hide your devil

Thomas Bernhard’s biographer, Gitta Honegger, has noted that Bernhard was deeply influenced by his reading of Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste. She writes: “Valéry never recovered from his amazement about the spectacle of his own intellect,” mocks E.M. Cioran. If one replaced “amazement” with “laugher,” the statement could apply to Bernhard.” According to Honegger, the idea of Monsieur Teste – of an intelligence so high that it could only take as its highest object – itself – and in so doing erase itself, really impressed Bernhard.

Honegger quotes a passage from the Portrait of M. Teste section that describes the the characteristic trajectory of action performed by Bernhard’s early heros:

- Jealous of his best ideas, of those which he believed to be the best – sometimes so particular, so much his own that expressing them in the vulgar, instead of the intimate language gives us on the outside only the most feeble and false idea of them. – And who knows if the most important ones for directing a mind are not as singular to that mind, as strictly personal as a garment or an object adopted to one’s throws – who knows if the true philosophy of someone is… communicable?

- Jealous, then, of his diverse clarities – T. thought: what kind of idea is it to which one does not attach the value of a secret of state or of a secret of art? and thus one must have the shame as for a sin or a pain – hide your god – hide your devil.

LI brings this up because we found, while searching about, a pdf of the entire M. Teste text on the web, here. And we’ve been reading it. It has been a long time since we read this text – I call it a text rather than novella, because it is not like a novella. It is more like Valéry’s essay on Leonardo. It is as much a ‘text’ as a corn flake is purely a breakfast cereal. No fucking around.

At one time, in the twenties and thirties, Monsieur Teste had quite a reputation. But Cioran’s judgment on Valéry reflects the more contemporary view. And it is true, there is a coldness that run’s like the purest fish blood through Valery’s work. There’s a wonderful moment in Sartre’s essay on Nizan where he simply dismisses Gide and Valéry as the very archetypes of intellectual preciosity and futility.

But the thing is, M. Teste is, in spite of everything, rather beautiful.

I’ll have some more excerpts later.

The demonstration that the Washington Post is, of course, not mentioning

There was an actual article on the NYT front page – at least on the web – about war protestors! After we lay there on the floor a bit, we got back up and checked it out. It was about the protest today in D.C. – LI is sending all our spells and good wishes to this thing – and (thank God), the journalists didn’t dwell overmuch on the celebrities that are going to be there.

As we have made clear, we have definite ideas about demonstrations. A huge demonstration must, I suppose, have a few speeches, but let those speeches be … about the War. Entirely. Not about Global Warming, Venezuela, or fish farming.

A friend the other day sent me an email to show me that others than me are thinking about anti-war demonstration tactics. The email was a proposal to combine anti-war protest with online dating. Or dating period, or something. Apparently, using the chi energy that gets all fizzy when you are waving a sign denouncing our atrocious governing class and their War, you bond with some other likely anti-war protestor. At first I was confused, and thought you bonded right there at the protest – which I thought was, indeed, avant garde and heat, a “we chose fucking over being fucked up” gesture, like the sixties except with condoms, but apparently it is more like finding that certain someone to share a coffee with as you both rail about Bill O’Reilly.
I make fun.
I shouldn’t make fun. I’m down with anything that wakes people up.

Anway, we loved this bit in the NYT story:

''We see many things that we feel helpless about,'' said Barbara Struna, 59, of Brewster, Mass. ''But this is like a united force. This is something I can do.''
Struna, a mother of five who runs an art gallery, made a two-day bus trip with her 17-year-old daughter, Anna, to the nation's capital to represent what she said was middle America's opposition to President Bush's war policy.
Her daughter, a high school senior, said she has as many as 20 friends who have been to Iraq. ''My generation is the one that is going to have to pay for this,'' she said.
She held a sign that said, ''Heck of a job, Bushie,'' mocking Bush's words of encouragement to his disaster relief chief, Michael Brown, amid criticism of the government's immediate response to Hurricane Katrina in the summer of 2005.

When I get my head out of my ass – and it is easy to get your head up your ass when you are writing a blog, or just living, in fact most of the time I go around, embarrassingly enough, with my head up my ass – I remember how much, really, I love the plain old Americans.

The Washington Post, speaking of having your head up your ass so far that you can shed your whole readership while giving op ed space to the retarded children of war mongering think tankers because you are brave and bold and Fred Hiatt, has, of course, nothing on the front of its web page about the demo.

