There is a New Berlin Wall and it's called The Euro

"The whole of the Mediterranean now finds itself in the wrong currency, and yet virtually nobody in the political arena has the courage to stand up and say that. I feel that the continent is now divided from north to south. There is a new Berlin Wall and it's called the euro."

I find myself surprised to report that these incisive and insightful words were uttered recently before the European Parliament by none other than Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain's far-right Euroskeptic party, UKIP - though I'm not sure the label 'far-right' is really appropriate any more. For in the charged political climate of today's Europe, it is perhaps an indication of just how acrimonious and divisive the politics of the eurozone have become - how irrational, fanatical, and hegemonic the policies of certain of its members - that Farage comes off sounding like the Voice of Reason. The eurozone seems to be in the grip of an economic neo-fascism far more extreme than anything UKIP could drum up.

I now officially count myself among the Euro-skeptics - not just with regard to currency union (that was the case before) but with regard to the EU project as a whole. I am not going to fault the UK or anyone for wanting to hold a referendum on EU membership in the future. All the worst fears about the EU, so far mostly peddled in the tabloid press - about surrendering national sovereignty and decision-making to faceless technocrats in Brussels, and EU politicians unaccountable to the people over whom they exercise enormous power - have been fully confirmed. And even worse - it would be bad enough if we were simply ruled by technocrats and bureaucrats in Brussels, but that would suggest at least a commitment to rational, data-driven policies. This is far worse. The latest rumblings over the Greek debt in Brussels - deal or no deal - suggest a political union driven by an irrational, sadistic, vindictive, fanatical and divisive neo-fascist politics of domination and hegemony, a conspiracy against the public, a conspiracy against democratic politics, led by politicians who are prepared to punish voters in a member country for their choice of government, for demanding rational economic policy, for making choices that their EU overlords dislike.



Economist Tim Worstall, writing in Forbes (hardly a lefty political rag), is more-less in line with Krugman, Stiglitz, and any number of award-winning economists: "It’s very difficult indeed to design plans for Greece that are actually worse than the one the European Union is trying to impose upon that benighted country. Decades of enforced poverty in order to maintain a currency (and possibly even a political order) that the country should never have embraced, should never have been allowed into, just isn’t one of those things that would win you a gold star in your high school economics class. Everyone from Milton Friedman to Paul Krugman, with a few insignificant bag carriers like myself bringing up the rear, has been screaming that the problem is the euro and while that remains so will the problem...However, amazingly, the German finance ministry seems to have managed to come up with a plan that is even worse...As has been pointed out, those who don’t [study history] are doomed to repeat it."

Paul Krugman in The New York Times calls the Eurogroup's demands "madness...This goes beyond harsh into pure vindictiveness, complete destruction of national sovereignty, and no hope of relief. It is, presumably, meant to be an offer Greece can’t accept…" And while Chancellor Merkel is harping on about trust, Krugman insists - "Who will ever trust Germany’s good intentions after this?...In a way, the economics have almost become secondary. But still, let’s be clear: what we’ve learned these past couple of weeks is that being a member of the eurozone means that the creditors can destroy your economy if you step out of line...even a complete Greek capitulation would be a dead end...The European project — a project I have always praised and supported — has just been dealt a terrible, perhaps fatal blow. And whatever you think of Syriza, or Greece, it wasn’t the Greeks who did it."

Joseph Stiglitz, another Nobel-winning economist, also insists that the real problem is Germany, which has benefited greatly under the euro. While he believes the eurozone should stay together, he notes that most economists (including himself) hold that "the best solution for Europe, if it's going to break up, is for Germany to leave. The mark would raise, the German economy would be dampened...and Germany would find out just how much it needs the euro to stay together...and possibly be more willing to help out the countries that are struggling...There's a whole set of an unfinished economic agenda which most economists agree on, except Germany doesn't."

"If Greece leaves," Stiglitz adds, "I think Greece will actually do better...There will be a period of adjustment. But Greece will start to grow."

Even on this side of the Atlantic, Wolfgang Munchau, associate editor of the Financial Times and former co-editor of FT Deutschland, writes that Greece's creditors "have destroyed the eurozone as we know it and demolished the idea of a monetary union as a step towards a democratic political union...In doing so they reverted to the nationalist European power struggles of the 19th and early 20th century. They demoted the eurozone into a toxic fixed exchange-rate system, with a shared single currency, run in the interests of Germany, held together by the threat of absolute destitution for those who challenge the prevailing order...This brings us back to a more toxic version of the old exchange-rate mechanism of the 1990s that left countries trapped in a system run primarily for the benefit of Germany, which led to the exit of the English pound and the temporary departure of the Italian lira. What was left was a coalition of countries willing to adjust their economies to Germany’s. Britain had to leave because it was not...Once you strip the eurozone of any ambitions for a political and economic union, it changes into a utilitarian project in which member states will coldly weigh the benefits and costs, just as Britain is currently assessing the relative advantages or disadvantages of EU membership. In such a system, someone, somewhere, will want to leave sometime. And the strong political commitment to save it will no longer be there either."

In fact, I have yet to read a credible, independent expert opinion that has anything positive to say about Greece's creditors and their role in this debacle. One financial analyst, Marc Ostwald of ADM Investor Services, claimed the latest deal offered by the creditors was worse than the 1919 Treaty of Versailles that crushed Weimar Germany with debt and paved the way for the second world war. The creditors, he added, seem to be trying “to completely destroy Greece”.



Even Jeffrey Sachs, one of the infamous 'shock doctors' much-maligned by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine (he is in fact credited with having coined the term 'economic shock therapy'), has effectively cast his lot with Syriza, writing that "Europe’s demands – ostensibly aimed at ensuring that Greece can service its foreign debt – are petulant, naive, and fundamentally self-destructive. In rejecting them, the Greeks are not playing games; they are trying to stay alive...The Greek government is right to have drawn the line. It has a responsibility to its citizens. The real choice, after all, lies not with Greece, but with Europe."

