Nietzsche, Kant’s Holocaust, and My Cat’s Face

Of course, I don’t have a cat. I wish I had a cat. I wish I had a cat that would (or at least could), like Derrida’s, remind me daily of the strangeness of being a human animal, a strangeness Derrida thinks through and with in The Animal That Therefore I Am.

I don’t quite know what to make of his rich, complex, playful, and deadly serious book, especially within the context of an Anthropology seminar. It aligns to some extent with the critique of Cartesian epistemology in Barad and Jullien, it engages with the phenomenology that seemed to undergird the work of Mol and Lingis, and in fact the three theses that structure this course come in to Derrida’s final hurried chapter on Heidegger; the problem is not one of disconnection between the text and the seminar. Rather, my problem is that I find it here nearly impossible to get outside of philosophy, or more specifically Derrida, or even more specifically Derrida’s “animalism” and Nietzschean perspectivalism.

When Derrida admits on pages 91-92 that his motivation in attempting to grapple with “Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Levinas, and Lacan, as a single living body” is perhaps an attempt to “gain… a sufficiently expert or knowledgeable purchase on what might touch the nervous system of a single animal body,” like trying to grab a cuttlefish without either hurting it or being covered in its ink (which I just now realize is a typically Derridean metaphor-pun), and that he admits this in order to confide “I have a particularly animalist perception and interpretation of what I do, think, write, live, but, in fact, of everything, of the whole history, culture, and so-called human society, at every level, macro- or microscopic,” which recalls his indirect quotation of Nietzsche on page 3 that man “was an as yet undetermined animal, an animal lacking in itself,” I can’t help but agree, yes, the human is an animal, even while I have to wonder about what it means not only to grasp a cuttlefish but to devour one. One thing I always admire about Derrida is his lightness of touch.

This question of devouring, which resurfaces here and there in terms of vegetarianism, animal suffering, instrumental reason, and even the Holocaust, comes up again in the end when Derrida contrasts Nietzsche to Heidegger in order to favor both Nietzsche’s perspectivalism and his (here unnamed) will-to-power—when Derrida says “everything is in a perspective; the relation to a being, even the ‘truest,’ the most ‘objective,’ that which respects most the essence of what is such as it is, is caught in a movement that we’ll call here that of the living, of life, and from this point of view, whatever the difference between animals, it remains an ‘animal’ relation,” he leaves unspoken the violence in Nietzsche’s animal relations, the cruelty of the “blond beast” to the slave and the disdain of the “higher man” for the “herd,” the difference expressed in hierarchy—he leaves out specifically, precisely, the “will-to-power” in all its aspects (160). Nietzsche’s perspectivalism is no mere relativism, but an issue of power and force. Derrida is right to point out that the stakes are “radical.”

This was something that struck me with Barad, as well, and her marvelous image of the creature that was an eye: intersubjective agential realism is great, but some animal has to eat. And at this point, thinking about the anthropos in philosophy and the theoria of anthropology, I don’t know what is being devoured by whom. As for me, I wish I had a cat.

Oulipo in New York: a Workshop of Experimental Literature

This is from the official website of the cultural services of the French Embassy.

Oulipo in New York: a Workshop of Experimental Literature

The Oulipo, Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, is a collective of writers and mathematicians founded in 1960 by François Le Lionnais and Raymond Queneau. Since its creation, the Oulipo group explores alternative ways of writing fiction and poetry, by using patterns and constraints often inspired from mathematical models, but always in a playful spirit. Its members include Marcel Bénabou, Anne Garréta, Hervé Le Tellier, Ian Monk, Jacques Roubaud, and American author Harry Mathews, all of whom will be in New York for three days of readings, lectures, writing workshops and book signings. Jacques Roubaud will be presenting the recently published English translation of his book La boucle (The Loop).

