Middlesex, Open City

1.  The Supplicant

Middlesex Philosophy resembles nothing so much as an ‘open city’ or a house of mourning.  Anyone can walk in – offer condolences (protest letters - letters of support), incite, flatter, self-promote, reminisce about the ‘dead’ (the ‘world renowned department’).  That world in which they are renowned ended with the threatened closure of their ‘world’.  The subjects of protest are now victims, victimized.  They are no longer activists or active.  Everything is unnaturally ‘wide open’ – it seems one could even as a stranger look into every nook and cranny of the abandoned city.  The city ‘fathers’ (professors) have fled or have been made incommunicado.  Conducting the defence are children (students) and a motley ‘international brigade’ or foreign mercenaries depending upon the perspective.  As it is a site of abandonment and extreme openness – all manner of historical drama can be re-enacted simultaneously – whether it be the precociousness of May ’68 in Paris or the Volkssturm of Berlin 1945.  Apropos, Winston Churchill used the Mansion at Trent Park as a retreat during the Blitz.  It belonged at that time to the family of Siegfried Sassoon.

The only Middlesex philosophy professor still rallying from the barbican of “Save Middlesex Philosophy!”- Facebook is Eric Alliez.  He acts mostly as a medium of masochistic spectacle (his own?) or as the official mourner.  In his video of a súplica to the Pope (online) he played the role of a wailer on his knees.  It was a spectacle of self-punishment in the sense of Anti-Oedipus – restoring the harmony disturbed by the criminal (Middlesex philosophy and occupation) who is at the same time the supplicant.
The Pope was the great absent (imaginary?) auditor – imaginable only as the mute direction of Alliez’ rapt upturned semi-ecstatic hysterical gaze and his supplicating gestures.  Every gesture was redolent of the tainted ecstasy of the martyr – revealing and concealing impure true emotion.  As if in the midst of a lycanthropic seizure (becoming-animal) Alliez engaged in a symbolic ‘Middlesex’ with the Pope. 
He conceived the role in the tradition of French classical drama, statically reciting the litany of Middlesex’s impressive ‘RAE ratings’, numbers make the best prayers and aphrodisiacs – as if he were wooing the Pope with a sort of “Catalogue Aria” of erotic statistics.  Yet as the presentiment of infinite disaster is starkly visible in his ‘tragic mask’ – one could have equally dubbed the scene with the words of the abandoned Dido, Queen of Carthage from Berlioz’ “Les Troyens” quoted by Badiou in “Logics of Worlds”:
“Adieu, mon peuple, adieu! adieu, rivage vénéré, / Toi qui jadis m’accueillit
suppliante; / Adieu, beau ciel d’Afrique, astres que j’admirai / Aux nuits
d’ivresse et d’extase infinie, / Je ne vous verrai plus, ma carrière est finie.”
[“Farewell, my people, farewell! Farewell revered shore,
You who once welcomed me, beseeching;
Farewell, beautiful African sky, stars that I beheld
In nights of drunkenness and infinite ecstasy,
Never again shall I see you, my run is over.”
Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, Being and Event, 2, translated by Alberto Toscano, p. 32]

Alliez’ onto-theological address to the representative of the ‘not-One’, the somewhat sexually discoloured Universal-Transcendental was at the same time in the words of Napoleon a ‘consommation forte’.  It was an ostentatious consumption or waste of reputation – the social debt/asset of Middlesex.  Was it in a sense the ‘price’ for the intimacy between master and slave (Pope-Alliez)?  The Middlesex numbers are those of regret, of the almost but not quite, not unlike unconsummated love.  Especially that mere 2% shortfall from the amount of 55% income-tribute required from the department by the university, one can imagine the Pope’s sympathy for such a partial indulgence.  But one might doubt that he offered Alliez matching funds.  

Still Alliez’ plea was a spectacle and not a drama – there is no behind the scenes, mere anamorphic ‘noise’ or distortion in the plane.  The illustrious unseen auditor gives an audience and he is the inner-spectacular ‘onstage’ audience of the spectacle.  As such the invisible Pope is the occulted part of the spectacle.
At a presumed unfilmed audience with the Pope, the intimacy reaches an even greater intensity.  This was the true organ without bodies.  Alliez emphasized in his report to Facebook that he got the Pope (Law of the Father) to repeat a word – Albion.  He himself had to repeat Middlesex – he mentions that he told the Pope’s interpreter not to translate ‘sex’ as in ‘sex’.  As according to Deleuze/Lacan the Phallus introduces the difference between life and language/logos – repeating the word is equivalent to repeating the symbolic masochistic coitus with the Father.  One wonders what the Pope has to do with Middlesex – but it was the magic of kairos , being within physical reach of the Father in Porto – the right moment to indulge an impossible desire – with the logic of dreams.  Middlesex was the cover for sex with the Pope.

Alliez has also enlisted other sadomasochistic contributions from various artists –“A Good Philosopher is a Dead Pig” under an image of a recumbent life-size pig face (slightly gaping jaw, a few stumps of teeth) demonstrating some kind of art pleonasm and a second image of the labyrinthine anal quarters of a pig urging the onlooker to “fuck philosophy”, both from Paul McCarthy.  “A (famous) feminist French artist” provided her interpretation of the genitals of the Dean – grey monochrome ice cubes in a suspended bidet, describing her reaction as doubly obscene, SM, “painful therefore JOYFUL” and signing predictably “Marcelle Duchamp”.  Alliez was very quick though to censure a comment from someone identifying himself as an ‘urban guerilla’ – his language of the guerrilla threatening “Management property and wealth” was a “cheap fairy tale of the revolution”.  “Does it help you fall asleep?”, he asked.  Obviously Alliez felt called upon in that instance to promptly defend Management.  Yet he is astonished that all those imposing letters from the ‘greats’ of ‘militant’ philosophy leave the ‘revolutionaries’ in the management unmoved.  For in disbanding the philosophy department at Middlesex it is the management who have effectively ‘occupied’ or paralyzed the department with their abrupt and surprising tactics.  The student occupations are symbolic counteractions or counter-occupations. Refugees from the conquered philosophy department, they have created an occupation against the occupation – in other words a refugee camp, and invited experts on post colonialism to tell them how to be more perfect refugees. 

     
2.  “Reactive Subjects”

Capitalism is ‘revolutionary’ in its total dissolution of bonds, writes Badiou. He was paraphrasing Marx who spoke of the “great civilizing influence of capital” in the Grundrisse, which is “constantly revolutionizing, tearing down all barriers in the way of the development of the forces of production(…)” such as “the satisfying of existing needs and the reproduction of old forms of life”. [Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Frankfurt/Wien, p. 313]  This is perhaps true of ‘old forms of life’ within the general population.  The ‘revolutionary tendencies of capital’ convert the population 
into a generic mass poised and malleable as ‘whatever’ material of the state organization -  whereas the true and indissoluble bonds are preserved within the state organization itself.  In England they still call these resilient bonds - the ‘old boys network’.  The State becomes the subject of state revolutions perpetrated upon the population – in local, national and supranational dimensions.  The case of Middlesex is an example of one such miniature state revolution, disrupting and dismantling existing structures of fidelity in vivo and all the organic reproductive tissues grown by them over the years.  Agamben calls the individuals of this shapeless body of society – “whatever singularities”.  [see Giorgio Agamben, Means without End, University of Minnesota Press, 2000, pp. 86,7 ff]
“For this reason – to risk advancing a prophecy here – the coming politics will no longer be a struggle to conquer or to control the state on the part of either new or old social subjects, but rather a struggle between the state and the nonstate (humanity), that is, an irresolvable disjunction between whatever singularities and the state organization.” [Agamben, op. cit. p. 87]

The non-state would seem to approximate the populace of ancient Rome – Agamben’s perpetual inner topography.  The majority of the population  were merely a nameless quantitative bulk (sine nomine vulgus), a count, but worst of all was not to be counted at all (nullo numero esse).  The Middlesex management spoke like Romans when they told a student “that when thousands of people sign a petition or ‘push a button on Facebook’ this doesn’t indicate a meaningful expression of support.” [“More Information about Philosophy Suspensions”, 25th May 2010 on Save Middlesex Philosophy]

‘Whatever singularities’ correspond to “inferior subjects” (see the previous post “Nos numerus sumus”).  But they do not just stand in discrete opposition or separateness from the state – they carry the state within them, as the ‘subject’ deformed by the intrinsic ‘imperative’.  In a recent action of the Middlesex ‘camp-pain’ called “I occupied Middlesex”, the anonymous undifferentiated group of protesters/students obligingly singularized and named (identified) themselves complete with ‘mug shot’ – as an ironic gesture of vorauseilender Gehorsam (anticipatory obedience) to the investigation of the management.  But the ‘irony’ of the protesters is not theirs at all – it is the fetishized metaphysical State subject working through them and ‘behind their backs’.  “The imperative categorizes its addressee; it affirms the freedom of the addressee, imputes evil to it and intends or abandons it to the law.”  [Jean-Luc Nancy, The Kategorein of Excess, A Finite Thinking, Edited S. Sparks, California, 2003, p. 151]
The whole notion of groups protesting against the state – or developing into dangerous destabilizing factors within the state is antiquated.  On the contrary, it is the groups which are destabilized and abandoned by ‘revolutionary’ acts of the state, and these groups protest only in the name of restoring what has been taken from them. 

They are essentially “reactive subjects” addicted to “reactionary novelties” [Badiou, Logics of Worlds, op. cit.].  By an odd inversion such reactive subjects claim (appropriate) the ‘infinity’ of the power of the state in relation to the masses as their own infinity.  The danger exuded by the state is ‘unthinkable’ for them except as added as a mass to their own ‘body’ of protest.  But their ‘protest body’ is actually the reflection of the double infinity of the state – the infinite power inscribed in the state and its infinite distance to the masses.
“This distance between the power of the state and people’s possible affirmative thinking possesses the characteristic of being errant or without measure.
We could say that the world in which there appears such a power (the state)—a measureless power which is infinitely distant from any affirmative capacity of the mass of people—is a world in which political sites can exist. If it is of a political type, an event-site (…)is a local disruption of the relation between the mass of people and the state. What endures from such a site is a trace, a fixed measure of the power of the state, a halting-point (for thought) to the errant character of this power.” [Badiou, Logics of Worlds, op. cit., pp. 69-70]

Badiou would seem to confirm that the ‘political’ originates in the infinite state subject – its “measureless power”.  When the relation between the infinite power of the state and masses is locally disrupted, then this becomes an “event-site” – but what remains of this site is not the trace of the disruption, nor of the “affirmative capacity of the mass of the people”, but rather a “fixed measure of the power of the state”.  It is the peculiar delusion of the “reactive subject” to see the infinite trace as its own.  

