The Myth of the 'Philosophical Investigations'

1.  The World (language) is a Labyrinth in which the Lover and the Beloved continuously approach one another upon labyrinthine ways which equally continuously move them apart. 

The Purpose of the Investigations is to create a labyrinth of the “We” (‘language is a labyrinth of ways’) into which the ‘you’ is guided – conducted – seduced.  Every ‘you’ is a potential beloved of the lover waiting in his labyrinth. 
The lover=the Minotaur=the monster of the labyrinth.

Out of the ruins (of disciples) one builds a labyrinth – the centreless universe – the all-devouring monad – the plural monad.

Only by losing oneself in the labyrinth can one be found by the lover – you have to want to get lost before the lover can find you in the labyrinth.  Wanting to be lost creates in the potential beloved a vertigo of self-abandonment, surpassing any other sort of betrayal.  One places one’s own genetic uniqueness in the service of the genetic destroyer.  Is that a manifestation of the ‘death instinct’?  

The labyrinth is dark – darkest of all is the lover.
The Beloved is the light in the labyrinth.

The “We” is a labyrinth of (disembodied) voices – not necessarily in unison – but occasionally punctuating the darkness with a chorus-refrain or an amen – spoken as ‘we’ and at once in “Übereinstimmung”; the intimation, attuned and coinciding, coaxing and chiding the ‘you’ – the beloved – to ‘go on’. 

The voices of the labyrinth were once ‘you’.  They are now ‘we’ – the voices of the damned – the ghosts of the previous beloveds.  Once ‘you’ becomes a voice of ‘we’ – he becomes a previous beloved – no longer the present beloved.  These are the voices of the remembered loves.  The ‘We’ is the chorus of dead loves.

When the ‘you’ of the beloved becomes a voice of the ‘we’ in the labyrinth, the ‘you’ dies as a beloved but the lover=philosophy dies for the ‘you’ as well.  Or the ‘you’ does not know itself anymore.  It is an atom of the ‘we’ of the seducing chorus.  Which is the same thing as saying – the lover has died for the ‘you’.  Only the next ‘you’ will revive the lover for the time in which the ‘you’ still resists becoming a ‘we’.

For the lover is also the hunter of the beloved – and what the lover hunts is the Will.
This leads to Bruno – the myth of Actaeon.  The chorus of dead loves are those who have received the mystical ‘mors osculi’ – death of the kiss. 

2.  In the negative cosmology of Bruno, Hell is part of God.  His ideas finally entered English thought some 50 years after his death during the time of the English Revolution via the ‘teutonick philosophy’ of Jakob Böhme.  The annihilation of the soul – as portrayed in the drama of Faust – is a desired end.  Mystical enlightenment comes only in the deepest darkness.  Divine grace is to be found in the depths of hell because that is where “God shall retire himself within his own Center, to be truly Hell.” (“An Introduction to the Teutonick Philosophie”, C. Hotham, March 3, 1646 – Dispute at Commencement in Cambridge)

Ludwig Wittgenstein revived certain aspects of the ‘teutonick philosophy’ when he began his teaching career at Cambridge in the 1930’s.  He found many young disciples willing to follow him along the ‘via negationis’, entrusting him with their malleable souls.   “My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul.  I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Part II)
In the drama of their souls Wittgenstein’s role is never perfectly fixed.  Sometimes he appears to be Faust, sometimes Faust’s tactless crude apprentice Wagner, but more often Mephistopheles.  Wittgenstein is not evil, but he sees with the eyes of the Evil One – very far.  Who is really in charge of the obedience of ‘bare life’ if not the Master of Hell – where and by whom are the damned punished?  God may write the Law, but Satan enforces it.  Wittgenstein is the mystical personality – he transmutes evil into good and good into evil until the question of good and evil collapses into absurdity.  One of Wittgenstein’s sources for his ‘negative political theology’ is the vision of Church jurisdiction expressed by Ivan Fyodorovich in Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov”.  In a discussion in the cell of the holy man Starez, the simple monk Vasij sketches the utopia of the Church-State:  “It’s not the Church which will turn into the State (…)that’s Rome and its dream.  That is the third temptation of the devil!  On the contrary, the state turns into the Church, advances itself to Churchhood, and becomes a Church covering the whole earth.  This World Church is completely opposed to the ultramontanism of Rome and is reserved for the Orthodoxy on earth.  Light will come to the world from the east.” (Dostoyevsky, Die Brüder Karamasow, München, 1978, p. 93)

The mystical personality is a person who has a general reputation for being very virtuous, self-sacrificing, almost unnaturally good, no matter how much evidence to the contrary.  Anything he does or is no matter how remote from the conventional notion of good will always be interpreted in a positive or logical light.  This is the very essence of his negative influence.  The ‘essence of negation’ which eluded Wittgenstein in his philosophical writings – is captured in his life.  He speaks through his interpreters and they declare his words to be oracular.  The first sacrifice required of Wittgenstein readers is sacrificium intellectus.  As Cavell writes in “The Claim of Reason”: “(…) Wittgenstein’s writing is, as certain of his readers had shrewdly suspected from the beginning, beyond rational criticism.” (Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason, Oxford, 1979, p.20)
His personality is a paradox because his kind of dialectical harm, which is generally recognized as good, is a cause of holiness in others.

The proof of true love is the breaking of the will of the other.  Through his ability to break the will of others, without necessarily imposing his own will in its stead; the mystical personality is a prime mover of fate.  He is the embodiment of the negative principle.  He nullifies his ‘victims’, he does not posses them.  The negative principle is not the essence of the mystical personality – it is his prestabilized fate.  He may try to evade it in his youth when it is less obvious – being simply disguised by youth and its excessive vigour.  When the lethargy and solitude of age set in, the true mystical personality begins to shine through.  The mystical personality can no longer hide behind the living, it is reclaimed by the worlds beyond. 

The ‘riddle of evil’ is very close to the ‘riddle of holiness’.  To measure their nearness one must first familiarize oneself with certain principles and methods derived from a negative theology of coincidentia oppositorum (Nikolaus Cusanus, Giordano Bruno, Jakob Böhme) 

Negative Theology:  God is not redemption.  The Anti-Messiah.  Why shouldn’t there be a separate anti-force, which brings the Anti-Redemption.  With all the magnificence of the Redeemer?  Not Lucifer – he isn’t the expected one.  But a figure about whom prophecies have been uttered – a figure of the future.  As Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says: “Oh that someone would save them from their Saviour!”.  The characteristics of the Not Redeemer should be equally recognizable as those of the Redeemer.  The first axiom of negative theology – God is the Not-Redeemer, the star of not-redemption.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Waiters' Game

The waiters’ game of cards in a back room in yellow light on a cold quiet night in late winter.  An ordinary night scene without fireworks or stars.

One player arrived smoking as we turned the corner.  The room belongs to a black man.  They will wake up at midday.  The host will prepare breakfast for the losers.  You can see his profile, another’s face and some hands.

P.S.  There is no waiters’ game now, no waiters, no hotel where the waiters work.  The room is slowly dying with the rest of the corner building.  The waiters have flown south forever.

