east atlantic libs in the 250 thou and up bracket, is very very sure that Trump is wildly popular and that his law and order ICE thing is going down like ice cream at a children's party. I think that reflects the fact that in the 250 thou and up bracket, Trump is wildly popular and his ICE thing is going down like, to vary the metaphor, Japanese scotch at the country club. But outside the privileged precincts, what is happening is quite different. To get Americans to dislike or disapprove of the police is very hard - we live in the land of copoganda, as we all know. So the Yougov survey for the Economist should come as a shocker. Although I don't think it has received any publicity at all.

If a Dem president were tanking in the polls like Trump is, we would have a running commentary about his or her "failing presidency." But in the corporate media, that meme will only start gaining headway once the bubble in the financial markets bursts, and everybody feels like Treasury and the Fed should pitch in a trillion or two to help the poor plutocrats out. Right now, things are going in exactly the way the 250 + crowd wants them to go. Their sons and daughters trans desires stifled! This wokeness defeated! And though admittedly settting the civil rights clock back to Jim Crow days is a little rough, still, DEI had just gone to far, so it is DEI's fault! Of the 33 percent that will always be with Trump, the most powerful bit are the ultra-rich.

As one bluesky poster put it, compare the NYT to the Drudge Report - the outsider paper that was once all the rage. This is what Drudge looks like now:

Fox by Karen Chamisso

 

Fox shall go down to the netherworld

sez our Ur-test, written before the flood

in the palpable materials of paradise

all clay and reeds.

 

There, he shall not eat the bread.

There, he will not drink the water.

There, he will throw the salt

behind is shoulder, to the left.

 

Will Fox burn his mask

after he emerges, root-torn

to the buzz of the indifferent gods

and the screams of the fly-stung priests?

Foucault - Sade - the philosopher villain: from transgression to neo-liberalism

 

1

 

There is a distinct streak of philistinism in Foucault.

In  the 1960s, he was truly interested and sometimes brilliant about figures in the aesthetic sphere, and saw it in many ways as a distinct sphere. But as he grew older and more professional, in the seventies, this sensitivity was submerged, or mostly submerged, under the sense that the seriousness of life was elsewhere. I’ve seen this syndrome in dozens of academics, for instance in philosophy. Perhaps it is especially disappointing in philosophy as many of the high hat philosophers evidently take science seriously and aesthetics lightly, a sort of side-effect of living. Men ceasing to read novels- we know that score.

In a 1973 interview with S. Hasumi, Foucault was asked about literature and, after dragging out his totem pole (Blanchot, Bataille, Klossowski), he said: “On the other hand, I am more blocked [gêné], or in any case much less impressed by writers, even great writers as for instance Flaubert or Proust. Sometimes I entertain myself by saying things like this about Flaubert, who you know a million times better than me…”

That Hasumi knows Flaubert “a million times better” than Foucault is a very backhanded compliment. Anecdotally: it is said that Foucault showed no enthusiasm for offering a position at the College de France to Barthes was because he considered Barthes not quite a first ranker- Barthes was just the type of person who know Flaubert a million times better than Foucault.

Eric Marty has written a book with a terrific title: Why did the 20^th century take Sade seriously? By the 20^th century, he doesn’t mean the publishers and the ordinary reader – he means the pantheon of guys. And I do mean guys – he does not even write about Simone de Beauvoir, much less treat the most known Sade scholar, Annie Le Brun.

But with this reservation, I have found the book reaching a spot in me. I too wonder why Sade was “rediscovered” in the 20^th century. One of the chapters in Marty’s book is, naturally, on Foucault, and I think that is where the book plumbs the question it asks. For it is a question that presumes that Sade was a twentieth century thing, and went out of fashion under neoliberalism. Since Foucault is the thinker most clearly identified with the movement from New Left radicalism of a kind to neoliberalism of a kind, the reference to Sade can be thought of as a kind of marker.  In the sixties, as Marty remarks, Sade was clearly important to Foucault – the mythic Sade, the alien, mentioned in The History of Madness in the series with Nietzsche and Artaud. Foucault also (a fact I didn’t know!) gave a series of lectures on Sade at the University of Buffalo in the sixties.