Eric Alliez on “Save Middlesex Philosophy!”- Facebook 30th May 2010: “Obscure, Pavel???? From the Pope in Porto to the F1 in Istanbul, the consequence is excellent!  Our battlefied is the antimodern/postmodern interface, remember… (…)A new way to inform them about the dangerous infinity of our supporters!”


3. “State of Exception”

An odd asymmetry – in the amoral quantitative world, why should the state be any more ‘legalist’ than the protesting anti-state (non-state)?  Only a passive ‘whatever singularity’ who carries the legal transcendental illusion inside would expect that the state keep within the bounds of its own ostensible legal code.  But it is precisely the state or sovereign power which decides when its legal code is binding and when it becomes unbound as in the “state of exception”.   “Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception”, a truism of Carl Schmitt’s ‘political theology’ underlying all of Agamben’s thinking about sovereignty and law.  In political philosophical terms, the exception precedes and grounds the rule – in the empirical world it appears as its opposite, something outré, outside of the law.  It is though, says Agamben, the negative condition of all positive law.  The relation of the ‘negative’ law (the exception) to the positive law (the rule) resembles, says Agamben, the relation of negative to positive theology.
“The exception is an element in law that transcends positive law in the form of its suspension.  The exception is to positive law what negative theology is to positive theology.  While the latter affirms and predicates determinate qualities of God, negative (or mystical) theology, with its “neither…nor…” negates and suspends the attribution to God of any predicate whatsoever.” [Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 17]  
 
When the state metamorphoses empirically into the “state of exception”, when the positive law is suspended, it stops thinking in terms of business as usual, with all of its weighing up of costs and benefits.  That is the thinking of a petit bourgeois, a Monsieur Prudhomme.  When perplexed Middlesex philosophy supporters wonder – how could a university such as Middlesex squander its best assets, they are the ones who are trapped in the worldview of an accountant.  The management or corporation has moved into its decisionist mode of state avant-garde.  The state as avant-garde obeys the logic of the sovereign, the suspending of the law, the ostentatious destruction of value.  In suspending the students and their professors, who cling to ‘neoliberal’, neo-utilitarian criteria of image, brand and sponsors – the corporation demonstrates how it has moved beyond economic grounds back into its ‘originary’ state.  In a sense ‘reverting to type’ while approaching what Agamben calls an “imperfect nihilism”.  The situation of abandonment in Middlesex is one “in which the law is in force without significance”.  “What, after all, is the structure of the sovereign ban if not that of a law that is in force but does not signify?”
[Agamben, Homo Sacer, op. cit. p. 51]  


4.  Infinite Ratings

In 2009 a similar attempt to close down a philosophy department was undertaken at Liverpool University – and successfully reversed. 
The senior management team and deans in Liverpool based their closure recommendations on the poor performance ratings of the department during the now notorious RAE 2008 – the same one in which Middlesex Philosophy scored so well.  Paradoxically, Liverpool’s poor ratings were perhaps their good fortune.

An article in the Guardian from 1oth March 2009 reported: “The local Labour MP Peter Kilfoyle lodged an early day motion in Parliament condemning the cuts.” [Anthea Lipsett, “Liverpool staff promise strike over subject cuts”]
The Liberal Democrat MP John Pugh disparaged the rating system itself as being unfair.  “I am dubious about assessment systems like the RAE.”  [John Pugh, “Liverpool’s cuts have not been thought through” in Mortarboard Blog, guardian.co.uk, 11 March 2009]

In May 2009 the philosophy department at Liverpool was granted a reprieve under the condition their ratings and research output improve.  The logic of the Liverpool administration had no chance to exceed the normal.  They never touched the sphere of the exception.  But in Middlesex the ratings are too good – they have already banished themselves from the logic of numbers and tables.  As their ratings are so good, though, they are reluctant to question the notion of ratings in itself. 
A precarious situation has arisen in which neither usefulness nor value have any meaning any more.  But the negation of value is also meaningless.  All that remains is the sovereign state of exception whose other body is the philosopher ‘homo sacer’.

Is it wise to rely so heavily on the ‘foreign legions’, the polymath defenders and supporters from abroad?  Machiavelli warns against such a strategy in strongest terms. [Discorsi, Book II, 20.]  Foreign auxiliaries stiffen the resistance of local warlords (management) and otherwise tend to occupy the terrain they have been invited to defend.
England is an island – the universities are still feudal corporations at whose apex some sort of ennobled personage, Marx’s proverbial “dung-hill aristocrat”, always has the last word.  The long hand of the monarchy insures the fidelity of university subjects.  Her Majesty’s representative in Middlesex is the Chancellor, the Rt Hon Lord Sheppard of Didgemore KCVO Kt.  Although the monarchy itself is a global capitalist enterprise, those whose duty it is to defend it must occasionally abandon a sheer business rationale. 

       

 

"Nos numerus sumus"

Axiom 2:  The exception is the parasite of the rule.
Axiom 2a:  The rule is the parasite of the exception.

