The Unapproachable Reiner Schürmann - A Phantasmatic Philosopher: Film Without Why: Part Two✦

3.  The Beast: Schürmann - Penseur Maudit

“4. Dialogue

A. Was I ill? Have I recovered?
     Has my doctor been discovered?
     How have I forgotten all?
B. Now I know you have recovered:
    Healthy is he who can’t recall.”☟

Drawing on his experience of ‘zazen’ and Meister Eckhart, Schürmann is exceptional as a thinker in that one concept or conceptual persona or topological site – ‘loss of origin’ – seems to encompass what he is and what he thinks.  Loss of the origin refers both to his own natality which he denies and abandons – his German birth into a German people in its collapse, – and his anti-metaphysical an-archic onslaught against the First Cause or Principle or the One  – for which arche and telos are both ‘without why’.  Here he never ceases to follow Meister Eckhart:

“Leaving things, leaving God, living without why: these teaching of Meister Eckhart surely sound subversive.  Indeed they are literally a subversion, an overthrow (vertere) from the foundation (sub-).  (…) One imagines what happens to the scholastic constructions when unexpectedly a preacher comes along who unveils the nothingness of foundations; the scholastic mind is seized with dizziness.  The God whom this other way of thinking annihilates in his function of foundation is perhaps indeed the God of western Christianity.” (Loss of Origin in Soto Zen and Meister Eckhart, The Thomist, 42, 2, April, 1978, p. 309)
One can almost hear the novitiate Schürmann shocking, unnerving his Dominican teachers in Le Saulchoir with similar arguments and dialectic.

Befitting to someone who devoted his life to the “loss of the origin”, Schürmann’s writings abound with faces, masks, symbols and astral bodies.  One wonders if they are his esoteric avatars.  Is a part of him the Puma shaped Inca city in Le Principe d’Anarchie – symbol and type of a defunct empire without writing based on seemingly eternal non-corroding laws: the principium of arithmetic and the decimal system – an extreme articulation in the ‘new world’ of Horace’s ‘nos numerus sumus et fruge consumere nati’. (we are numbers, born but to consume resources.)  Though as with all defunct empires, something remains.  The Incas are gone but we still are numbers.

Gérard Granel in Untameable Singularity his tribute to Schürmann in the same In Memoriam Reiner Schürmann issue describes another mask:

„The kouros, the young man borne away by the mares, whom the Goddess firmly enjoins to hold the present and the absent together, is Schürmann himself.“ (Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, New School for Social Research Vol. 19 No 2-Vol. 20 No. 1, 1997, pp. 224-5)

Schürmann puts himself on stage in many guises and allegorical costumes:  In America, for example he lives,  “as a stranger, in the midst of the most ideologically brutal of Western people at the century’s end – of a people who equally brutally deny not only singularities but even their own ideological fantasms and maximizations.” (Broken Hegemonies, Indiana University Press, 2003, p. 638)

Or in imitation of Foucault – he constitutes himself an anarchistic transgressive subject.

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem at the Reiner Schürmann Colloquium, Berlin, Nov 2017

He even dons the mask of the rejected origin, “as a lost, yet immanent totality.” (Symbolic Praxis, in:In Memoriam Reiner Schürmann, ibid. p. 63)

In Symbolic Difference and Symbolic Praxis – a pair of alchemical mystical texts – everything is on the verge of turning into its opposite, a permanent cum-vertere/conversion.

“The reversal of existence, brought about by conversion is the return of the existent to its origin (…)” (Symbolic Difference, In Memoriam Reiner Schürmann, ibid. p. 30)

Instead of loss of origin, Schürmann surprisingly proposes its recovery - the symbol of wandering ‘peregrination’ awakens the romantic lure of the homeland: “the mystery is the homeland”, writes Schürmann the escapee.  The repertoire of German wandering such as Parsifal, the Grail, the blue flower, Angelus Silesius’ ‘rose without why’, Novalis, Christian eroticism, German romanticism is opposed to the feminine counter symbol of deceitful, unfathomable and threatening water – which can cleanse but mostly bewitches, tempting the wanderer to suicide or as the ally of Loreley blinding him to the rocks so he perishes in it.  

Water though is not just feminine – it is also Poseidon – avenger and father of Theseus – annihilator of Hippolytus.

But perhaps Schürmann is Oedipus who has one eye too many – at the entrance to Thebes?   Or the Sphinx – or the riddle – or all of these at once?  Solving himself he then flings himself from the rock.

His book Broken Hegemonies says Granel is one vast solution to the riddle.  Schürmann he implies is not just the Parmenidean kouros, he is Oedipus for the riddle of Europe’s history, its “deadly illness of temporality” (ibid.,p. 216).  Schürmann is an ‘Oedipal’ son of a disgraced defeated German father, whose shame and unnamed suspected complicity with the Nazi regime haunts his autobiographical work Les Origines.

For his contemporaries he seems to have the mystique of an Empedocles who plunging into  Mount Etna – leaves his bronze sandal behind.  Unlike many other thinkers – not just his work – his life – seems to pose a question to which he responds in advance – “without why”.   The thought of this life resembles that thinking which disappears back into itself – at the end of Adorno’s Negative Dialektik – the same thinking which ‘fraternizes with metaphysics at the moment of its fall’.

Emma Bianchi and the Author at NYU, New York City, April 2017

Schürmann as the self-sacrificing Agnus Dei, god-victim of his students’ killing – is just another spectral mask – a chimera.  The epochal reversals ablaze in Schürmann’s writings follow him into his own life where they spawn their duplicates/doubles and double binds.