But this Sade gave way to a new image of Sade in the seventies. In one of his interviews, before the publication of his first book on the History of Sexuality, Sade becomes somebody else, somebody not mad, somebody who  is part of the great turn towards confessing desire endlessly – and disguising that fact with the myth of repression. Sade, Foucault says, is a “drill sargeant of sex”, making us go through our routines again and again. Sex here loses its transgressive aura to become a discipline, like any other.

Marty puts the reversal on Sade well: “This time we retain nothing of Sade, and Foucault seems rejoin a path which he has made his own, the analysis proposed by Adorno and Horkheimer, for whom the deep horizon of Sadean thought is genocide. But while the German philosophers inscribe Sade in Kant and Kant in Sade, Foucault proposes the reverse operation. After having believed in the cousinship of Kant and Sade, Foucault returns to a Kant without Sade, a totally Foucaultian Kant.

Marty, who edited Barthes work, has written about Barthes a lot: but he doesn’t quite answer the question as to why Barthes took Sade seriously in the section on Barthes. The book does take up a theme that I think is a tremendous find, with the find being one of those things that stare us in the face but, in all their evidence, like the purloined letter in Poe’s story, aren’t really seen until they are seen. But, oddly, the book loses sight of Sade as the writer – which one would expect from a Barthes scholar. Sade, after all, wrote novels and stories, and contributed significantly, as Mario Praz (who isn’t mentioned) pointed out, to the Gothic as a genre. It is the thinker and not the writer in Sade who dominates. Yet there are differences that are overlooked. Sade, one imagines – from his letters, if nothing else – jerked off to the New Justine as he wrote it. One can’t imagine Kant, on the other hand, masturbating to the Critique of Pure Reason. It is in the aesthetic realm that Sade really made his mark, so to speak. The mark of the wanker prophet.

Look around you at popular culture. Sade is still here.

2.

Klossowski, in the essay on the “philosopher-villain” that begins Sade, my neighbor, uses Sade’s own mocking division between the philosophers in his “own” works, who are decent people, and the philosophers in Justine, where, in an ‘inexcusable clumsiness that was bound to set the author at loggerheads with wise men and fools alike,” “all the philosophical characters in this novel are villains to the core.”

In a sense, what Sade is doing is employing the Russellian distinction between type and token, here – the philosopher-villains exist in quoted space. In one’s own work, where the citational melts away, the philosophers are decent – as decent as any lab worker who operates on the human product, as they used to say at the AEC when feeding selected American detritus – the poor, the non-white – bits of plutonium.

Claudio Magris in the 80s struck back at the elevation of transgression in the 60s: Magris’s image of transgression is not the rioter at Stonewall bu the Nazi bureaucrat and the leader. I take this as a standard argument against Bataille’s notion of transgression. Magris, here, aligns himself with Foucault’s distancing from the Bataille line in the 70s. The argument that is mounted against Bataille ignores the opposition to power encoded in it, or claims that the opposition, being circumstantial, depends on who, at any moment, is in power. Not all opposition is virtuously transgressive. This, as it happens, is certainly something Bataille is aware of. He lived in a France in which a radically anti-semitic opposition, spawned by the anti-Dreyfusard, had its own newspapers and system of writers. And after all,  if one supposes that all ideas and systems strive for power - and didn't Bataille claim not only to be a Nietzschian critic, but, in a sense, to be Nietzsche - than even a righteous opposition to all the forms of servitude that constitute the established power is at heart a hypocritical stratagem, thrown away when the transgressor gains power and can do as he wants. Otherwise, it would seem, we are talking about organized futility – as we approach sovereignty, the institutional bonds all dissolve that give sovereignty meaning.

Foucault, whose essay on the experience-limit touched that logic, began to backtrack in the seventies, for Magris like reasons – in fact, by becoming popular, transgression was actually lowering the real level of transgression in society.

I like Klossowski’s explanation of the Sadeian strategy, which is based on counter-generality. I like it because it goes so nicely with how the human limit – the traditional limits on the human right to the earth itself, the traditional perspective of humans as not, in fact, the subject of all history – has been erased. This erasure, on the theoretical level, by universal-making – making, for instance, universal history. Making universal emotions. Making universal subjects. Making a universal system of production in which universalized labor leads to infinite substitutability among the workers.

Sade, according to Klossowski, saw how he could game this enlightenment program:

“The peculiarly human act of writing presupposes a generality that a singular case claims to join, and by belonging to this generality claims to come to understand itself. Sade as a singular case conceives his art of writing as verifying such belongingness. The medium of generality in Sade’s time is the logically structured language of the classical tradition: in its structure this language reproduces and reconstitutes in the field of communicative gestures the normative structure of the human race in individuals…

With this principle of the normative generality of the human race in mind, Sade sets out to establish a countergenerality that would obtain for the specificity of perversions, making exchange between singular cases of perversion possible. These, in the existing normative generality, are defined by the absense of logical structure. Thus is conceived Sade’s notion of integral monstrosity. Sade takes this countergenerality, valid for the specificity of perversion, to be already implicit in the existing generality. For he thinks that the atheism proclaimed by normative reason, in the name of man’s freedom and sovereignty, is destined to reverse the existing generality into this countergenerality. Atheism, the supreme act of normative reason, is thus destined to establish the reign of the total absence of norms.” [Sade, my neighbor, trans. by Alphonso Lingis, 14-15]

Sade, then, is rejecting – or perhaps I should say, creating an antithesis - to one of the fundamental enlightenment discoveries – Bayle’s notion that the society of atheists would be every bit as moral as the society of believers. That is, Bayle took it to be a truth about human beings that belief and action are, in practice, forever divided. To believe we should love our neighbor as ourself, and to roust out our neighbor from her house and roast her, as a witch, on the nearest tarred pole, were not anthropologically contradictory things. To believe that the universe came together at random, and to denounce witch burning, were also not anthropologically contradictory things. By which I mean that Bayle did not come to this conclusion by going outward from a logical analysis of belief, but by suspending any analysis of belief and looking at what people said and did.

The image of the moral society of atheists was an immense shock in a culture that had sacralized belief. It runs through the enlightenment like pain ran through the princess after she’d spent the night sleeping on the pea. Tolerance, Mandeville’s cynicism, Adam Smith’s invisible hand, they all come out of the methodological imperative of beginning first with what people did and said, and suspending belief. But, until one gets used to it, this is a highly unnatural stance to take. It seemed to eat away at any belief, since after all, what function did it have?

On the one hand, the space opened up by tolerance made possible the social notion of happiness – for it was intolerance of belief, more than anything else, that had acted the role of nemesis in European culture and in the global conquests of that Europe. On the other hand, it was felt as a sort of numbing of a once vital organ.

Ps – in some ways, the gothic horrors of Sade are too infernal, too brightly lit by the Christianity that follows his every step like a shadow. One could extract another logical line, from the dissolution of all norms to poshlost’ – the world of banality. Magris, in a sense, goes wrong by not putting in this vital step. Contra Hannah Arendt, Eichman’s evil is not something that accidentally arises from banality – banality is the original and primal form of evil in the world. We follow Gogol here, per Merezhovsky. Instead of Juliette, we reference Sologub’s The Petty Demon. From which I take this wonderful extract – Peredonov, the “hero”, a schoolteacher, has just come home to his mistress, Varvara, who he calls his cousin. He’s promised to marry her, but is suspicious that she won’t come through on her end of the bargain, which is to make him an inspector. Besides, Peredenov is suspicious that she is poisoning him. He is also suspicious, every time he hears someone laugh in front of him, that they are laughing at him. And, to finish up this summary of his qualities, he prefers not to think, but believes anything he is told. So Peredenov naturally decides to torment Varvara by making her believe he has been over at the next-door neighbours, paying court to their daughter, Marta:

She's covered with freckles," said Varvara, spitefully.
" And she's got a mouth that stretches from ear to ear. You might as well sew up her mouth, like a frog's."
"Anyway, she's handsomer than you," said Peredonov."I think I'll take her and marry her."
" You dare marry her," shouted Varvara, reddening and trembling with rage, "and I'll burn her eyes out with vitriol !"
"I'd like to spit on you," said Peredonov, quite calmly.
"Just try it !" said Varvara.
"Well, I will," answered Peredonov.
He rose, and with a sluggish and indifferent expression, spat in her face.
"Pig !"said Varvara, as quietly as if his spitting on her had refreshed her. And she began to wipe her facewith a table napkin. Peredonov was silent. Latterly he had been more brusque with her than usual. And even in the beginning he had never been particularly gentle with her. Encouraged by his silence, she repeated more loudly :
"Pig ! You are a pig !"