PS - finally, at noon, WAPO puts up a story about the demonstration. With much concentration on the counter-demonstration of pro-war types. Ah, fairness. WAPO is all about fairness.

Lorenz Oken, famous anatomist of the pig

Last year, my web buddy, IT, turned me on to Ludwig (“Theses on”) Feuerbach. My notion of Feuerbach was vague – that he played a bit part role in the tragedy of Marx was the extent of it. Was he Rosencranz? Guildenstern? Well, I learned that he was no strolling player, but had important things to say about the very species essence of man, and was capable of putting on the Ritz, philosophically speaking, all by himself.

This year, I want to repay my debt by informing IT, via this post, if she reads it, about Lorenz Oken. Oken is known for having made up the term “cell” and being one of the founding fathers of biology. But he was also a follower of Schelling – meaning that he was always liable to loon like effusions of systematicity. His Physiophilosophy, which I stumbled on yesterday via The Scenes of Inquiry by Nicholas Jardine, is, by LI’s dubious lights, an incredible funhouse. It begins with Mathesis (which should warm the heart of a Badiou-ian), in which various sage and exciting and rather hard to pin down remarks about zero are made, and proceeds to ontology, physiology, and the meaning of life. The whole gives the impression of some rare work of perfect outsider art. Here’s a sample of Oken’s claims and method, as well as a moment of true psychotic breakdown in the patriarchy:

“Impregnation

2315. Since the male sex is related to the female, as corolla to capsule, as leaf to stalk, as air to water, and as light to matter; so it is related also as integument to intestine, as lung to lymphatic vessel, as artery to vein, as nerve to flesh or muscle, as Animal to Vegetative.
2316. Copulation is therefore an irradiation.
2317. Already, in the course of the heavenly bodies, has the highest act of the animal, that of copulation, been preindicated or portrayed. The creation of the universe or world is itself nothing but an act of impregnation. The sex is prognosticated from the beginning, and pursues its course like a holy and conservative bond throughout the whole of nature. He therefore who so much as questions the sex in the organic world, comprehends not the riddle or problem of the univers.
2318. If the female parts have effected a complete transition into the male, so are the sexes necessarily separate and distinct.
2319. Since the male parts are the female that have been more highly developed, so there resides in the latter the constant conatus or effort to convert themselves into the male…

2321. Gestation or pregnancy is none other than the propensity of the Female to convert itself into the Male. “

Stephen Jay Gould happens to have examined Oken pretty carefully in his book, Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Gould always cautions against making fun of past scientists. Here’s how he introduces Oken:

“Lorenz Oken's Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie appeared in three parts from 1809–1811. It is a listing of 3,562 statements, taking all knowledge for its province, and filled with bald, oracular pronouncements of the engaging sort that feign profundity but dissolve into emptiness upon close inspection. It is also responsible for Oken's bad reputation as the most idle (if cosmic) speculator of a school rife with unreason. In fact, Oken was one of the best comparative anatomists and embryologists of his day; his works on the embryology of the pig and dog (1806) are classics (he was also an influential, if naive, political thinker of liberal to radical bent—see Raikov, 1969).”

Perhaps the radicalism is why Engels makes small note of him in the Dialectic of Nature as a man who wants to make his way by pure thought into the secrets of nature.

“In Oken (Haeckel, p. 85: et seq.) the nonsense that has arisen from the dualism between natural science and philosophy is evident. By the path of thought, Oken discovers protoplasm and the cell, but it does not occur to anyone to follow up the matter along the lines of natural-scientific investigation – it is to be accomplished by thinking! And when protoplasm and the cell were discovered, Oken was in general disrepute!”

Here’s another, extended passage about Oken from Gould:
“Yet Oken's most pervasive principle is his own version of the single developmental tendency: all development begins with a primal zero and progresses to complexity by the successive addition of organs in a determined sequence. This law holds for all developmental processes: human ontogeny, the historical sequence of species, the evolution of the earth itself: "If we take a retrospective glance at the development of the planet, we find that it commenced with the simplest actions, and then assumed a more elevated character by gradually drawing together several actions and letting them work in common" (p. 178).
The sequence of additions follows Oken's ordering of the four Greek elements. Translated into the organs of animals, this sequence includes:
1. Earth processes—nutrition.
2. Water processes—digestion.
3. Air processes—respiration.
4. Aether (fire) processes—motion.
Man contains all organs within himself; thus he represents the entire world; "in the profoundest, truest sense . . . a microcosm" (p. 202). "Man is the summit, the crown of nature's development, and must comprehend everything that has preceded him . . . In a word, Man must represent the whole world in miniature" (p. 12). All lower animals, as imperfect or incomplete humans, contain fewer than the total set of organs. "The animal kingdom," wrote Oken in his most famous pronouncement, "is only a dismemberment of the highest animal, i.e. of Man" (p. 494). The position of any animal upon the single chain of classification depends upon the number of organs it possesses: "Animals are gradually perfected, entirely like the single animal body, by adding organ unto organ . . . An animal, which e.g. lived only as an intestine, would be, doubtless inferior to one which with the intestine were to combine a skin" (p. 494).”