Already in the lead-up to Syriza's election several months ago, Sachs wrote: "The leftwing party Syriza is no anomaly; it is telling the financial and political truth in the runup to Sunday’s elections, however unpleasant that may be to politicians in Berlin and Brussels."

What is becoming increasingly clear, given the near-consensus of eminent international economists - Nobel laureates and esteemed economic thinkers all - on the utter fallacy of the Eurozone creditors' position, and the correctness of Syriza's demands, is that Syriza is really not very radical at all. As Slavoj Zizek put it in a recent article in New Statesman, "if one looks closely at the proposals offered by Syriza, one cannot help noticing that they were once part of the standard moderate social-democratic agenda (in Sweden of the 1960s, the programme of the government was much more radical). It is a sad sign of our times that today you have to belong to a 'radical' left to advocate these same measures..." The label 'radical left', as I've said before, only has meaning in a charged political context where the 'centre' has become the technocratic neo-fascism currently gripping the imaginations of many eurozone leaders. If Syriza are radical, it is only as radically rational pragmatists.

In light of all this, the account given in a recent interview by Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, of the past few months of negotiations, makes a lot of sense:

...[T]he inside information one gets...to have your worst fears confirmed...To have “the powers that be” speak to you directly, and it be as you feared – the situation was worse than you imagined! the complete lack of any democratic scruples, on behalf of the supposed defenders of Europe’s democracy. The quite clear understanding on the other side that we are on the same page analytically...To have very powerful figures look at you in the eye and say "You’re right in what you’re saying, but we’re going to crunch you anyway."

It’s not that it didn’t go down well – it’s that there was point blank refusal to engage in economic arguments. Point blank...You put forward an argument that you’ve really worked on – to make sure it’s logically coherent – and you’re just faced with blank stares. It is as if you haven’t spoken.

Schäuble was consistent throughout. His view was "I’m not discussing the programme – this was accepted by the previous government and we can’t possibly allow an election to change anything..." So at that point I had to get up and say "Well perhaps we should simply not hold elections anymore for indebted countries," and there was no answer.

My constant proposal to the Troika was very simple: let us agree on three or four important reforms that we agree upon, like the tax system, like VAT, and let’s implement them immediately. And you relax the restrictions on liqiuidity from the ECB. You want a comprehensive agreement – let’s carry on negotiating – and in the meantime let us introduce these reforms in parliament by agreement between us and you...And they said "No, no, no, this has to be a comprehensive review. Nothing will be implemented if you dare introduce any legislation. It will be considered unilateral action inimical to the process of reaching an agreement." And then of course a few months later they would leak to the media that we had not reformed the country and that we were wasting time! And so... [chuckles] we were set up, in a sense, in an important sense.



The palpable hysteria with which European elites met Syriza's mere election a few months ago, with talk of markets tumbling and predictions of general mayhem, is reminiscent of C.P. Cavafy's famous poem, 'Waiting for the Barbarians', in which he describes a 'civilized' society in decline, preparing for an imminent invasion by barbarians who never, in the end, turn up - and ends with these lines:

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

The eurogroup's disappointment with and consequent resentment of Syriza amounts precisely to this - Syriza are the barbarians who never materialized, who turned out to be in fact the rational, pragmatic and moderate antidote to the irrational, German-led neo-fascist economic extremism driving the poorer European economies into debt servitude - Syriza made them look bad, simply put. Syriza as extremist barbarians would have been 'a kind of solution' - they would have justified harsh measures, in the eyes of creditors. When Chancellor Merkel talks about 'trust', this is probably what she is getting at, or where these sentiments come from. As some commentators have pointed out, the Germans have shown themselves to be less trustworthy than anyone - but they are nonetheless fanatically, obsessively, hysterically convinced that behind these rational, pragmatic moderates in Syriza, the barbarians still lurk, in wait.



What is also clear is that, even if Syriza has lost the political battle - for now - it has clearly won the rational argument. The forces of Reason and Rational Economic Policy are clearly on its side. And the development of science, even economic science, isn't subject to socio-political fluctuations, market movements, and special interests quite as much as the political field is.

During negotiations in Brussels yesterday, it emerged that one of the creditors' demands (specifically a German idea), as a condition of the Greek bailout, was to transfer 50 billion euros of 'valuable Greek assets' as collateral to a shady Luxembourg-based 'Institution for Growth'. This entity, as later reported, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of German KfW, chaired by none other than Germany's finance minister Wolfgang Schauble. Quite apart from the cronyism and conflicts of interest - this, dear reader, is tantamount to me giving you a loan to help you repay your debts, but in return demanding that you, say, sign over the mortgage on your house to me as collateral - which in the long run makes you poorer, as you are giving up an asset that will appreciate in value, and less likely to be able to repay your debts, including your debts to me. This is just another example of how fantastically stupid the austerity regime imposed on Greece for the past 5 years has been, and goes a long way in explaining why economists around the world are railing against it. Even if this idea was watered down in the latest form of the agreement - the assets now will be transferred to an entity based in Athens - the principle is the same: the Greek government is somehow expected to achieve major budget surpluses while at the same time making itself poorer in the long run (by selling off assets), and growing the economy, and repaying its debts, and making those debts more sustainable.