Francesco Guercio at the Reiner Schürmann Colloquium, Berlin, Nov 2017

As Johannes Fritsche wrote me in February 2016 – there were other daggers under professional Heideggerian cloaks already lying in wait for Schürmann – perhaps he considered the knives of his students as so much sparring practice: “one must not forget that these Heideggerians (that is, Sallis etc.,) were of course envious: Reiner Schürmann was an extremely handsome man, there was, also because of his sexuality, a certain ruthlessness about him, his first book (about Heidegger, after the one on Meister Eckhart) is still by far the best book about Heidegger's history of Being, Broken Hegemonies is the only truly "original" and exciting history of Being - and it is a "beast" while their books are just bieder and betulich.”

Schürmann had a tense relationship with the regime he obsessively derides. “The great philosophical bureaucracy” performing the “corporate role of philosophy” is his bête noire – especially in its American manifestation. The breaking of the hegemonic phantasms also deposes the katechontic philosophical ‘caste’ which secures their continuing existence – those who Schürmann describes, quoting Husserl, as “the civil servants of humanity” or “the bureaucratized version of the philosopher-king”. (Broken Hegemonies, ibid. p. 8)

✦ The Unapproachable Reiner Schürmann - A Phantasmatic Philosopher: Film Without Why (Parts 1-3) is an expanded version of our film project presentation and trailer premiere at the Reiner Schürmann Colloquium, Espace diaphanes, Berlin, November 2nd 2017.

☟(from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, “Joke, Cunning and Revenge”, Prelude in German Rhymes, Poems translated by Adrian del Caro, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 12)

© Shannee Marks and Peer Wolfram, Ulysses Productions, November 2017

The Unapproachable Reiner Schürmann - A Phantasmatic Philosopher: Film Without Why: Part One✦

1.   Prologue: Flight

‘Life without why’ is Reiner Schürmann’s refrain – drawn from Meister Eckhart.

Schürmann’s own life is formed of such radical contingency. “Fuir. Je fuis.” he writes in Les Origines.  He fled his German birth – “ghosts (…) more tenaciously alive than the living” who “impose laws on us that hold longer than those made by states or ideologists.”, (Reiner Schürmann, Origins, Zürich-Berlin, 2016, p.5). But is not this flight itself prefigured in a German poetic unconscious? Hölderlin’s “flight of the Gods” destitutes the world.   Schürmann rarely mentions music – unlike Nietzsche through whose thought he tries to evade Heidegger.   But doesn’t the restless movement of Schürmann’s thinking and writing hide an almost Wagnerian musicality – the never resolving harmonies, the febrile suspensions of Tristan and Isolde – der Liebestod? Des hégémonies brisées – Schürmann's Geburt der Tragödie is also an epic of shattered love.

Schürmann’s other grand flight is when he leaves the priesthood. He was a novitiate in Paris during the ‘6os – a time of revolutionary upheaval and ‘doubt’ inside the Dominican order.  Out of this time of collective heresy he constitutes the “an-archic self”.  In New York Schürmann teaches his students like a Zen master to “kill the teacher”.

Film without Why traces Reiner Schürmann’s aura to some of his chiasmatic outposts in Paris, Greece and New York – like Wakis, the wandering priests of Japanese Noh Theatre we gather the enigmatic signs of his afterlife from former students, colleagues, interpreters, 

strangers, Dominicans, archives, hearsay, locations, ambiences, speculations and topologies.

2.  The Mirror of Dionysus

Killing the teacher is an an-archic method or transgressive way to the an-archic self.  Schürmann’s pedagogy is ancient, Hellenic, Socratic but there, at a site where it veers into the East of Zen.  For Schürmann Meister Eckhart is also Zen – as he writes in Loss of Origin in Soto Zen and Meister Eckhart: “The synthetic concept I wish to develop as standing at the core both of the experience in zazen and of Eckhart’s mysticism is the loss of the origin.” (in: The Thomist, 42, 2, April, 1978, p. 283)   He experienced the master-student relationship  with a Zen master at first hand “the only way to learn Zen” – time he spent in France with Master Deshimaru from Kyoto.  A typical Zen koan describes this relationship:  If you meet a holy man, kill him, if you meet a Buddha, kill him… 

Schürmann departs from the quasi axiom of contemporary philosophy – the self can only be conceived as a form of infinite obligation or near servitude to the specific Other (Derrida, Levinas) or any Other.  Instead Schürmann’s self emerges negatively, crawling out of consciousness in the form of its own an-archic other.
“The modern pathology places phenomena, and the self first of all, on disparate terrains, under the archic-anarchic double bind.  Within the subjectivist arena, the ego remains the other of the archic self. (…) A topic without a general topography places the self within the event of appropriation-expropriation and leads to the other as anarchic self.” (Broken Hegemonies, Indiana University Press, 2003, p. 533)

We meet Chris Long, Schürmann’s former student, at La Maison du Croque Monsieur, one of Schürmann’s haunts, around the corner from where the old graduate faculty building stood on east 13th street and 5th avenue.  Croque Monsieur is an old-fashioned tiny Parisian type café with an upstairs.  The walls are sepia coloured, dotted with cloudy gilt edged mirrors; at black bistro tables couples are wrapped in steamy embraces, next to students enthralled by laptops, huge pastries etc. 