This joyful scene is interrupted by the entrance of a friend, Volodin. Drinks and jam tarts are served. And then:

“Suddenly Peredonov splashed the dregs of his coffee cup on the wall-paper. Volodin goggled his sheepish eyes, and gazed in astonishment. The wall-paper was soiled and torn. Volodin asked:
" What are you doing to your wall-paper ?"
Peredonov and Varvara laughed.
"It's to spite the landlady," said Varvara. " We're leaving soon. Only don't you chatter."
"Splendid !' shouted Volodin, and joined in the laughter.
Peredonov walked up to the wall and began to wipe the soles of his boots on it. Volodin followed his example.
Peredonov said :
" We always dirty the walls after every meal, so that they'll remember us when we've gone !"
" What a mess you've made !' exclaimed Volodin,delightedly.
" Won't Irishka be surprised," said Varvara, with a dry, malicious laugh.
And all three, standing before the wall, began to spit at it, to tear the paper, and to smear it with their boots. Afterwards, tired but pleased, they ceased.

Peredonov bent down and picked up the cat, a fat, white, ugly beast. He began to torment the animal, pulling its ears, and tail, and then shook it by the neck. Volodin laughed gleefully and suggested other methods of tormenting the animal.
"Ardalyon Borisitch, blow into his eyes ! Brush his fur backwards !"
The cat snarled, and tried to get away, but dared not show its claws. It was always thrashed for scratching. At last this amusement palled on Peredonov and he let the cat go.”

No opinion

 

I believe that if you gave a pollster a gun, and that pollster shot the polled in the leg and asked them if they approved or did not approve of being shot in the leg, a good fifteen percent would have no opinion.

In poll after poll, this year, when asked about various sick things Trump has done, a redoubt of “no opinion” or “don’t know” shows up at 10 to 15 percent every time. The 10 or 15 percent don’t know what they think about tariffs. They don’t know what they think about legal or illegal immigration. Inflation? They don’t know. Support for Palestine? They have no opinion. And so on through the litany of hot button issues. Or even soft button ones: for instance, do you like Taylor Swift?

Me, I am made for opinion, body and soul. Alas. If you shoot me in the leg, I would immediately register a strong against. But I dream of the don’t knows, the no opinions. I see them as a heavenly choir, a throng of Zen like illuminati, going through massacre and storm with the detachment of veteran boddhisatvis.

I have not checked the Amazon rankings, but I suspect this category in the polls are avid readers of Sextus Empiricus. And return, daily, to the Chrysippus section of Diogenes Laertes.

“And in the second book of his On the Means of Livelihood, where he professes to be considering a priori how the wise man is to get his living, occur the words : " And yet what reason is there that he should provide a living ? For if it be to support life, life itself is after all a thing indifferent. If it be for pleasure, pleasure too is a thing indifferent. While if it be for virtue, virtue in itself is sufficient to constitute happiness. The modes of getting a livelihood arc also ludicrous, as e.g. maintenance by a king ; for he will have to be humoured : or by friends ; for friendship will then be purchasable for money : or living by wisdom ; for so wisdom will become mercenary.''

I want to have this serenity – the serenity of air on a nice spring day, in the countryside. Air, not bothering anything, air, which if it comes at the picnicker as a breeze is the pleasantest and most inoffensive of breezes.  That at least 15 percent of the American population can remain in Pyrrhonic contemplation of being and nothingness I find astonishing – and heartening. This is what Diogenes Laertes said about our man Pyrrho:

“And so, universally, he held that there is nothing really existent, but custom and convention govern human action; for no single thing is in itself any more this than that. He led a life consistent with this doctrine, going out of his way for nothing, taking no precaution, but fa­cing all risks as they came, whether carts, precipices, dogs or what not, and, generally, leaving nothing to the arbitrament of the senses; but he was kept out of harm's way by his friends who, as Antigonus of Carystus tells us, used to follow close after him. But Aenesidemus says that it was only his philosophy that was based upon suspension of judgement, and that he did not lack foresight in his everyday acts. He lived to be nearly ninety.”

It is certainly in Pyrrho’s spirit that the facts of his life are construed in this account one way by one and in a completely opposite way by another. Diogenes Laertes himself gives no opinion. My opinion, which wraps around me the way a smelly neckerchief wraps around the neck of a homeless man out on his night rounds, is that Pyrrho was right – ignore dogs, precipices and speeding cars and go on your way. Just go. But I can’t follow the better, Pyrrhonic angels of my nature. I just can’t.

 

"Everything is fucked up I'm dying of the pox"

 Theophile de Viau

In 1619, a collection of poems by different authors was published in Paris under the title: Parnasse satyrique. The star poet in the group was Théophile de Viau. The poem he published went like this:

Par le sieur Theophille

Philis tout est f…tu je meurs de la verolle

Elle exerce sur moi sa dernière rigueur :

Mon V. baisse la teste et n'a point de vigueur

un ulcére puant a gasté ma parole.

J'ai sué trante jours, j'ai vomi de la colle

Jamais de si grand maux n'eurent tant de longueur

L'esprit le plus constant fut mort à ma langueur,

Et mon afficlition n'a rien qui la console.

Mes amis plus secrets ne m'osent approcher,

Moi-même cet estat je ne m'ose toucher

Philis le mal me vient de vous avoir foutue.

Mon dieu je me repans d'avoir si mal vescu :

Et si vostre couroux a ce coup ne me tuë

Je ne fais vuex désormais de ne …tre qu'en cul.

The translation goes like this:

“Philis, everything is f..ed up; I’m dying of the pox

which has me strictly bound in the last throes;

My D..k hangs its head, is on the rocks

and a stinking sore spoils my attempts at prose.

For thirty days I’ve sweated, vomited up bowls

I’ve never seen a sickness last like this!

my exhaustion would have killed firmer souls

and my affliction brings me no consoling bliss.

My most secret friends dare not approach me.

I don’t even dare to touch myself in this stew –

And all this Philis, comes from ..cking you.

My god, I repent of having lived so badly!

And if your anger doesn’t kill me with this blast

I swear that now I’ll only ..ck in the ass.”

(Sorry for my distortions – wanted to see if I could find a few appropriate rhymes, though of course my rough draft scans like a hog in heat).

Théophile was one of the early freethinkers who are separated by a degree or two from Gassendi. He is also, famously, one of the regrets of French literature – what if the French baroque had been allowed to flower, much as the English Jacobin writers were? There is a view, first expressed I believe by the romantics, that the imposition of rules of literary bienseance emptied French poetry of what Theophile called the “natural”. And that old fight isn’t worth fighting.

More interesting is that Théophile was put on trial for this poem, and nearly had the same fate doled out to him as to the Protestant printer, Etienne Dolet - who is, or should be, to translators what the skull is to the contemplating monk – for Dolet, poor guy, trying to convey a bit of Plato in French, translated a line in the Apology Apres le mort tu ne seras plus rien de tout, instead of tu ne seras plus, and so – for that rien - was burned at the stake. That is one way to ensure literalism!

There’s an amusing gloss on the enterprising use of ellipses and acronyms in obscene poems in Joan E. DeJean’s The Reinvention of Obscenity, who claims that the startling thing about Theophile’s poem was the ‘cul’ – a vite as a V. or a foutre as a …tre was, in a sense, a bow to the common dignity, but that ass, stuck at the very end of the poem, it was practically mooning the authorities. I love these discussions that are close readings of readings – the third life’s life. They are so Nabokovian. DeJean introduces the topic like this:

“These four-letter words, primary obscenities, stand out as the principle mark of this basdy poetry’s sexual transgressiveness. With one exception, cul (ass), which was to become key in Theophile’s case, they are never written out. Instead, in an act of self censorship that initially may have helped save the volumes from official prosecution, the words were abbreviated in various ways, and different types of punctuation were inserted to stand as a visual mark representing the suppressed content. This punctuation is the typographical equivalent of the fig leaves that began appearing in Renaissance engravings to veil male and female genitalia without fully hiding the contours.

The typographical fig leaves are, however, less efficient than their visual counterparts. A leaf painted on a representation of a human body means that the viewer, even though he or she obviously knows what presumably is there behyind the cover-up, is nevertheless denied the right to see the offending sexual characteristics. In the case of a text, however, a reader – and there is no reason to imagine that seventeenth century readers were any more conscious of these textual barriers than are their counterparts today – simply replaces the missing letters without a thought, so much so that he or she is immediately unaware that anything has been left out. This is truly the zero degree of censorship.