As for the cronyism and conflicts of interest in the suggested version of the plan, we should remember that Schauble, Germany's finance minister and chief EU moralizer in the Greece debt crisis, resigned from office as party chairman back in 2000 due to his role at the centre of a massive corruption scandal in Germany involving illegal campaign financing and "a labyrinthine network of secret slush funds fed by millions of Deutsche marks in undeclared - and therefore illegal - campaign contributions." Schauble, by his own admission "personally ran the slush-fund system during his 25 years as party chairman...At first the chairman insisted that he had only briefly met Karlheinz Schreiber, the fugitive weapons dealer who regularly handed bags of cash to CDU officials. Then last month Schauble was forced to admit that he had personally accepted a 100,000 Deutsche mark donation from Schreiber - in cash."

Well, I guess that makes it kind of easy to stay solvent and lecture others about financial responsibility, when you get regularly handed personal 'donations' of millions in cash by dodgy weapons dealers on the run from the law. And then, to have the cheek to talk about 'trust'…With this in mind, I suspect that Schauble hates Syriza so much precisely because they have no links to previous Greek governments, to the corrupt political elites with whom he did deals in the past and who, like him, had a penchant for failing to declare moneys (received or spent), which ultimately led to their demise, and the demise of the Greek economy once Wall Street imploded. Schauble, in other words, prefers to deal with corrupt neo-fascist stooges like himself. With his wheelchair and irrational intransigence that leads to disaster, he actually seems a great fit for the role of latent Nazi Dr Strangelove, director of weapons research and development in Kubrick's epic film - a man willing to risk everything, including the fate of the world, for the sake of his own misguided intellectual obsessions...



In the Guardian's reporting on the talks in Brussels last night, there was mention that the Eurogroup, among other things, wants "rigorous review of collective bargaining" - as if collective bargaining rights and unions caused the financial crisis, not corrupt banks propped up by the same corrupt politicians who are now trying to get rid of Greece's first non-corrupt government in at least a decade. Nice try. This clearly has nothing to do with constructive, rational economic policy. In negotiations described by one senior EU official as an "exercise in extensive mental waterboarding" of the Greeks (for those unaware this is a form of torture favoured by CIA interrogators), the new terms reached "are much stiffer than those imposed by the creditors over the past five years." This, said the senior official, was payback for the emphatic no to the creditors’ terms delivered in the Greek referendum last week. “He was warned a yes vote would get better terms, that a no vote would be much harder,” said the senior official.

Greece, in other words, is being collectively punished for voting 'no' in the referendum. Quite literally - punished. This really is terrorism, as former Greek finance minister Varoufakis put it. According to the BBC's Paul Mason, "in Greece large numbers of people – on all sides of politics – believe the Europeans are trying to force the elected government to resign before a deal is concluded." I'd say that's been pretty clear for a while now.

So here's hoping that the Greeks will have the courage to resist, and perhaps take the plunge out of the euro zone themselves. There are some signs of fierce opposition to the latest deal from within Syriza itself, not least the President of Parliament, Zoe Konstantopoulou, who delivered these blistering words to Greek legislators yesterday:

After the Second World War, Germany enjoyed the greatest remission of debt [in history], so as to allow it to get back on track. This was done with the generous partnership of Greece...And yet Germany is behaving as if history and the Greek people owe a debt to her, as if she expects to receive a historic payback for her own atrocities…

The artificial and deliberate creation of conditions of humanitarian disaster so as to keep the people and the government in conditions of suffocation and under the threat of a chaotic bankruptcy constitutes a direct violation of all international human rights protection treaties, including the Charter of the United Nations, the European treaties, and even the statutes of the International Criminal Court. Blackmail is not legal. And those who create conditions that eliminate freedom of the will may not speak of "options." The lenders are blackmailing the government. They are acting fraudulently, since they have known since 2010 that this debt is unsustainable. They are acting consciously, since their statements anticipate the need for humanitarian aid in Greece. Humanitarian assistance for what? For an unexpected and inadvertent natural disaster? Is it an unpredictable earthquake, flooding, a fire?

No.

Humanitarian aid [would be required] because of their conscious and calculated choice to deprive the people of the means of survival, closing the tap of liquidity in retaliation for the democratic choice of the government and the parliament to call a referendum and to turn to the people to decide their own future...

NO to blackmail

NO to ultimatums

NO to the Memoranda of servitude

NO to the repayment of a debt they did not create and that is not attributable to them

NO to new measures of impoverishment and exhaustion

. . .

It is important to keep reminding ourselves in all this that the global financial crisis that started in 2007-08, and which reverberates to this day in Greece, at its root has nothing to do with 'lazy Greeks' or the welfare state (as Paul Krugman pointed out many times) or poor people living beyond their means, and very little to do with Greece - it is the direct result of catastrophic incompetence, greed and corruption among top executives in the biggest banks in the richest country in the world - the United States - who were bailed out unconditionally with funds many times greater than the money merely funneled through Greece (and back to foreign banks in the form of loan payments). Some of the reasons why Greece is suffering to this day:

• In a global financial crisis, the weakest economies are hit hardest (especially in a common currency zone, which goes back to the argument why Greece should never have joined the euro);
• Years of mismanagement by previous Greek governments (i.e. hiding their debts), made up of the same corrupt politicians favoured and propped-up for years by equally corrupt foreign (mainly French and German) banks, and today supported by corrupt Eurozone and Troika officials who want to get rid of Syriza; they were effectively hiding structural weaknesses in the Greek economy which were exposed when global financial markets slid into recession;
• Failure by Troika and Eurozone officials to acknowledge their failures and follow rational economic policy in relation to Greece, making the crisis there far worse through austerity measures that led to record unemployment levels and even deeper recession since 2010…

As one commentator notes in the Washington Post, "This latest melodrama playing out in Brussels as European finance ministers meet to discuss whether or not to approve a new Greek bailout, appears so nonsensical that it can be hard to believe these people are deciding the future of Europe."