The notion of mixing up evolution and complexity still lures the unwary. There’s a rather horrible book, Non-Zero, which is in this tradition and made a splash about six years ago. – I reviewed that in the Austin Chronicle if any reader is interested in the archives.
I’ll have more to say about Oken in a later post.

I have seen the future, and it is Cheney.

Alas, having no access to CNN – or, for that matter, CBS, ABC or NBC – LI did not see the Wolf Blitzer interview with Dick Cheney. However, apparently it was quite a spectacle. Cheney’s bullying, monomania, and blood in the mouthism was on full display, to rally the lobotomized in the usual ways. That’s good, because Cheney is a forerunner. Having coddled and nursed into being a class of grotesque parasites, aka the CEO class, for the past thirty years, America will get what it grew: an endless stream of Cheneys.

One has to remember a basic rule about CEOs – they are horrors. A just state would simply expropriate their wealth entirely, simply to disempower a clearly dangerous class. This is why LI has always supported a 100 percent tax rate for incomes over 10 million dollars. Soi-disant conservatives are, of course, utterly opposed to such schemes, which is simply a way of saying that they are soi-disant – read any traditional political theorist, from Aristotle to Montesquieu, and they will warn you about concentrated private power in the state. That power isn’t anti-statist – it is, rather, much more likely to use the state for its own ends. For the liberty of the vast majority, there should be a war between the rich and the state. The rich have found it advantageous to pretend that there is. The truth is, of course, that there is no structural difference between big business and big government. The great art of government, for the liberal, is to produce enough countervailing power to force the state to act, every once in a while, for labor. The myth that the state supports the powerless and “punishes” the entrepreneur is only believed by losers who are deep in their cups at the Rotary Club smoker. They are losers precisely because they don’t know the first rule of entrepreneurialship – when you find the goose that lays the golden eggs, first, claim that the goose really doesn’t lay golden eggs, and second, get yourself elected a representative to the goose so that you can shrink it down to a small sized goose - in order, of course, to promote liberty - and then you can harvest all the fucking golden eggs you can stand. Best to have a long long long long war, of course, in reserve to justify the golden egg hording.

I can imagine that Cheney would say to the board at Halliburton, about the purchase of Dresser (whose asbestos suit liabilities cost Halliburton some 3 billion dollars), that it was an enormous success with the same snappishness that he claimed, to a disbelieving country, that we are “winning” something in Iraq. The swaddling of the CEO class produces that monstrosity, the grown up baby. Thus, Cheney’s claims seem more like the cries of a one year old in a high chair than reasoned discourse, or even the shady mumblings of some vast controlling puppetmaster. When the torturers in Brazil donned the baby masks, the director was directly plugged into the future – our torturers come straight off the Gerber label.

We have to shortcircuit the culture that elevates creatures like Cheney.

a failure

… il avait tué la marionette. – Paul Valery

Sometimes LI bears a striking image to a fly dying at the base of a window. The fly keeps bumping against that congealed air that 350 million years of evolution had never warned him against. The fly’s experience of the world, which is, as is well known, a place divided into 360 spaces, each space radiating a certain glow, and the edge of each space grading into the edge of the next space save when the edges parted to make a passage just exactly equal in width to the width of a fly’s body, seems, for magical reasons, no longer to work. In addition, something seems to be happening in the back behind the eyes, the load, as the fly would name it, that it always carries about and that sometimes gets sexually excited. Something seems to be squeezing the load. Normally, a pressure like this would prompt the fly to escape, but lately the 360 spaces seem to be liquefying to such a degree that they no longer scatter to the fly’s wingbeats. This is not good news. And, as the fly falls over, there flashes through its mind, absurdly, the first line of an old joke: “waiter, there’s a fly in my soup.”

