Cheney's death march

 Fred Licht begins his essay on Goya’s Charles IV and his Family with this exemplary paragraph:

“Ever since Theophile Gautier described Goya's Charles IV and His Family (Fig. 1) as "the corner baker and his wife after they won the lottery," scholars, amateurs, and casual visitors to the Prado have asked themselves how it was possible for Goya's royal patrons to accept so degrading a portrait.1 Even if one takes into consideration the fact that Spanish portraiture is often realistic to the point of eccentricity, Goya's portrait still remains unique in its drastic description of human bankruptcy.”

I was reminded of Goya by the photograph of the bipartisan ghouls sitting in attendance at Cheney’s funeral. From Bush to Biden to Pence, it was a panorama of the essential, sublime silliness of the American empire as it flops, all of them mourning the man who helped blow a hole in the ship of state and has left us all worse off than we would ever have been if he had not been born – and how often can you say that about someone?

Truly, Dick Cheney was a ghoul who would have satisfied Goya’s painterly criteria: the obliterating self-satisfaction of his face, the faux-studliness of his attitude, even the habit of hunting (which he did famously badly, injuring a man in his hunting party and infamously extracting an apology for the injury from the injured party) - which surely would have reminded Goya of the string of unfit Bourbon hunters. Yet the photograph was not of Cheney, whose image I can, unfortunately, conjure up from the dark 00s. It was a portrait of an incompetent and murderous political and corporate elite, whose faces are set in what I suppose they suppose is a solemn look, fit for a patriotic occasion. These people are, in truth, the undertakers of patriotic occasions, in as much as patriotism is some kind of reverence for republican virtu – not a single player here has a drop of it. Like a batting average to a baseball player, one feels the casualty average should hover over these geriatric heads. Behold Biden, a man who helped bury under the rubble of Gaza at least 10,000 or more children! Behold Bush, the glad recipient of many a torture memo, an incompetent whose epitaph should be the words he uttered to the men from the CIA who came to warn him, in August 2001, of the upcoming terrorist act: “"All right. You've covered your ass" And is that our lady of losses, Katherine Harris, next to Biden? And Pence? Lusterless eminences, the Rosencranz and Guildenstern of the neo-fascist farce we are currently seeing enacted.

Death has a way of concentrating our minds, and this death – the death of a deadly and toxic figure – should remind us that the U.S. elite is a numbskull-ridden horror comedy, But at least they are bipartisanly turning out for the man who once claimed to be, as Vice President, neither executive nor legislative, but in his own branch of government, untouchable. The claim which serves as the root for the current Trump interregnum.

Denunciation cannot wither what nature and our social order has withered already, but I don’t denounce because it will do any good to others – it is just that if you don’t spit the poison out of your mouth, if you swallow it, you will find yourself swimming among cancers sooner or later.

As Goya knew well, the master of the secret sketchpad, the painter of those black paintings in his final atelier outside of Bordeaux.

In the Golden Egg: Letter from Lord Chandos

 1. Hugo Hofmannsthal published The Letter (which is almost always translated into English as The Letter from Lord Chandos) in 1903. In turn of the century Vienna, Hofmannsthal, as a young lyric poet, had become the object of a more numerous and public cult than the one (more famous now) surrounding Stefan Georg. And, unlike Georg or Rilke, he was politically and religiously orthodox – a good Catholic, a supporter of the Habsburg order. Herman Broch, in his essay on Hofmannsthal, says that “on the triad of life, dream and death rests the symphonic structure of Hofmannsthal’s complete opus” – which should remind us of Klimt, and the whole Jugendstyl aesthetic of fin de siecle Vienna. It is a mistake to assume that these aesthetes, with their intense interest in hedonism, were somehow opposed to the sexual ‘repression’ of bourgeois Habsburg society, since, in fact, the latter never operated as a machine for repression. And so it was with Hofmannsthal – as his enemy Kraus liked to observe, he was certainly a man of the status quo.

However, he was also certainly a language man. Hofmannsthal seemed preternaturally gifted with phrases in his early poetry.

This is why the Letter created quite a shock.