I would even go so far as to say, we have here an entire currency union run by a cabal of incompetent, sadistic, fanatical neo-fascist buffoons and stooges - instead of obsessing about cutting Greek pensions, these people should be pensioned off and locked up in a care home somewhere where their senile babble will be muffled behind sound-proof doors instead of shaping policies that affect millions of people.




I have coined a new word: Oxi-mandias. In reference to the Greek 'Oxi' in the referendum, and Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem 'Ozymandias' - this is the impending fate of the European project, so long as it remains in the hands of its current fanatical, irrational, neo-fascist architects:

And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.
Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!"
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Or, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late."

When asked about the Versailles analogy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel responded: “I never make historical comparisons.”

How ironic, cynical, and loaded a statement for a German head of state to make. As Louis Armstrong 'Satchmo' put it, "Denial ain't nothin' but a river in Egypt." And indeed, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. If Karl Marx is to be believed - that history repeats itself, "first as tragedy, then as farce" - this one could well end in tragedy. A Greek, or Greco-German tragedy, no less.

Economics 101: Greece and the Financial Crisis

A friend asked me to explain what's happening in Greece "in a nutshell"...So as a more practical follow-up to my previous post on this blog, here is a slightly edited version of what I wrote to her, in case anyone else needs a primer (pretty accurate nutshell summary I think) -

In a nutshell? How about, an epic struggle between inhuman, irrational, world-destroying neoliberal capitalism and an authentic, democratic politics of hope? I don't know how much you know, but it all goes back to the 2008 financial crisis and the subprime mortgages in the U.S., which caused the Great Recession. Greece, like other European countries, had a lot of debt, due to years of mismanagement by corrupt governments backed by equally corrupt French and German banks. But what made things worse was that, in order to keep the government budget deficit within eurozone limits (to be able to join the euro currency), starting in the 1990s Goldman Sachs helped them 'cook the books' by hiding part of their debt. Keeping the debt off the books basically allowed them to keep borrowing without growing the budget deficit. When a new government was elected in 2010, they revealed this hidden debt, and revised deficit figures - the budget deficit effectively skyrocketed from around 6% to 15% of GDP overnight. As this meant that any further borrowing (and financing the government) was going to be very difficult, Greece was about to default on its debt. So in 2010 the Troika of creditors - the European Central Bank, the IMF and Eurozone countries (represented by the European Commission) - loaned all this money to Greece, in order to help them keep paying their debt - but most of the bailout money went right back into French and German banks in the form of loan payments, not into the Greek economy. And in return for those loans, the creditors demanded 'austerity' cuts from Greece, which were ostensibly meant to bring the deficit back down and make Greece's economy more efficient, but in reality (as many economists predicted) caused an even deeper recession because it reduced the amount of money going into the economy and therefore the amount of revenue (due to pension cuts, lowered wages, unemployment due to public sector job losses, etc), which led to three general trends:

1. more debt for Greece to repay
2. less revenue/income for repaying that debt
3. even less growth, income, productivity, deeper recession, etc

Greece effectively merely functioned as a conduit for European taxpayers' money to be funneled into French and German banks, who were the real target of the bailout. From the viewpoint of sound economics, this is either a colossal policy failure on the part of the EU and Troika, or a cynical conspiracy against the public on an equally colossal scale. It's kind of like if I were to lend you a bunch of money so that you can keep making interest payments on your debt to my friend Jeremy, but in return I demanded that you close your small business selling oysters because you're spending too much money on it (in my opinion), and take a minimum-wage job instead, and use most of the money I gave you to pay Jeremy - meaning you now owe more money (to me and Jeremy) and have less income from which to repay it - and less opportunity for growth and financial stability/sustainability.

What's happening now is that the creditors - Eurozone leaders, ECB and IMF - are essentially demanding that Greece continue in more-less the same fashion as it has for the past 5 years, and even implement further austerity cuts - against the advice of virtually every credible economist in the world - in exchange for further loans/credit from the creditors. The Greeks, who a few months ago elected a left-wing anti-austerity government unconnected to the previous corruption, are saying no - we need to grow our economy, we need debt relief (i.e. part of the debt to be forgiven), job creation, we need to get on a sustainable path that will allow us to actually repay our debt, which means stimulus spending, not further cuts... The irony is that back in 2012, there was a leaked report suggesting that the Troika's own internal review believed that “even under the most optimistic scenario, the austerity measures being imposed on Athens risk a recession so deep that Greece will not be able to climb out of the debt hole.”

Since they couldn't come to an agreement, the current programme expired, and Greece was about to default on its debt again as the ECB refused to provide emergency funding to Greek banks - and they cannot print their own money (in euros), being part of the common currency - some of the creditors were insisting that if the Greeks reject the bailout terms (further austerity cuts with no debt relief) in the referendum, they would have to leave the Euro (currency), meaning start printing their own money, or drachmas, which was the Greek currency before they joined the euro.

Bear in mind also that in both Europe and the US, it wasn't just struggling economies but the banks themselves - the ones who caused the global crisis in the first place - that were bailed out with taxpayers' money...But no structural reforms or 'austerity' cuts were demanded of the banks in exchange for those bailouts, which in some cases were even greater than the bailouts received by Greece or Ireland, amounting to trillions of dollars. In one notable case, AIG executives were reported to have received bonuses of up to a million dollars (per head) a year or two after the bailouts, taxpayer-funded...