Omens of Resignation

A sort of omen – I looked for the meaning of Goethe’s concept of “Entsagung” (resignation, renunciation) and read in a “suppressed maxime” of de La Rochefoucauld that “One need not be astonished that self-love sometimes unites with the strictest renunciation.”  Then I noticed in his chronology, that he is the co-author of a novel remarkable for its “morality of renunciation” – “La Princesse de Clèves”.  In the novel the heroine renounces marriage with her lover, out of obedience to the wishes of an unloved dead husband.  Was de La Rochefoucauld’s ‘Faustian’ dialectic of self-love (l’amour-propre) one of the sources of Goethe’s peculiar concept of renunciation?  Self-love according to de La Rochefoucauld can even form alliances with its own enemies and work towards its own ruin.  But if self-love ruins itself in a certain place through renunciation – it is only because at the same time somewhere else it has already re-established itself.
Madame de La Fayette, the presumed author of “La Princesse de Clèves”, and her close friend de la Rochefoucauld were under the austere influence of Jansenists.

The key omen was that de La Rochefoucauld died on March 17th 1680 and on another March 17th I felt the urge to re-read some of his maximes – especially about the myth of the contempt for death – “de la fausseté du mépris de la mort”.

P.S.  La Princesse de Clèves reincarnates as the “Marschallin”, Princess Marie Thérèse von Werdenberg in Hofmannsthal’s “Der Rosenkavalier”.  The Marschallin resigns herself to losing her young lover, helping him towards matrimonial bliss with the lovely daughter of the “parvenu”.
The drama of “Entsagung” turns into a bittersweet farce in the style of the old Viennese theatre.  

 

Norman Habits

Fate seems to reside upon habits.  Habits are stronger than truth, because their sheer persistence seems to defy refutation.  They appear to self-verify through daily or regular use.  Like a scientific procedure, habits are repeatable with the same or similar results.  But they are also like fate as they conduct you in their repetitive cyclical fashion incrementally along your unalterable inexorable route.

Aristotle calls habits hexis, although this word has many interpretations  - it usually refers to a ‘state’ which is nearly permanent, a kind of second nature.  Habits increase the general level of predictability in human life, as quasi-individual conventions they acquire the status of instinct.  In Aristotle’s Metaphysics hexis is opposed to energeia (activity or operation) – as whatever energy once entered the creation of a habit is thoroughly digested in the shortest of time. 

I have lost my habit of reading at the breakfast table – although I used to learn all sorts of useless information from it.  In particular about habits.  Habitual activities tend to produce habitual results.  Losing the habit may have increased my stock of energeia, or at least demonstrates that one can reverse the flow of nature or quasi-nature.  I never tried to lose the habit - it was probably driven out by a new and stronger habit.  Nietzsche advocates “short habits” thinking that one could distract a repeated action from becoming a habit by cutting it short.  A habit does rely on the temporal dimension but its shortness is no guarantee against its fullness or longevity.  Indeed it is within the realm of conceivability that a habit takes place only once.  Everything else about Nietzsche was long or at least not short.  His thought would be finally thought through in a thousand years, no philosophical system big enough to contain it.
He clung to friendship and family like a Virginia creeper, and one knows there is nothing one can do to annihilate those plants.  Most indestructible of all is his euphoria, it is no short habit.  Habits have the virtue of not always being in evidence; they are discreet if largely recurrent.
A lost cause is also a habit – any fidelity to such a cause merely rehearses a played out melodrama.
Something which is always there, like gaiety, is certainly not a habit, but it is not short either.  Aristotle would have referred to such a semi-permanent state as hexis as well.  But this is confusing.  Something which is always there, never goes away, needs no cause, in this case groundless good cheer, lacks the sine qua non of hexis – privation or a time in which the habit is in abeyance.  No matter how long a habit, even an infinite one – a habit (whatever size, quantity) will never reach “the sharpest point of infinity”. (“la pointe… plus acérée… de l’Infini”, Baudelaire)

One is lucky if one is able to choose to give up one’s habits, more likely the years will take them away, as one can learn from Horace.  “Each year of life as it passes takes something away from us as its prey: they have bereaved me of jest and game, they have deducted wine and kisses and now they wrestle the lyre from my hand, what else do you want?” (“Singula de nobis anni praedantur euntes; eripuere jocos, venerem, convivial, ludum; tendent extorquere poemata: qid faciam vis?” Letter to Julius Florus, Horazens Briefe, translated and edited by C.M. Wieland, Nördlingen, 1986, p. 508)

Once at the breakfast table I learned an old Norman rhyme about habits.
“lever a cinq, diner a neuf,
souper a cinq, coucher a neuf
fait vivre dans nonant et neuf.”
(rise at five, dine at nine,
sup at five, to bed at nine,
you’ll live to be ninety nine.”)
The Normans in Britain lived in their castles according to this strict routine.  Their habits distinguished them from the Saxons whom they conquered.  Were their habits instrumental to this conquest?  The historian G. Macaulay Trevelyan calls them “methodical barbarians”, suggesting they were people of strong habits but not civilised.  Life in a Norman castle was not very refined.  The habit of cooking everything in a pie is at least 6oo years old, as is the use of ginger as flavouring.  Recipes tended to hew everything to dust (hens and pork together) mix with breadcrumbs and egg yolk and boil.  Retainers of both sexes slept in a hall on rushes around a fire.  Everything seems dirtier and less comfortable than in the palaces of Ulysses or Menelaus.  The Saxons were in awe of these sombre piles – never having seen a castle before the Normans arrived on the island.  “The Saxons were slow and difficult to move: they were farmers and herdsmen, who did not mind fighting, if their crops were in and they had nothing to do; and it was difficult to keep them together as an army, unless the call for their services were very urgent.  They (…) thought very little about Art, or Literature and, so long as their neighbours left them alone, showed little interest in other people’s doings.  Saxons lacked the art of combination, and it was because of this they failed against the Normans.” - according to an illustrated children’s book published in 1918. (Marjorie and C.D.B. Quennell, A History of Everyday Things in England, London, 1918,
p. 2)

It occurred to me that a few hundred years before William the Conqueror came from France to trounce the dull-witted artless brutal Saxons another Frank (William was a Norman but ‘Frankified’) massacred and subjugated the Saxons on the continent during a kind of medieval Verdun.  The other Frank was Charlemagne.  The Saxons were so easy to beat because they had learned nothing from the Romans about fortifications.  They tore down all the walled cities or settlements built by the Romans in Britain.  They did not like being confined, preferring to live in clearings in the woods, near their fields.  They only knew how to swarm out in hordes but had little perseverance and only enough engineering to erect some flimsy wooden palisades.  Their idea of fortification was to dig long ditches – like the trench warfare of World War One.  The battle was fought already halfway into the grave.  The Normans fought from above – from the castle mount, on top of which was the keep, on horseback with spear and sword.  The Saxons were as helpless as the Incas or Aztecs (who had a higher civilisation) at the appearance of the conquistadors.  Whether they heeded the cold ‘bells of Angelus’ or warmed themselves at the fire of Woden’s blood sacrifice – all the Saxons succumbed to the Norman habit.  Even before the Norman invasion – the bells used to lead the Danish ‘host’ to where the unmapped Saxon settlements were nestling amongst the trees.
The place where Charlemagne had the Saxons slaughtered was Verden – renowned as the Massacre of Verden of 782.  Later in 843 the Treaty of Verdun divided the Frankish Empire between the three surviving sons of Louis the Pious, son of Charlemagne into Middle Francia, East Francia and West Francia.  

  

       

Conversation of the Enemy

Scene:  A baroque hall of mirrors on the outskirts of fin de siècle Vienna.  Two gentleman of the first society in formal dress, but without their tailcoats, are standing at opposite ends of the long hall.  Their voices echo across the void. They have just come from a ball or a soirée in a town palace or an urgent consultation at the Hofburg but not the same one.  Their tailcoats lie in the exact same position on the ground next to them.  The distance is so great neither can be sure he isn’t looking at his own reflection.

Count A:  The enemy is nothing personal, it is the condition of one’s existence, the only natural boundary to one’s will besides the exhaustion one carries about.  Without an enemy one withers between agues of languor and seizures of enthusiasm.  One’s enemy can tire one without ever laying eyes on it, without even engaging it, but somehow there is for the enemy the same intangible boundary, which it of course tries to violate as often as it dares.  But it always is a dare.  Not every generation of the enemy has nerves equal to the dare.  One need not meet one’s enemy; it is highly undesirable to do so, yet the lineage is as certain as if one had been brought together in an arranged marriage.  The enemy is the supreme habit.  One knows the genre.  Like every habit it belongs to the order of the world only more so.  It must also observe a délai de carence like any other habit.  The Kabbalah calls it the other side.  Like most habits it may begin as a striving for perfection and turn into a tyrannical routine.  There is no habit like the enemy for drawing one towards perfection.  Every move in the direction of the enemy is a move towards perfection; every move away from it is a fall from grace.

Count B:  A will beholden to the will of an enemy is freer or as free as a will, which denies itself.  The relationship is not transitive nor stricto sensu reciprocal.  Krishna revealed this dialectic of the enemy to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita.   Speaking to or speaking about the enemy is a habit.  One is hypnotized by the enemy’s suada.  Habits are character, character is ethics – or habits are ethics, ethics are character, character is will, will is unconditional and immutable and timeless.  Remorse is the emotion, which precedes and accompanies corrections in the reading of the will – and the motives, which are its instructions to the empirical character.  One’s enemy is the reverse or the antidote to oneself.  Every action of the enemy is the manifestation of its immutable will, any or all of its actions may wrongly interpret this will, the enemy may appear unlike itself for a good while, even indefinitely, this period in which the enemy does not recognize its will, obfuscates one’s own will in equal measure, even though no such effect is intended.  One must pray that the enemy be guided by its faculty of reason to finally recognize its own will, because its clarity will illuminate one’s own reason.  On rare occasions when the enemy remains stubbornly misguided disaster takes place all around like in the Eulenburg affair.  Or it is narrowly avoided as in the case of Colonel Redl.
Clarity cannot be achieved through rational means alone.  A science of logic is a chimera.  But the absence of logic is also a chimera.  Logic has an intermittence of the heart.   Clarity of thought only exists within the precise radius of the enemy.  The enemy in the abstract sense is negation.  As wills are not subject to change or influence there can be no thought of losing one’s enemy, if one is so fortunate as to have been born into a will which is existentially bound by the will of another.  Bondage of wills differs from bondage between empirical characters.  In the world of the will, bondage means an enhancement of the original and irreducible freedom of the will.  A will with an accurate enemy will tends to err less in the discovery of itself; once discovered to stray less from its line, so being true to itself.  My own economy serves me as it does my inimicus – never eat before you are hungry and always stop before you are full.   

A long silence is broken by three shots of a revolver.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Perfection of an Accident (Lord Carnarvon's Chauffeur)

1.  A curse is a species of prophecy – at the very least it aspires to a telos.  Both Plato and Aristotle, whose systems are grounded in teleology, believed nature was constantly moving towards perfection, its final cause.  Causality is not located in the past but in the future of events, circumstances, phenomena, form.  All the more with a curse.  What is the telos of a curse?  What is the striving for perfection of an accident, catastrophe, tragedy?  One assumes that perfectability is only true of positive ‘goods’ – alchemical thinkers saw the transmutations of matter as an expression of the natural tendency of matter to reach ever more perfect states.  Perfection though is not a moral value – it is rather the unfolding of a form already implicit in matter or in a ‘situation’.   Otherwise how would one ever recognize any degree of perfection?  In Simmel’s ‘sociological aesthetics’ based on his theory of types, beauty and ugliness depend on the closeness or distance from the type, the more typical, the more beautiful.  He refers to the example of the physician for whom certain cancers are beautiful when their appearance is in no way clouded by attributes extraneous to their type.  The type alone contains all the attributes of the individual - meaning it is an indefinite multiple almost in the sense Badiou uses ‘generic’.  A curse would be beautiful in the same way as a face – not due to ‘some immanent content of a thing but, rather, its correspondence to its type.’ (Simmel)

Christian thought implies perfection as the completion of a catastrophe – in this sense the Crucifixion is doubly perfect.  The cross is also a plus sign.  Christ’s appearance on earth called forth the ‘happy sin’ of Adam, but the real ‘cause’ of his appearance was his later Crucifixion and Resurrection.  Traditional hermeneutic interpretations of the apostolic and subapostolic literature imply a ‘futurist’ causality in which past biblical events ‘foreshadow’ or ‘prefigure’ the arrival of Christ.  In other words – that which is to be determines from a not yet existent future location and moment that which was.

But a curse has a more complicated relation to the future than mere foreshadowing.  One particular curse – that of the Tomb of Tutankhamun bears a striking resemblance to the structure of a psychoanalytic cure – not surprising given Freud’s love of archaeology and sensationalist tomb literature such as “She” by Henry Rider Haggard.  The curse resembles the situation of the cure because in both the ‘analysand’ is offered a painful opportunity during a certain time and space to encounter a truth, he leaves this meeting ‘armed or disarmed’. (see Alain Badiou, “Truth: Forcing and the Unnameable” in: Conditions, London, 2008, p. 133)  But this ‘truth’ is a suspended hypothesis – truth is never in the situation, it is its vanishing point, just as invisible as the origin of the curse or the event whose disappearance initiates the psychoanalytic cure.   

The mummy’s curse is a prohibition – anyone who violates the tomb will be harmed.  It seems to be a general formula – but one can assume that there is a very limited number of persons who would ever be likely to come so close to a Pharaoh’s tomb as to be endangered or threatened by the curse – especially if the location of the tomb and its existence are more or less unknown.  The curse is then ‘waiting’ for those chosen few even if it takes them hundreds of generations to arrive.
To ‘arrive’ though the object of the curse has not only to come to a certain prescribed known destination – he has to first find or invent the destination.  He undertakes a great work of discovery and exploration not unlike Freud’s category of “working through”, which Badiou following the mathematical concept of Paul Cohen, calls “forcing”.  “Forcing concerns the point at which, although incomplete, a truth authorizes anticipations of knowledge, not statements about what is, but about what will have been if the truth reaches completion.”(Badiou, op. cit., p. 138)  ‘What will have been’ for Lord Carnarvon, the alleged (hypothetical) prime victim of the ‘mummy’s curse’, was the completion of the search for the tomb - at the same time the necessary condition for the activation of the curse – the ‘forcing’ open of the door of the tomb.  

2.  If there is a ‘curse of the mummy’ then it embraced Lord Carnarvon before he ever set foot in Egypt.  Carnarvon was already a magnet for ill fortune and accidents.  The telos of such a curse seems passive – it cannot strive towards any final cause; if the prohibition is never violated no sacrifice will occur.  Unless, the curse is a vigorous potentiality, which can create the necessary conditions to induce a violation, attract the transgressor.

It began with a car accident in Germany in 1901 - in the heroic days of automobile travel.  Carnarvon was a car enthusiast, an ‘automobilist’, owning one of the first automobiles in England.  He toured France in a car.  The chauffeur was a close associate of the rich man in those days – his companion and ‘pilot’ in the pioneering world of automotive invention and other new technologies.  The banker Albert Kahn travelled extensively in Japan with his chauffeur, who first had to become proficient in the new techniques of autochrome colour photography.  Proust was most fond of his chauffeur Odilon, his wife Céleste became Proust’s live in maid and the intimate companion of his later years as a recluse.  Odilon was still more of a coachman, owning his own vehicle – but permanently (and round-the-clock) at Proust’s disposal for all his outings.  Proust was very close to the ‘revolution of the automobile’.  One of his best school friends from the lycée Condorcet was Jacques Bizet, son of the composer Georges Bizet.  Jacques Bizet was director of Taximètre Unic, a car-hire company created by Rothschild.  Odilon was one of their drivers – and he became Proust’s favourite “chauffeur de confiance”. (Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust, Opera Mundi, Paris, 1973, p. 51)

Carnarvon was less fortunate in his choice of chauffeur.  Whilst racing with his chauffeur in Germany they crashed – the car landed on top of Carnarvon, crushing his jaw and puncturing his chest and lung.  His doctor then told him that his health was poor and he should seek a warmer climate.  He began to winter in Egypt.  That is how he was led into his grand Egyptian adventure, which would finally finish him off.  All his love of the modern was diverted into Egyptology and the love of tombs.

Lord Carnarvon came like the ‘analysand’ in a state of weakness to the cure/curse – he travelled to Egypt ‘for his health’ and unknowingly entered a field of ‘emergent truth’.  The truth according to Lacan – Badiou follows him in this assertion – is first of all weak.  The love of truth is also the love of its powerlessness – for Lacan (and Badiou) this is none other than the “love of castration”.  This love is obviously not openly declared – rather it is the love which the ‘truth veils’, only lovable in being unsaid or ‘half-said’ (Badiou).

The anticipatory direction of Lord Carnarvon’s time in Egypt is twofold – the anticipation of archaeological finds (tombs and treasures), the movement towards an unspecific ultimate end (the curse).  He began his archaeological prospecting in a desultory fashion – to pass the time in Egypt.  But he was soon possessed of a desire for better finds – he hired Howard Carter who fanned this desire till it became his obsession, his ‘objet petit a’.  He had exchanged a daredevil chauffeur for a learned man.  Their successes in finding tombs of minor nobles whetted their appetite for digging in the Valley of the Kings – with the hope of discovering royal tombs.

Then at the ‘last moment’, when Carnarvon’s interest in the hunt began to wane, due to mounting costs and no significant finds, Carter pleaded for one last season in the Valley of the Kings.  He acceded to Carter’s wish, like the analysand who agrees to continue paying his analyst for the cure.  The final train of events was set into motion.  Carter was finally successful – he discovered the Tomb of Tutankhamun.   Carnarvon ignored the dire warnings he had received from well known seers not to enter the tomb.  He was quoted as saying “I will challenge the psychic powers of the age”.  On November 26th 1922 the funerary chamber of the tomb was forced opened.  Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon were the first to enter the tomb.  Shortly thereafter while resting in the Aswan area Carnarvon was bitten on the cheek by a mosquito. He accidentally shaved off the bite with his ‘cut-throat razor’ (‘love of castration’?) and poisoned his blood.  After treating the wound, at first he seemed to recover, but on April 5th 1923 he died from the effects of blood poisoning and pneumonia.  Strange coincidences were reliably reported to have occurred at the time of Carnarvon’s death.  The lights went out in all of Cairo.  His dog pining in Highclere, Carnarvon’s family seat, howled wildly and died.  When the mummy of Tutankhamun was unwrapped it was found to have a wound on the left cheek corresponding to the point on Lord Carnarvon’s cheek where he was fatally bitten by the mosquito.

The truth of the curse emerged gradually over the course of the years Carnarvon spent financing excavations in Egypt.  The truth moved from powerlessness to all powerfulness.  The unsaid took place.  The unnameable named.  The curse is what Badiou calls the ‘unnameable point’ of a truth – “one that cannot be forced without inducing disaster”. (Badiou, op. cit., p.131)

Perhaps Tutankhamun’s dynastic enemies, followers of the god Amun, were the authors of the curse.   They had relegated him to powerlessness, obliterating his name from statues and inscriptions.  He had been effaced from history until that moment.  That is why the discovery of his tomb had eluded all previous digs.  Carnarvon and Carter helped restore Tutankhamun to ‘power’ and reinstate him in history.  
“In the dimension of the future perfect, a truth’s power resides in the anticipation of its own existence (…)” (Badiou, op. cit., p. 139)

Would this power then be in Badiou’s phrase – ‘fidelity to the event’ of the future perfect?

Milk of Lime, Flowers of Sulphur

 

Coleridge records an example of futility.  Nine years of collecting all manner of documents on some phenomena of magnetism and automagnetism and he is not one step further, by his own admission, in his understanding than when he read a certain work on the subject.  Beware!!  Beckett seems to think that terror furthers reason (in the terrified) and Coleridge doubts if disease can ever be cured.  He would fit perfectly in Bad Gurzbach.  One dies of a dog bite, which happened twelve years ago.  Poison, which has gone in rarely or never, goes out again really.  Who also died of old wounds?  Oh yes. Unity Mitford, Rudi Dutschke, but who else?  Sulphuretted hydrogen.  H2S as a gas is colourless and evil smelling and poisonous if inhaled in large quantities.  But what if the body is already pumped full of minerals, iron and sulphates (sulphuric acid without the hydrogen, replaced by metals) then when breathing a ferrous air it should be able to produce the gas by itself, poisoning itself from within gradually?  (From my dream of the night I recall only the phrase “replace the gold” – after my “Iron” dream of the weekend, now the gold, the reverse succession of the Hesiodic ages, a hint of alchemy)

The spring waters and the champagne air of the spa interact in a deadly fashion, but only gradually over a period of many years.  Add to that the presence of sulphurettted hydrogen in volcanic areas such as the extinct volcanic formation somewhere in the forest behind Bad Gurzbach’s rural outskirts in Kirdorf, then the likelihood of autotoxification increases.  The same waters used to treat liver cirrhosis etc are broken down by some locally patented procedure into salt cake – the first stage in the manufacture of washing soda, one of the few industrial products extracted, processed and refined without leaving the county.  Most of it is also used on the spot.  The chemical industry is full of such symbioses and antibioses of the organic and inorganic.  It is nothing unusual.  A popular detergent contains a water softener used for the treatment of osteoporosis and a borate found in timber preservatives.  Still, external state inspectors have cautiously warned against the overuse of the Bad Gurzbach springs, but the locals persist in drinking their sulphurous water.  As the water doesn’t cost anything this is always a temptation.  Besides if they were to stop drinking, word would spread and the whole cure economy would collapse.  They sometimes salivate yellowish foam, probably flowers of sulphur, soluble in hot water, when engaging in particularly long chats.  Their saliva is carbonated. 

The Anglophile (Part II)

My chosen one, Saint Lyman, is for the rest of the English-speaking world a so-called ‘shit’.  Of course that suits me fine, I adhere to all forms of inversion, confusion, perversion and diversion – why shouldn’t I squander my affections on someone the world wants to discard.  They don’t treat him like a man who is already dead, but as one who had never been born.  I would have liked to write his apology like Plato for Socrates, but I knew nothing of him except what I read in the obviously biased accounts in the English newspapers.  Why they should hate him so much – brand him a ‘rotter’ – is a mystery.  He comes out of the same school as all the rest of them, thankfully though he is neither a pederast nor a paedophile, nor homoerotic, nor otherwise ‘kinky’, I think he is rather sexually indifferent, certainly no Bluebeard.  He seems to be a man of logic and I do so capitulate to logic.  He is a liar and a gentleman, QC, MP and SOB.  He is a knight errant who to no lesser degree than Amadis and the whole guild of chivalry made himself destitute for the ladies – to some of whom he was married and not even at the same time. 

Where in the hell did I read that Homer didn’t care much for Ulysses because he saw him as a compulsive liar?  The ancient Hellenic world did not believe in subterfuge – any victory gained by such means disqualified itself.  The Iliad ended ignominiously.  That’s why it was the first modern battle.  John Lyman, the classical rotter is a modern hero and a Faustian saint.  What was his terrible crime?  Those paltry sums which he pried from his ‘victims’ (and who can say that he did not earn those sums for cavalier services, I certainly would not begrudge him any nest eggs of my own and I plan to make that plain to him, I’m grateful to Stock-Krause for forcing my hand) – those womanly savings were the means to his own demise.  Not in the sense an otherwise astute typical English biographer might think – pride before the fall and all of that beloved English pantomime, not that – but because he wanted to be made to suffer, to demonstrate meekness.  What is more knightly than humbling oneself for a lady?  Although Lyman is as gregarious as any Englishman he has remained uncharacteristically silent, which is of course the ultimate proof of the gentleman.

I spent the whole morning thinking about my friend the heresiarch Saint Lyman held prisoner in the pits of the English Inquisition.  It was more work than I had done in years, piling up remorse, not my own.  I distinctly sensed him near me, looking over my shoulder much of the time, honing my mercilessness and communicating his prophecies to me via the central heating so similar in sound to the old bass fiddle he played while at Oxford.
Everything he intimates is in a slightly out of tune key of A but much of it is unfortunately drowned out by the unceasing babble of my Spanish tenants, the Angilos.  Discomfort always brings my thoughts to Lyman.  I would gladly be Sancho Panza for this sad English knight.  Why doesn’t he say anything in his own defence?  If he speaks then only to goad his punishers, fully aware which mock swagger of his will elicit their most revengeful zeal.  The only vice of which one could rightly accuse him is being a glutton for punishment.  Hot in the indulgence of this gluttony, he met up with her.  She was not the first, nor the fourth, but most probably the last stop so far on his knight errantry, offering damsels in distress fake Swiss bonds at high yield interest and for a while his inimitable self.

I wonder what they have been doing to the recalcitrant old tramp, have they been trying any of their ‘treatments’ on him.  Have they tried to spook his meanness out of him with the hair in the neck trick?  A trick worthy of being displayed in the Pitt-Rivers Museum, in a showcase on how to mortify one’s enemy.  A thread, thicker than hair but not as thick as a rope, is spliced with skin, a flap of skin is pulled out and sewn down onto the neck the way one would stitch up a stuffed Christmas turkey.  An infection naturally ensues attracting hidden unreachable deeper infections into its pus filled bed.  If he were to object to this therapy, they might decide to sew him on various places to his mattress.  Whilst lying there like a piece of rawhide other prisoners could come over him with whatever manner of implement they have managed to stash in their cells, such as spoons to ladle out parts of hands.

Lately I have been writing things down whose perishability has so accelerated; they are no longer on the page the next morning.  I learn to live with it, it is the converse of fading eyesight – not my eyesight fades but the object of my eyesight, in this case my handwriting.  There is nothing left to see so what good is my eyesight then?  Margarete the bakery sweep who doubles as lay nurse for some of my more derelict tenants is not all sweetness and light, but those sorts seldom are.  She is a preventer, not a destroyer like me, but someone who keeps things from happening.  Sometimes prevention is a good thing.  I have instructed Heribert to strew sand and salt on the icy pavements so that the elderly will not fall down and break a hip like that indestructible Englishman Jeffrey Bernard, who has more lives than a cat, about whose progress against hope I read from time to time for a treat.  Is he not supremely fit ‘to sweep the tavern doorstep with cheek and hair’?  I like reading about his escapades when I visit Georgie von Regenheim my legal counsel and business friend.  My first question when I come into his chambers and seat myself on the other side of the wide mahogany table, much like Churchill’s writing desk, is how is our Jeffrey doing?  (By tacit agreement we refuse to believe the malicious rumor that Jeffrey Bernard is really dead.  As far as we are concerned he is just slightly more unwell.)  Georgie pulls out an old magazine from behind some notary files.  I never fail to feel some titillation.  By saying Georgie is my business friend I am not in any way diminishing the importance of our friendship. All my relationships are business relationships but he is my only friend.  One has business enemies en masse.  Georgie was an Anglophile like me.  He had an American grandmother.  Georgie was a real landlord with a bulging portfolio of properties.  Whenever I visited him it is as if I had entered Walter Benjamin’s “cloudless kingdom of perfect investments upon which no money ever falls”.  Although the tenants in his buildings were forced to live with packed suitcases – Georgie was infamous for his sudden eviction notices.

I have been seriously considering recommending to Stock-Krause that she send Jeffrey Bernard a ticket to come and visit her as a goodwill gesture to a fellow amputee.  She has been looking so forlorn since she heard about my honourable friend Saint Lyman, indeed he is my second friend after Georgie.  There are many taverns down by the river, they are in the hands of the Greeks, and in one of them I am sure there is a bottle with Jeffrey Bernard’s name on it.  The best place to start is in Club El Alamein, the losers sit there and try to figure out not why but if they have lost.  No, that’s not quite true, they do know they lost the battle but are sure they have won the war.  The battle has been downgraded in the course of the years to a mere stability crisis.  Hans who also played the bass fiddle in the El Alamein Café Ensemble cultivated some nautical mannerisms à l’Anglaise.   He knew something about the different layers of the earth’s crust as well.  Jeffrey Bernard could talk to him about not going to sea.  One reason Hans gives for not going to sea is that ships sink so often.  He is not a coward only an amateur statistician.  He gave me a lecture about it one time in those days when I still came and went in public houses, in this case El Alamein. 
The town used to be full of fishermen.  Their coat of arms still shows a Petrus as the centrepiece of some mackerels in the shape of a cross – vaguely reminiscent of an Archimboldo.

I liked the river town because I thought that it looked so English.  As I imagined a small English town would look.  Dingy red brick facades, scorbutic dwarf trees bearing three grey curled leaves in spring and losing them by mid-summer.  Tiny rear gardens without sunlight.  You cannot buy fresh fish anywhere in town.  Greeks stick their poles in the brackish waters and are taunted by mangy looking local urchins and other Greeks come out of the taverns, down the steps, slide more than walk to the banks, frying pans in their upraised hands meant for the children who then run away shouting insults and curses over their shoulders.  One of them looks like the younger son of Angilo, my Spanish tenant. The child stunted its own growth by all of its creeping about and quickly disappearing around corners.  His older brother was the only one growing and he just got fatter.  Now the younger one runs with the pack.  They scramble back up the bank and jump over the train tracks.
Until now there has never been a train going past at the right moment.   

 

The Anglophile (Part I)

I must never let them know how I feel about them.  How well I know them.  It is my duty; it is the story of my life.  A famous general used to live in the neighborhood.  The old lady in the bakery who comes and visits the legless tenant on the fourth floor assured me she knew him well.  She could not tell me how it was and in what way she knew him well.  Would I ever challenge such a claim, hardly in the open.  She and I share her knowing of the general whether it is true or not.  I don’t mind keeping their little secrets.  They confide in me as they would put their pennies in a bank, every once in a while they want to see how much they have saved up.  I am their landlord, which means they can look down on me.  For of what bit of land is it of which I am the lord?  A forgotten corner in which humans have settled who are too old, too feeble of mind and spirit, too immobile, too poor, too stingy and too bowed by circumstances to move out of it.  I live among them upon occasion like lint between their toes and have no excuse like they do for still being here.

How surprised I was when I went to visit the legless tenant myself, Mrs Stock-Krause, she was telling me as usual of the time she lived in the “villa”, its photograph hung over her fake fire, some heaped up charcoal in a recess, some broken glass and a red light bulb.  She lights the fire even in the middle of summer (which it was at the time).  It made me hotter looking at it.  I think that having had two legs amputated has deadened her sense of climate.  She lived in the “villa” not with Mr Stock and not even with Mr Krause, but with a prosperous accountant who quite unusually went bankrupt.  One would imagine that an accountant would be immune to such calamities.  Stock-Krause sat on her red leather sofa, left over from the villa, a blanket over her stumps, looking like her legs were merely curled up under her, smoking away, although the legs had been amputated because they were ‘smoker’s legs’.  Now that they are gone she sees no reason to stop.  Her hair was covered by a turban made of flannel or felt, I think it was to cover baldness; I have never seen her without it or with another one.  We had not always been so friendly, in fact we were not on speaking terms for at least ten years.  I slammed down the receiver whenever I heard her husky voice at the other end, ordering her to “put it in writing”.  She kept insisting on repairs to her flat over and beyond her just deserts.  In these instances I have firm principles.  More or less out of the blue, for I can recall nothing in her previous remarks which could have prompted her to digress from her saga of the villa, I combed my memory, reproaching myself for having missed the turn in her soliloquy and resigned myself to assuming there had been none – only that she had hoped to hide her devious question amidst her usual tears and lamentations – suddenly she asked me if I were not a bit lonely myself.   I of course rebuffed her impertinent prying in a stern and casual voice, at the same time amazed that this piteous creature, who, if I were in the habit of feeling pity which I’m not, all pity in my view being false, my law knows no pity and my law is true, would certainly qualify as a candidate – had had the audacity to pity me.  This unnatural demonstration, this slap in the face of nature, kick in the teeth of decorum, this pinching till blue of plain good taste, spurred me to an invention which has changed my life.  “Why should I be lonely?”, I asked her in the most silvery of tones, “I am expecting the imminent arrival of my very distinguished friend, an Englishman, a parliamentarian, a QC, a scholar of English law and mores, in short a gentleman, a dandy, an amateur of rank and a man whose qualities would light up all the dirty windows of the block with a thousand fires.”  She started coughing until I was afraid she would suffocate and I was relieved that the old lady from the bakery chose that moment to visit, letting herself in, the door of the flat being perpetually unlocked.  I did not recognize her at first, because of the red smoky haze of the room and because she was wearing a very red dress, having been to a funeral and the limpness of her grey strands having been starched into an upright position at the beauty parlor.  She began telling Stock-Krause what they had served in the bakery after the funeral, egg sandwiches and cream cakes, she had made the sandwiches herself.  The boss had died and when she stood at his grave all lined in green mats, looking so comfortable, so like down quilts, she could have lain down with him.  I bowed myself out fearing that the necessary distance between myself and my tenants, forever being eroded by their lack of breeding, had dwindled to a dangerous low.

Who does not live in fear of being ordinary?  I do, I know.  Sometimes I feel guilty about my tenants.  Here they pay me rent and I use them for my amusement.  Should it not be the other way around?  Being ordinary and living in fear of the ordinary is one thing I do for them or rather they do to me.  Ordinariness is catching.  The very fear of being ordinary is so ordinary.  Being lonely is so ordinary and if I had not feared to appear ordinary before my tenants, who should not use me to pass their time in idle thoughts, then I would not have been tricked into my fake confession.  Keep the bastards at arm’s length, one might say.  Easier said than done.  For as the landlord of a property more likely as not to be eyed with derision, from which something as elusive as an ‘income’ could hardly be said to be forthcoming, when one is forced to be handyman, surveyor, assessor, rent collector, bookkeeper and social services – the tenants regard you as the equivalent of the dry rot behind their skirt boards.  To call my property private only reminds me that no one but me would want it and I do not want it either.  I just hope I might, exceeding hope, sell it all before the balconies come crashing down and I have to pay damages for loss of life and balconies.        

Schopenhauer is wrong – most people are phantoms for themselves.  Only the ‘Other’ is real.  Desperation is a mark of natural aristocracy.  I am in this respect a clean slate. 

I have another confession – reading Robert Walser awakens my inborn contrariness, the natural drive away from ordinariness, meaning I can eat chips every night if I wish and still be miles above the philistine who dines on scrambled eggs, smoked salmon and champagne.  Would consecrated bread still be holy even if it were mouldy?  Sheer contrariness drove me to make myself ordinary, to say something Stock-Krause would understand.  It was a ridiculous lie but it stuck in my head, Stock-Krause would not be likely to forget it either, seeing that she has nothing better to do when not mourning her alleged lost riches.  Still they look upon me as their capital – if something happens to me the roof over their head would be in jeopardy, their routine inquiries after my well-being have only this significance.  Without me this simulacrum of property would vanish altogether. 

Fraudulent Philosophy - Stanley Cavell on the Modern in Art

Why is it that certain ideas become outdated more quickly than others – even if they are especially designed to show what it is to be ‘up to date’ as in Stanley Cavell’s writings on modernism in art?  Does this have to do with the general wasting away of  ‘ordinary language philosophy’ of which Cavell is a major proponent? (see T.P. Uschanov, “The Strange Death of Ordinary Language Philosophy”, 2002, online)  Could it be that those ‘methods’ applied to art naturally share the same fate?  Or are there more general laws of obsolescence at work?  How do ‘logics die’ even when they are not logical?

A consequence of Cavell’s imposing sincerity of intention or meaning upon the artist and the work of art is his claim to expose certain works as fraudulent. (in: “Music Discomposed”, Must we mean what we say?, Cambridge 2003)  He describes this claim as “empirical”, arrived at by his experience with works of art and artists of his time – ‘contemporary with the claim’.  He thus applies it only to what he judges to be modern art  – not to the past history of art, nor art in an atemporal plane.  Cavell’s criteria are not transcendental in the Kantian sense, meaning the apriori conditions of the possibility of aesthetic experience; he seems to be demanding of modern art that it make it possible for him to ‘believe’ it.   

His case for sincerity or fraudulence in art, something in itself intangible, not perceivable in the work,– rests on his particular use of  ‘intending’ or ‘meaning’ in a work of art.  He borrows this idea of art and sincerity from Tolstoy’s “What is Art?”.  The writings of Krenek on certain theoretical aspects of the “new music” are his main ‘exhibit’.  Cavell dismisses these writings as ‘fraudulent’ and by a vertiginous leap in his argument concludes that Krenek’s music is also fraudulent.  It is Krenek’s “philosophizing” which annoys Cavell – composers should compose and leave ‘philosophizing’ and magazine articles to the ‘professionals’.  But Cavell has nothing to say about Krenek’s music – or even how it reflects his ‘fraudulent’ theories.  This does not prevent him though from appropriating Krenek’s themes of “composition, improvisation and chance” as the structure for his own musings on composition and the modern.  (“But I was discussing some writing now current about the new music.  Perhaps I can say more clearly why it leads, or has led me, to these various considerations by looking at three concepts which recur in it over and over – the concepts of composition, improvisation and chance.”
“Music Discomposed”, op. cit. p. 193)

Against this idea of an artist or work of art meaning or intending something ‘x’ which he has to convey outside of the work itself to Cavell or any other interrogator, I would suggest the work of art has the form of an axiom and of a fact or as Badiou would say – an event.  Cavell or any other critic is only an adjunct of the art event – in this case of Krenek’s music and his reflexive process of composition.
 Cavell’s ‘meaning’ follows art and not the other way around. The art axiom creates a disruption or a voiding of received meaning, what time or history do in other ways.  The intention of the artist is that the work exist – nothing more or less.  If it exists it is not fraudulent.  Something always happens.

Maurice Blanchot who like Krenek questions the traditional romantic idea of ‘inspiration’ - says about the literary work of art in “The Space of Literature”: “However, the work – the work of art, the literary work – is neither finished nor unfinished: it is.  What it says is exclusively this: that it is – and nothing more.  Beyond that it is nothing.(…)The work is without any proof, just as it is without any use.  It can’t be verified.” (University of Nebraska Press, 1982, p. 22)

Cavell insists on some other meaning, not expressed by the work itself, which must satisfy his demand for sincerity.  But he only demands that ‘modern art’ pass his sincerity test.  ‘Traditional’ or established art is exempt.  Amongst the moderns – John Cage and Anthony Caro belong to Cavell’s protected species – perhaps on advice from the art critic Michael Fried.  Although certainly Cavell would not deny that even the judgements of ‘traditional art’ are in a constant state of flux.  What do Wordsworth’s effusions mean today even for the diehards of English romantic poetry or Ruskin’s condemnations of ‘the pestilential art of the Renaissance’ for neo-Victorians?  And why is it that only “(…)the experience of the modern is one which itself raises the question of fraudulence and genuineness(…)”? (“A Matter of Meaning It”, op. cit. p.214) Something Cavell takes to be “an obvious but unappreciated fact” (ibid.) – how is something both ‘obvious’ and ‘unappreciated’?  But if it were an obvious fact (and perhaps it is) - then the “experience of the modern” in philosophy is also overshadowed by questions of the fraudulent and the genuine…

Cavell is a Beckmesser who says what I cannot ‘hear’ or ‘see’ does not exist.  Lurking in the background of his not ‘hearing’ and not ‘seeing’ of certain modern art is Cavell’s presumption that art and religion are closely related if not identical – and that they are both exposed to belief or disbelief.  He expresses this negatively: “For religious experience is subject to distrust on the same grounds as aesthetic experience is (…)”(“Music Discomposed”, op. cit. p.191)  He thus transfers the ‘tests’ of his ‘empirical’ claims to the religious sphere, deftly evading verifiability. Once safely ensconced in religious sensibilities he then claims that modern art with all the emotions it arouses (especially hostility and disgust) must be treated as one does persons not objects.  “In emphasizing the experiences of fraudulence and trust as essential to the experience of art, I am in effect claiming that the answer to the question “What is art?” will in part be an answer which explains why it is we treat certain objects, in ways normally reserved for treating persons.”(op. cit. p. 189)

Paradoxically, although the universal tendency of modern art is towards abstraction or the ‘unhuman’ (especially music – the subject of his remarks) Cavell in his claims about fraudulence and genuineness (sincerity) in art retreats in the opposite direction - further into anthropomorphism.  (Cavell has imperceptibly widened his net to include all of art without further justifications.) 

His “aesthetic experiences” interrogate the ‘conscience’ of the artist.  Avant-garde art though defines itself as an ‘experimental’ production of new existences (art bodies).  His rules for modern art are mere private evaluations originating in incommunicable quasi-religious experiences – they have no hold on what art is.

One could say that Cavell is himself a victim of his desire to name everything at any price, a drive or obsession which Badiou calls ‘evil’.  How else is one to regard his insatiable lust for meaning of meaning of meaning and so on endlessly from a work of art?  Is this a Wittgensteinian stance?  Wittgenstein saw all meaning rather as indeterminate and necessarily admixed with elusive degrees of falsehood (fiction, myth).  In a similar spirit Wittgenstein confided to his publisher von Ficker that the most essential part of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus is what he had not written.  Would Cavell ‘the new Wittgensteinian’ have demanded that he spell it all out for him? 

The Spirit of Algebra

1.  A saint’s body is the locus of religion, sex and cruelty.

One can say of a saint’s body what Rilke said about Rodin’s “the Muse” (the Inner Voice) 1896 – “Never was the human body so bent by its own soul.”

 A saint suspends the duality of body and soul – res corporea and res cogitans.  Even for medieval ontologists it must have been obvious that a saint in particular a martyr is not bound by this traditional split of logos and bios.  The pain of holiness writes itself directly on the saint’s body.  The saint’s body is a tractate on being where the arabesque of holy flesh undermines the distinction between theme and digression.

You cannot measure pain, but pain itself is a certain quantity.  A saint is its number.  Christ on the cross is the highest number, because his pain is the quantity of all the sins – especially the sin of holiness.  The Christ number is equal to the total of his sleepless nights – the number Pascal wanted to imitate.  He said: Jesus will be in his death agony until the end of the world.  One is not allowed to sleep until the Crucified One returns.

“Allgebra Du bist Musik: Allgebra Du bist Gott(…)Und nun liebe Mitmenschen: Die Stimme Gottes ist Menschenstimme und heißt Allgebrah.”
(Algebra you are music: Algebra you are God(…) And now dear fellow humans: the voice of God is a human voice and is called Algebra.)
Adolf Wölfli, From the Cradle to the Grave

Saint Adolf II (artist and lifetime patient in the Waldau Clinic in Berne) was the supreme avant-garde of numbers.  In Adolf Wölfli’s trans-galactic Swiss capitalist number system, St Adolf II is the “great-great-God” of his “St Adolf=Giant=Creation”, an interchangeable term for his immeasurable imaginary capital or “building fund”.  The highest number of this ‘new creation’ is “Zorn” (rage).  “Oberon” is the second highest number and already signifies catastrophes, which exceed telling.  St Adolf of the ‘new creation’ is a much higher numeral than ‘algebra on the cross’ of the ‘old creation’.  Wölfli propels his abyss upwards into countless new heavens unlike Pascal who locates his groundlessness more conventionally in the nethermost regions.


2.  The childhood of a saint need not be saint like; nothing about a saint need be saint like except the wish to be one.  I don’t think one is ever a saint without wanting to be one, because who but a saint would want to be a saint?  A saint need not be a martyr but he or she is always in some way unhappy.  One must have a talent for unhappiness, for one cannot be happy in emulation of someone (Christ or the Führer) who was the embodiment of extreme unhappiness and disappointment.  (‘God why have you forsaken me?’)  This would be insulting.  A saint is someone who chooses unhappiness willingly, wholeheartedly.  Unhappiness comes in endless variations; a saint though cannot just wait around for it to happen, he or she must attract or invent it.
Is the pursuit of unhappiness merely the reverse of the pursuit of happiness?  Does one need one’s will to do it?  Need it be a task, a work, something requiring energy or is it a strong urge towards the cessation of activity?  Illness is the most convenient state, it is an inactive activity.  Except - one must not strive to regain one’s health.

 Thérèse of Lisieux’s ‘doctrine of the little way’ merely translates the universal fact that greater human misery is composed of an assortment of little miseries, pinpricks, splinters, tormenting thoughts.   Her method is to turn this fact into a virtue towards sainthood – magnify each tiny irritation until it is ‘as big as a cross’, seek it out, don’t flee it, throw yourself into the arms of your tormenter – yourself.  You can do all these misdeeds to yourself because you are not one, not alone.  Who is then to say what your will actually is, how can there be only one will, if this other force can frequently disarm or disable you?  You live surrounded by enemies, counter wills and they are all inside you.  A saint intuitively knows how to turn the life-destroying negatives into
saint-producing positives.  This is the power of the saint’s Algebra-God.  When the first blood came bubbling over Thérèse’s lips whilst lying in bed on Good Friday, indicating tuberculosis, she felt deep joy at ‘His first call’. 

3.  What is the difference between a saint’s unhappiness and the ordinary kind?  Could it be that a saint does not indulge in the sin of Schadenfreude?  Although a saint-to-be is often befallen by ‘scruples’ – a sort of scurvy of the soul, when he or she is haunted by guilt for all kinds of phantom sins.  The thought alone signifies the possibility of sin and hence is a disguised sinful thought.  Kierkegaard calls this “the sin of despairing over your sins”. 

A saint is not pleased by someone else’s misfortune, but she is not displeased either.  Especially if the other’s unhappiness is a result of the saint’s own quest for unhappiness or even instrumental to it.  Thérèse was somehow pleased when her father suffered agonies of mental derangement and paralysis, which led to his death.  She wanted to see her parents and relatives in sickness; her reasons were of course the purest.  It brought them closer to everlasting life. Or was her father’s suffering and death a prelude to her sainthood and thus pleasing for her?  The whole family was attuned to sainthood – she and her sisters were nuns in the same Carmelite order in Lisieux, the father had tried to be a monk but was not accepted; the mother was also rejected by a convent.  One sister (in both senses) was the Mother Superior who instructed Thérèse to write her religious autobiography.  All the energies of this family seem to have been deflected towards the manufacture of generic religious pain in the same fastidious way they conducted their lace making and watch making business.

Whatever pleasure a saint-to-be can gain from the pain of others it is not extraneous to her sainthood, otherwise she is not a genuine saint.  She must leave physical existence and its upkeep behind her with all its rivalries and gratification.  A saint’s way of being as a progressive cancellation of her existence most exactly fulfils what Heidegger calls “Sein zum Tode” (being-toward-death).  Suffering and pain is a saint’s only food, so he or she would have no reason to resent any amount.  He or she chooses pain.  Pain and suffering remove a saint-to-be from the normal drives of ordinary humans.  Although finally, he or she will exchange all of that pain in a future world for the ultimate nihilism of sainthood.

4.  The law of fear has been replaced by the science of love.  “I hope that one day you will swoop upon me, and carry me off to the furnace of love, and plunge me into a glowing abyss, that I may become forever its happy holocaust…I implore you, cast your eyes upon a multitude of little souls; choose out in this world, I beg of you, a legion of little victims worthy of your Love.” (Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul)

The autobiography of Thérèse of Lisieux unfolds the potent negative egotism of “not wanting” anything, - the use of will to destroy will, otherwise known as “the negation of Will” (Verneinung des Willens).  She is stuck by a sister pinning on her scapular, says nothing, goes around with the pin in her flesh all day.  Montaigne tells a similar story about a peasant boy who hid a fox under his coat in front of a gamekeeper, while it gouged his stomach.  Burnt and unwanted food was “good enough for Thérèse”.  She never wore stockings; her sandals were tied with hemp.  Being alive was for her “exile”, loving Love, victim of Love.  Her disease has no name, she reports about spitting blood, one hour to undress, being always cold, willing to wash clothes next to the hot stove in summer, she did a lot of laundry, after a while even relishing the sprays of dirty water another nun ‘accidentally’ splashed over her face.  She was in charge of the sacristy linen.

She punishes herself for rebellious surges against the “discipline”, “sharp correction” and “voluntary penance” prescribed by the Rule of the Carmelite Order, by devising her own chastisements.  She wore a cross with iron spikes next to the skin, but gave it up when it caused a sore.  Some suggest she beat herself with whips made of nettles.  Like in any prison all objects are potential weapons or means of escape – for Thérèse escape could only be from the ‘exile’ of life.  (One wonders though as in the case of Pascal – where do the specialized instruments come from, what smith fabricated them, was there a local or central ecclesiastical production, catalogue, supplier in Rome?)  Some torture was intangible, ambient – she could not bear the noise of a fingernail grinding against the tooth of another nun.  Instead of reproaching the nun, she turns this into ‘fingernail music’ and yet another sweet funeral march.

The convent household was brutally efficient – whilst she lay in her long death struggle, her death pallet was brought into the infirmary and placed next to her white curtained bed.  She saw herself as a cheap toy of the child Jesus, a little ball he throws into the corner after poking a hole in it.  As Vita Sackville-West commented – Thérèse’s martyrdom was itself a nursery game.
She even questions if she is a “true mystic in the sense of Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross” – her raptures were “deliberate, not supernatural”, suggesting Thérèse may have suffered from a form of hysteria “closely associated with mysticism, in some cases taking the form of a transference of the love instinct (…)Psychologists go so far as to use the word erotomania.” (The Eagle and the Dove, London, 1945, p.140)  Sackville-West is “infuriated” by the mawkishness, tawdriness, ordinariness of this childish “lowbrow” sainthood, which offered ‘littleness’ as its highest virtue.  But that is precisely Thérèse’s genius of the commonplace – her invention.  She was the first ‘kitsch’ saint – the first saint of mass production.  (She was named co-patron of France together with Joan of Arc in 1944.)

Thérèse refers in her autobiography to it being the ‘century of inventions’.  She must find a “lift” (ascenseur) to sainthood, no need to climb the staircase step by step – she just has to make herself little and He will lift her up in his arms to where He is.  When describing the “bridal day” with her “divine Husband”, the day she took the veil, Thérèse evokes “a veritable rhapsody of italicised littleness” (Sackville-West).  She was “the little Holy Virgin presenting the little flower to the little Jesus.  Everything was little on that day.” (Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul)

She created the impression that any ordinary child could ascend straight from the nursery into sainthood – the ‘Lift to the Scafffold’.  She is the first generic saint – just one ‘little victim’ out of an indefinite multiplicity of littleness.  Her sainthood is a function of quantity – the quantity of infinitely progressive littleness and its infinite supply.  Is this sainthood something ‘new’ in the long history of Love – an event of Love, one of the four conditions of truth according to Badiou?  (what Schopenhauer calls “the metaphysics of sexual love”)  The amorous encounter between Thérèse of Lisieux and the Child Jesus?  A saint’s ‘Liebestod’?

She wanted all the tortures of all the saints.  When her coffin was opened, the body was not incorrupt as is told of other saints.  Even her bones were wasting away, as if the illness had gone on posthumously.  A sweet fragrance is said to have issued from her human dust, staying around the grave for months, miracles happened after her death - a paralytic child sat on her coffin and jumped off cured.