Apr. 1, 7-8:30pm
Oulipo reading followed by book signings, in English
The New School, Tishman Auditorium, 66 W 12th Street, NYC | T 212 229 5488 | More Info

Apr. 2, 12-2pm
Oulipo, Nouveaux Sentiers, Nouveaux Chantiers*, a roundtable discussion in French
Maison française of Columbia University, Broadway at West 116th Street | T 212 854 4482 | More Info

Apr. 2 , 7pm
Book launch and reading of Jacques Roubaud’s The Loop, in English
Idlewild Bookstore,12 West 19th Street, NYC | T 212 414 8888 | More Info | Please RSVP

Apr. 3, 2-5pm
Creative writing workshop with Marcel Bénabou, in French (limited to 12 participants)
French Institute Alliance Française | 22 East 60th Street, NYC | T: 212 355 6612 | More Info

Apr. 3, 7-9pm
Poetry readings followed by book signings, in English
The Pierogi Gallery, 177 North 9th Street, Brooklyn | T 718 599 2144 | More Info

Apr. 4, 1-3pm
Buffet-brunch followed by Oulipo reading, in French and English (invitations only)
Cultural Services of the French Embassy, 972 Fifth Avenue, New York | T 212 439 1400

SPRING BREAK MUTHAFUCKAS!!!! WOOO!!!

Of course this means nothing, except that I slept in till 10 this morning like I'm Marcel Proust or some shit.

What I spent most of my spring break doing was writing a book review of an awful, awful book called Paradoxes of Peace, by the waffling, rich old codger Nicholas Mosley, son of the founder of the British Fascist party, Oswald Mosley. It was an awful book, and my review will probably not get published because no matter how elegantly I might have dropped the hatchet, people often get squeamish about all the blood.

I also read my Marx chapters and worked on a talk I have to give on Glenn Gray's great book The Warriors. It was interesting working on Paradoxes of Peace and The Warriors at the same time, because the fact of the matter is that it takes a great deal more work to do justice to a good book than it does to a bad one. The work can be much more enjoyable and rewarding, no doubt, but good books must be struggled with in a way that bad ones don't require.

I also went to a cultural event last night, the MATA Interval 2.4 Play! Music for Toys, which was enjoyable. Overall the music was palatable and well-played but too pretty and too much watered-down minimalism for my tastes, although I was blown away by the standout Judy Dunaway (and that girl who did vocals with her), who can rock a balloon like a motherfucker. I also liked Margaret Leng Tan, who performed pieces that in themselves were not that interesting with such verve and charisma that they really stood out.

Uhm, that's about all I got. I'm reading a fantastic article by Richard Wrangham on "The Evolution of Coalitionary Killing," which argues for the "Chimpanzee Violence Hypothesis" to explain aggressive group attacks through natural selection. I knew it all along...

One last thing, everyone should go see I Love You, Man, because mi amiga Sarah Burns is in it and she's fucking awesome and the movie needs to do well so she can get a cushy hollywood job and fly me out to visit her in a private jet. Okay? Also it's supposed to be funny, and Sarah is super funny.

Ultimate Philosopher or Ultimate Warrior?

This is a reposting of the link to this wonderful Quiz. Any fans of Heidegger or Nietzsche are basically obligated to take this.

Marx Says: "Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life."

I should mention first of all the Grupat show that the Dr. recently put up in Dublin, which was super awesome (and for which I wrote all the fake press). Here's some pix.

So in addition to art show openings hrm hrm hrm etcetera, and having to read The Propensity of Things and re-read Austerlitz, I also managed to re-read Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which was awesome, Part I and part of Part III of The German Ideology, which was also great, except for the relentlessly vitriolic attacks on Max Stirner, and loads of essays and other stuff, most notably a bunch of stuff by George Orwell and Susan Sontag's essay on war photography. I always think of both of them as excellent writers, but in going back to read their stuff I find myself surprised by just how good they were. I have also been introduced to the essays of the phenomenologist Alphonso Lingis, whose writing on the themes of animal life and human perception is rich, deeply felt, and gorgeous.

I also read We Have Never Been Modern by Bruno Latour, which started out with the interesting if not particularly new thesis that "Modernity" is predicated on a sort of dialectical split between something like "Nature" and something like "Culture" that really doesn't exist at all. So far so good, but then Latour flogs this point for the rest of his book, positing a whole theoretical apparatus of quasi-objects, hybrids, and a parliament of things that are supposed to refer to the "real" unity operating behind the "false" dichotomy. We have never been modern because all our "modern" empirical whatever is embodied in practice, etc. Great.
What I don't get is why anyone who managed to get through a couple years of college would think this is in any way revelatory. Marx and Nietzsche both took the material conditions of consciousness as central not only to their overall projects but to their critique of philosophy. Frankly, I'm getting tired of late-capitalist theorists who act like they invented the critique of metaphysics. Really. Read a fucking book.

I also finished Homo Sacer, by Giorgio Agamben, which was actually really interesting. I don't have the patience to summarize it well here, but his basic argument is that the "modern" form of political organization occurs through an organization of "bare life" which requires the limit states or "states of exception" of both totalitarian sovereignty and the concentration camp. The book has loads of interesting thought along the way, though, including stuff on werewolves, Roman law, Aristotle, Carl Schmitt, effigies, Hobbes, and the Social Contract, before he even gets to Auschwitz. Highly recommended.

If you're into that kind of shit.

I also managed to take in some culture along the way, most notably a visit to the Natural History Museum (Bears! Jellyfish! Insects! Whale! Infants!) and seeing the rather disappointing Watchmen. I don't really have anything to say about the movie except that it's not as good as the comic book. Meh.

What else? Oh, a friend of my has begun a web-zine (or whatever it is called now), called The Arch. He is a great guy, a good writer, and a fellow vet, and he has been generous enough to put some of my stuff up on his site, so check it out.

The Fortress of Memory

I had to give a presentation on Sebald's Austerlitz, the notes for which follow.

I want to begin with a quotation from Walter Benjamin’s 9th Thesis from “Theses on the Philosophy of History”:

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

What if Benjamin’s pile of wreckage isn’t just a catastrophe but something more, something more deliberate? What if it is a fortress, designed to protect against the past, somehow, or to hide it, to cover it and keep it out? And what if the stone walls of this fortress turn from being our best defense into our most nightmarish prison?

I want to look briefly at the motif of the fortress-prison in Austerlitz, which seems to me a central—if not the central—metaphor of the work.

First, I want to draw our attention to the early pages of the book, where Austerlitz begins telling the narrator about fortresses and military architecture. “No one today,” he says on page 15, “has the faintest idea of the boundless amount of theoretical writings on the building of fortifications… no one now understands its simplest terms, escarpe and courtine, faussebraie, réduit, and glacis, yet even from our present standpoint we can see that toward the end of the seventeenth century the star-shaped dodecagon behind trenches had finally crystallized, out of the various available systems, as the preferred ground plan…” We return to this star-shaped fortress again and again in the work.

Images of walls, towers, and fortifications are everywhere in this book, especially because of Austerlitz’ interest in monumental architecture, but the star-shaped fortress at the center of things is Theresienstadt, or Terezin, the fortress-cum-ghetto described on 187 and 199 as having a “star-shaped ground plan,” which is shown prominently on 234 and 235.

Terezin, of course, is where Austerlitz’ mother Agáta was imprisoned, and from where she was “sent east” to her death in 1944 (204). Two other fortresses-turned-prisons bracket the novel, Breendonk, in the Netherlands (18-27), where Jean Améry was tortured by the SS, and the 9th Fort at Kaunas, in Lithuania, where “more than thirty thousand people were killed over [the three years between 1941 and 1944]” (297-298).

But the star-shape shows up in other forms as well: Austerlitz describes how once he and his parents Maximilian and Agáta “went out to the game park at Liboc where, surrounded on all sides by lovely meadows, there is a star-shaped house built as his summer residence by Archduke Ferdinand of the Tyrol” (252); we see the picture of a mosaic star pictured shown illustrating the Prague architecture described on 151; and there is another picture, on 116, of the Eagle Nebula, which shows us the “star nursery” described by Austerlitz’s dead school friend Gerald on the page prior, one of the “huge regions of interstellar gas which, not unlike stormclouds, became concentrated into vast, billowing forms… where new stars were born…”

Not unlike the stormclouds of progress in Benjamin’s image, giving birth to a star, a star-shaped fortress, a fortress of memory. Of course, the star also recalls the six-pointed Star of David, notably absent from the work and perhaps thus much more on our mind. Just like Austerlitz’s obsessive research into the nineteenth century helps repress the traumatic memory of the twentieth, or as Austerlitz puts it on page 16: “The frequent result… of resorting to measures of fortification marked in general by a tendency toward paranoid elaboration was that you drew attention to your weakest point.”

I want to point to one last thing, and that is the fortress-like Bibliotheque National that we encounter in the closing pages of the book, the library whose architecture, Austerlitz posits on page 278, “must have been devised… to instill a sense of insecurity and humiliation on the poor readers,” or as it’s put by his friend Henri Lemoine a few pages later, “both in its entire layout and its near ludicrous internal regulation seeks to exclude the reader as a potential enemy,” and “might be described… as the official manifestation of the increasingly importunate urge to break with everything which still has some living connection to the past” (286). It is no accident, clearly, that we learn on page 288 that this massive fortress of a library is built on the land where once stood a warehouse complex filled with the loot taken “from the homes of the Jews of Paris,” a complex “known to the prisoners as” the Galleries of Austerlitz.

We can see the massive stone and rows of books built over the memory of Austerlitz’ Galleries… and we can ask ourselves how much Jacques Austerlitz might be a personification of precisely this, a fortress where the past has been imprisoned.

The Propensity to Straw Man Arguments

I find Socrates a fascinating and admirable figure. Most of all, I admire him for his integrity: not only for his integrity in the face of death, during his trial for impiety, but for his epistemological integrity—famously, he claimed to know only that he knew nothing. Socrates is fascinating not just as a figure, however, nor just as a philosopher, but also as a construction: the Socrates in Plato’s early dialogues is different than the one in the later works, and both differ from Xenophon’s accounts. The question of historical veridicality is never far away when looking at any of the Pre-Platonic Greek philosophers, which is one reason why the whole tradition seems rather fascinating. Another reason the tradition is fascinating is how diverse it is: considering all at once Pythagoras, the cult-leader and number-worshipper who believed in the transmigration of souls; Heraclitus, who thought the universe was made of ever-changing fire and held paradoxical, cryptic views of the “logos” so central to Greek thought; and Empedocles, a poet and magician who claimed to be able to control the weather and raise the dead, what seems amazing about the development of so-called “rational” philosophy is not how unified it was but rather that it developed at all. When we expand our view, and consider later additions to the Greek tradition such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes, Stoicism, Epicurus, and so on, alongside earlier poetic thinkers like Hesiod and Homer, things get very complicated—we need to start talking about Athenians, Egyptians, Thracians, Spartans, and Persians. We need to start talking about dates and details and specifics.

All of this is to help explain what I mean when I say that I don’t know what Francois Jullien means when he talks about “Greek thought” (see 216, etc), or even what he means when he uses (or his translator uses), rather extensively, the word “logic” (123, 131, 209, 233, et passim). This is only the tip of the rather dangerous iceberg which, in my opinion, nearly sinks Jullien’s sometimes interesting and sometimes tedious book, The Propensity of Things. This “iceberg” is “The West,” which shows up in The Propensity of Things as a monolithic, unitary bogeyman. By generalizing “The West” so broadly from thousands of years of history comprising hundreds of cultures and innumerable traditions of reasoning or thought, even if only “symbolically,” Jullien makes me wonder how capable he is of handling Chinese culture and the idea of “Shi.” Since I don’t know anything about China, I can’t tell if he is as reductive and crude in his treatment of Chinese culture as he is of “The West,” but I certainly hope not.

I say “nearly sinks,” because while in my view his general argumentative framework slips into a sea of vague Orientalism (Chinese Thought is not Western Thought; The Other has the Boon (complexity, ambiguity, sensitivity, etc.) that we lack), perhaps we can save something in this idea of shi, or propensity—something like an idea of holographic knowledge, an arrangement of patterns implicit in situations and praxes, something between logos and prognostication. This is an interesting thought and one well worth thinking—as many people “The West” have tried to do before.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAeeeeeeeeeeeeee

So I've read tons of stuff since the last time I posted, which is precisely the reason I have not posted. My brain is tired and I need to go workout then drink beer. There's loads of great news and plenty of stuff I need to update, but mostly I've been reading Marx Marx Marx.

Don't let anyone lie to you: Capital is awesome. It's an awesome fucking book. Yeah, Capital.

More soon. I promise.

In the meantime, here's a picture of a donkey: