now and then a novel

“Ryū, you’re a weird guy, I’m really sorry for you, even if you close your eyes, don’t you try and see what comes floating by? I don’t really know how to say it, but if you’re really honestly having fun, you’re not supposed to think and look for things right in the middle of it, am I right?

“You’re always trying so hard to see something, just like you’re taking notes, like some scholar doing research, right? Or just like a little kid. You really are a little kid, when you’re a kid you try to see everything, don’t you? Babies look right into the eyes of people they don’t know and cry or laugh, but now you just try and look right into people’s eyes, you’ll go nuts before you know it. Just try it, try looking into the eyes of people walking past, you’ll start feeling funny pretty soon, Ryū, you shouldn’t look at things like a baby.”

This speech comes from the middle of the short novel, Almost Transparent Blue [1976, trans 1977], by Ryū Murakami. I don’t read this kind of book very often. None the less it felt oddly familiar. It would be cheap to say that it was about bodies and sex, or youth, or drugs, or Japan and America, because all these things play such a prominent role. On the cover, there is a quote from Newsweek, “A Japanese mix of A Clockwork Orange and L’Etranger.” I guess they say the first because there is a certain amount of drug-fueled violence, and the second because the physical and psychological states of the narrator seem linked? In any case, not a useful comparison. I suggest that the book as a whole is an investigation into the tragic possibility that what is said in this little speech may be true.

De l'Habitude

In a book store yesterday, looking for something else, I ran across Félix Ravaisson’s De l’Habitude. There were two editions, a PUF edition that also included a much later essay (De l’Habitude was first published in 1838), and a colorful and glossy little Rivages edition that was a few euros cheaper. In retrospect, I don’t know what I was thinking to have bought the Rivages. I think it’s the same house that put out a similar-looking edition of a few Bergson essays on politesse that I also bought on impulse, and with which I was not especially impressed (probably because they were not serious essays at all, but discourses given on the distribution of prizes at lycées—fascinating documents, but not for their deep thoughts on politesse). All evidence suggests that their strategy—slim volumes in attractive packaging—is successful.

In this particular case, I don’t mind. The essay is perhaps best described, despite the anachronism, as a phenomenology of habit. On one level, Ravaisson means by habit just what is meant by common usage: one becomes ‘used to’ doing certain things in certain ways. In order to explain what habit is more deeply, however, Ravaisson is obliged to explain the nature of being. The text begins and ends, circling back on itself, with a consideration of being, “la loi universelle, le caractère fondamental de l’être, est la tendance à persister dans sa manière d’être” (32). The last sentence of the essay summarizes the connection of being to habit, and is a nice example of Ravaisson’s prose: “La disposition dans laquelle consiste l’habitude et le principe qui l’engendre ne sont qu’une seule et même chose: c’est la loi primordiale et la forme la plus générale de l’être, la tendance à persévérer dans l’acte même qui constitue l’être.” (111-2).

The generative principle of habit is the same as that of being, but habit is available to us in as much as we live, and therefore move and change. Ravaisson says, “l’habitude n’implique pas seulement la mutabilité; elle n’implique pas seulement la mutabilité en quelque chose qui dure sans changer, elle suppose un changement dans la disposition, dans la puissance, dans la vertu intérieure de ce en quoi le changement se passe, et qui ne change point” (31). So habit cannot be discussed without setting out a whole doctrine of being in the world, a whole anthropology. This Ravaisson does in wonderful apperçus, and in a few lucid assertions, drawn from the medical science of his day, some of which we might no longer accept—but this doesn’t make a great deal of difference.

I cannot reproduce the remarkable analyses and assertions at which Ravaisson arrives. Habit is what develops when, through the repetition of action, the resistance and effort required to overcome it, decrease, and the action becomes dissociated from the will (volonté). The will, rather than intelligence, is the seat of the individual personality, so habit is really the dissolution of this personality, and the distribution of the intelligence that carries out action into the parts of the body that act. An example much less poetic than those that Ravaisson suggests would be tying one’s shoes. At first you had to think hard to do it, but eventually the active thought gets in the way, you let your hands take over—we’d call that muscle memory today, though habit implies a great deal more than muscle memory.

Because habit is the dissolution of the individual will into the organs of the body, it can become the principle of living being which allows us, or our understanding (entendement), to get a glimpse of that which is otherwise far below it. One’s instincts, Ravaisson says, were never habits, but our habits can become so like instincts as to be nearly indistinguishable from them (82, 95). Habit, then, is access to nature, “l’habitude peut être considérée comme une méthode, comme la seule méthode réelle, par une suite convergente infinie, pour l’approximation du rapport, réel en soi, mais incommensurable dans l’entendement, de la Nature et de la Volonté” (83). It is Ravaisson’s philosophical heritage, I think, to be concerned about effort and resistance (how are we to know we are, if there is not resistance to our will?) and to therefore place the individual with the will. What requires, for me, a real intellectual leap, is the radical separation between will and nature. By the end of the 19^th century, and I think still today, resistance and will is equal not to understanding, but to life itself. When, I wonder, did the change take place?

In the paragraph following the above quote, there is a passage that I suspect, if I really understood what Ravaisson means by ‘Nature,’ I would understand. He says, “L’habitude...C’est une nature acquise, une seconde nature, qui a sa raison dernière dans la nature primitive, mais qui seule l’explique à l’entendement. C’est enfin une nature naturée, oeuvre et révélation successive de la nature naturante” (83). What are all these verbal forms doing ? I understand the force of the passage, I think, but not what he is doing with the concept of nature.

The cosmology that emerges from this is something like the great chain of being. The spectrum of being is united by a single principle of life, “La limite inférieure est la nécessité, le Destin si l’on veut, mais dans la spontanéité de la Nature; la limite supérieure, la Liberté de l’entendement. L’habitude descend de ‘une à l’autre ; elle rapproche ces contraires, et en les rapprochant elle en dévoile l’essence intime et la nécessaire connexion” (97). What I find fascinating about this is the suggestion, made here and there, that this chain of being, united in principle, is in fact united only by habit. It is united in appearance; the nature of our access to it guarantees its unity.

In a bold move that is perhaps in keeping with certain tropes of Cousinian philosophy as I recall it (effort and resistance and will), Ravaisson makes the mindlessness to which habit reduces us the condition of distinct thought. Ravaisson rejects the possibility for pure thought to generate change:

Avant l’idée distincte que cherche la réflexion, avant la réflexion, il faut quelque idée irréfléchie et indistincte, qui en soit l’occasion et la matière, d’où l’on parte, où on s’appuie. La réflexion se replierait vainement sur elle-même, se poursuivant et se fuyant à l’infini. La pensée réfléchie implique donc l’immédiation antécédente de quelque intuition confuse où l’idée n’est pas distinguée du sujet qui la pense, non plus que de la pensée. C’est dans le courant non interrompu de la spontanéité involontaire, coulant sans bruit au fond de l’âme, que la volonté arrête des limites et détermine des formes (107).

My impulse is of course to historicize this. I want to know what other people were saying, and the degree to which this was a creative distortion and unlawful extension of the ideas current at the time (which is, I think, a possible description of what Bergson accomplished in his Essai). I know relatively little about this period in French philosophy (now I know more), and I read this little essay only yesterday and today. So I am in no position to accomplish that historicization—perhaps it has already been done.

I think my next steps will be to read the essay Bergson wrote on the occasion of Ravaisson’s death, and perhaps parts of Ravaisson’s 1867 book on 19^th century French philosophy. Since I went with Rivages rather than PUF (never again!), I don’t have real notes or bibliographic material, but the avant-propos (not dated, but I assume written recently) does mention these texts. It is otherwise intent on establishing a Ravaisson-Bergson-Heidegger lineage, which, I must say, I hope I would have arrived at without its help. Certainly one could go through and match passages in this essay to similarly worded ones in the Essai sur les donnees immediates de la conscience--they'd mean different things, but sound the same. Similarly, the author of the avant-propos (Frédéric de Towarnicki, who I suppose was one of the French delegation to Heidegger after the war, along with Jean Beaufret) mentions that Proust met Ravaisson in 1899, and gives us a pretty line from A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. Proust must certainly have known this essay. I am surprised, actually, that I hadn’t heard of it in connection with him, but perhaps I have and just don’t remember.

revolutionary writing

In a used bookstore near where I live, I was given the first number (novembre 2008) of a little ‘underground’ magazine called géographie nocturne. Géographie is 16 pages (8 normal printer sheets folded in half and stapled) of poetry, photography, prose art, and Marxism. It begins with three paragraphs of manifesto. Then there are some poems and another manifesto on role of the poet in the contemporary world. The middle of the magazine is occupied by 11 “thèses” on the proletariat—in the next number we are promised a treatment of ideology. The last pages are filled with free-form prose of several kinds.

The tone of the magazine is in general that of the uncompromising Marxist revolutionary, with a heavy dose of ecological awareness and—which I found distasteful, but which is no doubt emotionally necessary for even the pretense of revolutionary action—spiteful disdain for the “esclaves” of the bourgeoisie.

It is perhaps indicative of my reading of the magazine that the first poem, which is called ‘philistins,’ reminded me of nothing so much as Apollinaire’s ‘Zone.’ A very modernist coloration of crisis, necessary revolution, and elitism, is the main stylistic point of reference here. We are certainly on the familiar terrain where avant-garde politics and art overlap.

Unless I missed something, then only four authors are mentioned anywhere in the magazine: Marx, Lukacs, Debord, and Foucault. The first three appear in the central text on the proletariat, the main concern of which seems to be to argue first against altermondialisme or tiers-mondisme (the logic of capitalist development may be temporarialy geographically uneven, but we are all moving along the same developmental track, so the most important division is that at the heart of the nord), and then against the idea of the ‘middle class.’ Objectively, the proletariat includes all those who are not the bourgeoisie, even those who appear at first (and indeed are) in a position of power and benefit from the exploitation of others. In the end the argument seems to be that anyone whose psyche is not distorted by the need for money, anyone for whom money as limit does not exist, must be a part of the super-rich bourgeoisie at the very top of the ‘pyramidal’ structure of power.

I am not really ‘up to date’ on my Marxist theory, indeed I will admit to never having read Debord. Still, all the above seems hasty and not very considered to me. The goal here is to establish a line of battle, not to make the current configuration cognitively graspable. I find unsettling, actually, the need to fuse personal (aesthetic) liberation and the radical break of Revolution. I would have thought we could learn from the many generations who posed themselves this problem and failed, sometimes catastrophically, to answer it. This paradigm is not only Marxist, and Marxists aren’t always trapped within it. In France, it seems to me that this problematic tortures certain people beginning at the latest in the 1860s. I wonder if an analogous argument could me made in the United States, though organized around varieties of Christian fundamentalism rather than ‘secular’ revolutionary politics, and therefore concerned with the state of the individual’s soul rather than their aesthetic fulfillment—could we begin with John Brown? In this particular magazine, it seems to me that we see quite well—despite the fact that none of the particular texts are signed, although the thing as a whole is—the linkage between the struggle for aesthetic liberation (which is always about some kind of self-fulfillment), and the necessity for hatred of those functionaries or enforcers of the global order who are imagined to represent the impossibility of Revolution, and therefore the impossibility of this personal fulfillment.

It may, once again, be my formation, but it seems to me that this is to displace the central problem. As is only too clear at the moment, what is missing for revolutionaries (for the left generally, I’d say) today is a principle of intelligibility. Marx offered this for his readers in the late 19^th century, and it is one reason for the depth of his impact on the intelligentsia. In a smaller way, I believe that much of Alain Badiou’s appeal comes from a similar ability to apparently render intelligible (which is to say, describable) the radically fractured phenomenological world that one has no choice but to encounter and admit. The only kinds of intelligibility that I think (or if you prefer, believe) are in fact available are not ones which will be emotionally satisfying to those inclined already toward revolution. I have not yet understood why there should be any rationality to human history taken as a whole, the best arguments for such a position that I have yet heard are grounded in despair: because if there is not reason in history, they say, there is no reason or meaning at all. The premises and conclusions both seem wrong to me.

Géographie nocturne has been successful at least in riling me up. I quite like some of the prose pieces, possibly because I am less familiar with the traditions from which they draw than I am with the poems. It is easy to be mean and small in criticism—I will praise, then, the aim of such a project. I suspect that it is linked to a series of posters that have gone up recently in the neighborhood. Public art, guerilla art if you like, is generally a good thing, generally makes the world more interesting. I wish only that there was less nastiness and bitterness in it, less venom. This aspect of what I take to be a roughly unified project makes me think that the whole effort, although played out on public walls and in this magazine presumably intended for distribution, is really aimed inward, really a project of self fashioning. There isn’t anything wrong, exactly, with revolutionary self fashioning, but it does require some kind of engagement with the world one is ostensibly hoping to change. If that world is allowed to remain completely virtual, then the self fashioning takes place in a void and is at best a self-indulgent piece of performance art that washes over its audience without touching anything. Since hatred and fear are already the currency of the world, since disdain and contempt are already what individuals, qua individuals, largely receive from society, then deploying such postures hardly seems like a good strategy for those who would like to be revolutionary.

Lessing and the postwar

Here is a somewhat length passage from near the middle (269-70) of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook [1962]:

I dreamed marvellously. I dreamed there was an enormous web of beautiful fabric stretched out. It was incredibly beautiful, covered all over with embroidered pictures. The pictures were illustrations of the myths of mankind but they were not just pictures, they were the myths themselves, so that the soft glittering web was alive. There were many subtle and fantastic colours, but the overall feeling this expanse of fabric gave was of redness, a sort of variegated glowing red. In my dream I handled and felt this material and wept with joy. I looked again and saw that the material was shaped like a map of the Soviet Union. It began to grow: it spread out, lapped outwards like a soft glittering sea. It included now the countries around the Soviet Union, like Poland, Hungary, etc., but at the edges it was transparent and thin. I was still crying with joy. Also with apprehension. And now the soft red glittering mist spread over China and it deepened into a hard heavy clot of scarlet. And now I was standing out in space somewhere, keeping my position in space with an occasional down-treading movement of my feet in the air. I stood in a blue mist of space while the globe turned, wearing shades f red for the communist countries, and a patchwork of colours for the rest of the world. Africa was black, but a deep, luminous, exciting black, like a night when the moon is just below the horizon and will soon rise. Now I was very frightened and I had a sick feeling, as if I were being invaded by some feeling I didn’t want to admit. I was too sick and dizzy to look down and see the world turning. Then I look and it is like a vision – time has gone and the whole history of man, the long story of mankind, is present in what I see now, and it is like a great soaring hymn of joy and triumph in which pain is a small lively counterpoint. And I look and see that the red areas are being invaded by the bright different colours of the other parts of the world. The colours are melting and flowing into each other, indescribably beautiful so that the world becomes whole, all one beautiful colour, but a colour I have never seen in life. This is a moment of almost unbearable happiness, the happiness seems to swell up, so that everything suddenly bursts, explodes – I was suddenly standing in peace, in silence. Beneath me was silence. The slowly turning world was slowly dissolving, disintegrating and flying off into fragments, all through space, so that all around me were weightless fragments drifting about, bouncing into each other and drifting away. The world had gone, and there was chaos. I was alone in chaos. And very clear in my ear a small voice said: Somebody pulled a thread of the fabric and it all dissolved. I woke up, joyful and elated. I wanted to wake Michael to tell him, but I knew of course, that I couldn’t describe the emotion of the dream in words. Almost at once the meaning of the dream began to fade; I said to myself, the meaning is going, catch it, quick; then I thought, but I don’t know what the meaning is. But the meaning had gone, leaving me indescribably happy.

I read somewhere, probably on wikipedia, that Doris Lessing is the ‘epicist of the female experience.’ I’m a little over half way through this book, which certainly is epic, and it is true that it is female, about women and Woman. And yet, I think I am more interested in it as a book about the generation in their 20s during the Second World War, and about their postwar experience. (I notice an important word: experience—this is certainly a novel about experiences of certain kinds, hence, I think, the importance of the structure of overlapping fictions telling and retelling stories sharing a few nodes of character and situation). And in particular, the communist experience in the postwar. What it was like to be a communist of a certain class (the class in which simply everyone has a novel at least in the drawer) in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s. Also: I can't decide how I feel about what I guess is the British-English spelling 'marvellously.'

Bergson, Izenberg, Proust

Why is it that I thought of Bergson as troubling the narrative Gerald Izenberg sets up in the aforementioned essay? At the outset, not that I disagree, exactly, with Izenberg (I am in no position to do so), but rather that I think pieces of the story are missing, and that from the perspective of my own interests, things are importantly more complicated than he makes them out to be. My own knowledge and interest are focused on France, which Izenberg doesn’t treat: he discusses authors from Britain, Italy, Germany and Austrian (or rather, Austro-Hungary)—at the most I can say that he has left France out because, perhaps, it causes problems.

It is certainly the case that Bergson’s basic framework is dualism, inasmuch as his goal is to show the falsity of certain dualisms. Bergson’s first book, the Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, establishes the reality and necessity of liberté by demolishing the binary of materialist mechanism and idealist will. Mind-body dualism is the explicit target of Matière et mémoire. So he fits Izenberg’s story, because after the war, the problem to overcome isn’t simple dualism, but a much more complex fragmentation.

Now, I have just finished reading Bergson’s 1903 essay “Introduction à la métaphysique.” Incidentally, this is available online in its original publication through Gallica, at the very front of volume 11 of the Revue de métaphysique et morale—which journal, together with the philosophy of the history of science presented at the end of the essay, I find extremely significant and, given Bergson’s current reputation, somewhat surprising; the new critical Worms edition of the volume containing the “Introduction” comes out in 2009—I wouldn’t wait for Matière et mémoire, but I’ll wait for this.

There is much to discuss about this justly famous essay. Suffice it to say that after reading it, both the structuralist ‘revolution’ and Deleuze’s general tone make a great deal more sense to me.

Characteristically, Bergson says that the empiricists (which is to say those philosophers who stand behind experimental psychology) and the rationalists (which is to say, I think, Hegel and the various German idealists of the first part of the 19^th century), are not so far apart. As usual, the accusation is a little too clean, rather too much in conformity with Bergson’s own ideas, for it to be taken so very seriously. None the less, I think the description he gives of the empiricists, and here he mentions John Stuart Mill and Hippolyte Taine, is significant for placing him in terms of Izenberg’s argument. These philosphers, Bergson says, juxtapose psychological states with one another, and hope that a self will emerge from a sufficient number of so-juxtaposed states. This, he says, is like seeking the meaning of the Iliad between the letters of which it is composed—“le moi leur échappe toujours, si bien qu’ils finissent par n’y plus voir qu’un vain fantôme”[13]—the target here is materialist accounts of psychology that reduce the self to, at best, an epiphenomenon. And yet the mindset that Bergson ascribes to these empiricists maps neatly onto Mansfield’s metaphor of the faceless hotel clerk that Izenberg quotes.

Bergson very often proceeds by setting up poles of extreme possibility, and claiming the territory between the two for his own method. Certainly the ‘climax’ of the “Introduction” does this. In Matière et mémoire, Bergson describes two extreme personality types, defined by their relation to memory—one which is always action oriented, and which is incapable of self-reflection, and another which is lost entirely in the shifting currents of its own memory, given over entirely to the dream life. We have here transparently tropes of what I am tempted to call a Balzacian capitalism—the man of action, always oriented towards a profit of whatever sort (so many shallow and forgotten characters), and then the dreamer (also shallow, but beloved), at the mercy of the winds of sentiment and sensation—Lucien from Illusions Perdus. Surely the example Izenberg cites from Virginia Woolf, of speed and enforced, fragmentary experience, is best read as pathological that makes no sense without the Bergsonian frame?

So this is what I mean: Izenberg’s narrative makes sense to me—at least in parts—if we start with Bergson, but not if we start with what came before Bergson.

There are lots of reasons why an intellectual historian trying to make the sort of argument that Izenberg wants to make would stay away from Proust. He is complicated and very much out of step with his time. I think, however, that Proust might be an especially useful author for Izenberg. According to Antoine Compagnon (and I think a simple reading of Contre Sainte-Beuve bears this out), the ‘programmatic’ end of the novel was planned already when Proust started writing. So it is perhaps not totally unreasonable to take the first and the last volumes as being, in an important sense, pre-war, while the intervening volumes were written during and after the war. For myself, and I agree with Compagnon here, Sodome et Gomorrhe is the best—if that even means anything—and Temps retrouvé is to be taken with a substantial amount of salt. Why, long before I read Izenberg’s article, did I think this? Because in the middle volumes more than anywhere, we and the narrator see the extent to which a person’s self is constituted by all those around them, and how the essence of an individual can change radically (since Proust, I believe, is radically perspectival—maybe this is a condition of the novel as form?) depending on what one knows about this person. I think, although this is something to be demonstrated rather than crassly suggested, that all this has to do with Leibniz. Everyone was reading Leibniz in the 1880s, there are essays about him regularly in the Revue philosophique, and the monad is, after all, a lastingly powerful metaphysical construction. So perhaps a historical reading of the sort that Compagnon’s book on Proust gives us could, in fact, show how the Proustian moi changed even against Proust’s own professed will, because of the war.

The burden of such a demonstration would be to show how something like ‘the war’ could change something like ‘the idea of the self.’ Although I find Izenberg’s argument in many ways persuasive, it seems to me that there is a sort of causal gap in it, which can only be filled or bridged by much more detailed and contextually sensitive research than, of course, his essay has any intention of providing.

War and (Cultured) Selfhood

Gerald Izenberg’s “Identity Becomes an Issue: European Literature in the 1920s,” in a recent issue of Modern Intellectual History, is a useful and erudite framing of a certain facet of European literary culture. The essentials of his argument are simple. Before the First World War, when these writers spoke about split selves, they generally did so in dualist terms (rational/sensual, spiritual/material, ect...) After the war, the self becomes fractured along multiple complex lines, the center, indeed, is empty.

I am a little uncomfortable with the way Izenberg makes the reality of the war do so much intellectual work. I want to know more about what pre-existing conditions interacted with what, exactly, about the war, to produce the phenomena he is documenting. Was it the massive and long-term propaganda effort (at every level of society) hammering home certain ideals, which were then suddenly given the lie by the generalization of bureaucracy and death on a never-before-seen scale? I guess what I don’t like about this is that it fails to take account of the many people who did not react to the war in this way. And if many people did not have such a reaction, then we need either to look to different war-time experiences (this, I think, makes no sense), or more plausibly, to different pre-war positions. Or we could throw our hands up in the air and admit that the same cause does not always lead to the same result.

Which brings me to a more substantive question. One of Henri Bergson’s little tricks to get around the various metaphysical problems (especially having to do with free will) created by experimental psychology in the 1880s speaks to this last option. Bergson says that the question is poorly posed because there can be no too exactly identical causes. Either they are distinct in space (in different places) or in time (happen at different moments in the durée).