The Letter is presented as a reply to a letter written by Francis Bacon to Philip Lord Chandos. Bacon is concerned that Philip Lord Chandos, a promising young maker of poems and masques, had fallen silent. Lord Chandos writes that such have been the changes he has undergone that “he hardly knows if I am the same person to whom you have directed your precious letter”. He goes on to ask if he was the same person as the twenty three year old who, in Venice, under the stony boughs of the grand piazza, lived half in a dream of the books to come – for instance, sketches of the realm of Henry the Eighth, or a mythography of the ancient myths, or a collection of apothegmata as Julius Caesar would have written them, a sort of jumble of dialogues, curious knowledge and sayings not unlike Bacon’s own Natural History or New Organon.

“To be brief: all of being appeared as one great unity to me, who existed in a sort of continuous intoxication: the mental and physical world seemed to image no opposites to me, just as little as the world of court and the world of animals, art and un-art, loneliness and society; in all I felt Nature, in the confusions of madness as much as in the extremest refinements of a Spanish ceremonial, in the boorishness of a young peasant not less than in the sweetest allegory; and in all nature I felt myself; when I in my hunting cap absorbed the foaming, warm milk that an unkept person milked out of a beautiful, soft eyed cow’s udder into a wooden bucket, it was the same to me as I was sitting in the built in window cove of my studio, sucking out of folios the sweet and foaming nurture of the mind. The one was as the other; one did not yield to the other, neither in terms of dreamy, super-earthly nature nor in physical force, and so it continued through the whole breadth of life, right hand, left hand. Everywhere I was in the middle, never was I conscious of a mere semblance. Or it seemed to me that everything was an allegory and every creature a key to another, and I felt myself to be the man who was able to seize their heads one after the other and unlock with them as much of the other as could be unlocked.”

Well, now, - if you have been a philosophy student or a lyric poet and not had this feeling, than you are highly in need of an ego. Having a full sense of what you possess when you are young gives you these buttery, milky moments of feeling, as though the crosspatch world has been waiting those dark dark eons just to encounter the revelatory moment of the tearing of the seals which has happened in your head. You are the angel of the Lord. Or you are Krishna, a god man who was pretty conversant, himself, with the ways of milkmaids. At least, so it was with me at twenty one, a fuckin’ mooncalf if there ever was one, but a common enough exhibit of the syndromes of the hyperborean consciousness. Lord Chandos is a recognizable type, the child of the century – his avatars are in Balzac, in Lermontov, in Tolstoy. The modernist moment is marked by the struggle to be impersonal – to deliver oneself from the milky moment – and that struggle requires some terrible sacrifices of ego for an uncertain outcome. One outcome is the Flaubertian artist. Another outcome is… well, as it is described in the Letter.

2. All eggs – Prajapati’s, Humpty Dumpty’s – crack. Far from being the kind of thing all the king’s horses and all the king’s men should deplore, cracking is the perfection of the egg, its designed endpoint.

The milkfed days of Philip Lord Chandos , were apparently – or so his account would make us believe – appointed to lead him from glorious estate to glorious estate as he became a grandee of great learning. And thus he’d put one foot and then the other out of the egg.

But it is a fact that some eggs fail. And it is a fact that promising minds are easily culled and spoiled, that entrance into real life is entrance into a bureaucratic labyrinth in which the many branches are all equally tedious, that energy is delight only as long as the divide between promise and attainment seems eminently surmountable. Hands, necks, cheeks wither. The great work, the grand instauration, the New Atlantis becomes a great mill, to which one finds oneself chained, one day, much like any other slave.
Or… perhaps in a horrible moment, all mental energies collapse, and the egg dies within.
“But, my honorable friend, even earthly concepts escape me in the same manner. How am I supposed to try to describe these rare mental pains to you, this elevation of the fruited branch above my outstretched hand, this retraction of the murmuring water before my thirsty lips?
In brief, my case is like this: the ability to think or speak consecutively over an object, something, has been completely lost to me.”

3. Who among us does not know these imbecile gaps? Brain farts, tongue ties, the cat not only getting your tongue but gobbling it up before your horrified eyes? I used to be a ready speaker in my twenties and thirties, always prompt to take out my mental case of knives, so to speak, and throw them at the target, thwack thwack thwack. I can still tap mechanically into the old flow, but how easily the references, the memories, the names will suddenly fly out of my head at unbidden moments! The cool web of language, as Robert Graves has it, tears (the homunculus spider in my head weaving, over the seemingly endless time I’ve been alive, its complex, dreadfully dusty webs). Forgetting a word, in my salad days, was not my constant sidekick, but a stutter in the machine, and I had merely to knock it once to put it all on track. Ah, blind habit, friend of human kind! Now, of course, it is a regular event that the web is torn, and I’ll be caught in the midst of my babble. I’ll have that magic, frightening aphasic moment, when the name-world become unfamiliar. A spell in reverse, you might say.
In the aphasic moment, what spreads out irresistibly is an existential embarrassment. If memory does anything, it keeps us steady on this earth. It might even give us, if the mystics are right, eternity in a grain of sand, properly remembered. The Letter from Lord Chandos is one of the few texts that touch on this inversely spelled moment. And the need to keep running in spite of the phasic drip. The need to keep the diligent, unsteady spider weaving. It is as if at the center of the whole project was some covered up glitch. I can taste the poisonous, acrid flavour of this moment on my tongue.
Although I’m not going to exaggerate – this isn’t the kind of thing that makes you slit your wrist with a butter knife in the intervals. It is the kind of thing you don’t talk about with anyone. So why not launch it out there on the Internet and watch it float?

Nemesis precedes Justicia: the impunity point in the American 21st century

One of the reasons, I think, that the Epstein affair has sort of haunted the American 21st century is that it is emblematic of the rise of impunity for the rich and the powerful. The rich and the powerful always possess a certain large impunity – this is one of the great incentives to wealth. Popular wisdom has long known this, but it is undiscussed in our schools and colleges and magazines in general. It would stick out, a bit. I got rich so I could do criminal shit -why, say it aint so, great entrepreneur!  

Our legal system, for instance, is built on two conflicting principles, one of which is egality before the law, the other of which is a very strong hierarchy of lawyers, organized by marketplace principles, which makes egality before the law a joke. One man kills his neighbor and cuts off his head and is put in jail and even executed; another man, possessor of a fortune running into the hundreds of millions, kills his neighbor, cuts off his head, is arrested and escapes and flees and is recaptured, and he simply purchases lawpower and gets off scot-free – I’m of course referring to the case of Robert Durst.

The tug between the punishability of all citizens and the impunity of the top few is a theme in all republics. I would venture that there is something like an impunity point beyond which the republic loses its form of stability – its traditional organizations and support structures. That beyond-punishment space opens up real possibilities. We have always, in the American republic, lived with a certain impunity space, but when it broadens, things get very tricky. For the last twenty-five years, I think, elites have enjoyed a very strong moment of impunity, of which we have all seen the evidences. The whole bearing of the court system as well as the executive and legislative branches have been to grant this space to an array of activities (which is given the anodyne name of “de-regulation” in political economics), highlighted by the array of increasingly severe punishment for an array of activities among those who cannot afford great or even moderately good lawyers. I’d say that there is a reason that the macro-effect of this is greatest on the African-American population, which is uniquely rare among the elites – in contrast to women, or gays, etc. In the latter cases, it is all about breaking the glass ceiling – moving up in the elite cohort from a position in that cohort. In the case of those who are in the area outside the elite cohort, it is all a matter of the Great Jailing.

The impunity point was reached well before the Biden presidency, but in many ways it is an exemplar of gateway behavior. The deregulation of the economy achieved, during the Biden presidency, an absurd structure – the wealth of the wealthiest, measured mainly by financial instruments, went well past the level of ancien regime aristocracy. At the same time, the impunity of the political class, in the exemplary instance of Donald Trump, was paraded before us as, absurdly, a sort of pragmatism. The country club penitentiary combined with the Mar a Lago bathroom to show everyone that nothing, in the Republic, was serious anymore. No law was really non-negotiable for the elites, and no law was too onerous for the non-elite citizen – especially in the subset Republic created by private credit agencies and private equity firms.

This all sounds doomscrollingish, but I feel anything but. That the system is bursting in all directions could mean that we are transforming into an authoritarian gumball. But it could mean what it means – that the time is up on this state of impunity. That we’ve come to the point of the ultimate game, in which people will actually sacrifice largely in order to punish those they feel who have acted unfairly. Liberalism was, also, born out of revolt. Nemesis precedes Justicia. Amen.

Secrets - the movie

1.

 

Childhood – middle class childhood – is, among other things, an education in secrets. Secret making and breaking. A paper by Yves de la Taille on the development of  “the right to a secret” among children cites researchers in the Piagetian school claiming that children develop a conception of secrecy around four years of age. I wonder if that has changed as we’ve plugged our kids into youtube and other internety business. I vaguely remember an Oswald the Octopus episode about a secret, which amused Adam in his toddler days.

I don’t think the secret begins as a peer to peer, sibling to sibling or playmate to playmate toy. Parents take great pleasure in making secrets part of kidlife. What would a present be if it isn’t wrapped – if it isn’t the subject of hints – if it isn’t hidden, after it is bought, in the parental closet or workroom? The present needs to be presented in the wrapping because the wrapping is the charisma of the gift. You tear it off, and you guessed right or wrong.

Gifts and guessing, that long bourgeois couple. It will outlast the love marriage.

2.

Secrets and secret societies play an abnormally large role in Georg Simmel’s theory of socialization. Consciousness itself is under the law of the secret. Self-consciousness is not only consciousness that I think, it is consciousness that you don’t know what I think. The cogito comes out as a sly devil, a hider. Epistemology must first deal with secrets and their breaking before we get to the other stuff. I know what I think as I talk to some Other, even while I am talking, and the Other can project this on me since the Other does the same thing. I can, of course, say what I think, but the phrase, “can I be frank,” or “can I tell you what I think” derives its affective sense from the fact that I don’t always, and in fact almost never, tell you what I think entirely. I edit for you. And thank God you edit for me. I’m uniquely equipped to do this, beyond the lie detector’s reach – which of course depends on physiological signs, and doesn’t really measure what’s held back – because I know my secret self. Which is my self, the one I take to the toilet, the shower, the bed. The intimacy here is, formally, a secret, and it is within that secret that all the variables of memory and sense hide. This secret distinguishes me from the Other, and the Other has its secret, and we exist as secret sharers side by side, or in traffic, or as fan to celebrity, lover to love, aging parent to child. We live in secret and we die that way. Here, it really is a matter of until death do you part. Or as Simmel puts it, this is the “deeply grounded circle of mental life.

Yet, such is the power and attraction of exposing oneself that it is a rare individual who goes about making a mystery of himself. The escaped convict, the confidence man, the revolutionary, the knight of faith – all do trail mysteries, but all are out of the mainstream. When Simmel published his Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, the mystery man in literature was in fashion. Hamsun wrote Hunger in 1890 and Mysteries in 1892, which had a tremendous influence on German literature, at least. Dostoevski’s The Possessed, published as Die Dämonen, was published in German translation in 1906. Les Caves du Vatican, Gide’s novel with its scene of the l’acte gratuity – Lafcadio’s murder of his seatmate on the train – was an act that was a mystery even to its perpetrator.

In this atmosphere – the nervous crisis of the European intellectual – putting the secret and the secret sharer as a whole chapter of the large book on sociology made sense. For Simmel, the internal secrecy of the consciousness was anything but a logical choice – it was a choice forced upon the subject by natural history. The secret (which is and is not the unconscious) is distinct as a form from the logic and reason that may advantage a person who wants to keep a secret. Simmel, living before the wireless, compares what happens in the mind of the socialized subject to a treebranch that is entangled in a telegraph wire, causing it to send out messages every time the wind blows. It “leaves signs that give us a reasonable sense” – but that are ultimately caused by something other than the sense. “If one looks at ideas as they continually flow in a time series through our consciousness, this flickering, zigzagging collision of images and ideas … is far distant from reasonable normativity.”

We are idiots babe. It’s a wonder that we still know how to breathe. Which is the expressionist message.

3.

 

In one of his essays, Louis Marin speaks of a certain book of traps, written by a 16th century Venetian. What an evocative title that is! Traps, spies and secrets have always fascinated me.

The secret itself – which tends fatally to the scenario of the trap - has not, for some reason, been a large topic in philosophy since Simmel,  even though it is certainly a conceptually involuted trope. It has been replaced, I think, with the problem of the unconscious.

My approach to the secret takes it that there are two broad secret types. First order secrets are those in which the content of the secret is secret, while the form (that is, that there is a secret there) is not; this is the usual type that is treated in the literature, both fictional and factual. We have, for instance, an intelligence agency and we know that it has put under lock and key documents about X. In this case, we know that X is secret. It is our minimal knowledge, but it is in itself non-secret knowledge. As well, our knowledge that the secret is being kept is public knowledge.

Sometimes, an institution will insert an ambiguity in that knowledge by saying that they can neither confirm or deny X. This is a step towards the second order secret. These are secret in which both the content and the form are secret.

For instance, you have a friend who, it turns out, is a murderer. The secret here is both that he is a murderer and that you never suspected he had a secret. I’ve often thought that if, somewhere, there really was a man who shot at Kennedy from the grassy knoll, and he kept that a secret all his life, it would form an interesting novelistic problem. How would you portray that secret keeping as the interesting novelistic theme without violating the secret – that is, approaching the life with an unsourced knowledge that the man had this secret? This would be possible only if something after the man died indicated that this man was the shooter on the grassy knoll. But if you told the tale from this “leak” of information, you would be starting out from a desublimated place; and the whole sublimity of the story is the fact that such a non-secret murder was effected by a man who kept it secret his entire life.

Secrets have a sublimity. A paranoid sublimity.  To keep it secret that you have a secret is to be an agent within a paranoid narrative.

The rough division of secrets does not really give us the essence of secrets, but it is a start.

I once dreamed of a novel in which this second order of secrecy forms the core. Unfortunately, to tell the tale is to violate the core.

You might think this is a trivial distinction, but actually, it is the distinction that informs the relationship between secrecy and political power. We know, for instance, that the CIA holds back information from American citizens - we know that they have secrets. The peculiar status of the CIA depends on our knowing that they know what we dont know in much the same way that the Minister D., in the Purloined Letter, holds sway over the Queen because she knows that he possesses a letter that she doesn’t  want the king to know about. The queen’s secret, then, is a second order secret, while D’s is a first order secret. Second order secrets are often such as to make their possessor vulnerable, while first order secrets are often of the type to make their possessor powerful. This generalization obviously has some very important exceptions, but when it comes, at least, to Intelligence agencies in the U.S., it holds true.

In fact I once dreamed of writing a little spy novel- the notes for which are in some box or other in somebody’s closet- in which the premise was that the real US Intelligence agency was the asphalt testing division of the US Department of Highways and Transportation, while the CIA and the NSA were shells. That was a sort of joke. It is funny because, of course, we think of the CIA, etc., as powerful, and even romantic, because we know they operate in secret, whereas asphalt testing has no James Bond-ian resonance. The charisma of the wrapper is on one, but not on the other.

Parents little think of what they are teaching their child with that first wrapped present.

"Do your own research"

 I find the meme "do your own research" a stab in the right direction - the direction of a Deweyan utopia. Instead of "don't do your own research", the response should be: there are many methods to researching, and you should know a bit about them before you do this noble thing: researching.

When the anti-vax crowd was "doing their own research", they were not doing it by using some elegant cross-checking, historically founded method. They were googling. A good start! But like stepping inside a library, also a good start, you have to know where you go next.

The right wing influencers were like bad librarians, telling you to search in the section entitled pseudoscience.

Unfortunately, the liberal crowd was too often like: don't research at all. Eat your gruel! Not only a dumb answer, but one that has lead us in the past to disaster after disaster.

There have been times without number over the past 25 years when doing your own research was very important. For instance, when all the Serious people were saying Iraq had WMD and was threatening the U.S. Backed up by many a warhawk outfit, rightwing and centrist, who flooded the zone. And who would dispute the towering expertise of, say, Paul Wolfowitz, whose opinion on the minimal cost, even profit, of invading and occupying Iraq surmounted the mere amateur estimates of those who estimated the war as costing 200 billion dollars. And the latter were wrong too – multiply that by five.

My idea, the one I got hold of in the first grade and have never let go of, is: Go into the library. Then ask to find out where the right section is. Then get some map in your head of the recent history of the research on the issue you are interested in. Don't be afraid of being heterodox. But remember as well that mere contrarianism is more of a tantrum than a method. Do, do your own research, and reflect on how you do it, so you can do it better. Figure out your limits, both of the content and of technique.

And remember: this is what teachers from the 8th grade onward have been trying to get you to do!

This quote from one of Einstein's letters is a good guide: “So many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth."

Go forth and seek the truth. That is the point of doing your own research. Whether it is research on how to fix an electric appliance or research on vaccines and the history of quarantine methods, your education should have given you the skills to go to the library and find guides. This is the point of education in a democratic system: to help you your whole life long.

details - from Naomi Schor to Heinrich Heine

 IN Naomi Schor’s great book on details [Reading in Detail], one of the monuments of the deconstructive moment of the 90s, there is an anecdote about Dali meeting Lacan, recounted in Dali’s The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, and thus as unreliable as Mickey Mouse’s broomstick assistants in Phantasmagoria.

“While awaiting Lacan’s arrivcal, Dali is at wok on an etching. In order to see the drawing on the copper plate more clearly, Dali found it helpful to stick a small white square of paper on the tip of his nose. After Lacan’s departure, Dali goes over their discussion, sorting out their agreements and disagreements:

‘But I grew increasingly puzzled over the rather alarming manner in which the young psychiatrist had scrutinized my face from time to time. It was almost as if the germ of a strange, curious smile would then pierce through his expression. Was he intently studying the convulsive effects upon my facial morphology of the ideas that stirred my soul? I found the answer to the enigma when I presently went to wash my hands… I had forgotten to remove the square of white paper from the tip of my nose!

… This very Freudian slip-up, this conspicuous “shine on the nose”, will serve as a parable for paranoia-criticism and its vissicitudes…”

Schor’s book is a combination of a certain feminist reading in aesthetics and an archaeology, or perhaps I should say underwater archaeology, a “diving into the wreck”, of the ways in which the detail has been sublimated and continually rediscovered in the eras of romanticism and modernism, those companions of consumer capitalism. The detail is the threat of a certain plenitude that, as man after man, quoted by Schor, assures us, is both threatening and female. In Baudelaire’s terms, the detail encodes the riot, the uprising: any detail conceals in its being noticed the moment in which order is potentially sprung. And yet it is of course the individual members of the street mass, the workers and plebes, upon which the work that sustains the order is done.

As it is with the vast unpaid mass of female labor.

2.

Heine’s memoirs begin by extensively undercutting the memoir genre as one of liars. He illustrates the inherent lie in self-portraiture by telling a shockingly racist anecdote about a South African King of the Ashantis, who has his portrait painted by a travelling European. After often jumping up from his pose several times, the king has a request:

The King, who admired the striking resemblences [of the painter’s portraits of Ashanti women], demanded to be counterfeited himself; he dedicated some sittings to the painter when the latter thought he observed, from the King‘s springing up to observe the progress of the painting, that there was a disquiet in the expression of his features, the grimacing of a man by which he betrayed that he had a wish on his tongue for which he could hardly find the words… Seeing this, the painter so pressed his majesty to tell him his greatest desire until the poor Negro King finally whispered whether it wouldn’t be better to paint him white.“

This anecdote, which mysteriously twins with Dali’s, very richly invests the detail with just the kind of social psychopathology that Schor is raising up from the wreck.

3.

Which gets me to another anecdote in Heine’s “Confessions”. Heine wrote a number of articles under the title De l’Allemagne, in mocking homage to Madam de Stael’s book of that title. A mockery backgrounded by Heine’s notion of the battle in Europe between Napoleon – the male principle – and Madam de Stael – the female principle, both exponentially raised to represent their sexes. Heine’s account of de Stael is unfair, of course, but it is also funny. And in the midst of his complaint against her account of Germany (which, he insists, she saw from a limited point of view, ignoring the “brothel and the barracks” in favour of the “thinkers and the poets”), he tells an anecdote that displaces Schor’s discourse about the detail and fetishism and moves us to a discourse about the detail and obsessive compulsion: although are these things so far apart, really?

“I will by no means imply that Madame de Stael was ugly; but beauty is something wholly different. She had pleasant particulars, which however formed a very unpleasant whole; particularly unbearable for a nervous person like Schiller, of blessed memory, was her mania for taking a tuft of grass or a small paper sack and rolling it over and over between her fingers. This manoeuvre made poor Schiller dizzy, and in despair he gripped her beautiful hand, in order to stop it. And Madame de Stael thought that the sentimental poet was pulled out of himself by the magic of her personality. She did in fact have beautiful hands, I’ve been told, and the most beautiful arms, which she contrived to show naked – certainly the Venus de Milo never displayed such beautiful arms.”

This is the kind of anecdote, the kind of detail, that gets passed around in the European salon of literature. The balling up the paper sack – the grabbing of her hand – the comparison of naked arms to the goddess with no arms, in her most famous statuary incarnation – these tap out a certain S.O.S., a certain coded distress of Heine, the poet of blessed memory. Against the background of the struggle between the male principle and the female principle, Napoleon and de Stael, de L’allemagne seems to be caught in a vertiginous moment, a complex of misunderstandings observed by Heine, in Paris, himself trying to understand the “female principle” in the person of his last lover, Elise Krinitz.

4.

Details and generals.

In Schor’s chapter on Displacement, she quotes from another “confession” – that which forms Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.

“What happens then in the borderline case of a self-analysis, for after

all no Hippocratic oath governs the relationship of Freud the writeranalyst

and Freud the analysand? The answer is forthcoming: in The

Interpretation of Dreams, Freud blithely breaks what I call the second

law of the detail-every detail must be interpreted-which he enunciates

in a note to his case history of the Wolf Man: "it is always a strict

law of dream interpretation that an explanation must be found for every

detail" (S. E., 17:42). Indeed, beginning with the analysis of the Irma

dream, Freud is careful to stress the limits of his interpretation: "I had

a feeling that the interpretation of this part of the dream was not carried

far enough to make it possible to follow the whole of its concealed

meaning. If I had pursued my comparison between the three women,

it would have taken me far afield.- There is at least one spot in every

dream at which it is unplumbable-a navel, as it were, that is its point of

contact with the unknown"

The navel is, as a point, strictly not the point of contact with the unknown, but the point left by a past contact. The navel was famously a question for the theologians, whose speculations are given a medical-cosmological sense by Thomas Browne in the Pseudodoxia Epidemica:

“For the use of the Navel is to continue the Infant unto the Mother, and by the vessels thereof to convey its aliment and sustentation. … Now upon the birth, when the Infant forsaketh the womb, although it dilacerate, and break the involving membranes, yet do these vessels hold, and by the mediation thereof the Infant is connected unto the womb, not only before, but a while also after the birth. These therefore the midwife cutteth off, contriving them into a knot close unto the body of the Infant; from whence ensueth that tortuosity or complicated nodosity we usually call the Navel; occasioned by the colligation of vessels before mentioned. Now the Navel being a part, not precedent, but subsequent unto generation, nativity or parturition, it cannot be well imagined at the creation or extraordinary formation of Adam, who immediately issued from the Artifice of God; nor also that of Eve, who was not solemnly begotten, but suddenly framed, and anomalously proceeded from Adam.”

Haven’t we seen this knot before, being balled up in the fingers of Madame de Stael? Whose particulars, beautiful in themselves, do not make up, for Heine, a beauty, but instead a constant irritation. And whose arms compete, in their nakedness, with Venus de Milo’s absence of arms? And can we plumb this point?

I’m not going to answer these questions.

The use-value of sanity

 

Often one reads that Foucault romanticized insanity, and this is why he pisses people off. I don't believe that.

I believe he pisses people off because he refuses to romanticize sanity. He refuses the unspoken agreement, among men of good will, that we are all sane here. He refuses to see the dreadful networks of death and destruction, the dreadful vacuous boredom that consists of fear of boredom on the one side and the prisons on the other, as collectively sane, and you just don't make those noises in the club. The biggest and most consistent romanticizers are, after all, those who find the position they live in, all the amenities, the distant violence and the vicarious pleasures, the whole goddamn ball of wax, as something completely normal. What a crock that is. Foucault had an unrelenting grip on that thing.

Madness is, on the one hand, a very plain thing - I go into the library, some poor bugeyed soul approaches me to tell me what he's been hearing, and I say to myself: you are mad.

On the other hand, all of it is also at large, out there among the suits, as the sanest behavior. The Greeks with their slaves and their incredible tortures and deaths. The whole early modern period, where the sane got jobs as, say, slave traders. In Saint Domingue, in the eighteenth century, a slave could be punished for having eaten some sugarcane by being forced to work with a metal cage fastened to his head - an ingenious torture for a hot climate, among bugs. Now, a sane craftsman made the cage, a sane overseer puts it on the man's head, a sane plantation manager made the rules, a sane owner gets the money. I believe they were sane. But what good was all that sanity?