In the philosophy of our time one has to study and analyze new structures of sophistry.  Lyotard accused Badiou of being “an absolute decisionist” – a new Carl Schmitt.  Badiou defended himself in an interview in “Infinite Thought” [“Ontology and Politics”, London, 2004] – saying he isn’t, or that his concept of the event is not.  Is decisionism a moment of the new sophists?  Badiou also speaks of the duplicity of philosophy – its inherent split between truth and sophisms, related to rhetoric [“The definition of philosophy”, in Badiou, op. cit.].  Badiou is a decisionist at least to the degree that he considers philosophy to be action – the singular action of the self-transforming philosopher.

Money and Revolution are both circulating entities or have something to do with circularity.  Is Revolution like money an apparition of the sphere of circulation?  The masses circulate on the street like money – “(…) in the exchange of looks and the exchange of rings (…)” (Gottfried Benn)  The gaze you catch en passant you will never see again – like the coin you leave in the café or the shop.  B H Levy implied something similar regarding the uniqueness of May ’68.  These events overthrew the whole of political philosophy, dissolving the relationship of above and below, between the ruler and the ruled.  Everyone became an activist.  Everyone on the street partook of the immortality of youth.  One could consider money in the same way – immortal in its perpetual identity with itself, unchanging general equivalent, above and below is only a question of quantity, not quality.  Ruling introduces a difference of quality into the indifferent mass.  Not ruling is the lack of this quality.  In May ’68 politics as a qualitative sphere was momentarily replaced by the quantitative liberation of the masses on the street.  But this moment in which masses and money equalled one another was very short.  Soon afterward all the qualitative relations of power were restored – those intrinsically bound up with the juridical, the domain most resistant to any numerical onslaught.  The juridical is the bad imperative towering over the individual, but addressing each and every singular as that which exceeds the individual in the most personal and relentless fashion.  The Law unravels the revolt-mass into atomic parts and then crushes them.  The juridical is the profane imitation of the ‘categorical imperative’, the ‘law of the law’ which includes the ‘outlaw’ (each particle of the revolt-mass is a singular ‘outlaw’) as the one to whom the law is addressed.  As a singular ‘outlaw’ for whom the laws are actually conceived, the mass as singular but not identical particles is “abandoned (…) to the entire rigor of the law.”  [Jean-Luc Nancy, The Kategorein of Excess, A Finite Thinking, Edited S. Sparks, California, 2003, p. 140.  One hears the intonations of ‘homo sacer’ in this view of the outlaw in relation to the law before the law – the imperative.]

Even worse, in his abandonment, the ‘outlaw’ is overwhelmed by the sublimity of the law ‘inside of him’ (Kant’s categorical imperative) – of the ‘ruler inside of him’.  The ‘respect’ for the law he carries inside mirrors (is a model or mimicry of) the obedience of a subject to his ruler – if he overthrows this ruler he implicitly destroys himself, self-executioner.  [Nancy, op. cit., p. 148.  Nancy quotes Kant, Religion Ak 6: 49: “The majesty of the moral law (as of the law of Sinai) instils awe (not dread, which repels, nor charm, which invites familiarity); and in this instance, since the ruler resides within us, this respect, as of a subject toward his ruler, awakens a sense of the sublimity of our own destiny (…)”]

The state or sovereign is the metaphysical subject, the true subject as opposed to the finite singular.


The Singular Universal as the Inferior Subject

Structure: There seems a natural development from the “two of love” to the “inferior subject” or “singular” – Kierkegaard’s all encompassing major category – as a result of forfeiting love.
A question for the subject – is the unconscious subjective or objective?  One speaks of the stream of consciousness – but what is the stream of the unconscious?  Does it stream at all?  Is the unconscious rather unmoved, immobile?  The singular is not inferior in itself, it draws its inferiority from its relation to the world, in particular the world as state or the softer version – community.  The singular is a microcosm, the state a macrocosm.  For Plato each regime had its own particular set of human characters.  And yet the state like Swedenborg’s le grand homme is a spiritual entity – an idea.  The human character arising in a state is not spiritual, hence inferior to the state.   Le petit homme, the singular can never reach le grand homme, symbol of the whole, the cosmos.  The unattainable spirituality of the state explains the magical significance of the ‘political’ for contemporary philosophy, especially that which traces its roots to Plato (Badiou, Agamben, Nancy).

French political philosophy remains true to itself – it is not as easily overthrown as the regime it describes.  The idea of what comprises a revolution is also part of political philosophy, at least since the French Revolution.  Rivarol, who was a contemporary of the French Revolution as Levy was of May ’68 characterized the events of his time in a similar fashion – although of course he was a royalist not a sans-culotte.  For Badiou’s generation May ’68 is so precious and unforgettable because it is a means of forgetting the ignominy of 1940-1944, disguising and redeeming it.

Rivarol’s definition of Revolution: “(…) and when a people separates itself from its tool, that is from its government, then there is a revolution.”  [In: Die Französische Moralisten, translated and edited by F. Schalk, Bremen, 1963, p. 163]
Strangely, Rivarol the royalist sees the people as the source of power and violence, perhaps under the direct impression of the revolution.  “People=Force, Government=Tool.  The Unity of Force+Tool=Political Power.”  A propensity for mathematical or formalized thinking is quite typical for French state theory until this day (one understands Badiou somewhat better).  Power—Tool=Revolution.  It is refreshing that Rivarol has no need either to condemn or glorify holy or demonic revolutionary violence, Badiou’s beloved Terror.  Levy describes the interruption of the unity of ‘force and tool’ euphorically, but his concept of revolution is identical with Rivarol’s.  May ’68 was not the ‘overthrow’ of political philosophy, rather the confirmation of the classical theory of revolution and the state.  