Izenberg ends his essay by pointing to Heidegger, and Being in time. Bergson is certainly not Heidegger, but he did think famously and explicitly about selfhood and time. Gide and Woolf, at least, would have read Bergson—I don’t know about the Germans, but probably they had as well. Is it perhaps a Bergsonian—modernist—self that was exploded into little bits by the coming of the war, and the encounter with irrationality originating from outside the individual durée?

Of course it would be foolish to ask Izenberg to treat more authors--an impressive diversity of writers are discussed already--yet I wonder if he would have been able to avoid Bergson if he had looked more closely at Proust. The aside we do get on Proust does not, I think, entirely do justice to the complexity of the Proustian self, which is hardly guaranteed by recovered memory. At any rate, this article has had the effect of renewing my resolution to read both Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, and then Jerrold Seigel's The Idea of the Self.

Renan and critique

Le premier sentiment de celui qui passe de la croyance naïve à l’examen critique, c’est le regret et presque la malédiction contre cette inflexible puissance, qui, du moment où elle l’a saisi, le force de parcourir avec elle toutes les étapes de sa marche inéluctable, jusqu’au terme final où l’on s’arrête pour pleurer.

Ernest Renan, L’avenir de la science. Pgs 152-3

It has been argued by Ian Hunter [In Critical Theory in 2006 with responses more recently] that there is something like a tradition of ‘university’ metaphysics, critical in rhetoric and conservative in essence, that includes most saliently a node around Hegel. I wonder if Renan fits into this tradition. Certainly he seems to in this quote, which I think might, with a change in tone and level of irony, be put in the mouth of a 25 year old discovering ‘critique’ today, just as Renan was in 1848 when he wrote this. Although it rings of pseudo-history to me, I wonder if there is something to the psychological continuity associated with 'scientific' and 'critical' philosophy.

Du contrat social and Badiou

I put Du contrat social down, and needed a little distance. For whatever reason, I turned to Badiou’s chapter on Rousseau in L’être et l’événement for a second understanding, a second voice. Badiou, it seems to me, is remarkably effective in re-reading Rousseau in his own language. Perhaps, though, the chapter is more about Badiou than Rousseau. It reminds me the extent to which Badiou’s project is to found politics (and philosophy) in a post-foundationalist environment. I wonder if Rousseau’s original problem was not formulated in the opposite context: that is, in an environment of over-many competing and plausible foundational claims. Still, the quick reformulation is worth reciting here. The decisive observation, which makes the rest possible, seems to me to be that Rousseau does indeed see the formation of the general will, of the people, as taking place at a particular moment, but curiously out of history, since the will cannot be represented, and cannot be changed or even, in a sense, destroyed. Badiou has three points to make to begin the movement of the little essay.

First, “Le pact”—that is, the contrat social—“est l’événement qui supplémente au hasard l’état de nature.” Now, Badiou is obviously correct to point to the temporal and yet a-historical dimension of the formation of a people. I am not so certain about the rest of this clause.

Second, “le corps politique, ou peuple, est l’ultra-un événementiel qui s’interpose entre le vide (car, pour la politique, la nature est le vide) et lui-même.” Du contrat social is the only book to date, so far as I can recall, that induced me to draw diagrams in an attempt to understand just what was being said. The Souverain ended up always on the outside of my diagrams, with arrows to and from (one arrow to, and a symbolic three from, actually). The sovereign general will has a number of odd properties, and is easy to understand as ‘next to the void’ in Badiou’s sense.

Third, “la volonté générale est l’opérateur de fidélité qui commande une procédure générique.”

Badiou says that the last point is the difficult one. In fact, given my understanding what all these technical terms mean here, I do not think there is any real problem. There are some striking resemblances between the way Rousseau discusses how to follow or know the general will and Badiou’s ethics of fidelity. If we could stage one of those inane intro-level ‘conversations’ between political thinkers, it seems to me that Rousseau would, within limits, agree with Badiou’s descriptions.

My problem is not with the third, but with the first ‘translation’ of Rousseau into Badiou. For Rousseau, I would say that the ‘event’ of the social contract has a historical beginning that is not open to later re-interpretation in the same way that I understand the Badiou-ian event to be. For Rousseau, the event is not “au hasard.” Badiou’s fidelities give us a way of understanding certain forms of human action that would otherwise appear groundless, but they are not, themselves, exactly a reason for these programs. Badiou, and it is understandable, is not so much interested in why we pursue politics, love, science, art. But Rousseau is; according to Rousseau, all individuals strive to preserve themselves. This is the nature of the individual, and it is replicated in the ‘moral individuals’ of the government on one level, and the state on a higher level. Indeed, Rousseau even suggests that it is important that the government have a limited drive to self-preservation qua government. So it seems to me that if the volonté générale can be an object of the practice of fidelity, the formation of people always takes the form of the creation of a self-preserving entity, which is not at all the same thing as Badiou’s politics. There is a broader objective structure—an anthropology, however peculiar—behind Rousseau’s instantiation of politics.

At any rate, Badiou helped me to think a bit about Rousseau. Next, perhaps, I will look at what Althusser has written. The pile of books is too large not to have a principle, and Marxian readings are more sensible at the moment than other ones.

Strauss and the American Dilemma

Richard H. King’s “Rights and Slavery, Race and Racism: Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Dilemma,” appears in a recent issue of Modern Intellectual History, and is very interesting and informative. It was provocative for me on several levels. For this very reason, I have some objections to make, and some comments to note.

First of all, and perhaps this is a bit unfair, it seems to me to replicate a ‘Straussian’ method. This is to say that it isolates a tradition of texts, and reasons based on careful reading of what the texts are trying to say. Context (the civil rights movement) comes in to the picture only as an opportunity for the development of this Straussian tradition in its continued consideration of basic, foundational issues. This limitation is not a problem, exactly, except in as much as the article makes, or gestures at, claims for the importance of Straussian thinking to conservatism in America in general—in particular the conservative occupation of the territory of color-blindness.

Of course, Strauss and his ‘heirs’ have been important. But it seems to me that linking Straussian thinking to the broader context of conservative (and otherwise) political thought and cultural commentary would give us a purchase on this shift King points to in from a support in the early 1960s for black nationalist movements—essentially for separatism—and the later endorsement (in the 80s and 90s?) of color-blind policies. Does, as King suggests, this shift in the Straussian camp simply mirror a broader shift among conservative commentators and intellectuals in this period? If so, why did it take place, and was the cause the same for the conservatives of principle as it was for those of tradition? This line of questioning might, I think, trouble the relatively clean tradition of principled conservatives (Straussians) King has constructed.

At a certain point in the article, King gives us a paragraph on the anti-psychological bent of the Straussians. As a result, he says, they are essentially unable to discuss the psychological effects of slavery and racism on individuals—this comes in the context of Herbert Storing’s essays on Frederic Douglass and Booker T. Washington. I am, myself, allergic to psychological discussions of this sort. In my experience they are either reductive or novelistic. In any case I don’t trust them. But I wonder if it would be possible to link, or at least seat next to one another at the dinner table, a Straussian history of political philosophy, and some sort of cultural studies-type discursive approach to race and racialization. It seems to me that the latter approach becomes absolutely necessary once mass media are introduced, and that, in fact, tectonic shifts in modes of representation could have significant explanatory power in the slow-democratic polity of the past half-century.

One of the fascinating problems that King discusses, and that I would love to hear more about, is how one conceptualizes the relationship between the founding and the Civil War. This opens an enormous and hoary debate about narrative, which I would like to leave mostly to the side. In this particular instance, I wonder how much contingency is permissible within a Straussian telos. More concretely: of course, in a very banal sense, it is impossible to deny that the Founding and the Civil War are related. But in what way, and with what necessity? Is this kind of narrative series a place in which Straussians might be pushed on the source of meaning of texts? It has always seemed ridiculous to me—especially ridiculous—to claim any kind of transcendental status for the original constitution (even, as is more pertinent here, for the Declaration of Independence). To honor the document is to forget the nation. Or, as I imagine Rousseau would say—I have been reading Du contral social, it’s amazing, perhaps more on it later—this is to put the law which made the government in the place which can only be occupied by the sovereign, which is to say the general will, the people. I’m sure Strauss would have a devastating answer to this objection, but it seems to me clear that you cannot pretend to read the Declaration of Independence as thought the Civil War had never happened, as though Lincoln’s Gettysburg address did not reach into the older text and changed it. It follows, I think, that contemporary political meanings of this and other texts must be highly historically conditioned. It is impractical beyond conservatism to refuse to see this.

Epistemology of the web

This article on collective, web-based intelligence, is jarring to read just after Barthes. Still, more interesting than most of what I've read on this sort of thing. What would a contemporary antimoderne have to say about these developments?

Barthes at the College de France

Earlier today, wandering about in a bookstore, I found an attractively slim Points Essais edition of Roland Barthes’s inaugural lesson at the Collège de France. It is titled, boldly, Leçon.

Leçon is interesting, for instance, in light of Micheal Behrent’s article on Foucault. In as much as it is admissible to read the text as argument, and I’m not sure such a reading would be the most nuanced or productive, it must be admitted that Barthes’s argument rests on a certain conception of insidious and all-pervading power. Barthes is in this text, and at this moment, linked especially closely to Foucault. Foucault brought Barthes to the Collège de France, and in a sense it is Foucault’s space. So given this, we can say that Barthes is inscribing a whole project of literary inquiry in a Foucauldian space.

The most painful thing about reading the Leçon, for me, is Barthes’s suggestion that an ever-renewed investigation, a continual assault on foundational assumptions, could be an effective counter to this kind of power (which is not capital, but is also not not-capital). Perhaps the least ‘modern’ sounding of Barthes’ opinions is that desire is somehow to be opposed to power. The opposition of elemental and natural desire (albeit conceived as multiplicity) to power (albeit also conceived as multiple), seems simply naïve. Perhaps I have not understood. Yet I can only cringe when I read, near the end, “Ce qui peut être oppressif dans un enseignement, ce n’est pas finalement le savoir ou la culture qu’il véhicule, ce sont les formes discursives à travers lesquelles on les propose” (pg 42). Although I understand that, at one time, Barthes was something of an adversary for certain professional historians, he was also deeply concerned with History. Perhaps this is the issue: History, not history. Surely both can be oppressive?

What I ask myself is, does the above quote suggest that Barthes thinks something like what Behrent says Foucault thinks about the new configuration of power—biopower as opposed to discipline? This, or something like this, seems plausible to me partly because Barthes engages in a certain amount of self-historicisation of the sort I always find fascinating. For him, there was a coupure with the Liberation, but again with or around Mai ’68. I wonder if it would be possible to track his opinions of the changing shape of French society over these decades in the something of the same way that Behrent does with Foucault. In the end, I think it is a mistake to take Barthes seriously as a thinker of political or social issues. As a writer, yes; as a literary critic, yes; but not as a thinker of the social. And I think he would agree with this. The Leçon suggests as much. It is too bad that he is read as ‘political’ by so many Anglophone critics.

As far as this particular text is concerned, it seems to me that it is best to heed the warnings Barthes gives at the beginning, that he only ever writes essays, “genre ambigu où l’écriture le dispute à l’analyse” (7). More plainly, I think we should take everything Barthes says here (I would go so far as to say, ever) as essentially a first person statement. It is about pleasure, about his own pleasure—we are invited to participate, and to get what we can from it, but the basic principle is always, as he says, “cette disposition qui me porte souvent à sortir d’un embarras intellectuel par une interrogation portée à mon plaisir” (8). He is a writer, and he is engaged in “un combat assez solitaire contre le pouvoir de la langue” (25). The thing of it is, I always enjoy reading him. I find that, while I often disagree with what he says, I agree profoundly with what I understand his project to be. I think next, perhaps when I run across it in a bookstore, since I have no professional excuse at the moment, I will take up La chambre claire.

pessimism

« Le monde est arrivé à une impasse, et nous nous consumons probablement en vain à chercher une issue par de profondes combinaisons théoriques. »

These are Edgar Quinet's words, written in the early 1850s. I found them quoted on page 161 of Christophe Charle's Les intellectuels en Europe au XIXe siecle. Charle himself is quoting them from another secondary source. Since a precise day is given (December 22nd, 1853), I assume that they are from a letter or a journal. The strong assumption is that they refer somehow to the aftermath of Louis Napoleon's coup, and the likely course of his government. Perhaps I will hunt it down.

Le choc Bergson

Henri Bergson is not a philosopher who, like Agamben, I have consciously avoided. None the less, it is the case that I have often heard his name come from the mouth of someone who was, I am certain, interested in this philosopher only because Deleuze wrote about him. Yet for a variety of reasons, I have started to read Bergson. I began at what is more or less the beginning, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. I can say with honesty that I experienced what I imagine the publishers must have had in mind when they printed, on the front of the otherwise quietly ugly standard PUF design, “LE CHOC BERGSON.” Bergson is a remarkable writer, but also one that I am concerned I may have trapped in my person web of reference.

What do I mean by this? I mean that reading the Essai, I thought of Proust and Sartre. I thought a little of William James (who, since he is cited, cannot be avoided). And then, in what is probably the most historically useful association, springing less from conscious thought than what might be called aesthetic association, I thought of George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty. This last seems to me somehow similar in its tone and its construction. There are, I think, reasons for this on several levels. First, the two books were written only about a decade apart (1886-96, give or take some months), and were both ‘first’ books. That is, both were written for presentation to a jury of senior academics, and in what was essentially the same intellectual field. After all, Santayan was writing for James, and James and Bergson were already, by this point, in communication. On a higher level of abstraction, but books are attempts to maintain what I would, quite un-technically, call transcendental reasoning in the face of a respected, powerful, and aggressive materialist science. James is in something of the same boat. The next generation of philosophers, Sartre and Heidegger, say, seem to have felt no need at all to engage with ‘psychophysique’ and the like.

The Essai is rich and complex—though I would not say, exactly, that it is ‘difficult.’ Part way through the book I began to think about memory, and how a philosopher of durée would deal with this. Of course the next book is Matière et mémoire, so I image I’ll find out. It was hard to read the example of the musical phrase, which turns up several times, without thinking of Proust and Vinteuil. Yet it seems to me that Vinteuil means something quite different for Swann, and even for Proust, than the musical phrase does in the Essai. I want to know a great deal more, for instance, about what Bergson does with language in his later work. No doubt much has been written here, and I will soon know. Suffice it to say for the moment that after reading the Essai with Proust and Sartre in my head, both as ‘readers’ of Bergson, Proust seems, oddly enough, more (philosophically???) interesting than Sartre. Perhaps this is because I know more about him than I do about Sartre.

I am going to continue to avoid saying anything substantive about Bergson’s ideas. I have never been able to be interested in the philosophical ‘problem’ of human freedom—perhaps Bergson more or less tabled the issue, except for the odd twist of the postwar existentialists? Rather than discuss the issues, I’ll finish by saying only that I am sorry it is not yet possible to buy Frédéric Worms’ critical edition of Matière et mémoire (it apparently comes out in 2009)—the notes in the Essai are helpful and, despite the somewhat didactic tone, not obtrusive.

Last of all, I admit that I bought Deleuze's little 1966 manual on Bergson. It was only 5 Euros from the box outside of the librarie Vrin. Maybe after MandM I will read it.

Bourgeois solidarity

Léon Bourgeois’ pamphlet, Solidarité, first published in 1896, belongs to a genre of political pseudo-philosophy with which, for whatever reason, I feel well acquainted. I am reading the 1906 edition from gallica. Bourgeois and the political position that he embodies are enjoying something of a renaissance. See for instance the treatment on La vie des idées. Although I know some things about Bourgeois’ context and the intellectual/cultural resources on which he drew, this is the first time I’ve read him specifically. Here, mostly for my own benefit, I want to outline not so much the argument, as some of the assumptions and the formal structure of the text.

Bourgeois is, as I have read, absolutely positioning himself as the genuinely republican third way not so much between, but above the alternative of socialist collectivism and liberal individualism. Solidarité as an idea is a synthesis, an overcoming, of the dichotomy of socialism and liberalism. It is also a scientific description of the nature of reality, empirically tested and found correct. Republicanism itself does not come up very often in the text, but it is mentioned, I think significantly, at the very beginning and very end—the parts that a busy Parisian was most likely to read.

Solidarité can be said to mean the moral and legal consequences of the scientific fact that all progress and survival is the result of collective, rather than individual, effort. Individuals rely on other individuals, and therefore are indebted to them. Not only to other people in the present, but also to the past.

One of the most rhetorically striking things about this little pamphlet, for me, is that there are basically two metaphors—and they are barely that—at work in it, which I find odd next to one another. The first is organic. All organisms function only as a result of the cooperation of their individual parts. It is true that Bourgeois, caught up in the moment, goes so far as to say that gravity is essentially the solidarity of all objects with all other objects—but the central point of reference is the organism. And of course, it is obvious to him that species work in the same way as individuals. The currency of this belief (that a group of people may be treated psychologically or behaviorally as one large person) amazes me. I wonder if Vico’s suggestion (no doubt not only his) may have some value: that people in general, when faced with something they don’t understand, tend to assume that it acts like they themselves do. Although there is much that is reprehensible about the organic metaphor (though—what exactly is the organism? The nation? The race? Oddly, ‘race’ is used more often than ‘nation’ or ‘patrie’), it is unsurprising for this period. But more or less at the midpoint of the pamphlet, I think when Bourgeois is beginning to move on to law, the metaphor changes. Now, rather than an organism, society (to which, by the by, Bourgeois denies any existence other than as the sum of its parts) becomes like a business firm. We, however, are not so much laborers in the employ of the firm as stockholders. Debts are owed in all directions. All we have to do is decide by what rules we will work.

For Bourgeois, the only difference between society in general and a business is that the stockholders of a business are able to decide in advance, before they invest, the terms of their investment. We are all already here. Solidarité, however, helps us to think about how, if we were all freely able to make such a judgment, we would rationally agree to arrange things. There is a surprising similarity to the Rawlsian ‘veil of ignorance’ here, but I think that for Bourgeois science can tell us more or less what we should agree to.

It would be interesting to map out the triads and binaries that are always at the bottom of Bourgeois’ thinking. For instance, solidarité shows us that there is no contradiction between science and morality—but they remain a binary, and one that maps onto liberalism (science) and socialism (morality). As in so much other political thinking, we have the assertion that beyond human difference, there is an essential human equality. The point here is that juridical equality is absolute, even a law of nature, while physical equality (or equality of outcome) is a dangerous delusion. But what is the human? « c’est...d’être à la fois vivant, pensant et conscient. » (110) He even admits that there might, on other planets, be other beings that meet these criteria. But then we do have sharp internal differentiation—which, interestingly, is measured both chronologically and in terms of social space. So that a humble laborer today is as much advanced (thanks to his accumulated cultural capital) over the cave-man as the genius is over the laborer: “Le plus modeste travailleur de notre temps l’emporte sur le sauvage de l’âge de pierre d’une distance égale à celle qui le sépare lui-même de l’homme de génie » 117-118. I want, at any rate, to know more about the 'republican anthropology' behind all this.

There is much more to say about this little text—for instance, Leibniz, was he being taught aggressively in this period?—but the above are my sharpest impressions.

from Vico

"Wars are generally fought by nations who speak distinct languages and are therefore 'mute' in relation to each other." [para 487]
Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. David Marsh.

He meant this more or less literally, but it should perhaps be taken, not metaphorically, but at least with the words 'language' and 'mute' in their broad meanings; same with 'nation,' i suppose.

Behrent on Foucault

I have just finished reading a very interesting, and unpublished, article by Michael Behrent on Foucault and economic liberalism entitled, “Liberalism without Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Free-Market Creed, 1976-1979”. The article and its references will be very useful for me in thinking about Sorel’s context of reception in post-1968 France; in particular, the question of the meaning(s) of liberalism. Behrent does a wonderful job of situating Foucault and, it seems to me, of explaining what economic liberalism ‘did’ and meant for him. The highest praise: it made me want to run out and buy (perhaps I will tomorrow), the 1978 and 1979 Collège de France lectures on which the argument is based.

As much as I liked the piece, though, I find myself disagreeing with it on a fundamental level. I get the impression that Behrent more or less agrees with what he convincingly argues Foucault thought about economic liberalism. One reason I want to read these lectures is to see if Foucault does indeed seem to be endorsing the idea that the absence of explicit disciplinary practices in an ideal neoliberal regime necessarily means the absence of implicit, or hidden, disciplinary practices. Probably he is agnostic on the question, and is interested in possibility only.

But then again, to translate things into contemporary US politics, Foucault is not neoliberal in the sense in which I understand this word. It seems that the Foucault was in favor of various forms of social protection (the negative tax, for instance) that are, in the US context, liberal rather than neoliberal (if, and I think we can, we take the last two of Roosevelt’s four freedoms as much of what neoliberals have wanted, in the last decade, to roll back).

So, finally, what I want more of is Behrent’s own evaluation of how much of the ‘neoliberalism’ that interested Foucault was reflected less in the governing practices of various parties than it was present only in his own mind. Ordoliberals may have provided an example in Germany, and certainly Behrent is clear about the negative examples in France—perhaps the Second Left may also be cited as an example, but although certain French liberals may have seen allies there, it is a stretch, I think, to compare autogestation with the Chicago School.

At any rate, a very interesting piece. I am sorry to have missed the seminar at which it was presented, and I hope it is published soon so that I can cite from it.

Spinoza's Ethics

I read Spinoza’s Ethics largely because I had heard so much about how a certain kind of Theory was deeply indebted to him, or claimed to be. My suspicion was (and is) that it is really Deleuze’s version of Spinoza that interests people, in the same way that people have now heard of Bergson largely because of Deleuze. There isn’t anything wrong with this, and I should admit strait off that I haven’t read very much of the relevant material on the French Spinozan revival of the 1970s. This, anyway, is how I came to Spinoza. Several months ago, I read the Theological-Political Treatise. Parts of it were very interesting, but since my interest in biblical hermeneutics and the debunking of miracles is, at best, abstract, I was not greatly moved. Since then, I have been traveling and focusing n other things, which is a shame. But I finally managed to sit down and work through the Ethics.

This was a first reading, and no doubt a superficial one. There are a few things I would like to highlight and remember. Most generally, and perhaps most superficially, I remember from long ago that much pop (or near pop) neuroscience takes its philosophical inspiration from Descartes. The way in which Spinoza thinks about the relationship between mind and body seems to me obviously far better tuned to contemporary understanding. I am generally fascinated by this aspect of the work, and would, on a second reading, pay close attention to it.

Perhaps most elusive and unexpected, for me, was Spinoza’s treatment of time (and much of this in the last pages of the book). This is bound up with the relation between mind and body. There is eternity and there is duration. The mind is able to conceive of nothing except through the body, which has duration, and is in time. However, the mind may conceive of the body under the species of eternity, but this is, I think, essentially to conceive of God. This is the preserve of reason, which always is concerned with the eternal. There is a great deal more here, and no doubt the duration/eternity dichotomy is crucial not just for Spinoza, but for the whole tradition of philosophy—perhaps it is even universal. The question is, and I might tend in this direction, is Spinoza attempting to get around this dichotomy, to present us with a way of thinking that downgrades the distinction to relative unimportance?

Now, given that I came to this text with Theory in my head, I was especially interested in desire as a concept. Desire is defined at one point as, “appetite together with consciousness of the appetite” (76 – I am using the Penguin Classics edition of the Curley translation). I should say in passing that, in Lukacs, consciousness appeared as the highest good, and there seemed to be no need to explain why it was good. Spinoza does a somewhat better job explaining why it is good. Later, as the first point in the definitions of the affects we find, “desire is man’s very essence, insofar as it is conceived to be determined, from any given affection of it, to do something” (104). The middle clauses, Spinoza explains, are important. Desire is man’s essence only insofar as man, and everything else, strives for self-preservation. Desire is then the conscious (as opposed to appetite) striving for something that, given an existing condition (Spinoza’s affection), tends toward the preservation of the individual. Of course, Spinoza quickly points out, desires “are not infrequently so opposed to one another than the man is pulled in different directions and knows not where to turn” (104).

Spinoza believes that if all individuals acted according to their own best interests, or what, with a clear mind, they perceived these interests to be, we would have peace, freedom, and prosperity. This is because there is nothing more useful to one individual than another individual in full possession of his own capacities. The state, however, and its power to coerce and/or legislate on matters of morality and action, is necessary because people are generally ruled by their affects rather than their reason.

I wonder how similar this is to a Smithian hand-of-God argument? Indeed, since I have been trained to pay attention to the way people talk about affect, it seems to me that a single problematic does indeed somehow unite Spinoza and, who is perhaps most interesting in this regard, the Marquis de Sade. Indeed, as an aside, I am very sorry that I could not bring myself to write about La philosophie dans le boudoir immediately after finishing it. The thing is horrible and fascinating; especially in the light of certain arguments about emotion-talk and radical forms of republicanism at the time of the French Revolution. Sade really does represent this logic pushed in a radical way to a certain limit.

A final confusion of which I want to remind myself: Spinoza several times uses the phrase “more reality,” at one point in what must be one of his famous sives, it is “more reality, or perfection” (33). What does this mean, exactly? I think this must be a significant philosophical point, in the same way that “Deus sive natura” is not just any conjunction, but a basic Spinozan contention. More perfection, I understand. The more of God’s nature one is able to understand, the more perfection one contains, or, is. But I am confused by the equation of this to reality. As opposed to confused ideas of reality? Spinoza, I would have thought, allows the reality of confusion, just not its correctness, or perfection. We can only ever have an imperfect, or mutilated (such language!) idea of evil, since it is itself a negation. It is impossible to hate God, since to know God excludes the negation necessary for hate. But does Spinoza consider such gaps, failures, and negations to be absences of reality? I am a bit confused about this.

At any rate, I rashly moved on from Spinoza some days ago, and have started reading another old and difficult book—though one I have a better excuse for tackling: the New Science of Giamattista Vico. I will need to spend some time with this text, which is more exciting than I had thought it would be, and will write more about it soon. But for now I want only to point out that there are some interesting echoes with Spinoza. For instance, here is Vico’s axiom 35, “Wonder is the daughter of ignorance. The greater the cause inspiring it, the greater the wonder.” Then here is axiom 36, “The weaker its powers of reasoning, the more vigorous the human imagination grows.” One of the more elegant moments in the Ethics is the definition of wonder as what one experiences before a singular thing. This seems to me remarkably powerful. A thing appears singular when one is ignorant of how it is connected to other things, when one has no conceptual grasp of it. (I would argue that psychologically, when a thing is really singular, it inspires not wonder so much as uncomprehending boredom—something is interesting when it speaks in a powerful and unexpected way to what one already knows. Too familiar, or too foreign, and it is impossible to think about). Perhaps having just read Spinoza, I am going too far and assimilating to him what are really pieces of Enlightenment common sense by Vico’s time. Still, the categories of wonder and imagination are clearly important—if I were more energetic, I would keep careful track of how Spinoza defines them, and then how Vico defines and uses them.

It also occurs to me, though only here, that Badiou, who certainly ought to know his Spinoza, may be doing interesting things in his Ethics, discussed a bit below, around the idea of evil as essentially a negation, a failure.

pears and flies

Today I went to the Städel Museum here in Frankfurt. I spent the most time at one particular special exhibit, “Die Magie der Dinge. Stilllebenmalerei 1500-1800.” These paintings are mostly from the low countries and Germany-though the show ends with Chardin. I seriously considered buying the catalogue, which is a pleasingly designed and large book, but I am not, just at the moment, buying this kind of book. So all I have is the brochure, which reproduces only a few pictures. Happily, the brochure leaves out the kind of silly still lives that the curator (or the curator’s boss?) thought it would be in good taste to include. In the entryway to the exhibit there is a large and beautiful vase of flowers-but then inside there is a pile of gourds and melons that looks more like a cheap thanksgiving centerpiece than anything else. I don’t get it.

This show has a definite narrative. It begins with ‘precursors’ to still-life painting found in various kinds of religious art. The first paintings are of the ‘Madonna and Child,’ but also with flowers in a vase. In one case, these are lilies and irises, symbolizing both her purity and the extent of her compassion for Jesus’ suffering (the lilies are familiar, but the iris is less so-certainly these flowers have a fleshy and perhaps bloody appearance). Similarly, we get a large-scale painting depicting a biblical scene, but with the foreground taken up by a market, and so by animals and vegetables. The curatorial materials called this a religious ‘peg,’ soon discarded, but at the time necessary for the real subject matter. I suppose this might be so, and I shouldn’t ask for too much from a blurb on an info-card; but the painting seems more interesting to me than that. The narrative of the exhibition demands that the juxtaposition of biblical/mundane subject mater be understood as transitional and provisional, but it seems to me that it would be interesting to read such a juxtaposition in terms of Erich Auerbach’s large narrative of mimetic levels, style and genre in literature. Indeed, this particular painting (Pieter Aertsen, Market Scene with Christ and the Adulteress, 1559), seems to me to have a triadic structure-the trades-people sit among their wares, and then above, in the background, Jesus writing Hebrew in the dust. Also in the background, with the biblical scene, there is another vegetable stand and selling, looking on. In contrast, those sellers in the front seem oblivious to what is going on behind them. It seems to me that the forward scene is at least as much about the people as it is about the objects they are selling. So I wonder if the biblical scene, rather than a peg on which to hang a market scene, is perhaps commenting on, or mediating between, the people and their things. Indeed, there are some pleasing formal connections between the two groups of figures.

What we have here in the first room, then, are the elements which will go into still life paintings, and the first movements toward disentangling it from other genres. In later rooms we get various forms and subgenres. I found the ‘sottobosco’ (sp?) theme boring, but was surprisingly intrigued by the niche paintings. These are paintings of another painting, or a window onto a scene, surrounded by flowers and other standard still life figures. Seeing a number of these paintings in one place made me think of them less as elaborate tromp-l’oeil exercises, and more as, in fact, efforts to create a space from which to look. This is to say that the outer band of the painting creates a space for a viewer to be, as they view the inner image.

Most of the memento mori type paintings I found relatively crude and blunt; for me without emotional resonance. There was one, however, made on a larger scale than the others, displaying many objects of vanity (cards, coins, drink...) and then off to the side, a candle just gone out, with smoke trailing up off of it in just the way it does only in the two seconds after the flame has gone. This motif (the just-extinguished candle) was in several paintings, but this particular one (I wish I had written down its information-perhaps I will go back next week) managed to capture a moment perfectly; duration-a time object-as well as the physical objects.

The narrative arc of the show is that the still life begins as extremely heavily symbolic, sometimes allegorical, and as the genre developed, the objects themselves became more important than their symbolic meanings. The artistic excellence and luxury of the painted flower became more and more important than the fact that the flower is an iris, for instance. As formal perfection becomes more important, driven then as now by the art market, it becomes difficult for succeeding generations to outdo their teachers. By the later part of the 18th century, as we see in the icon of the show, the object itself is literally put on a pedestal. This is the point, I think, of the curatorial emphasis on Justus Juncker’s 1765 ‘Stillleben mit Birn and Insekten’ (which the brochure has incorrectly in English as ‘Partridge and Pear’-there were in the museum many instances of bad English; however, it must have been intentional on someone’s part that in the English-language chronology of Max Beckman’s life, we learn that in 1947 he moved to Amerika). Then the reason that the show ends with Chardin, a French painter, is that with Chardin we can say that the painting itself, rather than the object depicted, has become the real point. This is to say, the beauty of depiction is no longer than which is valued, but the act of depiction itself.

Such was not the only point of the show-for instance it did want to locate this genre in terms of social structure, as pointedly bourgeois, and in the hunting pictures, for instance, apparently a way of claiming something of the aristocratic life-style. This argument was made in particular in reference to one large-scale hunting picture, which is dominated by a brilliantly painted hare, hung upside-down in the center and well lit. In the background, we see a sort of mansion. This is supposed to mean a claim to aristocracy. I am not so sure, since the picture was for me interesting because of the tactile tension between the bright, torsioned, beautifully textured hare in the center, and the snarling terracotta lion’s head just behind it.

But I also do not think that I am wrong about this basic narrative. I am of course in no position to argue that the narrative is wrong. I know very little about these paintings, or indeed art history in general. However, it does seem an awfully familiar story to me-in fact it is one story of modernism. The logic of the content purifies itself and eventually develops into reflexive formalism. The connection to the Dutch bourgeoisie (whatever that means) is necessary to as a driving force, but basically has nothing to do with the shape of the changes within the genre-it is an engine, but not a steering wheel.

So, finally, because I have been reading History and Class Consciousness, and Lukács’ words are ringing in my ears, I wonder if it makes any sense to offer a more Marxist reading of this sequence. Lukács often argues that one hallmark of capitalist ideology is the tendency to view objects in isolation from one another-atomization rather than totalization. Do we see in this narrative of still life painting the stripping-away of old cultural prejudices (symbolic meaning), and the isolation of objects qua objects in an increasingly rationalist fashion? Kind of. Certainly there is a stripping-away, but I am less certain of the rationalism. We can probably say atomization. Indeed, perhaps it could be argued that what we see is the painters slowly ceasing to paint the objects that society has made, and starting to paint things themselves. The pear is sitting on the altar to things in themselves as they are.

But it is also the case that many of the things pictured are commodities. In this light, what we have is the Dutch bourgeoisie tearing objects out of the old social structure (Mary’s irises), and turning them into commodities which then take on a life of their own, outside the control of their ‘masters.’ No doubt there is a great deal of Marxist art history already on the Dutch still life-it does seem obvious that it should be understood as an art form that helps this class to manage or process its world. Maybe some enterprising art historian has synchronized changing trends in still life painting with Giovanni Arrighi’s periodization of Dutch capital. Seems to me like a good idea.

On the other hand, I am a little suspicious that the show has made one genre out of what are in fact several genres. Flowers, for instance, seem to be a genre all on their own, with meanings and a dynamic that is not the same as for pictures of meals, or dead game, or especially living animals. Where do we find the genre boundaries between still life and domestic painting? The memento mori paintings, for instance, are very clearly and obviously allegorical. This is true of some, but not all of the other sub-genres of still life. The flourishing industry devoted to painting fish, for instance, does not seem to have put a great deal of symbolic ballast into their pictures.

In all events, the show was very interesting. I may well go back to the museum before it ends (August 14th-soon), and look at it again, this time writing down what I want to remember.

from Flaubert

Il ne distinguait pas, cet homme si plein de pratique, la dissemblance des sentiments sous la parité des expressions. Parce que des lèvres libertines ou vénales lui avaient murmuré des phrases pareilles, il ne croyait que faiblement à la candeur de celles-là ; on en devait rabattre, pensait-il, les discours exagérés cachant les affections médiocres ; comme si la plénitude de l’âme ne débordait pas quelquefois par les métaphores les plus vides, puisque personne, jamais, ne peut donner l’exact mesure de ses besoins, ni de ses conceptions, ni de ses douleurs, et que la parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles.

Madame Bovary, Part 2, Chapter XII.

Although it sounds foolish to say, Flaubert really is amazing. I admit to stopping part way through L’education sentimental, though I was enjoying it. But just now I’ve read Un cœur simple straight through in one sitting, and am now a little over half through Bovary.

I can only imagine that this chunk of text—at least from “la parole humaine...”—is often quoted. I especially like that Flaubert is telling us this apropos of Emma. It is not clear to me that Flaubert himself would endorse such a view of language, and I wonder if he is often taken to do so.

Also, from Bouvard et Pécuchet, “Les ouvrage dont les titres étaient pour eux inintelligibles leur semblaient contenir un mystère.” No wonder so many books are written about Flaubert.

Homo Sacer

I looked at my (temporarily much reduced) bookshelf while I was finishing Ellen Wood’s book, and decided that the best thing to read next was Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer. I have resisted reading Agamben. In a question and answer period after a lecture early last year, a grad student asked the professor, who was in the English department, something about what he was reading and thinking with these days. He said something like, “I’m reading, really seriously, Agamben.” A room full of heads bobbed up and down reverentially. At that moment I decided not to read Agamben. But I keep running across him, and have now accumulated enough context that he has come to seem interesting.

The category of the political is certainly mentioned often enough in Homo Sacer, as, in connection with the idea of sovereignty, it can hardly fail to be. Agamben’s basically ontological point of view, however, means that I have very little to grasp onto when thinking about what he means by it. Certainly he is miles from Wood, who is happy to regard politics as a space of civic equality. Similarly, echoes of Rancière’s distinction between politics and police appear at certain moments, though it seems to me likely that Agamben would, in Rancière’s terms, find only police and no politics in the modern world.

Agamben presents himself as bringing together, so to speak, Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism, and Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics (it seems to me that what is happening here is really adding the latter to the former, rather than combining). Although I am not now in a position to say firmly what politics is for Agamben, it is unsurprising, given this description of his project, that analyses of power and sovereignty would occlude or explode the political as a category.

I will not say very much about this book now. I read it quickly, though with pleasure. It does seem to me that Agamben consistently ignores the meaning of half of his central formulation. Homo sacer is one who can be killed, but not sacrificed. In the ancient context, it seems that the most important part of this formula is sacrificial—homo sacer is not buried with funeral rites. In the modern period, more important is that homo sacer may be killed, but not murdered. Are we to understand that the juridical order has simply replaced the religious one in an unproblematic way? Agamben objects to the Victorian doctrine of the ambiguity of the sacred, which he says arose at just the moment when sacredness no longer made sense to Europeans (that is, when the decisively became secular—but can this claim really be accepted?), and that it consequently infected much thinking on the subject, especially Bataille. I confess that on first reading I do not quite understand how it is that this objection—which seems to me valid—hooks into the rest of the argument, and in particular what kind of sacredness is supposed to have replaced it? Is Agamben arguing that the State (and, therefore, everyone within it, inasmuch as they are understood to partake in bare life) has indeed, in the figure of the sovereign, claimed the title of sacred? This seems to me to be dismissing anthropological investigation into the idea of the sacred very quickly. Moreover, the biopolitical imperative, and its articulation into juridical orders, does not, it seems to me, ‘cover’ the sacred in the contemporary world.

These comments are inadequate. To finish, I will make again the objection that I usually make to this kind of Heideggerianism. Agamben does not seem to need very much evidence about “today” in order to construct an ontology for it different from some supposed and unitary past (under which, none the less, today’s ontology flowed “like a river” (121)). Although I can read and enjoy this kind of talk, it seems to me that in order to render it useful, not to say meaningful, it must be handled carefully.