Chris Long and the Author at La Maison du Croque Monsieur, NYC, April 2017

In a previous life the old graduate faculty building had been a pale relentlessly plain quadrangular Bauhaus/Neue Sachlichkeit type of department store for ladies’ hats.  When this enterprise failed the New School bought it cheaply and in 1968 revamped it for the Graduate Faculty.  They kept the escalator and the appearance of an austere commercial fortress. The Graduate Faculty building was torn down in 2011 to make way for the sparkling zeppelin shaped glass tower of the New School’s global fashion department.  Back to ladies’ hats… 

Schürmann spent most of the last 18 years of his life (1975-93) in or around this address, as self-contained as a couvent or a priory.  The Graduate Faculty was in walking distance of his big fifth floor loft apartment in Noho near Washington Square on Broadway and Bond Street, which he shared with his partner the artist Louis Comtois.  The ‘loft’ buildings of the area are ornate neoclassical monuments, relics from the gilded age of manufacturing and retail in Lower Manhattan.  Built in Greek Revival Style or Queen Anne style or Victorian eclectic the buildings are decorated with colonnades, their facades and filigree dazzle in deep red terra cotta, luminous white marble and ornamental cast iron.  By Schürmann’s time manufacturing and commerce had long since left for the suburbs and artists and their diverse undergrounds moved into the lofts.  Robert Mapplethorpe’s first studio was in a loft on Bond Street.  Louis K. Meisel Gallery where Louis Comtois exhibited his large colour field abstract paintings was nearby on Prince Street.  It’s still at the same address today.

On his way to work, Schürmann would have walked down Broadway through a dilapidated downtown Manhattan, in those days a bleak urban war zone, primed and blasted with graffiti.  Schürmann’s New York was still the junky and nark town of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, full of crumbling flophouses and peep shows, but already bleeding tax breaks into the high rent shell game of Donald Trump.   “Sometimes you can see maybe fifty ratty-looking junkies squealing sick, running along behind a boy with a harmonica, and there is The Man on a cane seat throwing bread to the swans, a fat drag queen walking his Afghan hound through the East Fifties, an old wino pissing against an El post, a radical Jewish student giving out leaflets in Washington Square, a tree surgeon, an exterminator, an advertising fruit in Nedick’s where he calls the counterman by his first name.” (William Burroughs, Naked Lunch, The Restored Text, London, 2005 p. 7)

By an uncanny coincidence our film shoot is on April 14th – the same date as Schürmann’s final lecture of his last spring course in 1993 – the subject was Heidegger’s Being and Time, the sections 48-50 on ‘being towards death’.  In the words of T S Elliot: “April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land...” (The Wasteland)  It was Schürmann’s very last class on earth.  Finitude was palpable.  Chris Long was one of his teaching assistants for that final course.  Schürmann gave the lecture course that term in the Swayduck Memorial Auditorium, a large auditorium (of 225 seats) on the first floor of the Faculty named after Edward Swayduck, a labour union boss whose Amalgamated Lithographers of America Local One donated 25,000 dollars to the New School.  As expected attendance had packed the hall to the eaves, it was standing room only.  Everyone knew Schürmann was dying of Aids.

Schürmann was already in a state approaching ‘exination’, a neologism he formed from the Latin exinanio: to empty out, to exhaust or exinanitio: to void.  One almost longs for a scene similar to Kafka’s  Das Urteil – when the bedridden father suddenly rises in bed to his full height, shedding his old man blankets and covers and condemns the son who had tried to cover him up too soon to death by drowning.  But there would be no such return to the vigour of paterfamilias for Schürmann – instead his self-proclaimed ‘successors’ or ‘heirs’ flock to his final class, his last show on earth.  Schürmann does not disappoint them.

Stepping into the river (New York’s East, or the Hudson Bay) of Reiner Schürmann’s work – it is never the same, I seldom really know where I am. Sometimes I use Broken Hegemonies like an oracle – the way the Persians read a random page of Hafiz.  Burroughs comes to mind again – an unreliable Virgil: “ ‘Come back, kid!! Come back!!’ and follows his boy right into the East River, down through condoms and orange peels, mosaic of floating newspapers, down into the silent black ooze with gangsters in concrete, and pistols pounded flat to avoid the probing (pussy sm) finger of prurient ballistic experts.” (Naked Lunch, ibid. p. 5)

One time it is Kant who is washed to the surface – the Kant who “was undoubtedly the first to detect the work of desire in reason”,  just as Schürmann injects desire qua natality into the austere house of being.  (later abandoned for the so-called topology of being).  The desire Kant ‘detected’ in reason  - is the desire to know – too much – a transgressive knowledge/desire punished by the Fall.  The work of the philosopher of reason is to set barriers, limits – teach finitude in the thrust of reason, “keep in check that work and its accompanying megalomania: (RS implies that hegemonic thrust is within reason itself, not in epochs, regimes or their representatives)  “The life [of reason] is nothing but the faculty of desire in its minimal exercise.”  Kant sought to teach a minimizing sobriety to the maximizing thrust.  Reason always “wants to be satisfied.” But utter satisfaction is not useful.  “There is so much that I have absolutely no need to know.” (from Kant’s Reflexionen (Anthropologie) no 1034)  It was necessary to train reason in finitude, a task to be taken up ever anew.”  writes Schürmann at the beginning of Broken Hegemonies. (ibid. p. 12)   Here Kant is reminiscent of Socrates in the agora – there are so many things I don’t need – things and knowing are both acquisitions – there is a greed to know which one has to resist – Mehdi Belhaj Kacem calls this a pleonectic urge, pleonexia – the opposite of anorexia.

Perhaps the claims Schürmann’s students stake upon his teaching, his oracular counsel are pleonectic – the possessive reverence of the cult, showing a lack of Socratic restraint, of sophrosyne, phronesis.  Simon Critchley sees himself at the opposite end – “I don’t want a maitre – nor do I want to be one.”  In the subway, on the way to our film shoot I scribble down: “Question for Simon – do you also provide your students with knives to kill the teacher?”

Before I could even ask him (when we meet in his office on the 11th floor of the Albert and Vera List Academic Centre) what he thought of Schürmann’s Zen like imperative – of ‘knives against the teacher’ – he suddenly describes his own teaching as if reading my thoughts: “You have to set yourself up to be killed. Parricide is part of the philosophical tradition.  Aristotle killed Plato, Plato the tragic poets, the tragic poets killed myth and Homer etc.”

Simon Critchley and the Author at the New School, NYC, May 2017

Schürmann’s free floating auratic religiosity affects his students – inspires a sort of idol worship.  (Critchley refers to a death cult.) But the rule of “knives against the teacher” transforms the cult into a martyrology and quasi-parricide. Perhaps the parricide Critchley speaks of - the inevitable act of "setting oneself up to be killed" by the students - is another way of saying the students perform sparagmos on their orphic teacher?  A quasi-omophagic act immanent to the progress of philosophy?  Schürmann refers to the “mirror of Dionysus” in Broken Hegemonies citing Plotinus’ Enneads – as an “Orphic symbol of dismemberment” (ibid., footnote p. 649), another name for the bacchantic act of tearing apart the living god.  Is this also a ritual of rebirth - a species of 'natality'?

“(…) tragic truth arises from a desire that affirms life”, Schürmann writes in his typewritten Nietzsche lecture notes, continuing his thought in handwriting in the margin: “be it as disrupting as Dionysian dismemberment…” (Vol. 4 Lecture 3, Part 1, p. 20, Inventory established by Pierre Adler, January 1994 in List Center Library, New School, New York City)

One former student – who did not want to be ‘subjected’ to filming – passed on a koan like anecdote about Schürmann, which he had been saving up for some kind of use.

This student – call him KB – writes:
“I have only a short anecdote to contribute, namely:

The setting: Office hours.

KB: Professor Schürmann, I’ve come into some money. I’ll be able to sit out the summer either soaking my head in Heidegger or subjecting myself to the Greek course on offer at the Latin/Greek Institute. (—Or words to that effect.)

RS: If you study the Greek, you’ll be happy for the rest of your life. (—No disclaimer.)

I left. I did. I’ve been.
KB”

With this last flourish hinting at veni vidi vici – the author of the letter seems to suggest that he left – not Schürmann’s office, but Heidegger alias philosophy – which possibly had made him unhappy, enrolled in the Greek course and has spent the rest of his life being happy. Wittgenstein was known to have had the same magical-surgical effect on students of luring them away from philosophy - even years later. One Oxford don gave up philosophy to become a plumber – he collapsed and died on the way to a plumbing job.  Both Wittgenstein and Schürmann were pied pipers who didn’t really want anyone to follow them.
When I asked Vishwa Adluri, another former student, his reaction to this Schürmann apocrypha, he was moved.  He said the story was genuine; it made him feel “the presence of Reiner”.

For some of those witnessing his very public demise, Schürmann’s own figure, gradually merges with Socrates:  Vishwa imagines himself as Phaedrus walking with Schürmann-Socrates in the countryside outside Athens. Although emaciated and marked by the fatal illness – his eyes emit a brilliant light and his voice can still mesmerize his listeners. “Knowing Reiner in his last days was nothing more and nothing less than what walking with Socrates must have been for Phaedrus.” (from Vishwa Adluri, Parmenides, Plato and Moral Philosophy, London/New York, 2012, p. 5) Schürmann, he told me, saw philosophy and the work of a philosopher as a holy sacrifice – that a philosopher should give his life to his work.  St Francis and the monastic life of poverty remained his ideal.

Vishwa Adluri and the Author in Madison, New Jersey, April 2017

Johannes Fritsche, a colleague from the New School, too recalls though that Schürmann was known to espouse a pedagogy rooted in auto-destruction, self-sacrifice.  He writes in the In memoriam Reiner Schürmann issue of the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal:
“As Aaron Garrett  (another former student of Schürmann’s sm) mentioned once, Schürmann understood teaching as Socrates did and was convinced that a good teacher should provide the students with the knives to kill the teacher.” (New School for Social Research, Vol. 19 No 2-Vol. 20 No 1, 1997, p. 202)
Schürmann’s teaching sounds an acephalous note, an an-archic imperative.  He assigns his students the work of destroying him.  How successfully do they complete their assignment?  I asked Chris Long if he had also heard Schürmann speak of sharpening knives against the teacher.  He had.  Schürmann, he feels, gives him permission to undo some of the darkness of his thinking – move in a more ‘nuptial’ optimistic track rather than the direction of Schürmann’s tragic singularizing mortality. He wields his philosophical dagger bequeathed by Schürmann to act out a sort of ‘killing with kindness’.

In the essay Care of Death: On the Teaching of Reiner Schürmann (in Philosophy Today, online January 2017) he pays homage to Schürmann’s teaching on the cusp of his own death.  Schürmann like Socrates in the dialogue Phaedo - comforts and heals his disciples in his prison cell “on the prescribed day of his death” (ibid. p. 1).   He cites Agnes Heller, who in her speech at Schürmann’s memorial service similarly casts Schürmann as Socrates – except instead of dying for philosophy – he died for something better - for love.

Emma Bianchi who also attended that last class on Heidegger describes the hushed silence in the auditorium when Schürmann entered, leaning on his cane, wearing his long leather coat, walking with painful slowness to the lectern.  “He looked noble.  I drank the Kool-Aid,” she told me.

Reiner Schürmann in New York City

But how close was Schürmann really to the Socrates of Phaedo in his own ‘theatre of death’ – the last class on Being and Time?  And even more perplexing– is Socrates’ teaching in Phaedo comparable to Heidegger’s doctrines of being-toward-death and Dasein’s ontological attunement to finitude?  Schürmann emphasizes in the last sentence of the lecture notes for that spring term - not so much ‘care of death’ – but being-toward-death as an instrument or condition to retrieve the thought of being as time, Dasein’s temporality.   But this is Schürmann interpreting Heidegger – not his thinking sans phrase. Schürmann of Broken Hegemonies is not identical with the Heidegger of Being and Time: life without why is constituted by a topological double bind or differend structured as much by natality as it is by mortality – what he calls the ultimates.  But that still leaves Socrates of Phaedo and with him Schürmann dangling in a Heideggerian no man’s land of philosophical euthanasia. In Chris Long’s recollection, Schürmann’s last class sounds almost like a branch of Dignitas: “Schürmann, like Socrates, always urged us to follow close along with him in examining the logos.  So too, in that last lecture, he healed us well by directing us back to the text where we encounter the question of being and how we might cultivate practices of authentic care and devote our lives to the practice of philosophy as care of death.” (ibid., p. 11)

In the cosmological drama being played out in Schürmann’s last class  – Schürmann qua Socrates – the prototype of the philosopher condemned to death – prepares to die, whilst Heidegger the mortician looks on as the angel of death.

The subject of Phaedo though, Socrates’ last teachings, is not Dasein’s finitude or temporality nor being toward death – it’s the immortality of the soul.  He tells his pupils that he expects to ‘depart to some happy state of the blessed’, (Phaedo, trans. by Henry Cary, Everyman's Library, London/New York, 1913, p. 200), where he will be with better masters or gods – urging the poet Evenus ‘if he is a philosopher’ to follow him soon.   If Schürmann were the Socrates of Phaedo then he would have been similarly inviting his many listeners to that final course on Being and Time to follow him as soon as they can. 
(And yet … in an uncanny hint of ‘gallows humor’ Schürmann writes in the 1991 foreword to the English translation of Origins: “I often joked with Louis: were I to write more about us, the story would be entitled, “Follow Me If you Can”. (ibid.) )
Socrates himself is not physically ill –unless you regard the expectation of a violent sudden death as an illness.  He is a prisoner on death row.  His death is semi-voluntary; he probably could have escaped his ‘death sentence’ by going into exile to Megara or Bœotia. Socrates chooses to stay.  Schürmann has no choice. But death is death. Socrates’ mysterious last words, which so horrified Nietzsche (Gay Science, 340) – “Crito we owe a cock to Æsculapius, pay it therefore and do not neglect it” (Phaedo, ibid.) – imply that he saw life itself as the disease from which the hemlock cup was curing him.
As he says to Simmias: “because as long as we are encumbered with the body, and our soul is contaminated with such an evil, we can never fully attain to what we desire: and this, we say, is truth.” (Phaedo, ibid. p. 134).   Nietzsche on the other hand sees life as convalescence from Socrates’ other ‘disease’ –the disease of the West.  As Schürmann says in his lecture on Nietzsche: “Nietzsche’s thinking is preparatory – or, it is neither the language of sickness, not yet the language of great health, but the language of the convalescent.  (…) Nietzsche is still in the grips of the Western disease – willing truth at any cost – and already beyond it, “superficial out of profundity” (…)”  His philosophy is an ‘incipit’  – a beginning, says Schürmann, quoting Rene Char “Le poète, grand commenceur”. (ibid., p. 21) 
Nietzsche’s Fröhliche Wissenschaft as he writes in the preface, is his bacchantic, Dionysian release from premature infirmity/frailty – a “drunken revelry of convalescence” from the compulsion to know.  Instead we the convalescing knowing ones have learned to forget – we discover how good it is not to know – not as philosophers but as artists.  How could Schürmann – the ‘Nietzschean’ – not prefer Nietzsche’s euphoric convalescence from the archic disease, ‘the will to truth’, to Heidegger’s teleocratic/telic ‘care of death’? 
Or isn’t it Nietzsche who immunizes Schürmann against Heidegger’s later attempts in Beiträge zur Philosophie: Vom Ereignis to cast being as property or the act of appropriation-alienation (Ereignis), in which the self recursively cannibalises itself? 

✦ The Unapproachable Reiner Schürmann - A Phantasmatic Philosopher: Film Without Why (Parts 1-3) is an expanded version of our film project presentation and trailer premiere at the Reiner Schürmann Colloquium, Espace diaphanes, Berlin, November 2nd 2017.

© Shannee Marks and Peer Wolfram, Ulysses Productions, November 2017

Landscape with Minotaur

When I walk across the meadow

At a brisk clip

The haemophiliac light

haemorrhaging in the West

half expecting to see

on the other side of the river

the city of sacrifice

a yak, a water buffalo, a llama

the puma-shaped city

“the butts of the rest”

the bats swim by

the minotaur

just below the tree line

keeping their distance

the train roars

in my rear

the turn of the boars

boats …

Landscape with Hypnos

Infiltrated, polluted and cajoled by podcast-(p)ushers spamming up my emails, I listened to a podcast from the New Yorker – one of a whole swarm of podcasts supposed to turn you if not overnight at least after countless hours of dazed listening into a genius or someone who can reasonably fake it.   The New Yorker podcasts house hours and miles of author voices – who can put you straight to sleep.  For the first time ever I heard words of Harold Brodkey whom I mixed up with Joseph Brodsky (so much better – a direct descendant on his father’s side of an ‘ancient Rabbinic dynasty’).  Harold Brodkey died almost in the same Aids wave in New York as Reiner Schürmann (sociological curiosity my excuse for listening to his ‘story’).  The reader is a gay writer of a certain age (who doesn’t want to be necessarily considered gay in his writing) from Cincinnati.  

The story “Dumbness is Everything” is fairly rudimentary – only just giving the lay of the land – that sexualized geography around NYC in its rich hinterlands of Westchester County and a married couple driving home drunk from one of their boozy parties.  Just a few breaths before the word popped up in the story – I already heard, felt, smelled – this is Gatsby land – and obligingly in the foaming spray of words – out came “Gatsbyoid” to describe the power vectors tensing between the conjugal two backed beast on the conjugal  sublet lawn under the starry skies of Great Gatsby country.  The beginning of the tale is promising – a few asides about the property relations of the wife’s Mafiosi-ish family.  The reader of the story, whose choice it is, says it is about class and class bodies – somehow a taboo in American prose.  Upper Mafiosi class, Harvard class – the Jewish boy ‘made good’ who sneaked into Harvard is pitted against the she-demon scion of a Mafiosi family whose considerable not so old wealth comes from money laundering and shady real estate deals.  (Sort of a fifties ancestral prototype of the dynastic union between Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump?) 

She moves as if she were brandishing a riding crop.  Where they live though seems to be in essence parvenu-pariah land – the other houses scattered on the slope are “owned by Jews”.  So is this sexed up class war really just a turf war between rival fractions of the pariah-parvenu class – rather than a genuine gentile versus pariah reciprocal seppuku/lingchi pact?  A moot point?

Other than the ‘mindless topology of the highway’ - the only setting of the scene Brodkey concedes is how the couple in their drunken stupor try to ferry in unnoticed into that Westchester village where they are domiciled, sneaking past the only light – the lighted gas station and police station.  This sounded so familiar.  Almost.  Except the lighted police station in our village is just a mock up – or even if it’s lighted and even if police bodies are inside they’re not there for us, to protect us.  They’re there explicitly professionally to ignore us.  It is an empty shell of a police station but conscious of its emptiness.

Besides these two monuments of rural villagehood – the story never strays from the grounds of their estate.  They live in the caretaker’s cottage which they never reach in that very long story – seeming to end numerous times but refusing to die just like that.  (Brodkey wrote it at the end of his terminal illness.)  They stop at the lawn – a sloping lawn, near a garage, a stone or brick wall – where clothes are torn, pulled off – and then it’s just the landscape of their fucking bodies on the lawn – commandeering and commanded – a few token snatches of dialogue about ‘who might see us’ – how alone they are on their expensive borrowed lawn.  Sex in that vintage year some time in the fifties – “at sea on the lawn” – had a bronze like character.  Bronze kisses, caresses, ‘nuzzles’, licks, scratches and other tactile ploys – the woman is unexpectedly a ‘bad kisser’ but her mushy lips thicken the plot.  The gargantuan fuck on the lawn – Westchester County’s tribute to “Dejeuner sur l’herbe” - is interrupted occasionally so the author can take note of plant life, the air, a passing cloud of party ghosts.  The story’s reader denies that there is any nostalgia in it.   The present of 1954 or so is just not happening now, but somehow eternally then.

Brodkey does his best to de-conjugalize the sexual congress on the lawn – to make it less proprietary.  Still the story begins with an inventory of property relations – lest doubts arise later – on whose land they’re fucking. 

Landscape with Dilettanti

Boat Dilettanti
Fishermen/Angler dilettanti
Drug dealing cocaine snorters
Who fornicate in the pub garden
Dilettanti
Working Men’s Club dilettanti
And Handymen ultra dilettanti
“none of us are experts”
three tiles are missing in your roof
won’t cost you a thing
Dilettanti
postmen dilettanti
Wet mail all curled up in a corner dilettanti
Costco Thai curry pub food dilettanti
à la carte Lebanese night dilettanti
taking Christmas reservations now
dilettanti
Costa spiv dilettanti
sidewalk café dilettanti
volunteer firemen dilettanti
tutti quelli che
et tutti quanti

( Engendered by the use of the word dilettanti in the egregious British film “The Governess” where the lord of the manor character named Cavendish – an amateur naturalist in a remote pile on the Isle of Skye – dabbles in camera obscura pre-photography – until finally the Sephardic Jewess faux Christian governess-jus-primae-noctis-lay discovers the magic potion for fixing the image – salt water.  He expresses the fear he would appear to be a dilettanti.)

"We will catch up with you." - Nazi Philo-Zionism Read Backwards

 

The Jews were always meant to be the engine of their own extermination machine – the Nazi plan was for their genocide (to the greatest degree possible) – be self-financing, self-propelling, self-executioning.  Such economic thinking was not specific or exclusive to the Nazi design for mass murder – it was in keeping with the Ur-cell of all German national economic thought – maximized autarchy.
Jewish cultural, social and political institutions and aspirations including the desire for national self-determination should never cease to accelerate the momentum of the Final Solution.  
The Hitler dispositif was also opportunistic, Hitler and the SS often made it up as they went along.  Zionism in the thirties was an ascending force in the Jewish community – even more it was roiling within the territorial jurisdiction of their rival – and highly emulated model – the British Empire’s “Mandatory Palestine”.  What a tempting morsel for SS appetites – a quasi-self selecting pure Jewish colony under direct colonial rule.  No wonder the various members of the SS “Jewish Department” like its head Baron von Mildenstein and his protégé Eichmann were so energized by their visits to Palestine – waxing lyrical with almost genuine admiration for Jewish feats of pioneering in their towns and kibbutzim.  Mildenstein – a ‘völkisch’ Nazi spent 6 months in Palestine at the beginning of Hitler’s reign researching pro-Zionist articles for the Nazi press.             

Following the British lead – the Nazi-Hitler strategists in the German Foreign Office under Konstantin von Neurath sought to manipulate unrest and internecine battles within the various populations under their control for their own hegemonic pursuits – including of course the conatus for self-determination.  Just as T.E. Lawrence co-engineered Allenby’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem towards the end of World War I on the back of the demise of Ottoman power and with the muscle of the irregular legions of Emir Faisal, son of the Sharif of Mecca – the Nazis thought to use the German Zionists to disrupt and undermine the British hold on Palestine.  The SS became rigorous Zionist recruiters – forcing German Jews to ‘ethnicize’ themselves in line with the Nazi Weltanschauung of racial purity and separation – learn Hebrew, stop speaking German and acquire useful trades for Palestine.  Mildenstein and Eichmann almost went native – studying Hebrew themselves, listening to Hebrew folksong records in their office. (How ironic that some thirty years later Eichmann was tried and put to death in his beloved Zionist Palestine – by that time Israel.) But unlike the British tactics and methods – the Nazi expansion drive was not merely intent on using Zionist colonies to secure a bridgehead for their own imperial designs on Palestine and the region.  The concentration of Jews in Palestine was to have been a proto-ghetto – perhaps even a model for all those Jewish ghettos-to-come along the route of their exterminatory invasion of Europe – the waiting rooms for the death camps.

For a brief period in the mid thirties Hitler and his SS followed a stratagem of ostentatiously favouring and grooming Zionist organizations in Germany.  This ‘experiment’ was as much a prelude to genocide as the ‘Nuremberg Laws’ - just another means of extracting German Jews from the German ‘body politic’ – softening them up for ‘the kill’.  The Nazis in fact defended “the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, the finishing touches of Germany’s pre-Second World War anti-Jewish legislation (…) as an expression of their pro-Zionism.” (Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of Dictators, Croom Helm, Lawrence Hill, 1983, First Internet Edition, pdf, AAARGH 2004, p. 85)  As Lenni Brenner further notes: “The Zionists could not even claim that they were duped by Hitler; they conned themselves.  Hitler’s theories on Zionism, including the Jews’ alleged inability to create a state, had been there in plain German since 1926.  The Zionists ignored the fact that Hitler hated all Jews, and he specifically condemned their own ideology.” (ibid. p. 89)

Hitler’s Zionist ruse though still has the power to captivate and deceive to this day – as shown by Ken Livingstone’s recent credulous exhuming of the Nazi bogus pro-Zionist policy in his shrill claim “Hitler supported Zionism”.  The German Zionist Jews who were taken in by Hitler’s attentions, wouldn’t have imagined in 1933-38 what the ultimate goal of Nazi policy towards the Jews was to be – but what’s Livingstone’s excuse?  As Queen’s Evidence for his case Livingstone has shanghaied Lenni Brenner’s 1983 study Zionism in the Age of Dictators – failing though to grasp its many subtleties.  This is how Lenni Brenner summarizes Hitler’s ‘Zionism’ – and the tragic complicity of part of the Zionist establishment with Nazi pre-genocidal immigration politics.
“However, the fact that the Zionists became Adolf Hitler’s ‘favoured children’ hardly qualified him as a Jewish nationalist.  Even von Mildenstein, for all his Hebrew records, accepted the party line when it turned to outright murder.  Throughout this period the Nazis toyed with the Zionists as a cat would play with a mouse.  Hitler never thought he was letting anyone get away from him because he was encouraging Jews to go to Palestine.  If the Jews went to far-away America, he might never be able to get at them and they would remain the foes of the German Empire in Europe.  But if they went to Palestine instead?  ‘There’, as a Gestapo agent told a Jewish leader, ‘we will catch up with you.’ ” (ibid.) 

Fortunately history ‘caught up’ with Nazi Germany – too late for the Jews of Europe – but in time for the Jews of Palestine.  That is when they turned their attention and energies to expelling the British from Palestine with all the means of persuasion at their disposal.  Although later an ex-member of the Stern Gang and Anglophile of sorts, habitué of a famous bohemian café in Jerusalem across the street from the ‘Old Knesset’ was wont to lament after several cognacs “If the British ever return to Palestine, we should cut off their legs so they stay here with us.”  It was Labour’s privilege under Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin to oversee that painful withdrawal of the British presence from ‘Mandatory Palestine’ and contraction of the British Empire.  Ernest Bevin – the foreign minister – Labourite workhorse and buffo ogre – conducted the immense retreat of British imperialism from the Palestine theatre.  Are Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Corbyn still grieving for that particular loss of British power on Labour’s watch?          
     

The Being-With Party and Other Scenes of the English Province

 

The Being-With Party


The Being-With party hung out on the brown strip two doors down. This proves that ekstasis need not move very far – or that what seems to be outside self is merely a regrouping of it.  The immediate neighbors one door down posed for a long while in middle field.  The curly blond occiput of the doctor’s wife was visible in conversation with a florid white haired white bearded man in a straw hat (an important retired albino) – his head was big and clunky, the way dwarfs’ heads tend to appear  – intermittently she let her conversation flow towards the neighbors one door down.  I watched them through a ‘hit man’’ wide slit in the blind, afraid they might notice.
Somehow I was magnetically attracted to this demonstration of suburban group power.  Flesh was present and accounted for its own accounting.  The party mise en scène was very sparsely decorated.  Besides the green marquee, the party flag – that was where the food and drink were quartered – too few chairs.  The solid talk in the hot shadeless July sun from 1 to 8 approximately – gave off a constant roar.  Where the bras (D plus cup) and panties (size 18 at least) of the hostess usually flutter from their laundry ‘spider’ in full view – this is where the party made its stand.  You could feel how parties in the English province give rise to Parties. 

The categorical imperative is also a Being-With, the presence of the collective other inside, especially as a punisher.  In that sense Socrates was his own executioner.  Seneca is another example.  Nietzsche’s word from Selbst-Henker.  All relations of fealty:  Until the ‘emancipation’ via Capital, relations of fealty were the norm.  Was that the same sort of Being-With as when those relations became sublimated in the commodity form?  Every relation within Capital is one of radical separation – separating the worker-consumer from the means of production; the relations (of no relation) between humans in the community are regulated by/through the universal equivalent – money.  Like money they are equally fungible – quantifiable.  The spectacle says Debord is the unified appearance of this separation.  Yet relations of fealty persist, survive in the spectacle of power alias ‘the state’.  One owes the state an allegiance, occasionally expressed in the swearing of oaths, which is not just translatable in monetary equivalents.  Treason is also a crime of or against fealty. The justice system enforces fealty – non-contractual relations.  For instance when you refuse to serve in the military, pay your taxes or fulfil your custodial obligations towards a dependent.  Or the legally binding marital vows in front of a magistrate – “I solemnly declare etc, etc.” 
The state perpetuates itself as the spectacle of a world exceeding or removed from the universal equivalent – in that way it presents itself always as a receptacle/an archive for the archaic (pageantry and ostentation), an endearing ‘throwback’ to all more ‘pure’ forms of obligation existing before and ‘outside’ of epochal capitalism.   

 

       

 

Village Scenes – and Inmates

One of those couples came down from the hills.  I was standing in front of the bananas in the village supermarket, trying to find a few ripe ones.  From the side, in my blind angle, an old fart started handling the bananas himself.  All I saw was his withered liver spotted claw shifting the packages.  Then he spoke to me in a loud inquisitorial voice, full of the petulance of old queers – “Are you sorting the bananas?”, a question which made no sense except as an insult or a comment on my touching – for his taste – too many of the bananas.  I should have said something offensive, but I wasn’t quick enough – rather startled to hear any sounds coming from that obscure direction.  (Creeping up from behind with a verbal cudgel is a typical British manoeuvre.)  When I turned around I saw the frightened face of his companion, his greasy pomaded hair, a round crude rutted face of an ex-convict or one who has to play the role for a senescent employer. After the bananas, it was the turn of the oranges.  The old man pawed them aimlessly, pointing certain ones out to his companion.  Had he thought I was a stocker in mufti?  Or in his long life had he always found the world just waiting to be of service?
A woman in a black dress with a wide red belt around her narrow waist stepped out of a car in front of the old people’s flats.  Soon there were more black suited people hurrying towards the entrance.  Their clothes looked fresh out of the mothballs, typical for a village funeral.  Most were smiling, a fat woman looked like she was eagerly awaiting a good tea.

A hot June afternoon is a good occasion for a personality or a wife swap – as when I looked outside and saw what could only be the neighbour lady’s doppelgänger lying in her commodious lawn chair.  But any impersonator of someone has him/herself to disappear completely.  The impersonator is the superfluous identity, acquiring the identity of someone else who disappears in the bodily sense, but persists in the guise of the invaded host. 

Twyford on the London-Oxford line is very sexological.  A big poster on the train platform asked and answered the faux survey question: “Why do so many women fake orgasms – because so many men fake foreplay.”  The poster showed a woman with a face like Emmanuelle photographed from above, her head on an ethereal pillow.  The only people on the benches waiting for the train were women, young women.  In that moment I saw them all faking orgasms. 

 

The State Visit

Where I saw only the procession of the irresistible adorable red Chinese Emperor on his state visit to his British dominion – his subjects and their grandees panting for his emperor’s touch and trillions of yuan, the Queen perhaps wetly fantasizing about how it would feel to be ‘empress of China’ – Stewart Lee, writing in the Guardian, had an outbreak of Tourette’s syndrome in the form of dead empire rage.  Perhaps the state visit of Xi Jinping brought back bad memories of how the British had to cough up Hong Kong – much to their displeasure - and even worse panic fears that it soon might be the time of London.

Instead of this aimable homme du monde très poli, ruler of the world hegemon, he pretended to see only a giant red ass – volcanically spouting and spewing farts and excrements over Westminster, Buckingham Palace and the English pub.  At the state banquet all the greats of this land – headed by the Queen – lined up to either kiss or lick this ass. (As one knows psychoanalytically speaking money/gold and faeces are one.)  Only the ‘first born’ (meaning Charles) was for some reason absent from this divertissement after the fashion of the “Divine Marquis”.  I did wonder why all the blood royals except for the Queen were somewhere hidden from view.  Only the Duchess of Cambridge was seated quite alone next to the Emperor.  Had they offered her - in her blood red gown and tiara – as a serviette for the Emperor’s bodily waste?  She looked a little like a cooked goose herself.