It would seem, the only utopias still possible are purely quantitative.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chassidic Planets

Joseph Roth’s literature comes from the East, from the border of a great empire where miracles and storytellers belong to the everyday world.  He was a “Badchan”, the eastern Jewish combination of joker, fool, philosopher and storyteller.  But he was also a realist in the sense of Balzac and “Thousand and One Nights” for whom the detail is not a symbol, but rather itself the concrete totality. 

In a short tribute to a fellow “Kolporteur”, Egon Erwin Kisch, Roth expresses the intention of his own poetics: “Egon Erwin Kisch is not a roving reporter; that is only a nickname, that he gave himself not without self-irony; he is a conscientious and profound journalist.  What makes him a superb writer and his reportage – a literary oeuvre, is – the materialist Kisch will hopefully forgive me – the grace, the grace of the true writer, which consists in a way of describing reality, without injuring the truth; that despite the documentary reality one does not neglect the truth.” (Joseph Roth, Prague, 1934)       
(“Egon Erwin Kisch ist kein rasender Reporter; das ist ein Spitzname, den er sich nicht ohne Selbstironie gegeben hat; er ist ein gewissenhafter und gründlicher Berichterstatter.  Was ihn aber zum vorzüglichen Schriftsteller macht und seine Berichterstattungen zu literarischen Werken, ist – der Materialist Kisch möge es mir nachsehen - die Gnade, die Gnade des echten Schriftstellers, die darin besteht, daß man die Wirklichkeit beschreibt, ohne die Wahrheit zu verletzen; daß man trotz der dokumentarischen Wirklichkeit nicht versäumt, die Wahrheit zu sagen.” Joseph Roth Werke, Band IV, Amsterdam, 1975, p. 286)

One hears a Hegelian phenomenology in this brief credo – the truth is real, reality is not necessarily the truth.  Roth’s narrative truth does not however lie in an exemplification of a philosophy of history.  Rather it is below – the subversive unwritten manuscripts of “stillen Dichter” (silent poets) – in the shabby world of the eastern Jewish small town (Shtetl) and its saving Chassidic graces.  His wisdom resides in the secret knowledge of the powerless, of the slaves, that behind every mask of power are the grimaces of Job.  “Also you are Job”, whispered the old man called “Heiliger Vater” (Holy Father) to Napoleon after Waterloo in Roth’s “Die Hundert Tage” (The Hundred Days).  The recognition of forms of misfortune is a privilege of the weak.  This tale appears from its other end in Ernst Bloch’s “Spuren”.  Bloch quotes an eastern Jewish story meant as a joke, only because its earnestness belies an uncanny vertigo in the seamless plane. 

The story entitled “Fall ins Jetzt” (Fall in Now) in “Spuren” goes as follows:
Some Jews were conversing in a prayer house in a small town.  They were discussing what each one would wish if an angel were to appear.  The rabbi said he would wish to be rid of his cough.  I wish I would marry off my daughter, said the second.  A third wished he did not have a daughter, but rather a son who could take over his business.  Finally the rabbi turned to a beggar sitting on the bench in the back and asked what his desire was – for certainly he did not look like he was without a wish.  The beggar’s wish takes the form of an imaginary chronicle leading up to the present.  I wish, said he, I were a great king like King Solomon but without his luck in war.  My armies are defeated, my cities and forests are set on fire, the enemy is at the gates of my palace with its onyx, marble and sandalwood.  I am alone in the throne room with sceptre and crown, deserted by my court and nobles, I hear the people in the streets crying out for my blood.  I must flee the enemies invading my land with nothing but the shirt on my back, I cross the border and mingle among people who do not know me and am saved, “(…) und seit gestern abend sitze ich hier.” (“and since yesterday evening I am sitting here”, Ernst Bloch, Spuren, Frankfurt, 1983, p. 99)  The rabbi is perturbed by this wish in which again the beggar loses everything.  The beggar interjects – I would have something, the shirt on my back.

Bloch emphasizes the interaction of a dream past and the present – the convolutions introduced by the wish-form as a historical conjecture with an ending in the ‘real’ present.  This is however the essence of the storyteller, the epic ballad – the fictive past is transformed by its telling in the present.  The present harbours all possible pasts as its story, not unlike the intervention of the dream in reality.  As de Nerval says: “Le rêve est une seconde vie.”  Cervantes placed both dream and reality in the present.  The dream images of Don Quixote do not make him ridiculous – his dreams derisively reveal the material squalor of the world through which Don Quixote rides blinded by dreams.  The blindness to a ‘documentary reality’ enables the vision of another reality.  The supposed insanity of the hero of Gustav Meyrink’s “The Golem”, his sensual perception of “Grauen” (horror), is expressive of the ghetto’s most tangible form – the room without the door.

Roth, eastern Jewish K.u.K loyalist, ‘hanging on Franz Joseph’s sideburns’ (Itzik Manger) reflects another mythological truth, that of the German fairy tales.  His Napoleon is the emperor of the people, chosen and crowned by them.  He is the Volkskaiser, the sleeping emperor, who will awaken for the final victory to free the poor and oppressed.  An erotic bond exists between the people and their redeemer.  Without this belief the beggar just sits there – the present collapses into itself.  He is a naked vulnerable Job without a past and therefore without a future. 

Roth shared the longings for messianic redemption of eastern European Chassidism.  He remained a son of the Shtetl, home of those strange figures without an address and visible occupation who people his novels and whose historical limitations he described most aptly.  They were also his own.  “Der arme Jude ist der konservativste Mensch unter allen Armen der Welt.  Er ist geradezu eine Garantie für die Erhaltung der alten Gesellschaftsordnung.” (“The poor Jew is the most conservative person amongst all the poor of the world.  He is the perfect guarantee for the preservation of the old social order.” Joseph Roth, “Juden auf Wanderschaft”, Werke, Band III, Amsterdam, 1975, p. 321)  This conservatism was perhaps the greatest misfortune of the nation of Jobs.  Messianic transcendentalism was only exceeded by fatalism and submissiveness in daily life.  Chiliastic redemption was a local rumour, possibly true in the next town but never in one’s own.

The names of Kisch, Meyrink and Bloch manifest the perimeter of Roth’s narrative world.  Like them, he charts the fluctuations of an objective cruel fate –Glück und Unglück (happiness and unhappiness, luck and unluckiness), power and powerlessness, master and slave – but always leaving a crevice for a wish or a joke or a Houdini like escape.  Roth saw not only the existing and coming destruction of the world into which he was born.  He was not only a beggar with just a shirt on his back.  The truth of Job is also the turn of fate, a redemption which infuses the vagaries of ordinary people with cosmological design.  “As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.” (“Solange es noch einen Bettler gibt, solange gibt es noch Mythos.” Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, Frankfurt, 1983, [K 6, 4], p. 505)

 

 

 

 

 

                   

Fidelity Limited

1. Bourgeois Amorism
Adorno notes a seeming paradox in bourgeois life and love.  “Everywhere bourgeois society insists on the exerting of will; only love should be exempt from will, the pure immediacy of emotion.” (Theodor W. Adorno, “Constanze” in Minima Moralia, Frankfurt, 1980, p.226)
Being outside or beyond will means having no definite cause or effect – or that Eros is the union of cause and effect.  This paradox is not so mysterious.  As portrayed by Adorno bourgeois love seems to suggest a utopian enclave of the natural, the non-commercial, in the midst of a social organism governed by interest and economy.  But there are simpler reasons for the removing of love from the sphere of the will.  The medical encyclopedia divulges the open secret – when a man is experiencing erectile dysfunction – the inability to achieve the stiffness necessary for intercourse, no amount of will can give him an erection.  On the contrary the more he tries the less he is likely to succeed.
“In most cases, the physical examination does not detect any reason for impotence, most frequently it is caused by emotional inhibitions, for instance the unconscious rejection of the partner, an earlier frightening experience, fear of failure etc.  These disturbances require an appropriate psychological therapy, (…) to eliminate impotence, because it does not help, when the affected person is of the opinion he could overcome these emotional inhibitions with a special expenditure of will.” (“Impotenz” in Knaurs Gesundheitslexikon, 1970, p.481)

Indirectly one acknowledges the norm of the “expenditure of will” even where it is absurd to expect will to have any effect.  Abstaining from will is in this case a higher level of the exertion of will – using will to hold back will.  The dilemma of impotence is reflected in the tendency to want to reverse the will taboo for Eros – to have Eros adhere to the will as the principle of action.

The will has its limits in the physical and the related psychic occlusions  – especially all those somatic functions which are more or less part of the vegetative nervous system.  One cannot will oneself to sleep either.  One could equally claim – bourgeois society has an incongruously naturalized view of sleep.  Of course the pharmaceutical industry as the embodiment of the Social Corporate Will manufactures chemical aids (anti-depressants, barbiturates, Viagra, sex change etc) as quasi-will to denaturalize all the involuntary acts and conditions of the human organism.  Adorno confines himself to a sentimental view of Eros in this passage – assuming that the physical performance is a given (guaranteed).  He indulges in a strangely inorganic non-physical view of human sexuality.  But love without physis would have little significance for the individual or society.  Eros never has anything to do with will – rather with desire, equally unpredictable and mysterious.  Will is a secondary force – needed for the attaining of the secret object of desire.  But once the lover is in possession of the beloved – no amount of will can guarantee the duration or continuity of desire.

One would rather consider the relationship of pleasure (Lust) and will – as a corollary of the classical pair of intellect and will.  Pleasure is implicit in Bruno’s idea of the heroic passions.  Pleasure is the goal of an action as well as being the impetus of the drive itself.  Power is also the unfolding of pleasure – as in the will to power.  In general, one imagines the will as a force (power) for the augmenting of pleasure. 

2.  Sprezzatura
It is not necessarily the case that will is even in such demand in all other spheres of bourgeois life – one impresses one’s circles far more with ‘unearned luck’ than with petty ‘Strebertum’ (careerism).  Wealth and position should seem to fall into one’s lap – even if the lucky one has been indefatigably scheming and toiling at success behind the scenes.  Will is an ideal in Germanic society (“Triumph des Willens”), less so in Anglo-Saxon.  Will is mostly necessary as a kind of glorified ‘secondary virtue’ – one compensates for other failings – of talent, beauty, breeding with a strong will.  A strong will appears as something each individual can muster or fabricate as a result of his own labor – in a sense this is an infinite regress – to obtain a strong will one must have a strong will.  Will is also neutral – not an objective in a real sense, a mere workhorse.  A strong will says nothing about what one achieves by its application.  Any enterprise totally reliant on will has an air of desperation from the start.  For this reason aristocratic society looks down on effort – closely related to will.  Effort like work is plebeian – as an aristocrat one is born into a state in which will is unnecessary.  Most important is honor, a dignified ‘chasse à gloire’ and the avoidance of ennui especially in carrying out the courtier’s duties of office.  Baltasar Gracián describes the dreariness of a courtier’s life in his “Art of Worldly Wisdom”:
“It is a tedious occupation, the governing of people, but even more so when they are fools or stupid.  One needs a double reason with those who have none.  Unbearable are those offices which require the whole person, employing him during a set number of hours and for a specific matter.  The better ones, causing no feelings of tedium, mix seriousness with variety; diversity is refreshing.  The most prestigious offices are those where dependence is less, or at least more remote.  The worst are those for which you must sweat in this world but even more in the next.”
(“Es ist eine mühsame Beschäftigung, Menschen zu regieren, und vollends Narren oder Dummköpfe.  Doppelten Verstand hat man nötig bei denen, die keinen haben.  Unerträglich aber sind die Ämter, welche den ganzen Menschen in Anspruch nehmen, zu gezählten Stunden und bei bestimmter Materie: besser sind die, welche keinen Überdruß verursachen, indem sie den Ernst mit Mannigfaltigkeit versetzen; denn die Abwechslung muntert auf.  Des größten Ansehens genießen die, wobei die Abhängigkeit geringer, oder doch entfernter ist.  Die schlimmsten aber sind, die, wegen deren man in dieser und noch mehr in jener Welt schwitzen muß.” Balthasar Gracian’s Hand-Orakel und Kunst der Weltklugheit, Aus dessen Werken gezogen von Don Vincencio Juan de Lastanosa und aus dem spanischen Original treu und sorgfältig übersetzt von Arthur Schopenhauer, Essen und Stuttgart, 1985, p.85.)

Jünger in his “science of the excess” sees the will as an obstacle to the proper state of Heiterkeit, disinvoltura of power, of the destructive character, based rather on luck, happiness and magic than on will.  He departs markedly from the “Faustian” way.  Not in the reliance on magic, but in the teleology of power. Jünger like Carl Schmitt try to escape the drab feudalistic SS ‘Nibelungentreue’ (fidelity of the Nibelungs) by plundering the Baroque for the characteristics of their ideal figure of the fascist ‘courtier’.  Disinvoltura is an aristocratic ideal – similar to sprezzatura (nonchalance, casualness) considered a primary quality of a courtier in the baroque age.  Nothing should seem to require much effort.  Baldassare Castiglione was the first to expound upon the virtues of sprezzatura in his portrait of the ideal Renaissance gentleman.  If it is the case that bourgeois society allows love the privilege of eluding will – then this is a relic of a bygone aristocratic sensibility.  Willless doing is also implicit in the enigmatic concept of the “inoperative community” (Jean Luc Nancy).   Just like the relation of no relation – interestingly Badiou sees this as characterising the ‘scene of two’ of love – Agamben as the definition of the ban, of abandonment.

3.  “Thou shalt love”
The exercise of will in love is fidelity, says Adorno.  Society distorts wishes to ‘spontaneously’ flow in the direction of what is approved or to follow the dictates of interests.  Love, which is not subsumed under this dictate, is stable, enduring, “hartnäckig” (stubborn) in opposition to the command of fashion.  So ironically the immediacy of love as a bourgeois institution is particularly suited to the need to be free for society – freely disposable.  Whoever thinks he or she is following the ‘voice of the heart’ – falling in and out of love accordingly, is in reality a pliant tool of bourgeois interests. 

Only love, which transcends this inevitable bourgeois fleetingness of any attachments – even to the point of obsession, resists those interests.  All this seems to be a very noble and laudable view of love – almost in the sense of Heloise and Abelard and all other great loves which defied society even at the cost of the physical destruction of the lovers.  But Adorno has burdened love with an additional compulsory work which is sure to kill it or any Eros – insubordination against society. “The command of fidelity, issued by society, is a means of unfreedom, but only through fidelity can freedom accomplish insubordination against the command of society.”
 (“Der Befehl zur Treue, den die Gesellschaft erteilt, ist Mittel zur Unfreiheit, aber nur durch Treue vollbringt Freiheit Insubordination gegen den Befehl der Gesellschaft.”, Adorno, op. cit., p. 227)

Love erupting in its unexpected fashion can certainly cause disorder in established caste and class systems.  This is however more a side effect of love – leading as a matter of course though to conflict and often annihilation – in the case of great drama – Aida, Venice Saved, Romeo and Juliet, La Traviata, Tosca, Tristan and Isolde, Francesca of Rimini and Paolo Malatesta, Anna Karenina, Chekhov’s “Lady with the Toy Dog”, Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas – where does it not?  Clandestinity is merely part of the mechanics of the tryst, the assignation.  But Adorno would instrumentalise this ‘second nature’ of disturbing love.  The lovers who through their all-consuming obsessive love, as a secondary effect, disrupt those social and political bonds resting on arranged marriage or class endogamy, should now consider this disruption of social order their raison d’être.   Whereas, love resembles art in its privileged status – having no other purpose beyond itself.  This privilege, Adorno would imply, should at least in the case of love be suspended or abolished.  Love must now serve the obsession of social emancipation. 

“But the one, who, under the illusion of thoughtless spontaneity and proud of a supposed candour, abandons herself totally to what she thinks is the voice of the heart, and runs off, when she no longer thinks she hears it, is, especially in this sovereign autonomy, a tool of society.  Passive, without knowing it, she registers the numbers being spun in the roulette of interests.  In betraying her lover, she betrays herself.” (ibid.)

Adorno would perpetuate a kind of vassal bondage in his claim that the lover who stops loving is a traitor of self and love.  Fidelity in love as a revolt against bourgeois inconstancy seems almost a retrograde feudal gesture of voluntary servitude.

Badiou admittedly constructs much of his concept of the subject within the “dialectic of being and event” upon the ‘institution of fidelity’ arising from the “amorous encounter”.  “The word ‘fidelity’ refers directly to the amorous relationship, but I would rather say that it is the amorous relationship which refers, at the most sensitive point of individual experience, to the dialectic of being and event, the dialectic whose temporal ordination is proposed by fidelity.” (Alain Badiou, Being and Event, London, 2007, p. 232)
Although Adorno and Badiou are otherwise hardly comparable as thinkers – they seem to briefly concur in this view of amorous fidelity as a kind of ‘revolutionary institution’ within society.  Of course Badiou rests the whole of his theory of the subject upon this tenuous notion of amorous fidelity, whereas Adorno restricts himself to a critique of infidelity as false emancipation in bourgeois society.  Badiou seems to be oblivious to the institutionalized deformations of amorous fidelity or infidelity so apparent to Adorno.  He simply extrapolates from the empirical amorous encounter and its particular fidelities and infidelities to form his “generic fidelity” emerging in the aftermath of an abstract event – although the empirical model (the amorous relationship) is preformed and distorted by the interventions of capitalist expediencies.  Badiou seems to hint at a degree of historical variability in his fidelity-apparatus – but he does not question the specific capitalist form- determinations of fidelity itself:  “Are there, for example, events, and thus interventions, which are such that the fidelity binding itself together therein is necessarily spontaneist or dogmatic or generic?” (Being and Event, op. cit., p. 238)  Badiou’s system though is inherently torn between what he calls in “Manifesto for Philosophy” the positive ‘nihilism’ of capitalism, its “rupturing of the traditional figure of the bond” (which as he says destroys “the substantiality of bonds and the perenniality of essential relations”) and his own key concept of fidelity.  The proposed adhesive function of fidelity seems strangely undermined within a situation of capitalism defined by the systematic erasure of any kind of bond.  One is tempted to observe – if capitalism liberates philosophy from the tyranny of the bond, as Badiou declares in “Manifesto for Philosophy” then the truth process as he conceives it can hardly be contingent on a subject’s fidelity to an event.  Such fidelity would be nullified by capital like any other bond.

Perhaps, it is not the true lover who endangers society actually or potentially as much as the untrue lover of the type of Don Juan who uses the energy of love to mock and destroy unshakeable authorities such as the Commendatore without himself being touched by it (love).  He is the real unrepentant disloyal revolutionary; his is the power of infidelity, the unpredictable breaking of allegiance.  At the very least Don Juan practices the Aristippian system of the archetypical poet Horace – not to let things subject him, rather to subject things first. “Nunc in Aristippi furtim praecepta relabor, et mihi res, non me rebus, submittere conor.” (Letter to Maecenas in Horazens Briefe, translated and edited by C.M.Wieland, Nördlingen, 1986, p. 44)  

The insistence on fidelity seems out of character for Adorno – as if love itself had become a law binding someone who once has loved always to love the same object.  Certainly the absurdity of this dictate is obvious.  It is as if a sly Kierkegaardian note had crept into Adorno’s argument, inspired by his wish to condemn the false freedom of bourgeois society.  Adorno ridicules precisely this impossible ‘forcing’ of love in an earlier essay entitled “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love”.  “This very impossibility becomes to him the core of the command.  “Thou shalt love” just because the “Shalt” cannot be applied to love.  This is the absurd, the wreckage of the finite by the infinite, which Kierkegaard hypostatizes.  The command to love is commanded because of its impossibility.  This, however, amounts to nothing less than the annihilation of the love and the installment of sinister domination.  The command to love degenerates into a mythical taboo against preference and natural love. The protest of love against law is dropped.  Love itself becomes a matter of mere law, even if it may be cloaked as the law of God.  Kierkegaard’s super-Christianity tilts over into paganism.”
(T.W. Adorno, On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love, in: Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Herausgegeben von Max Horkheimer, Jahrgang 8, 1939-1940, München, 1980, p.418)

In Adorno’s later reflections in “Constanze” (Minima Moralia) a taboo is established by extant love, not by a transcendental commandment – although the old love ceases to move the lover, it has created a precedence, which cannot be overturned by new preferences.  Or – the new preferences are mere apparitions, implants of the interests of capital.

But even without punishment, in the event of the violation of such a ‘law of love’, there are always consequences worse than any punishment.  Who punishes you when you don’t obey the Law “Thou shalt love”?