Varoufakis, the controversial but in my view awesomely cool former Greek finance minister (he resigned right after the referendum as a tactical move), explaining some of the issues:

Either/Or: the Greek Democratic Pharmakon in the Age of Austerity

In a seminal essay titled 'Plato's Pharmacy', Jacques Derrida engages in an extended discussion of one of Plato's less well-regarded dialogues, the Phaedrus, expounding on the ambiguity of one word - pharmakon - which is repeatedly used as a metaphor in the text. Often translated simply as 'drug' or 'medicine', to the ancient Greeks pharmakon could in fact mean either medicine and/or poison:

Pharmacia (Pharmakeia) is also a common noun signifying the administration of the pharmakon, the drug: the medicine and/or poison. "Poisoning" was not the least usual meaning of "pharmacia." (p. 70)

But the ambiguity evoked here is not merely linguistic or semantic - it goes to the very heart of nature itself, and distills to its very core the famous slogan attributed to the ancient Greeks - 'everything in moderation'. Every medicine can be a poison at a given dosage or formulation, and vice versa - some of the deadliest venoms on the planet are today the subject of ground-breaking research into a wide range of potential therapeutic uses, for instance - new drugs derived from venom for everything from heart disease and diabetes to autoimmune diseases, cancer, and pain could be available within a decade. “We aren’t talking just a few novel drugs but entire classes of drugs,” according to one researcher. And the properties that make venom deadly are also what make it so valuable for medicine.



Taken metaphorically in the economic arena, fiscal discipline is a pharmakon; fiscal austerity, on the other hand, is fiscal discipline taken to a level where it becomes poison - where it kills, rather than heals. When fiscal discipline becomes an ideological end in itself, rather than a means to an end, it becomes toxic. And it becomes all the more dangerous when those who administer it, failing to distinguish between the divergent effects of this pharmakon at different dosages, are utterly, fanatically convinced of the purity of their cause.

Contrary to the widely propagated (in the West, at least) perception of 'lazy Greeks' living off the welfare state and so forth (more on that here and here - Greeks work longer hours than Germans and the Greek welfare state takes up a smaller percentage of GDP), a closer examination shows that it is in fact the Troika and the Eurozone finance ministers who are the epitome of intellectual laziness and incompetence, and ideological fanaticism - like a doctor who fanatically believes in a particular drug or form of therapy and administers it recklessly with no concern for dosages or formulations and no interest in the finer points of fine-tuning treatment, in the process killing or seriously harming his patients. Or as Nobel-Prize winning economist Paul Krugman put it, "Europe’s self-styled technocrats are like medieval doctors who insisted on bleeding their patients — and when their treatment made the patients sicker, demanded even more bleeding." Greece didn't even get a real bailout or any kind of stimulus in exchange for being forced to undercut its own growth (and hope of recovery) through austerity measures - as economist Mark Blyth points out, most of the bailout money ostensibly loaned to Greece simply went right back into French and German banks, who were the real target of the bailout - Greece merely served as a conduit for European taxpayers' money to be funneled into European private banks. This is either a colossal policy failure or a cynical neoliberal conspiracy against the public on an equally colossal scale.

By contrast, it is precisely the Greek Syriza government, and perhaps most of all its controversial finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, that emerge as thoroughly modern (or even post-modern) proponents of intellectual rigour, method, and rational economic discipline - insisting on precise policies that produce the right outcomes, and which are supported by measurable evidence as well as a democratic mandate. Varoufakis' economic background is in cutting-edge academic game theory, and he has worked for several years as a consultant for Seattle-based video game developer Valve Corporation (incidentally, on scaling up virtual economies and linking multiple economies together on the Steam digital delivery platform, looking at exchange rates and trade deficits). And he has, according to BBC's Paul Mason "templated a style of politics that may be equally adaptable for the right as on the left, for those with the will to try it: operating from principles, being as open as possible with information, engaging the public in language they can understand, and putting his entire persona on the line." Last but not least, the Greeks have been more adept than any current European political figure at using technology and social media.

Even Varoufakis' resignation, following the insistence of Eurozone finance ministers and despite Syriza winning the popular mandate by a landslide in the Greferendum, is not only a brilliant tactical move (unsurprising given the game theory background), but shows just how serious Greece's new government is about doing right by its people. They understand the momentum of the crowd, the dynamics of the herculean task in front of them, and the discipline required to complete it - Varoufakis is like the star football player who has scored a potentially game-changing goal (in calling the referendum) but must now be sent off the pitch in order to preserve the lead as he is disliked by the petty referees. He walks off the pitch smiling and upbeat, having served his purpose - no arguing with coach Tsipras - and writing on his blog: "I shall wear the creditors' loathing with pride."



And it is interesting to consider where this loathing comes from. I cannot help thinking that there must be a component of jealousy involved - seething, burning jealousy. Syriza enjoy popular support of a kind that most European politicians can only dream of - and I don't mean simply that they won an election. They walk into packed crowds on busy public squares to heartfelt hugs and kisses from throngs of supporters. They are for the people, of the people. And despite their casual attire, which only makes them that much cooler and more approachable, they are in fact the rigorous, methodical, rational moderates - there is nothing especially radical about what they are pushing for - while the eurozone finance ministers and the Troika are the incompetent, petty, bumbling ideological fanatics in suits and ties, advocating policies that virtually every credible economist in the world has declared unsustainable and lacking economic sense - and admitting at the 11th hour before the referendum that they were, after all, mistaken. We should not be misled by Syriza's name, either - Coalition of the Radical Left - which only has meaning in a specific historical and political context where the 'centre' has become a morbid and inhuman techno-capitalist normativity. And anyway - moderation, after all, in the sense in which the ancient Greeks meant and practiced it, is less about substance and more about form - it is not about your choice of pharmakon so much as how you take it, in what dosage, and how it relates to the symptoms you are treating.

But Syriza is about chemistry in more ways than one - it is "a coalition whose colours are red for socialism, green for ecology and purple for feminism." It is a united left front that has managed to rally over 61% of Greek voters in the referendum behind it, in a leap of faith into an uncertain future, in a country in crisis, on the brink of collapse, experiencing food and medicine shortages, caught between a rock and a hard place - no mean feat, given the internal fractiousness of leftist movements in general, and the external pressures acting against this one in particular. To accomplish this kind of synthesis, and go on to win an election, and a referendum (by a landslide) in a maverick negotiating move, and quite possibly overcome overwhelming odds against an army of international creditors led by hard-line pro-austerity conservative governments to win a better deal for Greece, and without actually compromising one's political ideals - this requires a very delicate yet bold balancing act.



In the wake of the Greferendum, the latest word from London-based bookmakers William Hill (as reported on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme this morning) is that they have 'closed their market' on whether Greece will leave the Eurozone before 2016 - a spokesman for the company said that "in such a volatile situation, in which events can move very quickly, it is very difficult to be confident that our odds are accurate."

In other words, all bets are off - quite literally. The Greek referendum has introduced a genuine state of exception, something genuinely new into politics, where 'what comes next' is so unpredictable that even the world's biggest bookmakers, seasoned professionals who make a living from betting and setting odds on everything under the sun - from sports matches and horse races to election outcomes and royal weddings - are holding their breath. This is a ball balanced on a knife edge, a chemical reaction at the quantum level that calls to mind the Heisenberg uncertainty principle - it could go either way.

"Syriza does not have a mandate to take Greece out of the eurozone, nor does it have a mandate to apply unworkable austerity," says Euclid Tsakalotos, Syriza's new finance minister. Everything hangs in the balance, and something's gotta give. But despite his posh British accent and Oxford training, creditors and Eurozone finance ministers will be disappointed if they expect this man to be a pushover - unlike Varoufakis, he is from the more radical Marxist branch of Syriza and a bit of a Euroskeptic. (Also, he was drawn to the euro-communist left during his student days at Oxford largely on account of Britain's bloody postwar betrayal of the Greek left, their wartime allies.)

It is worth remembering here that the Greeks have a long tradition of questioning the status quo and arguing the exception, going back to the ancients. As classics scholar Edith Hall, writing in the Guardian, reminds us (in a piece unrelated to the current political situation):

The Greeks, more even than the Romans, show us how to question received opinion and authority. The earliest myths reveal mankind actively disputing the terms on which the Olympian gods want to rule them, and the philanthropic god Prometheus rebelling against Zeus in order to steal fire – a divine prerogative – and give it to mortal men. Sophocles’ Antigone refuses to accept her tyrannical uncle’s arbitrary edict, draws crucial distinctions between moral decency and contingent legislation, and buries her brother anyway. Aristophanes, in his democratic comedies, subjected politicians who wielded power to satire of eye-watering savagery. Socrates dedicated his life to proving the difference between the truth and received opinion, the unexamined life being, in his view, not worth living. No wonder Hobbes thought that reading Greek and Roman authors should be banned by any self-respecting tyrant, in Leviathan arguing that they foment revolution under the slogan of liberty, instilling in people a habit "of favouring uproars, lawlessly controlling the actions of their sovereigns, and then controlling those controllers".

Whatever happens next, unpredictable as it is, even if Greece buckles under and bows to the demands of creditors - for Greek history is rife with both victories and heroic defeats against vastly superior opponents (one never can tell), fought by vastly outnumbered Greeks - this is surely an exceptional moment, which may well signal decisively the beginning of the end of capitalism, in the long run. Perhaps as some on the French progressive left have been saying, nous sommes tous des Grecs européens.

Everything in moderation, as the ancients had it - even a dose of Varoufakis, antagonizing and divisive as he may be for some, has its place and time, like every good good-cop-bad-cop routine. And in all things we must - in the words of Walter White of Breaking Bad fame (a.k.a. Heisenberg) - 'respect the chemistry.'

Some More Shock Therapy: I have met a German terrorist

Well that's at least how Wikipedia describes Astrid Proll, who used to be in the infamous Baader-Meinhof gang in the 1960s and who gave a talk at the 1968 and All That! conference at Conway Hall this weekend. She seemed quite nice. I would never have thought her capable of robbing banks, forging documents, and being an expert car thief!



The conference was good, although a bit chaotic - the sessions were held back to back with no intervals (not even five minutes), with several going at a time in different rooms, and if you weren't there early or at least on time for each one it's likely you found yourself sitting on the floor or standing, at least in the more popular sessions, which discouraged any mid-hour drifting between talks. The following disclaimer was included in the programme:

'The Organizers warn that due to the volatility of finance capital and the spontaneous manifestations of class struggle there may be last second changes to the programme...If it turns into a complete fiasco the Organizers will be found drowning their sorrows in the Guy Debord Bar in the Foyer. Please join us."

At the end of the day they brought an enormous sack of unused bagels (which prior to that were on sale in the bar) out into the foyer for general rationing, free of charge. They even provided plastic bags for people to take them home in. I packed about 10 and strapped them on the back of my bicycle.


From the final rally, left to right: Astrid Proll, Adrian Mitchell, moderator (?), Sheila Rowbotham, Alain Krivine, and Eamon McCann.

Among other highlights were Alain Krivine (French Trotskyist politician), Sheila Rowbotham (British socialist feminist theorist), Chris Harman (editor of International Socialism) and Jean-Pierre Dutueil. There was a book fair going on in the main hall, where in addition to some funky revolutionary postcards and a copy of the Socialist Review I purchased a copy of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine and A Rebel's Guide to Gramsci. I felt very tempted to purchase a Trotsky t-shirt but then thought better. Somehow the idea didn't seem fitting. (heh heh)




At the book fair there was also a stall selling the War on Terror board game, which looks like a pumped-up version of risk, complete with an 'axis of evil' - a dial on the board which you can spin and which serves some purpose in advancing the game.



Naomi Klein is also giving a talk as part of the '68 season around London - Monday May 19, 7 pm, Friends' House on Euston Road (good old Quakers). Tickets are £7, £5 concessions (it's for a good cause!) and can be booked on the waronwant website. Full season programme can be viewed here: www.1968.org.uk.

A word from my mother on '68 in (ex-)Yugoslavia, excerpted and translated (by me) from an e-mail:

"In 1968 we had student demonstrations too. They were a sort of echo of the French demonstrations, but they were different in content. The young were rebelling against the betrayal of socialism, against injustice, poverty...Dad took part in those demonstrations.
We also protested to give support to the Czechs. Tito was the first foreign statesman to condemn the Russians for invading Czechoslovakia. The Czechs who found themselves in Yugoslavia were offered asylum and given all possible assistance.
We also protested against the war in Vietnam. In my high school we organized evenings of Vietnamese poetry and all sorts of other activities. We wore shirts with anti-war slogans..."

I might get more of these from other ex-Yugoslavs alive at the time, which I will duly translate and post here, so stay tuned.



I said ex-Yugoslavia because I wish to avoid any confusion with Milosevic's post-1990 Yugoslavia, a fraud and an abomination of Serbian nationalism which, despite the claims of many Western leftists (equally guilty of 'orientalism' in this case as their right-wing counterparts), had nothing to do with socialism or leftism but was a thoroughly right-wing nationalist diktatura. (And my mother is a Serb born in Belgrade, by the way. She grew up in Sarajevo.)

She also added, "Tomorrow is the election in Serbia. At the time of the last one someone said 'may the worse one win!' Well I think that will happen this time around."

On that note I must ask, what the fuck is happening to Europe at the moment? I'm talking about the Italian and British (local) elections. I happen to have recently visited two places that serve the exception to the current right-wing political trend: Madrid (Spain being one of only 2 remaining leftist governments in the EU, not counting Britain's Labour which is a hoax) and Bremen, which is the only remaining German city-state with a left-wing government. (Until a few years ago most of them were left-wing, I am told)

This is not a case of political/socialist tourism: in one case it was a friend's birthday/holiday, in the other case a wedding. I suppose you could say that it's not entirely coincidence, either. Anyhow, in terms of national governments we are basically left with two (again not counting Labour): Spain and Portugal. The Iberian peninsula, once the bulwark of Western Christianity and the Inquisition, is now the only remaining lefty stronghold. I am tempted to speculate cynically whether the simple reason is relational economics: both countries are among the least developed in Western Europe (Eastern Europe is upwardly-mobile and perhaps also still in the throes of post-Communism and therefore wary of lefty governments), and Bremen is apparently the poorest German stadt. When people are poor and can't afford the rent or pay for healthcare, they vote socialist. When they get rich, they vote in the government that will keep the immigrants out and keep them rich. Am I being too simplistic?



Economics aside, there are several interconnected ways one could explain the recent rise of the Right. It may be a little too comforting to think that the British election, and in particular the election of Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, is a reaction against Labour - though there is certainly some of that involved. The fact is that turnout has gone up - by a whopping 10%. Several hundred thousand more Londoners voted this time around, compared to the 2004 election. And the turnout is up on all sides - by sheer numbers, even Ken Livingstone got some 200,000 votes more than in 2004. It's just that the conservative vote has increased more - by about half a million votes. (See results on London Elects)

One way to look at this - and I think the last two Italian elections support this view - is that we are witnessing the decline of government as such. Basically, the social and political structure of the world we live in is disintegrating. Nobody can govern, left or right, and every election the people just elect whoever is in the opposition, whoever hasn't fucked up this time. They come to power, fuck up, and the likelihood of them staying in power for another term or so only depends on how badly they fucked up. But to be even more dismal, one has to take into account the increasing convergence of mainstream political parties at the centre. I don't think this is an indication of the will of voters, but rather the result of a simple realization on the part of mainstream politicians: right-wing voters will vote right-wing anyway or abstain, and left-wing voters will vote left or abstain. If the election is critical (as the London Mayoral one was), they will vote for the mainstream candidate (Ken or Boris) rather than their true (left or right) preference, which they can list as second preference anyway. Which pretty much leaves the voters in the middle to be fought over - those who switch sides, or who have no strong left or right commitment. Swing voters, in other words.



What makes this dismal is that this middle may well be a relative minority of voters - but it is enough to capture a sufficient number of them to win. In other words, for those of us who do have a definite left/right committment, the mainstream candidates aren't particularly after our votes, deep down - because they know that when it comes to the crunch we will not vote for the mainstream opposition. Sure, they will do lip service to whatever agenda they are meant to support, but ultimately what they are after are those voters who switch sides. In the simplest terms, Ken is after swingers who are thinking of voting Tory or who may have voted Tory last time around, and Boris is after voters who are thinking of voting Ken or voted Ken last time around. Each is after the other's game, the left is playing right, the right is playing left. They eventually meet in the middle.



In dialectical terms this can be characterized as the articulation of a hegemonic or universalized particular; rather than being what Laclau calls a 'chain of equivalences' or some shared content or thing in common between various political orientations (the universal as a constitutive lack), the case is one of a particular (the interests of a minority of 'swing' voters who are mostly, presumably, middle class, white, British, and probably wealthy or reasonably well off) which becomes universalized and comes to dominate the entire field of particulars; not through the common denominator of shared values but through a dichotomic electoral mechanism which invariably functions in such a way that those who tip the balance are those whose will is actualized by the power elite, overshadowing or even extinguishing all other particulars - not in the electoral process itself (because in the end it makes little difference who is elected) but in the actual affairs of state, in what governments do between elections. Regardless of who is elected, the political programme enacted is almost exclusively that of the balance-tippers, the side-switchers, the swing voters.

Europe, Empire of Signs 2 (Some Further Notes on Language + the Blindness of Self-Representation) or, Absolutely Sweet Inferno

This is a sequel to the previous post, conceived and (for the most part) written before the comments to it, and is therefore not a reply to the comments but rather an expansion and development on the original theme, and should be read in conjunction, although the ideas, disjunctions, and fusions in both are still very raw, and perhaps in need of further elaboration and development. It is still, to put it that way, ‘under construction’. (as all writing and thinking always is, in a sense; but one must draw the line somewhere, sometimes)


>>S’i’ credesse che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria sanza piừ scosse;
ma però che già mai di questo fondo
non tornò vivo alcun, s’i’ odo il vero,
sanza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
-Dante, Inferno, Canto XXVII

Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
- Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-27)

I. Decapitating the Gorgon: Auschwitz, Blindness, and the Death of God

Having written the last relatively brief segment on this theme I was struck by the notion that the very thing Agamben is approaching in Remnants of Auschwitz - hovering, circling, circumventing, but never quite attaining it seems to me - is the problem of language already posed by Barthes in Empire of Signs. The suffering of those who 'touched bottom', the Muselmanner, the 'true witnesses' who paradoxically are unable to witness because they ‘have no voice’, Agamben tells us, cannot be borne witness to by the survivors, who are not 'true witnesses' by virtue of having survived the horror of the camps. There can be no witness ‘from the inside of death’. Towards the end of the first chapter ('The Witness') he writes [my italics]: '...it means that language, in order to bear witness, must give way to a non-language in order to show the impossibility of bearing witness. The language of testimony is a language that no longer signifies and that, in not signifying, advances into what is without language, to the point of taking on a different insignificance, that of he who by definition cannot bear witness.'

Barthes concerns himself with this very same lacuna, but on the broader register of language as such. The moment of Basho's awakening to the truth of Zen, he tells us, is not the moment of "an 'illumination', of a symbolic hyperesthesia, but rather an end of language: there is a moment when language ceases...and in this echoless breach...what is posited must develop neither in discourse nor in the end of discourse: what is posited is matte, and all that one can do with it is to scrutinize it...not to solve it, as if it had a meaning, nor even to perceive its absurdity (which is still a meaning) but to ruminate it "until the tooth falls out."".(p 74) For Agamben, the only language that can approximate the point of witnessing is language that descends into 'inarticulate babble', which 'fills one with consternation like the gasps of a dying man' - Celan's poetry, perhaps, or the senseless muttering of a single incomprehensible word by a paralyzed, speechless child whom the other prisoners have named 'Hurbinek'. But after positing this at the end of the first chapter, he quickly slides back into negativity and binary opposition and resumes the search for clues, for meaning, for the descriptive substance behind the figure of the Musselman, searching through language (writing) for the ‘non-language’ behind the ‘last gasps of the dying man’; and even his insistence on the 'impossibility' of such testimony or the need to descend into the absurd (Celan’s ‘inarticulate babble’) already appears merely as a limitation arising from Christian-Platonic thought. The haiku, by contrast, Barthes tells us, 'never describes' but rather achieves a 'suspension' or 'exemption from meaning', (81-83), and is:

'...[A]rticulated around a metaphysics without subject and without god, corresponds to the Buddhist Mu, to the Zen satori, which is not at all the illuminative descent of God, but "awakening to the fact," apprehension of the thing as event and not as substance, attaining to that anterior shore of language...to constitute a space of pure fragments, a dust of events which nothing, by a kind of escheat of signification, can or should coagulate, construct, direct, terminate. This is because the haiku's time is without subject...this self, by infinite refraction, is never anything but the site of reading...' (p 78)

Agamben performs, at the outset, all the right gestures – but nonetheless by insisting on the existence of a ‘lacuna’, a specific ‘impossibility’, something missing in or from language at a particular point in relation to being (thus affirming the validity of that relation and our attendant expectation from language), something in language, a precise point where language fails to correspond - rather than simply the positive limit of language, the point where we arrive at the realization that it is not merely the 'language of testimony' but all language that must 'no longer signify' in order to communicate the pure 'dust of events'. What Agamben reveals as a limitation or failure of language to bear witness to horror may be simply a limitation in our thought and the error in the expectation we place on language to directly ‘bear witness’, to signify, to subordinate the signified reality to the signifier; our assumption that there is a beyond, that there is something else, something that is left out of account but in theory could be spoken in language, a dimension of the horror not already captured.

The ‘lacuna’ is not merely one that appears in relation to testimony from ‘the inside of death’ – the ‘extreme situation’ of Auschwitz brings us face to face with a far more widely distributed, more profound problem of language, shaking to the core some deeply held and cherished preconceptions: it confronts us, on one hand, with the very impossibility or inoperability, through a constant displacement, of subjective ‘self-representation’ as such (by the speaking subject, by ‘Europe’, by the Musselman, who is only an extreme instance) and the ‘error’ of subordinating the signified to the signifier and thus falling back on negativity, on binary oppositions (language/non-language); and on the other, the ‘impossibility of bearing witness from the inside of death’ as merely an instance of the impossibility of bearing witness as a ‘true witness’ (what Agamben posits as superstes) to anything besides our own subjectivity. It is entirely conceivable that the horror of those who have 'reached bottom' already belongs to the ‘survivors’ in a sense, and that in fact the point where the transition occurs - where a 'not-true witness' or survivor becomes a Musselmann or 'true witness' - is in fact the point where the sufferer is divested of his own tragedy, where it is not only the ability to give voice to one's horror that ceases, but one's ability to apprehend it.

Agamben is on the very brink of recognizing the ‘lacuna’ as a positive (non)-Being (to use Deleuze’s term), rather than a negative lack: “The Musselman has neither seen nor known anything, if not the impossibility of knowing and seeing. This is why to bear witness to the Musselman, to attempt to contemplate the impossibility of seeing, is not an easy task.” (p 52) If we attempt to view this silence not as a ