KILLING 1

I have my bare feet planted on the rug. I am at my desk. Suddenly, I feel something ticklish run over my toes. This immediately draws my attention away from the document I am reading. I look under the desk. Behold, a cockroach.

In my apartment complex, the man who sprays poison comes around once every two months. Usually, then, I enjoy an environment in which, silently and without me having to think about it, vermin die. They die out of my sight. I imagine the spray is some kind of pyrethroid. The poison operates on the cockroach’s central nervous system, causing repetitive firings – thus the jiggly behavior, Nerve blockage then ensues. The effect of the pyrethroids causes sodium channel modification, and in some insects the nerves will burst. Temperature changes can modify the effect. To sum it up, “the depolarizing nerve blockage caused by prolonged sodium influx into nerve axons is the primary cause of pyrethroid toxicity to insects.” So say Huber,Masler and Blakrishna in Cockroaches as models for Neurobiology. About 800 million dollars is spent in the U.S. each year to put down the German Cockroach. Thus, a gigantic, silent poison rain comes drifting down, and still, the thing that tickled me has evaded it.

Forcing me to take action. Already,obviously, the bug is confused. It senses a leaping up and down of a large and dangerous presence. So it shuffles forwards, and finds to its horror that there is some kind of thwacking, falling entity in that direction, which calls for reversing direction. It promptly does so and seeks a dark place, in which it remains for a half a minute, getting its bearings. Its little hairs are on high alert. It is sensing different zones of temperature and light. Then it makes a dash for home – which would probably involve climbing down a pipe, or going through a duct that is cut in the apartment for hvac air passage. The last thing it senses is a space to rush over and then it feels, along every nerve and through its thorax, its carapace, and legs the greatest pressure it has ever known, a tremendous and impossible flattening, as if all it had ever lived for was a lie. And then nothing.

‘The desire to control the indoor climate with air conditioning units to mitigate extremes of temperature, moisture, and airflow sets the stage for several cockroach species to infest and inhabit homes. The presense of some domestic species in dwellings, such as the German or brown banded cockroaches, is often a sign of poor sanitation or substandard housekeeping.” (Lockley, Ledford)

fair play for bull-baiters

In 1800, a bill was proposed in the House of Commons to ban bull-baiting. In bull-baiting, a bull was tied to a stake and dogs, often bull dogs, were set upon it. Sometimes, the dogs succeeded in killing the bull, sometimes the bull succeeded in killing the dogs, and most often, the bull and the dogs came off wounded.

The bill was defeated. Even so, it produced enough of a stir that a French academy asked a prize question about whether animals had a right to not being treated barbarously.

Another animal cruelty bill was introduced in the Parliament seven years later by Erksine, the well known defender of Tom Paine. It too was defeated.

Both defeats were mainly due to the eloquence of William Windham. Windham was one of Burke’s Whigs. He served as a minister in Pitt’s war government. He was, evidently, out of sympathy with the French Revolution. Yet the speech he made against banning bull-baiting is a document that defends the pleasures of the rural poor in explicitly class conscious terms; in almost the same terms, Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son in law, denounced the anti-vivisection movement in Britain in the 1890s.

Windham begins by dismissing the argument that bull-baiting has a corrupting influence on the character of the spectators by using himself as an instance: he saw two bull-baitings in his youth, he claims, and has not, since, seen any signs of cruelty or corruption. He then gets to the heart of what he thinks is wrong with the legislation by making it an issue of the culture of the common people:

“A great deal has lately been said respecting the state of the poor, and the hardships which they are suffering. But if they are really in the condition which is described, why should we set about to deprive them of the few enjoyments which are left to them? If we look back to the state of the common people in those countries with which our youthful studies make us acquainted, we find, that what with games, shews, festivals and the institutions of their religion, their sources of amusement and relaxation were so numerous as to make them appear to have enjoyed a perpetual holiday… “ Then he imagines what the poor in the country might say to the reformers: “Why interfere with the few sports we have, while you leave yourself and the rich so great a variety? You have your carriage, and your country houses; your balls, your plays, your operas, your masquerades, your card-parties, your books, your dogs, and your horses to amuse you – On yourselves you lay no restraint. – But from us you wish to take the little we have?”

Windham is objecting, as becomes apparent, not just to interference with bull baiting, but to the tendency to regulate the amusements of the poor for their own good. And in so opposing the bill, he speaks up for that countryside culture:

“In the exercise of those sports they may, indeed, sometimes hurt themselves, but could never hurt the nation. If a set of poor men, for vigorous recreation, prefer a game of cudgels, instead of interrupting them, it should be more our business to let them have fair play.”

This is the note of Hazlitt and Cobbett – and not what one might expect from a reactionary. Nor this: ‘The advocates of this bill, Sir, proposed to abolish bull-baiting on the score of cruelty. It is strange enough that such an argument should be employed by a set of persons who have a most vexatious code of laws for the protection of their own amusements. I do not mean at present to condemn the game laws; but when Gentlemen talk of cruelty, I must remind them, that it belongs as much to shooting, as to the sport of bull-baiting; nay more so, as it frequently happens, that where one bird is shot, a great many others go off much wounded. When, therefore, I hear humane Gentlemen even make a boast of having wounded a number of birds in this way, it only affords me a further proof that savage sports do not make savage people. Has not the butcher as much right to demand the exercise of his sport, as the man of fortune to demand that of hunting?”

Move forward, now, to Lafargue, who begins: “The bourgeois have the tenderness of angels in regard to animals: they feel a closer relationship to the animals than they do to the workers.”

Lafargue is not only following, unconsciously, in the path of the Burkian Windham, but in the path of Marx, who, in his list of the paragons of bourgeois humanism in the Communist Manifesto, includes societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals. Lafargue finds it infuriating that an English law allows the police to interfere with a scientist experimenting on an animal, and while allowing companies to experiment on their human clients with products mixed dangerous impurities or the like, all to save a bit of money in production:

“John Simon is an English factory inspector. He has studied the tortures to which the tender hearted bourgeois submits children, women and proletarian men in the capitalist prisons, in order to steal the fruits of their labor. He denounced them with a courage never known to the radicals. In his discourse [to a recent congress], he established that there exists two categories of experiment. One practiced by the physiologist on certain animals. The other practiced on thousands of men by speculators. For an example, he cits the classic experiments of Professor Tiersch on mice in order to discover the mode by which Asiatic cholera propagates, and the popular and well known experiment which was practiced during two cholera epidemics, of 1848-49 and 1853-54 on a half million inhabitants of South London by a certain commercial company who supplied these districts with polluted water.”

However, Lafargue is not only concerned with science – although it is interesting that the a defense of the amusements of the common people has transformed, in the course of the century, into a defense of science. He also uses Windham’s example of bird shooting to indict the bourgeoisie for committing acts of cruelty for their own amusement whilst banning acts that repulsed them among the lower orders.

Only by seeing that the dispute over animals and their treatment has deep roots in the common life, a life that was being transformed all over Europe, can one make one’s way, here. There is a delusion that we can get a clear political guide from understanding the pattern of our semantic binaries. They seem to group themselves before our eyes. We look at the history of the word, person, we see a sort of semiotic equivalent of the theodicy here, we think that we can make sense of the civil wars hidden in the word. We say, look at these oppositions deriving from this word that is originally a simulacra of the face, the face as an exchangeable object. Look at the number of semiotic transformations we can touch upon: of the relationship between the face and the body, the clothed and the naked, the man and the woman,, the elite and the common, the man and the beast. But when we look at how these things are imminently constituted and experienced, we find that things are not as we imagined them to be.

Maurice Angulhon, in “Le sang des bêtes. Le problème de la protection des animaux en France au XIXème siècle”, claimed that, unlike the 20th century, the entire onus of the movement to protect animals from cruelty, especially domestic animals, was aimed at preventing human cruelty. Windham, in fact, is responding to a similar claim in England – the spectacle or practice of cruelty to animals among the working classes will lead to either crime or a dangerous propensity to political rebellion. Surely this is true, to some extent, that the chief organizers for the protection of animals were animated by a “curious mixture of profound humanism and social fear.” For instance, under Napoleon, the traditional way of butchering an animal, which was done in the full view of whoever wanted to watch in Paris, was regulated so that it occurred in special abbatoirs. Just as the ladies wore red sewn into their necklines as a memorial of the guillotine, so, too, this prohibition could be seen as another, more fearful homage to the guillotine: “in dissimulating the blade of the butcher one contributed perhaps to avoiding the blade of the street jury.” (85) Industry and animal husbandry were much more visible, nonetheless, in cities where the flow of traffic was measured by the horse, and where the knacker’s trade in sick and dying horses, which were often sold off and starved to death, flourished.

It is easy to read this whole history as one to which we find the master key in the struggle of class with class. But Windham’s politics should be a caution that more than class advantage, or class projection, is at play here.

kant, the inevitable

Kant starts from two places in the Critique of Practical Reason. The first beginning is with the good Will – that most un-Socratic of moral entry points. The only thing that is unreservedly good is the good will. And then we start again. This time, we start with this existence (Wesen) endowed with Reason. This existence is introduced to us, firstly, under no name at all. This makes me think of the many names that I could list for this existence - “man”, “human”, “character”, “subject” , ‘agent”, “actor”, “self”, “soul”, “person”, etc. – each of which is endlessly involved in the discourses of the human sciences, each of which – unlike, say, the pieces of a chess game – is ascribed no fixed amount of power by some canon of rules, but rather is preferred and gains its power according to the state of the human sciences at any one time – which is to say that the rules, here, are further back. If an introduction is a way of putting together a name and a face, then we aren’t really introduced to the rational creature, here, at all. It is a feint, using a satiric tone made familiar from writers like Voltaire.

But what we can gather is that whatever name we eventually attach to this creature, and whatever it is made of – Carbon based, silicon based - what makes it happy is not the major question confronting the practical reason. However, it is, as it were, the question that dogs the creature, much in the way Faust is followed by a black dog at the beginning of the poem.

It is in Kant that the relationship between the culture of happiness and the collapse of the human limit – seen from the inside – comes into Hi Def focus.

In fact, from my perspective - an old man in a dry month, being read to by a boy, waiting for raain - Kant is engaged in trying to reconstruct the human limit here.

Of the names I’ve listed above, one name seems of central importance: person. A nineteenth century Kantian, Adolf Trendelenburg, wrote a much quoted article, “The History of the Word Person”, which poses the question: where did this word person come from? He starts off by showing how important the word was, quoting Kant’s Foundation of the Metaphysic of Ethics: “In opposition to the concept of the thing, Kant says in the Foundation of the Metaphysics of Ethics (1785): ‘a rational being (Wesen – existence) will be named a person, because its nature already exhibits it as an end in itself, that is, as something that may not simply be used as a means, and in so far as this is holds, limits the exercise of arbitrary force against it, and makes it an object of respect.” (Kant-Studien, 1908, 2).

He then goes back to multiple ancient sources for person. The first is persona, the mask. What is odd about this is that the mask doesn’t have a brain. It would seem eminentlyto be a thing, a Sache. He gives us one etymology of person that emphasizes something else about the mask: “Ona in Latin means full – “so designates persona per se one, the fullness out of itself, as to the person of Christ is designated the fullness, the pluroma.”

Trendelenburg points out the use of the Greek equivalent, prosopon, in Stoic writing to mean playing a role – but in the sense of the role nature, or Tyche, has thrust upon a person. Epictetus, for instance, writes that if nature has thrust lameness upon you, then you are to “play” lameness. All the world’s a stage.

Another field in which the persona unfolds a meaning is in law. At first, in Roman Law, persona was a mass noun, referencing all humans – as opposed to beasts. However, in the Institutes of Justinian, this collectivity was modified. Slaves were defined, like beasts, as aprosopon – non-persons. Finally, much later on, in Leibnitz’s use of person (which occurs in his legal writings), it again takes on the meaning of the human vs. the beast.

Looking at this from the perspective of both the question of nudity and the question of the personhood of beasts – which we took up in our post about Bernardina’s essay – the word person encodes an interesting manifold of binaries. Especially noticeable is the opposition between face and body, and the parallel opposition between human and beast. Ah, the civil wars in a word.

Looking with 72 senses at Kant

“…commencez d’abord par me dire combien les hommes de votre globe ont de sens. — Nous en avons soixante et douze, dit l’académicien, et nous nous plaignons tous les jours du peu. Notre imagination va au-delà de nos besoins; nous trouvons qu’avec nos soixante et douze sens, notre anneau, nos cinq lunes, nous sommes trop bornés; et, malgré toute notre curiosité et le nombre assez grand de passions qui résultent de nos soixante et douze sens, nous avons tout le temps de nous ennuyer. — Je le crois bien, dit Micromégas; car dans notre globe nous avons près de mille sens, et il nous reste encore je ne sais quel désir vague, je ne sais quelle inquiétude, qui nous avertit sans cesse que nous sommes peu de chose, et qu’il y a des êtres beaucoup plus parfaits.” – Voltaire, Micromégas

Philip Almond, in Adam and Eve in Seventeenth Century Thought, reviews the idea that other planets contained other living beings, which he thinks is one effect of the Copernican revolution. I have made the case that Cyrano de Bergerac’s inhabitants of the Moon owe a lot to the inhabitants of the New World. The discovery of the New World and the continuing discoveries being made in the 18th century in the South Pacific had the effect, on the learned in Europe, of destroying the notion that the knowledge of the world revealed by the traditional disciplines was complete. Extraterrestrials were an annex to that history of discoveries. A sort of dream compromise was struck between Utopia, More’s island in the Pacific, and the discoveries of astronomy. Almond quotes Robert Burton’s argument that if the Earth is a planet whirling about the sun, then the other planets must be like Earth in having inhabitants. Huyghens was also of this opinion. Fontenelle – that modern ultra – argued for the thesis in his Entretiens. In his second conversation with the marquise, he writes that ‘since the sun is now immobile, has ceased to be a planet, and the earth which moves about it, has begun to be one, you will not be so surprised to hear that the moon is an earth like the latter, and that apparently it is inhabited.” Fontenelle is often called a delightful writer. He was, at least, a flattering one, tempering his knowledge to the gestures of salon gallantry, the social convenance of volupté in which the moment of learning that a thing is such and such a way is identified with the thing’s being such and such a way – as if our discovery was an essential condition of the object’s being. In this way, he produced a rococo Genesis that is not for all tastes.

Not, for instance, Voltaire's, who makes fun of the whole strolling in the garden, talking with the marquise thing in Micromegas. Voltaire not only hits out at Fontenelle in Micromegas, but also at Pascal, who for Voltaire was always the arch-enemy. That Voltaire accuses him of being a mediocre geometer is, from a man who was as uncomfortable with mathematics as Voltaire, a rather usurping gesture. But the point here is to bring to earth Pascal's 'anguish' in the face of the infinite. In the goings and comings from planet to planet, the infinite simply becomes the tall and the taller, and even on the edge of the universe the picaresque narrative rule applies - every sage finds his buffoon.

Other writers – notably Lambert in Germany and Thomas Wright in England – use the as a basis to enquire into the constitution of the heavens. Kant reviewed Wright and knew Lambert.

As the interior human limit dissolves under the blows struck upon it by Enlightenment materialism, the extraterrestrial, or something that fills up a space that is comparable to the human, emerges. The notion of another rational being, neither God nor man nor angel, is not long in presenting itself in the Critique of Practical Reason. And it does so in terms that are surprisingly close to Micromégas:

We assume as a principle that, in the natural disposition of an existence organized, so to speak, purposefully, so as to be alive, we will meet with no feature (Werkzeuge) that is not most appropriate and suitable to that end. If in an existence that had reason and will, the actual end of nature were its preservation and well being – in a word, its felicity, it would have badly executed this intent by selecting this creature’s reason to be that intent’s overseer. For all the actions that it has to carry out to meet this intent, and the whole rule of its behavior would have much more exactly been enacted, and this end would have been more securely maintained, by instinct, than could happen through reason. And should the latter be allocated to the favored creature above, it would have had to serve him only in order to make observations of his fortunate material disposition, to admire, to enjoy, and to be grateful to the ever so benign cause of it; but not to have its desires submitted to this weakened and delusion-prone guide in order to blunder into Nature’s intent. Nature would have forthrightly confided to instinct the taking over of not only the choice of ends, but also of means. (6-7)

This paragraph is certainly in a philosophical treatise, and is meant to be appropriate and suitable in tone towards that end. And yet, it uses a rhetoric, a tone, that bears the distinct stamp of that most Enlighenment of genres, the philosophical satire. We are hyperaware that the words ‘man” and “human” are avoided here, and we are hyperaware of the satire’s bent for negative space, the way it grabs the eraser, the way it produces disjunction in order to create conjunction. No subject here, but instead, an existence, (Wesen) a creature (Geschöpf), as if we must begin with the language stripped down to a certain anatomical level. And if the satirist casts a distinct shadow over the page, hasn’t there always been a relationship between the moralist and the scold? And even, in philosophy, the stripping advice of the stoic. There is a degree of freedom in this paragraph, in other words, that is derived from something other than proofs and arguments.

beginning of a kant thread

The collapse, the forgetting, the erasure of the human limit happens inside what Sartre called ‘human reality’; and it happens outside. This is a strange story, a dialectical mystery. For as the world became the object of universal history, and the human limit to the control of the world was removed, inside the human reality of the self, this operation – which consisted, if one were to put it in a single phrase, of removing Nemesis as the guardian and definer of a limit – produced strange fruit. Human reality becomes the human product. And this human product, now given the project of becoming happy and promoting the happy society, loses the old objects and landmarks, the old directions, the old orientation, the old walks in the dark, the old migrations. The human reality becomes free, and uses its freedom to become the human product.

Of course, this is a story recorded in a whole literature that makes weep weep weep sounds over the human product. Oh, that we had another ending to universal history, a few more tropes.

But as we have been looking at the process by which beast becomes beast, thing thing, the flight a fault, the hunter a judge, the butcher a jury, it is time to turn to the subject: in particular, Kant’s notion of this subject as an end, living in a kingdom of ends. I’ve pointed out that the subject as the Greek hero can run about buck naked, as long as he is made of marble and runs with that Ruhe – that rest – for which Winckelmann celebrates him - but that the modern man who takes off his vestments is sucked into the logic that has kept him in plates of veal and chicken, has put the fork and knife in his hands, a logic that has a lot to say about the poor forked flesh, although it seems to turn and twist and give us different answers at different times. If we looked, for instance, at English novels between Castle Crotchet and Jude the Obscure, how many undressing scenes would \we find? I’d guess very few, in spite of coats buttoned and unbuttoned, hats put on and taken off, gloves ditto, the difficult task of taking off mudsplashed boots, and all the eating and drinking that Dickens characters and Thackeray’s undergo – never to stumble to a jakes in our sight. Why? That’s a question we should pin up to the board.

There are certainly other paths to the Castle, other ways of reading the Critique of Practical Reason, but I want to start a thread that reads it with, on the side, this social logic that whips the cattle and tortures the bear and chops the head of M. le coq. I have an instinct that tells me somehow, on this path, I will touch – hands out in the dark, hand understanding always my witch’s guide – upon a certain set of rules that concern the clothed and the naked, although never allowing us to predict with absolute certainty what is allowed and when. And that in turn will give me clues to this particular moment in the building of the Artificial Paradise.

artificial paradise

Hobbes begins the Leviathan like this: “NATURE (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal.”

What artificial animals are these? They are the automata of which Descartes also speaks: the mechanical singing bird, the mechanical dog. And if nature can be imitated by the machine, then nature itself can be defined in terms of a machine:

“For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the Artificer?”

But of all machines made by God or man, what is the greatest? It would have to be an artificial man. Is there such a thing?

“Art goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of Nature, man. For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin, CIVITAS), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; the magistrates and other officers of judicature and execution, artificial joints; reward and punishment (by which fastened to the seat of the sovereignty, every joint and member is moved to perform his duty) are the nerves, that do the same in the body natural; the wealth and riches of all the particular members are the strength; salus populi (the people's safety) its business; counsellors, by whom all things needful for it to know are suggested unto it, are the memory; equity and laws, an artificial reason and will; concord, health; sedition, sickness; and civil war, death. Lastly, the pacts and covenants, by which the parts of this body politic were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that fiat, or the Let us make man, pronounced by God in the Creation.”

Hobbes is writing in 1660. Baudelaire, writing on a seemingly much different track in 1860, introduces The artificial paradises, his variations on themes from The Opium Eater, like this:

“Good sense tells us that the things of the earth have only a little existence, and that true reality is only in dreams. In order to digest natural happiness, like the artificial, one needs first to have the courage to swallow; and those who might perhaps merit happiness are the same to whom felicity, such as mortals conceive it, has always had the effect of a vomitive.”

I’ve been using the term ‘artificial paradise’ for more than a year in these posts to refer to the product of Hobbes’ Leviathan and Baudelaire’s poison. What was eaten once has thrown us into a world in which we desperately search for something to swallow that will make us forget the little reality upon which our world hangs. And we do. The product of this monstrous but fatal conjunction is, of course, the world that the people of the developed world assume to be the only one left. It is paradise, because here, happiness has become the norm. And not only in the developed world – the artificial paradise has as much dominion in Shanghai as it has in Atlanta or Nantes. The artificial man, call it the state or the corporation, and the human product, call him the druggy or the consumer, have created between them a world of happiness, closed in on itself.

Of course, as in the first paradise, there is a dissenter.

“To dull minds it might appear singular and even impertinent to dedicate a picture of artificial voluptés to a woman, source of the most ordinary, most natural of voluptés. However, it is evident that as the natural world penetrates into the spiritual, serving it as feed, and thus concurring in bringing about that indefinable amalgam that we name our individuality, the woman is the being who projects the largest shadow or the greatest light in our dreams.The woman is fatally suggestive; she lives another life as well as that of her own proper one; she lives spiritually in the imaginations that she haunts and that she makes fecund.”

The shadow or the light – this is shapeshifting indeed, between the symbols in myth and opinion that are expressly used to stand for the absolute opposition of wo existential types. Yet there they are, in dreams, communicating one with the other, transforming one into the other.

Collage, collage. The question of women in the artificial paradise is so large it could open its mouth and swallow me, a mere piker.

This is from Michael Lewis' article about the Iceland financial collapse:

"Back in 2001, as the Internet boom turned into a bust, M.I.T.’s Quarterly Journal of Economics published an intriguing paper called “Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment.” The authors, Brad Barber and Terrance Odean, gained access to the trading activity in over 35,000 households, and used it to compare the habits of men and women. What they found, in a nutshell, is that men not only trade more often than women but do so from a false faith in their own financial judgment. Single men traded less sensibly than married men, and married men traded less sensibly than single women: the less the female presence, the less rational the approach to trading in the markets.

One of the distinctive traits about Iceland’s disaster, and Wall Street’s, is how little women had to do with it. Women worked in the banks, but not in the risktaking jobs. As far as I can tell, during Iceland’s boom, there was just one woman in a senior position inside an Icelandic bank. Her name is Kristin Petursdottir, and by 2005 she had risen to become deputy C.E.O. for Kaupthing in London. “The financial culture is very male-dominated,” she says. “The culture is quite extreme. It is a pool of sharks. Women just despise the culture.” Petursdottir still enjoyed finance. She just didn’t like the way Icelandic men did it, and so, in 2006, she quit her job. “People said I was crazy,” she says, but she wanted to create a financial-services business run entirely by women. To bring, as she puts it, “more feminine values to the world of finance.”

Today her firm is, among other things, one of the very few profitable financial businesses left in Iceland."

I am not trying to write a total apocalypse, of the post WWII kind favored by Adorno or Foucault. But for sure, I have the elements of one here. It is easy to feel that such interior invasion and exterior transformation, such a brave new world, might be the end of the world. We could die, in our artificial paradises, of pure claustrophobia. And for those who vomit up tv, they often find themselves ingesting prozac. There’s reason behind this alchemical balance. There’s reasons of state.

I put this here out of sequence in my threads. I needed to jot it down.

It’s over, m. le coq, to sleep with the chickens

Does nature have rights?

One solution to the situation caused by the erasure of the human limit would be to say that there is a human limit defined by the rights of nature. From a practical point of view, this might be a smart environmentalist move. From a philosophical point of view, it might be a bit hard to construct (do swallows have a right to their migratory flight paths?), yet I could see how, within the framework of Rawlesian liberalism, this might seem a doable proposition.

From my perspective, however, this would not “solve” the problem. Rather, it would be another way of annexing nature to the artificial paradise. If we scratch the rights talk, we find the same massive attitude. Which is why I am traveling to such strange spots, the shadow of an it, an outsider pounding on your door, in the hide and sneakery of Limited Inc.

The question brings us back to a particular animal with rights – man – and his peculiar property of being now naked, now not. I’ve been looking at this nakedness from one tradition. Now let us look at it from the tradition of the animal.

Let me refer to Sergio della Bernardina’s ‘A person not completely like the others: the animal and its status (L’homme 1991 31(4))

To start off with – the title from this post comes from one of Bernardina’s pieces of data. It is a saying in a Spanish ritual, in which a cock is buried up to its neck and members of a group that surrounds it take turns, blindfolded, trying to detach his head with the blow of a stick.

Bernardina groups together a number of rituals and behaviors – behaviors of peasants driving cattle to the slaughter house, behaviors of hunters – from pre-industrial times until now. It is not just cocks that are treated to such bouts of cruelty. Dogs, wild mountain goats, pigs. Bernardina quotes an ethnological report concerning the emblematic Ainu bear ritual. In the Ainu village, the villagers first capture a bear cub. The cub becomes the pet of the village. It is cuddled. ‘Even officially” it is treated like a person.

Then comes the fatal day of the ceremony. “He is given a tour of the village, and all the details of the ceremony are gently explained to him, compensation for all the tribe of bears for the future ones put to death. It is necessary that he can recount all the grandeur of the ceremony in order for others to be happy to come to men who treat them so well and not to feel that anger which can destroy the huts of the village.”

Then, according to the ethnologist who Bernardina is quoting, “for reasons that we didn’t quite grasp”, each begins to mistreat the bear, to make it angry, to strike on it from all sides, to poke it with branches, etc. At last it is lead to the center of the village, where everyone is assembled, and then the chief of the ceremony shoots at it with an arrow. Theoretically, this should kill it right away – actually, everybody begins to shoot arrows at it. Then the bear, either dead or dying, is dragged about. Someone breaks its neck.

What the anthropologist doesn’t understand is why this cruelty has to be exercised. This is Bernardina starting point. Far from being an expression of plebian sadism - a very popular claim - Bernardina thinks that the cruelty actually plays a structural role. And that role is about transformation.

His notion is this: there is an idea out there that an animal is a thing. A machine. But Bernardina claims that we have no evidence that the direct human experience of an animal is of a thing. The tendency we find across cultures is that an animal is a person. It has “rights” in the sense that it has a certain personhood. For Bernardina, the idea that an animal is a thing or a machine only makes its entrance when the animal is put to death. It is here that the animal must be demoted from person to beast. The cruelty it is subject to is not, he claims, derived from some sadistic substratum, but is a way of making the beast appear as a beast. It will lash out. It will prove that it is guilty. And it will be put to death.

In fact, in Bernardina’s interviews with hunters in contemporary Europe, again and again, the fact that the beast, the prey, flees is unconsciously but compulsively presented as a justification to kill it. M. le coq, of course, is guilty of the sin of concupiscence. And so on. The very flies boys kill for sport "bother" us with their buzzing.

In a sense, Bernardina’s theory – of the making of the thing from the person – is the other side of what Bataille says, in his book on the cursed portion. There, he talks about dilapidating the thing to make it into a subject – even a divinity. This would be the negative of the positive of cruelty – in the former case, lowering the person to the status of a thing, in the latter case, raising a thing to a subject by way of making it cry out. There's an interdependence in the cultural logic here. For if punishment is about making a person into a thing, to punish a thing implies that it once was a person. The tears of things are the signatures of the spirit. In the dream of universal history, the punishment comes first, and the crime later. I cut myself to punish the object that I am, and thus become a subject doubly, first as the punisher, and then as the person who cries over the wound.

What does this have to do with our thread? Myself, I’ve been thinking of the passage from the dressed subject to the vulgar undressed nude. The act of undressing does seem to bring into play the same semiotic factors. And yet, of course, there are the nudes of Greece. The Lacedomonian girls wrestled naked with the Lacaedomonian boys, naked – or so the myth would go. Such innocence – it all begins in innocence.

Here is a story from an Italian paper:
M. Alessandro Schena, we read in an article of the press of 1895 (Caccia e Tiri, 20 August) “had bought a young English setter. He raised it with paternal care and much patience, since the student, in growing up, revealed a rather lunatic character and a rather independent temperament, which did not please his master too much… On the other hand, he manifested some excellent qualities: a very fine flair, a beautiful point, an impeccable sound (riporto) were his gifts, which were great enough to pardon some small sins. So much so that as a result of mutual indulgences, they became sister souls. But love, that perturbing and universal demon, broke their peaceful ties. Once coming to the age of manhoon, the animal commenced to court not females of his own species, but those of the human species; perhaps he had heard that the latter, unlike the former, are available in all seasons. Since he could not satisfy his desires with simple galanteries, he even had recourse to violence. Every day the master had to face protests from honest wives and modest virgins of the village. When one day he was caught in the act, the dog revolted against the just and vigorous punishment of the master not only by showing his teeth, but even in addressing some obscene propositions to the master himself. So much so that the master, red faced and with a broken heart,saw himself obliged to send this lascivious animal, with one shot, to the circle of Semiramis.”

voltaire's triumph

The naked and the nude – Robert Graves, that master of buncombe and poetry, wrote a poem contrasting the two, and giving all the props to the former – because the latter is of course, having gone through the cultural clutter since Winckelmann and come out of the trenches, all too classical, not grounded in the real White Goddess stuff:

For me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art.

But if we cut back, of course, love and lies switch places, and the nude stands for the discovery that breaks the chains of enlightenment boudoir pinup. Given the sensualism of the 18th century, founded on attraction at a distance, on the one hand, and a materialism of something like atoms of touch – atoms like infinitely small hands, atoms that fill space with a feeling, an omnitactility, to which all that is spirit must be brought back – the distance between the nude statue and the onlooker was going to be a problem. The problem was one of directness – just like the political problem of representation. The nude led the people later in Delacroix, Marianne, chest exposed. Art and the truth are much more tightly conjoined than Graves, in 1957, wanted to admit.

Everything that rises, in the 18th century, seems to converge in Kant’s codexes, and this is no exception. First, there is … the peculiar morality that forbids making human beings objects – a universal moral law built on its universal contravention, a morality built on a moral impossibility. For these are subjects that walk among us, suddenly. Indeed, by inserting this simple denial of human everyday existence in the critique of practical reason, Kant gave the practical a whole new heroism – contravening the vulgarity into which the modern tended to find its equilibrium. Second, when the object is unavoidable, the aesthetic object, he lifts that too out of everyday life and demands for it the disinterested gaze. This was intentionally misread by Schlegel as a remark about the modern: modern art will be interested, or it will not be at all.

And so, obviously, the modern nude, that vulgar and obscene thing, the product of a decayed age, would violate those two norms. Unless, of course, one restores the conditions of the classical age…

The year before David presented his painting, the Return of Brutus to His Family, to the man who had commissioned it – the year 1789 – Voltaire’s body had been interred in the Pantheon. This is how Delecluze describes the scene:

“ The year before, Paris had witness a great ceremony that was also a great event: the translation of the body of Voltaire into the Pantheon. This celebration … gave occasion to recognize this general and sharp taste for the things of antiquity, and at the same time this feebleness that everybody felt in modifying the modern costume with borrowings made from the Romans and Greeks. Not only the car on which the remains of Voltaire were carried bore the impress of the reemerging taste for antiquity, but the literary people, the artists, the musicians, the actors and actresses which marched beside the chariot were dressed a l’antique, and carried in their hands signs of triump or instruments of music from pagan times, made of cardboard and covered with gold leaf paper.”

what makes a goddess laugh?

According to Alain Roger, a philosopher, art continually references nature and continually denaturalizes it. When we look at art, then, we should be looking for the methods of denaturalization: "In whatever manner it operates, art always proceeds by denaturalization. But this is in turn covered by two opposing forms: by excess or default. The same support, such and such a part of the body, for instance, could, according to the place and the epoch, be made the object of a dilation or as well a reduction, which can go as far as annihilation. Nature erased, or hyperbolized. This is what we see, in a fashion particularly spectacular, in the artistic treatment of vulvas.”

Roger makes his case by going far back as we can go in finding representations of the vulva – he goes back to 30,000 BC and the first “Venus” statuettes found in many digs, such as Laugerie Basse. Roger believes that there is a structural constant here – when the statuette depicts the vulva, it dilates it and abolishes the face. Sometimes the whole head is reduced to a bump.

Roger contends that the whole figure of the woman is ithyphallicized – made into the semblance of an erect penis, “as if “nature”, being thus exhibited, must, at the limit, be denatured in its Other, as if the vulva can only accede to the view in annihilating the vultus, on the one side, and in ithyphallicizing itself, on the other. Nothing, or the Phallus.”

Roger ties this observation to the myth of Baubo. I’ve already mentioned Vernant’s essay on Baubo in a post written in 2007 (how time flies!). Baubo made Demeter laugh by raising her skirt and showing Demeter her privates. Baubo is associated with Gorgo and another Greek monster figure, Mormo. Vernant speaks of a genital face – a sort of folding of the body, or rather, a repetition of or projection of the genitals upon the face. And vice versa: “In place of the vulva, a vultus! This is what made Demeter laugh: a vulva, but vultuary, a turgid, congested, phallic face. She burst out laughing for this, this simulacra, his facetious facies, this fallacious phallus. One could, of course, hold to a much shorter reading: Demeter burst into laughter because, as Aristotle says, “the laughable is a part of the ugly”, especially if one recalls that, in the Parmenides, “the hair, the mud, the dirt” justly make up a part of the laughable, the “geloia”.

Artists and Models

In the 1852 biography of David, Delécluze gives us some invaluable testimony about the atmosphere in the atelier in which the Sabines project was going on. The ‘wind was changing” as he puts it in 1797. Two of David’s assistants, Mulard and Gautherot, were Jacobins. During the “rest times of the models”, “they did not fail to harangue” the rest of the students concerning republican doctrines.

However, on the other side was another student, Roland, a “Creole from Martinique, honest, brave, not very witty, excessively strong, who worked like a galley slave at painting to make himself a profession and repair the losses incurred by his family when the revolution ruined the colonies.” Roland was nicknamed the Furies, and he once encountered Gautherot in a café and, at the end of their political argument, challenged him to a duel. Which did not take place. While Gautherot was brave as against the attack by Roland, he had perceived that public opinion was no longer with him, and suddenly ceased his political haranguing. (50-51)

I don’t know if Flaubert read the biography, but there are passages that could certainly have come out of L’education Sentimentale:

“Ducis had a raucous, false and very low voice. During his campaigns in the Vendee, he had learned various republican songs, and particularly the one that begins: Le fanatisme insense, l’ennemi jure de notre liberte, est expire. Thus he sang it in such a way that when he pronounced the fa …, he would stop on the note, working for a minute or two on his painting, then, when nobody was expecting it, take up the song again: natisme insense. Then, after having cut it short with other intervals of more or less duration: l’ennemi jure… de notre liberte… he finished on a very grave and low note: est ex-pi-re!!!” (51)

My leap from Winckelmann to David, from Germany to France, or from Greece to Europe – all of these are leaps, moves, within the hide and seek of an overall game, the game of the white mythology. Delécluze, in his report of David’s early training – winning a prize, he was able to travel to Rome in 1775 – mentions Winckelmann, of course.

“No educated man nowadays doesn’t know of the immense step made by Heyne and Winckelmann in philology and archaeology applied to the general knowledge of antiquity. The effect of the lights that these two men disseminated on this matter was felt first in Germany, and then more particularly in Italy, where Winckelmann went to live to observe the antiquites, to study, and to write his History of Art… The number of statues retrieved from digs each day augmented the pool of riches for the scholars to study in their research on antiquity…” (127)

It was in this context that David lived in Rome in 1775-1779 and decided that the royal road was open for the regeneration of art. That road lead through ancient Greece.

But David’s path went through the tumults of a revolution, and the choice of contemporary subjects – the Death of Marat, the Swearing of the Oath on the Jeu de Paumes.

To be continued…

Putting a syllogism to your throat

In 1755, when Winckelmann wrote his essay on the imitation of Greek sculpture and painting, he had experienced, in his own life, little Greek sculpture and no Greek painting. He had not yet gone to Italy. He relied for his knowledge on the antiquities collected in Dresden – coins, drawing, copies of sculptures. However, his enthusiasm for the Greeks was all the greater for not his having trespassed on their reality. The book was so successful it made Winckelmann almost instantly famous. Diderot could be confident that his readers would know who Winckelmann was when, in the Salon of 1765, he compares him, at the beginning of the section on sculpture, to Rousseau, under the heading of the fanatic. Diderot’s sketch of the fanatic is worth citing, since one sees, here, definite intersignes with the Nephew of Rameau.

“I love the fanatics: not those who present you with some absurd formula of faith, and who, putting a knife to your throat, yell: Sign, or die; but those instead who, taken strongly by some particular and innocent taste, no longer see anything to which it is comparable, defending it with all their might; carrying into the houses and streets attended not by a lance, but by a syllogism, summoning both those who pass by and those who’ve been stopped to agree with their absurdity, or the superiority of the charms of their Dulcinea over all the other creatures of the world. They are amusing, the latter. They amuse me, and sometimes they astonish me. When by chance they have encountered the truth, they expose it with an energy that breaks and reverses everything. In the paradox, piling up images upon images, calling to their aid all the powers of eloquencee, all the figures, the bold comparisons, the tropes, the movements, addressing themselves to the sentiments, to the imagination, attacking the soul in its sensibility on all kinds of sides, the spectacle of their efforts is still beautiful. Such is Jean-Jacques Rousseau when he comes forward, bursting the chains, against the letters that he has cultivated his entire life long, the philosophy that he professed, the society of our corrupted cities, in the midst of which he burns to take up residence, and where he would be driven to despair if he were ignored, unknown, forgotten. However much he shuts the window of his hermitage that looks out on the capital, it is the only view he sees. In the depth of his forest, he is elsewhere. Such is Winckelmann, when he compares the productions of the ancient artist to the moderns.” (X, 355)

In fact, as Diderot pursues the argument, Winckelmann makes a mistake that is the opposite of Rousseau’s. Instead of basing art upon nature, he bases it upon the ancients. Diderot, however, is, in the end, on the side of the moderns, even if he owes a particular vision of the ancients to Winckelmann:

“But pose to him a second question, and ask whether it is better to study the ancient than nature, without the knowledge, the study and the taste of which the ancient artists, with all the particular advantages by which they were privileged, would have left us, nevertheless, merely mediocre works. Without hesitating, he will say, the ancients. And suddenly we see the man who has the most intelligence, heat and taste, negate it all, placing himself in the pretty midst of Toboso.”

Don Quixote, an underground Don Quixote, pursues all these comparisons, becomes all these fanatics – and will until there is breaking and reversal indeed. Diderot's tone, and the love of fanatics, makes him into the kind of medical observer, the observer of curiosities and manias, with which Don Quixote's path is strewn.

Yet Diderot, who, in the depths of the forest, sees, or so he claims, the forest, does not see how he has already accepted Winckelmann as his guide to the ancients. In fact, classical scholars do date the revolution in modern classical studies to Winckelmann. And not just to the more scholarly later work, when Winckelmann traveled to Italy and saw with his own eyes what he had praised in his essay. It is the essay itself to which Ludwig Curtius, the classical scholar, points in his famous 1926 essay about Winckelmann and his followers, both for its influence on classical research and for its broader influence on a diverse group – Curtius names Nietzsche, George and Lagarde – who took the Bildungsideal – the ideal development of the Greeks a la Winckelmann – as having a bearing not only on art, but on “life”. Winckelmann was an “enthusiast of a particular kind” who was “ruled by a passion… that sought not simply knowledge… but life, not simply scholarship, but the freedom of a new kind of humanity.” (Griechensehnsucht und Kulturkritik, Esther Sunderhaug, 268)

...

What is characteristic of the modern?
This question is, in a sense, a way of rephrasing the question, what is the human limit? My work goes forward like a game of hide and seek. I have to continually touch base. I’m continually pursued by It. When I touch base, I’m free, until another reiteration of the game.
A child’s definition of freedom.
In Winckelmann’s essay, there is one thing above all that characterizes the modern versus the ancient: the modern person disgraces himself when his nudity is represented. The Greek, on the contrary, is most himself when most unclothed.

The argument Winckelmann develops to prove this thesis moves from an Enlightenment geo-determinism that goes back to the 17th century (Montaigne explains his relativism by referring to truths that are different on one side of the Pyrenees than on the other). It is admittedly an odd argument to apply to a history as long and varied as that of Greece, but there were well known ways to explain how a constant factor like geography and climate could be countermanded by other social factors. Winckelmann is not, here, in a much different case than Montesquieu in De L’esprit des lois. Thus, we start out with the sky – the Himmel. Much as Goethe felt himself stripped, in a sense, of his Cimmerian darkness when he traveled to Greece, so, too, under the sky of Greece conditions are so benign that the human body doesn’t have to be wrapped up in too many clothes to be protected against the weather.

This is, of course, even more true of tropic climes, but Winckelmann ignores the obvious question of other warm climes. Instead, he sets other conditions coordinate with that sky: there is the healthy living of the Greeks; there is the lack of venereal or other diseases; and there is the culture of athleticism.

All of these conditions apply to the naked bodies of the Greeks. For nudity to be shameless, it must be ideally beautiful:

“The most beautiful bodies among use were no more similar to the most beautiful among the Greeks, perhaps, than Iphikles was to his brother, Hercules. The influence of a soft and pure sky effected the first development (Bildung) of the Greeks, although it was bodily exercises, begun at an early age, that gave this development the noble form. Take a young Spartan, who was the product of a hero and a heroine, never swaddled in childhood, who had been sleeping on the ground since his seventh year and in wrestling and swimming had been practicing since he’d developed his childish limbs. Put him next to a young sybarite our own time: and then judge which of the two an artist would chose for a model of a young Theseus, an Achilles, yes, even a Bacchus.” And, of course, the comparison with the New World Indian, which by this time we should expect:

Look at the swift Indian, who can run down a deer. How his bodily fluids flow, how swift and pliable are his nerves and muscles, and how lightly is the building of the whole body made. It is thus that Homer pictures his heroes for us, and his Achilles he characterizes specifically through the swiftness of his feet.”

It was practice that made the nude – it was practice in the nude that made the nude shameless.

"Bodies maintained through these practices the great and manly contour, which the Greek master gave to their sculpture, without mistiness or superfluous additions. The young Spartans had to appear before their elders naked every ten days, and those which were beginning to get fat had to go on a strict diet.”

It is, I admit, to quick and easy to take this route to the quotation from The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But I will:

“Let me return to this dream. Its horror did not begin with Tomas's first pistol shot; it was horrifying from the outset. Marching naked in formation with a group of naked women was for Tereza the quintessential image of horror. When she lived at home, her mother forbade her to lock the bathroom door. What she meant by her injunction was: Your body is just like all other bodies; you have no right to shame; you have no reason to hide something that exists in millions of identical copies. In her mother's world all bodies were the same and marched behind one another in formation. Since childhood, Tereza had seen nudity as a sign of concentration camp uniformity, a sign of humiliation.”

Booty 2: that convenient sword, that neckline

I say, there are background assumptions that we operate with. I say, there are routines, there are moral sanctions that fade into the background. How does something “fade”? Here no doubt I could produce a story of use, or repetition, of the wearing away of novelty. Like the metaphors that become metaphysical concepts in one, materialist reduction of metaphysics, like the natural events that become Gods, in one early anthropological account of the gods, the everyday moral synthesis – say, operating on the binary naked/clothed to let us sort through the situations in which nakedness is allowed and the situations in which it is sanctioned – becomes a matter not of our election so much as of our imitation. It is the powerful weight of what other’s do that determines, for the most part, what we do. And how do the others decide? Well, we could tell a number of stories here.

This is the naïve sociological view. It is the view of, for instance, Hume, when he attributes to custom what he takes away from the metaphysical foundations of cause. And in fact we can find other customary treatments of cause, which would seem to lend some credence to Hume.

The problem with this story is that we can watch in our own lifetimes and see routines fade, and then intensify. We can, for instance, see that the binary of naked/clothed operates not just one unity upon the other, but each interpenetrates each. We measure, for instance, how much clothes show. We have a sense of what we are showing and what we aren’t. At the same time, we have a numbness or a sensitivity to what ornament negates the naked. A belly button ring, a tattoo are not on the side of the clothed – but aren’t on the side of the naked, either. A man or woman takes off a wedding ring and says, I feel naked, but they don’t quite mean completely unclothed.

And of course, the naked and the clothed are caught up in our collective erogenous zones. They are continually “coming alive” as differently disposed binaries, defined by different notions of modesty, for instance, different notions of officialness, different ways of looking at all the not quite paraphilia of the body, hair, fingernails, teeth. Within this semantic space – that in which the naked and the clothed operates – we find these potential differences that make us want to account for the different notions, want to give histories of what changes over time. Almost certainly, in the eighteenth century up to quite recently, the change from the naked to the clothed was interpreted as a clear progress. The biblical account of the fall, of course, implied that there was no clear progress in God’s eyes – there was a double meaning in the fact that Adam and Eve assumed clothing, since it was a reminder of sin, and it was a necessary condition for the social.

These then are the codes. These then are the breaks. And then there is a system of myth in which the need to explain the naked/clothed binary seemed missing. Or at least different.

In Peacock’s Crotchet Castle (1823), Mr. Crotchet, the Scots/Jewish businessman who, in his retirement, has provided himself with a big house and the enlightened company of people with all kinds of views –– reads in the paper that there was “an order that
no plaster-of-Paris Venus should appear in the streets without petticoats.”

“Mr. Crotchet, on reading this order in the eveningpaper, which, by the postman's early arrival, was always laid onhis breakfast-table, determined to fill his house with Venuses of all sizes and kinds. In pursuance of this resolution, came packages by water-carriage, containing an infinite variety of Venuses. There were the Medicean Venus, and the Bathing Venus; the Uranian Venus, and the Pandemian Venus; the Crouching Venus, and
the Sleeping Venus; the Venus rising from the sea, the Venus with the apple of Paris, and the Venus with the armour of Mars.” In the course of the book, the vicar, the Reverend Doctor Folliott, who is usually seen praising and quoting the Greeks to his baffled companions, is “much astonished at this unexpected display. Disposed, as he was, to hold, that whatever had been in Greece, was right; he was more than doubtful of the propriety of throwing open the classical adytum to the illiterate profane.” In consequence, the two engage in one of Peacock’s whimsical dialogues, in the course of which Crotchet, who is less classically educated than an old fashioned, eighteenth century type, tells the vicar the following:

“MR. CROTCHET. Sir, the Lacedaemonian virgins wrestled naked with
young men; and they grew up, as the wise Lycurgus had foreseen,
into the most modest of women, and the most exemplary of wives and
mothers.

REV. DR. FOLLIOTT. Very likely, sir; but the Athenian virgins did
no such thing, and they grew up into wives who stayed at home--
stayed at home, sir; and looked after their husbands' dinner--his
dinner, sir, you will please to observe.

MR. CROTCHET. And what was the consequence of that, sir? that they
were such very insipid persons that the husband would not go home
to eat his dinner, but preferred the company of some Aspasia, or
Lais.”

After Folliott’s objection, Crotchet goes so far as to blast modern cant:

“MR. CROTCHET. Well, sir, that was not the taste of the Athenians.
They preferred the society of women who would not have made any
scruple about sitting as models to Praxiteles; as you know, sir,
very modest women in Italy did to Canova; one of whom, an Italian
countess, being asked by an English lady, "how she could bear it?"
answered, "Very well; there was a good fire in the room."

REV. DR. FOLLIOTT. Sir, the English lady should have asked how the
Italian lady's husband could bear it. The phials of my wrath would
overflow if poor dear Mrs. Folliott -: sir, in return for your
story, I will tell you a story of my ancestor, Gilbert Folliott.
The devil haunted him, as he did Saint Francis, in the likeness of
a beautiful damsel; but all he could get from the exemplary Gilbert
was an admonition to wear a stomacher and longer petticoats.”

Mr. Crotchett, however, holds to his wrestling Lacedaemonian virgins

In 1823, however, this was definitely the losing side.
But in 1799?

“For David, the nude signified art because it signified antiquity. In his "Note on the Nudity of My Heroes," the painter described the nude as a greater artistic achievement than the clothed figure and offered a classical pedigree for the ideal form. He explicitly stated that his goal was to paint a work that the Greeks and Romans would not have found foreign to their customs. Significantly, the artist presumed that authenticity, even transparency, to the classical world would be valued in modern France. To speak to the ancients was to speak to Frenchmen, but the signs of that veracity (male nudity) required an exegesis, even a defense, ap- pended to the brochure that addressed his fellow country- men. David's goal, that the ancients would not find his painting foreign to their customs, admitted the possibility of disparate cultural boundaries, but his unexamined assump- tion that Frenchmen would respect and understand the language of the ancients refused to acknowledge such funda- mental difference. The painter's profound faith in the socio- political efficacy and relevance of classicism could not fully control the paradox between universalist and relativist models of culture. David would never know whether the ancients found his tableau foreign to their customs, but he certainly discovered that many of his countrymen considered it alien to their own.”

Mohawk Booty, Greek Booty, Your Booty

The only serious rival to the “glorious Greek” was the “noble savage,” preferably North American. And the genius of that Prince of Arrivistes, Benjamin West, was able to combine the two. When in 1760 he was shown the Apollo Belvedere he started back and exclaimed, “My God, how like it is to a young Mohawk warrior!” - Winckelmann and the Second Renascence, 1755-1955, by Gilbert Bagnani American Journal of Archaeology, 1955(115)

Darcy G. Grigsby’s Nudity a la grecque in 1799 focuses on David’s rehabilitation in that year (in a new society in which revolutionary associations in one’s past were considered damning) that took the form of his exhibition of his Sabines paintings. David wrote a brochure to hand out to visitors (of which there were perhaps fifty thousand in all) in defense of his work, and in particular in defense of the male nude. It was also a defense of the artist as entrepreneur: “Isn’t it an idea that is as fair as it is wise that those who procure for the arts the means of existing themselves sustain themselves by their proper resources, and enjoy the noble independence that is natural to genius (qui convient au genie) and without which the fire that he animates is soon extinguished? On the other side, what more dignified means to extract an honorable part of the fruit of his labor than to submit it to the judgment of the public, and to only expect recompense from the welcome that they wish to give it?” (Necklines, 325) Grigsby’s essay disputes those historians who view the painting, which he calls The Intervention of the Sabines (also known as the Sabine women, or the Combat of the Sabines and the Romans) as a success, at least in terms of the “welcome” the public wished to give it. Grigsby’s argument is this:

“David's text arguably attempted to control debate as well as to instantiate it. In fact, contemporaries seized his terms and continued to dispute both choices for years. I would argue that the controversies were interrelated and that the scandal of David's tableau resided in the ways it made nudity a la grecque the centerpiece of a public spectacle. Indeed, it was the commercial presentation of antiquity as a site of nakedness and the mingling of genders and classes that made David's epic painting such a provocation to the critics of Directory France.”

Nudity – the shock of the mingling of genders – the shock of the mingling of classes – haven’t we seen this before? As Benjamin West might have remarked, it all has a Mohawk sound. If we are to make universal history, blindly, one of our first steps is to unmingled the things that aren’t to be mingled. Lahontan’s fictional factional Huron, Adario, saw perfectly plainly that the Jesuits in New France were ardent stratifiers. The rediscovery of Greek art put into doubt this stratification – that was its force. Rediscovery in the strong sense – as Bagnani shows by enumerating the editions of Greek classics after the Renaissance, the period between the middle of the 17th century and Winckelmann had been one in which the study of Greek culture was almost arrested as a scholarly affair. The Greeks lost their prestige, while Latin, which any schoolboy could read, became, again, the grid through which the past was read.

To be continued…

Laocoon/Columbus

The savage and the civilized, that world historical couple, show up, conceptualizing ghosts, ghosts of concepts, transfigured outlines of the victim and the victim’s victim, in the oddest places. Consider the parallel between, on the one hand, the exhibited savage – Pocohantas at King James court, or the Venus Hottentot – and classical statuary. Not, perhaps, a couple you would expect. They do play a similar synecdochal role, parts – especially private parts – standing in for wholes; and – given that geographies for the eighteenth century European were cast as different levels of temporality upon that new measuring stick, progress – the Greeks and Romans were increasingly seen in savage terms themselves. Or rather, by the end of the 18th century, Laffitau’s famous remark that the customs of the Iroquois reminded him of the ancient Greeks was becoming a filter by which the ancient Greeks reminded the classicist of the Iroquois.

The Great Transformation was, among other things, a great forgetting - Heidegger is right. Except what was forgotten was not being but becoming - the machinery that produced the savage and the civilized, and how the outcome, at the end of the day's work, was always uncertain. Was today's product the savage or the civilized? the peasant or the frontiersman? A gnostic history does not ask: what was the secret of the West? It asks what was the West's secret sharer. It looks for doubles and incognitos. All of our histories are tangled with the history of the rise of the happy culture, the culture in which happiness becomes a norm, an ideal, the hinge that connects the govererned to the governors.

The background of Goethe’s trip, what traverses it, is that it is a trip away, on the one hand, from an emotional geography – the dark Cimmerian skies, as Goethe puts it, are exchanged for the bright skies under which the orange trees bloom – and on the other hand away from the modern. When we move away from the modern, we move into the epistemological net of “discovery”, our cognitive key.

Discovery, savages, colonies, exhibitions. These threads are wound around each other.



The decade after Columbus discovered America, in January 14, 1506, in a vineyard in Rome, an underground room was discovered in which had been sealed a statue. The statue was identified by a Florentine architect, working for Pope Julius, Giuliano da Sangallo. Amazingly, Sangallo saw right away that it was the Laocoon described by Pliny as one of the greatest statues of the Hellenic period. Sangallo’s friend, Michelangelo, might have been there that day, too. Recently, an art historian, Lynn Catterson, has claimed that Michelangelo actually forged the statue. The Laocoon is prone to claims about its provenance, since it seems to some to be a Roman copy of a Hellenic statue, and for others it might actually be a Hellenic statue. Pope Julius immediately purchased it and put it in the Cortile de Belvedere.

The metaphor of statuary, as well as accounts and thoughts about statues themselves, are scattered throughout Goethe’s Italian Journey. The reason for this is that Goethe became sensitized to Italy not only through his father’s own trip there, but also through the late Winckelmann, of whom Goethe will write a long biographical essay. Winckelmann is the tutelary guide to this Incognito. Winckelmann, that great man for marble, whose murder shocked the enlightened spirits of Europe.

The great debate between Winckelmann and Lessing about the Laocoon was, really, about the system of the arts – what are the powers of the third life and how are they exhibited, to phrase it in my own vocabulary. The debate – we are not straying, we are straying – was about pain and its representation.

Reading Winckelmann’s Considerations of imitations of Greek works in painting and sculpture and considering the equation, variously calculated, between Greeks and savages, we soon discover that statues figure here in terms of colonies – and indeed, that there is a geopolitics of colonization that subtends the system of the arts:

“Good taste, which has distributed itself more and more widely through the world, began to develop first under the Greek skies. All the discoveries of the foreign peoples came like the first seeds to Greece, and took on another nature and shape in that land, where it is said that Minerva preferred to live, before all lands that she had hitherto encountered, on account of its mild seasons, as a land which brought forth clever heads.”

Under the skies (Himmel) – like Montesquieu, like Adam Smith, Winckelmann sees a strong connection between geography and culture. We are, though, approaching a moment in which that connection inverts. In the nineteenth century, the geography of warmth and bright skies becomes that under which stagnation and laziness flourishes. Not yet, however. And that nineteenth century theme was always traversed by a doubt – the doubt implanted by the classicist tradition. Here, the flow of influences seem to go from warm skies to cold wildernesses. For Winckelmann, certainly, the North was a barbarian place colonized by the Greeks: “And one must confess that the reign of August the Great is the actually happy point in time in which the arts, as a foreign colony, were introduced into Saxony.”

But it is not simply a colonial irradiation. For the Greeks did not come as conquerors, even if their arts colonized the northern climes. However, what is certain here is that the arts are a colonizing force. There’s clearly a certain politics of the savage, a certain mission, in which good taste takes form. Just as Derrida points out in The White Mythology, there seems to be a pattern attractor which, again and again, brings together these skies, these forests, these savages, this good taste, this movement – from East to West, from South to North. But the movements are delicate, the patterns can be reverse, ilynx is always possible. The Greek is destined to become a savage as he becomes less rococo. There’s a distressing miss match between the colonizer and the civilized. On the one hand, a moment opens up in which the wilderness will make its claim. On the other hand, the fact that the colonized are the more civilized – the Greek slave is the teacher to the Roman master – opens up what Bloch would call a utopian element in art. It is an eternal monument of the greatness of this monarch, that in order to promote the development of good taste he brought out of Italy the greatest treasures, whatever was perfect in the painting of other lands, and exhibited it before the eyes of all the world.”

But I have gone too far here. I need to turn back. Because, under my own incognito, I want to contemplate this splendid passage, which has the sound of a destiny:

“Der einzige Weg für uns, groß, ja, wenn es möglich ist, unnachahmlich zu werden, ist die Nachahmung der Alten, und was jemand vom Homer gesagt, daß derjenige ihn bewundern lernt, der ihn wohl verstehen gelernt, gilt auch von den Kunstwerken der Alten, sonderlich der Griechen. Man muß mit ihnen, wie mit seinem Freunde, bekannt geworden sein, um den Laokoon ebenso unnachahmlich als den Homer zu finden.”

discovery and knowledge

And so Goethe leaves behind Weimar, where he has official responsibilities, and goes to Italy as his father had, as Winklemann had, as Herder had – the great trip. But he goes under an incognito – an unknown man in unknown territory. The function of being “unknown” is, of course, relative to a knower. To take on an incognito is the same as coming down with amnesia; but, in a curious way, it mimics amnesia. It projects a certain forgetting of oneself on others. It is, above all, a dramatic conceit. The Lord of Dark Corners, the King in Measure for Measure, for instance, pretends to go on a trip in order to return to his city, under an assumed name, and see that thing we all dream of seeing: what things are like when we aren’t there. But of course the dramatic conceit requires a secret third, an audience, for it to work dramatically. The comparative task is entrusted to the audience in this experiment in bi-location. Goethe takes the chance that he really will disappear – and there are murders on this trip, for sure. Winkelmann, after all, was murdered.

The incognito shapes this voyage of discovery. As I’ve pointed out, the divide between the North and the South takes on resonances of the within and the without, the European and the savage. You can’t have discovery without the savage, he must be somewhere. It is an odd that few people, that I know of, have remarked on one of the great flaws in Foucault’s Les Mots et Les Choses – the absence of any consideration of discovery. This was a crucial term in the episteme of the 17th and 18th century. Perhaps because it traverses the disciplines, it remains invisible to Foucault – there is no science of discovery – in contrast to the project of creating a science of knowing, the task to which a considerable part of philosophy, at that time and since, has devoted itself. Like “adventure”, “discovery” is diagonal to the grid of sciences, the order of words and things.

There is another reason, I suspect: Foucault’s stubborn refusal to open up the system of knowledge, centered in Europe, to the system of the world. As with the Annales school, with Braudel as our chief representative, here, one senses an active forgetting of the New World in Foucault.

But we amateurs of black magic find discovery everywhere. And its semiotic resonances. Goethe uses the term Entdeckungreise (Journey of discovery) to speak of a “friend” who went on one, presumably to Italy, and ended up eloping with the daughter of one of the natives “because he thought it was all part of the trip”. And, as we know from Pocahantas, he was right. The package deal includes taking the savage, or some piece of him or her, home. Goethe spends a lot of time thinking about collecting antiquities, making molds to send home to museums.

Collecting is in a field that is bounded by the savage, the ancient, and the rare. But it is also connected, by multiple connotations, to nemesis, to curses on the takers.

Leave that for another post. As an unknown – an incognito – Goethe effects a transformation on the things around him by removing the clutter of his own personality. Oddly, though he knows that he is Goethe, his incognito makes the things ‘forget’ he is Goethe. It clears a space between himself and them. Not only can he “see and read the things as they are” (212), but he has escaped the bonds of the character. He is not, here, the author of Werther. When Bertrand Russell considers the question of the author of Waverly from a logical point of view, he instinctively reaches for a royal example – the example of George IV identifying, or not, the author of Waverly with Walter Scott. Why a king? There’s no explanation given. I’d say, however, that the immediate reference to a king is a reference to the politics of the name, which is after all state business – the subject must be registered. Goethe is not just any incognito – he is the most famous author of his time. When he visited a place, he was celebrated. And if he had revealed who he was, he knew what the result would be. The reality was that if Goethe came to Rome as Goethe, he would have to visit certain dignitaries. It was part of his position in Weimar, and it would be a scandal if he didn’t follow through on this protocol. Goethe would insult them. By dispensing with his name, Goethe was suddenly put into a curious liminal position, and a slightly scandalous one.

He remarks: “My wonderful and perhaps whimsical half-incognito brings me advantages which I could not have imagined. Since everyone is used to ignoring who I am, and thus nobody has to talk to me about myself, nothing else remains than for people to talk about themselves or of objects that interest them, and through this I learn thoroughly what each is preoccupied with, or what curious things have happened and go on.”

Yet of course this is a half-incognito – some suspect the truth, and Goethe, behind the name, knows the truth. This desire to slip his social connections, to escape his subjectivity, can only half succeed – in the moment he writes, the escape disappears. He even calls this, at one point, my disappearance.

“Since I didn’t want my dear little incognito to be something like an ostrich [Strauss], who hides his head and thinks he is hidden, so I surrendered it at some points, observing my old thesis. I gladly greeted the Count von Liechtenstein, the brother of my dear friend, Baroness Harrach, and sometimes dined with him, and soon observed that my compliance here would lead me to other things, and so it proved.”

how otherwise was the living thing to the molded stone

Derrida begins the White Mythology with an excerpt from Anatole France’s Garden of Epicurus. In that essay, a dialogue takes place about metaphysics, in which one of the interlocutors, Polyphile, makes a suggestion that should sound familiar to those who’ve read the German ideology: the abstractions of metaphysics are all, in fact, images borrowed from images of matter. The soul, for instance, if we dig our way through the tangle of etymologies, can easily be seen to derive, linguistically, from the word for breath. By an easy inference, we go from the abstraction to the living thing, breath. As France’s interlocutor makes his translations, he remarks that Western texts of metaphysics resemble the Vedas. This is no accident – there is quite a history, by the time France is writing, that attempts to demonstrate that our Western concepts came from India. India to Greece – this was the direction urged by Georg Creuzer in his Symbolik. So we have two scenes play themselves out: one is that materialist deduction which leaves the idea – and idealists – by the side, as poets at best; and we have a history, a past that we can go back to through the language we use itself.

Derrida sets himself the task, in the White Mythology, to investigation this double scene. He asks about the eclipse of symbolization, that process that seems to use the matter, the images of common things, until it erases their materiality. And he asks about this course from the East to the West. There is one thing that proceeds from the East to the West and is eclipsed – the sun. Yet to find the sun, here, is to use France’s method of scratching through the abstract. It is part of Derrida’s argument that the way in which the arguments take sides, here, corresponds to a certain systematic impulse – one that he calls the White Mythology. When, in the seventies, James Scott talks about the Great Tradition of the urban elites, with their abstractions and the Little Tradition of the Peasants, with their materialist practices, he is (although doubtless he has not been influenced by Derrida) going in the same direction – or at least concentrating on the social processes that bring about the White Mythology.

Of course, Derrida’s interest is not those social processes so much as the system itself. I should remark that the American reception of Derrida often makes him out to be Polyphile, whose interlocutor leaves him unconvinced, because he has not “argued within the rules.” But Derrida is not Polyphile, far from it; his argument is founded on showing that the divisions between disciplines, between the idea and the thing, between metaphor and metaphysic, are not given naturally, but are treated as though they are given naturally, thus setting up a semantic “bank”, so to speak, that is always loaning from one account to another, on the supposition that somewhere there is an asset that is worth what it is – an idion, a thing that is properly itself. I risk the metaphor because, indeed, it is a question of economics, taken in several ways: as a science of pleasure, as a science of circulation and production, as any science having to do with value, as a system of household management. There is also the verb form of economize, meaning to spare one a long story – for instance, the story of symbolization which takes us from matter to abstraction. It is economized, shortened, bracketed, left out as irrelevant.

Derrida makes clear that this is not another metaphilosophy, nor a study of the rhetoric of philosophy. Rather, it is a grapple with those systematic concepts that have guided our notion of the metaphor and of metaphysics, which have determined the fields that would study them – rhetoric, or some impossible philosophy of philosophy.

I think of the White Philosophy as I think of what Goethe, in Italy, is trying to accomplish – for surely he is going through the stages of just that kind of estrangement from the system in which he can no longer live, the system of the proper in Weimar, and like Polyphile, he is using a method to scratch through the surface and get to the savage past. In Goethe’s case, the method is a planned alienation from the proper that he must know is right out the adventurers tool kit – the use of the Incognito. By shucking his name, Goethe hopes to slip the yoke and turn the joke – he hopes to see anew, afresh. To see “alone the things he had never hoped to see.” And that refreshment is a journey that not only reproduces a journey taken in the past by others, including his own father, but is a journey continually coming upon the past, from the stone age hovels of certain of the Italian peasants to the mode of transportation via mule cart – a bruising transport over the roads that, as Goethe notes, was replaced in the North centuries ago.

When Goethe gets to Rome, this doubled sense of himself and his object is projected in a classical metaphor:

“When Pygmalions Elise, whom he had formed wholly according to his wishes, and had given her as much truth and being as any artist could, finally came up to him and said, I am here [ich bin’s], how otherwise was the living thing to the molded stone.”

an ancient jug

In 1918, Ernst Bloch published his first edition of the Spirit of Utopia, beginning it with an observation on an ancient jug – Krug. The pitcher had been dug up from some place in the Franconia region. Bloch tells us that it brings a strangeness with it – Fremd fuehrt er hinein. It isn’t exceptionally beautiful – in fact, one could doubt it was beautiful at all, compared to other jugs from ancient times. Yet he likes it. There is something about it that has an Italian mood – perhaps it is roman. Yet its décor shows a very northern thing, a wilderness thing – from the Urwalde. It shows a bearded, savage man holding an uprooted pine sapling. He can imagine Tenier like peasants with big noses holding it and similar pitchers in their fists and drinking wine from it, “until they with the others had to disappear, as all good grounded handwork – bodenstandige Handarbeit - disappears.” He sees the wild man on the front of it descend, in the land, to the escutcheons of the nobility and the signs on taverns – a mysterious descent of the race of the savage in the heart of the Rhine country.

“Yet here, on our jug, the bearded man gazes immediately out of the shadows of the woods, the moist and dark wilderness of the oldest times approach all around, quite near, the head of the giant troll distributes his faunal, amulet-like, alchemical gaze. The speak out of a time, the old jugs, when the floppy ear and the fiery man could be seen in the evening fields in the Frranconia region, and havc kept the old man – das Alte - without allegory, literally, in peasant guise.”

1918, of course, saw the entire collapse of the Wilhelmine order. And this context is important enough that I am aware, even as I bracket it, that I cannot bracket it. But I bring up this ancient jug of Bloch’s because of the connection – the thread, as he puts it – between the savage, the troll, the peasant, and the Roman, the South. The pitcher is a pioneer, came north to the wilderness where one could still see the wood people in the evening fields. Tacitus mocked the Germans for being so barbaric that they didn’t know about agriculture – they were complete meateaters.

The question of frontiers, and of time, was one that kept coming up, in 1783, for a certain Leipzig merchant, Jean Phillip Moeller. He was traveling through Italy without any servants. Noticing that in certain Italian towns his German boots were attracting attention, he changed to shoes and socks – evidently trying to fit in with the people. He spoke Italian. He toured the great sites, or some of them – he only spent a few hours in Florence. Later he wrote that his course, which took him from Dresden across the Brenner pass to Venice, and then to Rome, seemed like an “underground” journey. In Rome, he met his friend, an artist, who reported that certain artists had spread the rumor that the merchant was really Goethe. This was shot down by a man who said that he knew Goethe, and Moeller looked nothing like him. This made Moeller laugh.

Because, indeed, he was Goethe. If Italy were an already ‘discovered’ country – Goethe’s father had made the grand tour of it – one way to remake it a frontier, one way to make it something new, was to make oneself an undiscovered person, an incognito. Goethe, on his trip to Italy, is not just escaping from his situation with Charlotte von Stein, with whom he was in a frustratingly chaste relationship, and the whole of Weimar’s claustrophobia, but he was escaping the very bonds of the eighteenth century. In a sense, in his person, Goethe was doing what Kant, at the same time, was doing – starting from the very ground of possibility and working on up. Like Kant, Goethe did not want his understanding to get in the way of what was there.

white mythology in the white magic

We get someplace, and then we wonder why we came here. And we look back and can’t remember our path. And our goal is just to get to the Castle. The Castle is just up the hill. It seems so simple. The parts of our plan are falling into place. But then we look around. Why does everybody look suspicious? Why do we feel like we have to keep talking? What do we want? What office do we hold? Who invited us here?

Why am I talking about myth and folklore in the context of happiness?

In an essay on the early enlightenment critique of myth first translated as To Bring Myth to an End in New German Critique, Hans Blumenberg poses the question of why the Enlightenment, defining itself in part as the war against superstition, did not bring myth to an end. Literally, why did the Greek myths survive as narratives that poets, artists, and even psychologists and historians are drawn to? Blumenberg cites Fontenelle, one of the key moderns in the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns that erupted over Perrault’s essay in 1688, because Fontenelle was so explicit in his attack on myth. He was puzzled by the continuing vitality of Greek myth in literature. Why were the poets still using Theseus, Ariadne, Orestes, Oedipus? Why did the circus never end?

“In his discussion of myth Fontenelle expressed the Enlightenment's amazement at the fact that the myths of the Greeks had still not disappeared from the world. Religion and reason had, it is true, weaned people from them, but poetry and painting had given them the means by which to survive. They had been able to make themselves indispensable to these arts. This statement is meant as a contribution to the history of human errors. Part of the program of the Cartesian school was to remove this category too, together with the totality of prejudices, from people's minds. The vigor of the myths must have seemed all the harder to understand since the explanation of the tenacity of prejudices which described them as keeping themselves alive by flattering man about his nature and his place in the universe, against all his better knowledge, did not fit the case of myth. Not only did Fontenelle see a relationship of exclusion between the new science of nature and the ancient myths; he also leaned toward the assumption that given an appropriate presentation, science could fill the vacancy that had arisen, in the system of needs, as a result of criticism of the myths. No doubt he considered something along the lines of his Entretiens sur la pluralite des mondes as the compensation for all the lost beauties of the tradition, in the destruction of which he had participated so suc- cessfully, in the year in which the conversations on the plurality of worlds appeared, with the Histoire des oracles (1686). The basic idea of 'reoccupation' had motivated Fontenelle's invention of the literary genre of the didactic conversation, for the Enlightenment - which did not consistently keep in view the ulterior purpose that he had meant the genre to serve.”

‘Re-occupation’ – a startling word. A military word, of course, one that immediately casts the other side – the side of myth – as the enemy of reason, occupying territory that reason must again advance into a seize – although the very notion of occupation makes it difficult to know if there was ever an original possessor of the land. We were this land’s before the land was ours – and we are trying as hard as possible to forget this fact. Or rather, myth.

As I’ve pointed out in a series of posts last year, the image of antiquity held during the 18th century was changing from that held previously, on back to 15th century Florence. If, among the constellation of humanist European intellectuals, there arose a sort of rule of thumb morality, secretly other-than-Christian, which could aptly be called neo-Stoicism, in the 18th century this belief lost its default position among the intelligentsia. Via Shaftesbury, Stoicism became a tool of ever deeper de-familiarization; and, as a serious set of propositions about pain and pleasure, became the object of La Mettrie’s mockery, the last laugh from the libertine culture.

But the downfall of a certain classical attitude coincided with the rise of a new interest in, a new attitude towards the classics. Antiquity became the site of a transaction that was happening on a worldwide scale, marked by the Encounter – with the savages of North America, the savages of Africa, the savages of Central Asia. The Encounter not only altered synchronically the terms in which the subject – the philosopher’s favorite costume to wear to the world wide party – understood itself, it altered the past. For what, after all kept the European from being a savage but a religion and a science that came from the deep Mediterranean past, Jerusalem and Athens? And yet, the Greek part of that past – with its nudity, its ferocious myths, its rituals – seemed, the more one looked at it, less like civilization and more like savagery. At this moment, myth began to lose its ornamental stature. Far from science taking the place of myth, myth began to appear as something more than the sum of the errors of which it was made.

I seem to be finding that the cutwork for the creation of ‘resistance’ to the great tradition – to the turn it takes as it embraces happiness as the emotional heuristic by which to understand the normal human personality and as the hinge that connects the governors and the governed – comes back to a series of trips. Trips, flights, the assumption of peripheral positions, holings up, going underground. And then there are those who want to be, who make themselves be central – like Goethe. And yet who find themselves irresistibly drawn to the erotically marginal. I like to think of Goethe traveling to Italy in 1783, planning it as an escape, telling no one, even – especially – his heavy handed muse, Diotima, Charlotte von Stein, to whom he addresses his notes on Italy (as though he had to allot her a place in his head even as he was escaping from her person), while – perhaps mythically – Potocki is traveling too – around the Ottoman empire.

As without, so within – and within the white magic, what are we going to find if not the White Mythology? Within the idea that backwards is equal to forwards, that the path up and the path down are one and the same – the Heraclitean compromise position on ontology, it is here that we find the altered antiquity of the moderns, myth for the modern man. But antiquity, classicism, myth, folklore also open up a space in which to contest the modern. That’s the double aspect of it.

Which is why I am presently following/reading – Sneaky pete, the amateur historian – in the heels of Goethe in Italy at the moment.