So – this is the sitch with LI vis a vis our attempt to get together a nice post on De Quincey and the disconnected giant. This is the new modernist giant, the giganticism that consists of unexpected and unlimited multiplication.

But before I get to De Quincey and Baudelaire – maybe next post – I will tell you a dream.

Actually, although this dream happened to me, I don’t really remember it happening to me. It happened to me when I was a child. I was lying in bed, and – as I often did when I was a child – I was rocking from side to side. Rocking from side to side was how I got to sleep. But on this occasion, I was in bed abnormally early, because I was sick. I was feverish. And – according to my parents – I started screaming. So my parents came into my room to see what was wrong, and I said that my hands had grown so big and so heavy that I could no longer hold them up. This dream is something I heard later from my parents, who thought it was funny. Not that they were cruel about it, but later, after I was over my fever, we all laughed at my panicked idea that my hands were these enormous, separate entities. And, if I make an effort, I can still communicate a bit with that faint speck of myself so long ago. I can see – or at least sense – the enormity of those white, moist, wildly growing hands.

divine entrapment

LI was pleased as a parrot with our Wings of Desire post, but it seems to have fallen flatter than an illmade pancake on the ears of our readers – alas! Getting all that dough in the auditory canal – that’s fucked up!

And yet, such is our hardness in vice that we are going to continue a thought we started in that post – a thought that extends back to our reading of Michelet’s La Sorciere last summer.

When Michelet writes about the importance, to the witch, of doing things backward to undo the powers that be that rule over the world, he is, of course, thinking of the Lord’s Prayer. As we pointed out, reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards was a perfect symbol of what Marxists call the negation of the negation. It also bore a relation to the unconscious poetry that runs through Marx’s own texts, where things that are upside down have to be reversed to stand right side up. But that inversion isn’t done by laying rough hands on the reader and shaking him – the reader has to see something that is impossible to see, which is: how he sees. In the path to seeing the things of this world in their real order, the reader has to go through a demonic moment.

Well, in the W.o.D. post, we pointed out the system of espionage lightly concealed by the cosmology of angels and Satans. And the clustering together of all the little fathers, pharaoh to Stalin, around God, the supreme fiction of a society that needs to turn the innocent. That needs a quota of the damned. Up to an including the kids in Miami that the FBI has dropped into a dark hole, forever, after encouraging their fantasy of blowing up the Sears building - or at least having something exciting happen in a life of unremitting economic boredom and terror - i.e, life on a unskilled worker's earnings in America.

Turning the innocent – entrapment of one sort or another – has evolved a whole discourse. It is called temptation. When you say the Lord’s prayer backwards, in a sense, you can hear for the first time that craven plea not to be led into temptation – and you can ask, who are we pleading with here?

As a matter of fact, St. Augustine (my friend and foil Paul C. should perk up his ears, here) had decided ideas about this. In a letter to Constantius, St. Augustine considers a passage in Paul’s letter to the Thessalonicans in which he seems to imply that “only the devil tempts us, and God tempts no one – as in effect Saint John says literally. However, it is said elsewhere, the Lord your God tempts you; and it is necessary that the words of the Scripture which appear contrary be accorded one with the other. And how can they be? By the diverse signification of the word temptation: for temptation is an other thing which comes to seduce us and makes us fall from that which comes just to test us. In the first sense, it is from nobody else than the Devil; but in the second sense, God tempts us some times. Voila, the difficulty resolved.”

That resolution echoes down the centuries and in every cop show you want to watch: is it genuine evil, or government authorized non-evil evil?

In a famous commentary on the Psalms, St. Augustine has more to say about the phenomenology of temptation. We will end with this quote, and pick up this theme in another post:

Now these three kinds of vice, namely, the pleasure of the flesh, and pride, and curiosity, include all sins. And they appear to me to be enumerated by the Apostle John, when he says, "Love not the world; for all that is in the world is the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life." 1 John 2:15-16 For through the eyes especially prevails curiosity. To what the rest indeed belong is clear. And that temptation of the Lord Man was threefold: by food, that is, by the lust of the flesh, where it is suggested, "command these stones that they be made bread:" Matthew 4:3 by vain boasting, where, when stationed on a mountain, all the kingdoms of this earth are shown Him, and promised if He would worship: Matthew 4:8-9 by curiosity, where, from the pinnacle of the temple, He is advised to cast Himself down, for the sake of trying whether He would be borne up by Angels. Matthew 4:6 And accordingly after that the enemy could prevail with Him by none of these temptations, this is said of him, "When the devil had ended all his temptation.

o for a foe!

LI doesn’t really know what to do today. The amount of ridiculousness in the press over the last five days is truly gratifying, but it is also a blog it yourself situation. We have, in the bizarre Washington Post, an op ed piece flogging Jeb Bush on Sunday, followed by a I was only joking interview with the author on Monday, followed by today’s rather priceless piece by one of those Cheney scion who, in the spirit of smaller government and peculation for all, was shoehorned into a position for which she was magnificently unfit in the state department, where she got out the crayons out of her crayonbox – the reds and the blues and that hard color, verf- vermillion - and made a whole two pages of remarks just like Daddy! That the Washington Post editorial page not only supports the war with bloodsoaked teeth bared, but aims to reproduce certain aspects of it (namely, giving berths to the academically challenged sons and daughters of rightwing honchos) is sweet in very sick, sick way.

And then, before you can turn around, Christopher Hitchens has two, count em two reviews up, one on a book by Mark Steyn, the other on a book by Nick Cohen. To batter the remnant of Hitchens that now does the writing is beyond even LI’s sadism. It should be noted, though, that Cohen is trying to resurrect an old trope from the first round of pro-war propaganda – the sleight of hand substitution trick. You take a term that can be logically described in two ways, and you substitute an invidious description to describe a person’s belief. I march against the war in Iraq. The war in Iraq will hurt Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein is a fascist. Thus, I march in support of fascism.

That type of invective is the equivalent of going about in soiled intellectual diapers. It convinces nobody. It is logically threadbare. It is, in other words, shit and sophistry… but more just shit. I support the war in Iraq, the war in Iraq brought a Taliban like group to power in Basra, I am a supporter of Islamofascism. See how easy it is to play this game? Leggos for the lobotomized. This is, believe it or not, the sum total of Nick Cohen’s four years of writing about Iraq. He actually thinks he is making a “critique”, God save the saints. Of the Left, no less and no doubt, he’s all about the Left, the Left and he are splitsville, he’d had the Left over to dinner and they didn’t bring even a bottle of wine and they stink and also, also, the Islamophilia on some of them, why liberals and lefties are going on and on, nowadays, quoting the Q’ran and shit. This raises the bellylaugh quotient, of course. We especially like it when you throw in a few Hitchens reviews, bespattered with the term, “comrade.” I would say: you can’t make this shit up. But somebody obviously does.

However, as our far flung correspondent T. has told us – enough! basta!

We long for a worthy adversary.

PS – well, I guess LI should say something.

After the State of the Union address, the natural place to go is the Washington Post, and their excellent political reporter, Dan Balz, under the headline: A President Beleaguered But Unbowed

We totally agree with this assessment:

“Caligula’s response last night was a speech that was very much in keeping with the style of leadership he has demonstrated repeatedly in office. If he was humbler in tone and rhetorically generous to his Democratic opponents in calling for cooperation, he was anything but defensive.

There was an underlying message in the speech. The main plea was to make his horse the speaker of the House, a chord struck earlier in the day by spokesman Tony Snow. Although roughly two in three Americans disagree that Mr. Ed, as President Caligula calls him, should be House Speaker, and members of Congress are preparing nonbinding resolutions declaring their opposition, Caligula asked for time to show that the strategy can succeed.

He recalled that the country was largely united at the time he announced both his sister’s divinity and his own divine right to couple with her in 2003 and acknowledged the divisions that have emerged since. But he argued that whatever motivated members of Congress at the time of the declaration of divinity, there was a consensus that the United States must have a young, nubile couple of very, very rich people in charge of this great country. And young people, as the President steadfastly maintained, come with complicated sexual urges.
…
Caligula's final message last night was perhaps the most robust domestic agenda of his presidency, a way of saying to those who are ready to write him off that he still has the power of the bully pulpit to inject ideas into the national debate and force others to react to them: from the purging of the Senate, the assassination of his tutor, to the announcement that his divinity is greater than Jupiter’s, it was a message that said he should not be regarded as a lame duck.”

LI, as ever, urges readers to send money to the PAC of Mrs. Nero, who is really, really getting on top of the Mr. Ed issue. "We don't want Mr. Ed not to be a god," she said today, "but we are firm in saying that maybe Mr. Ed is not the first choice for House Speaker unless we can find the synergy to go forward to make me, and other middle class Americans, comfortable with this choice."

Mrs. Nero - a leader, a doer, a conversationalist with America!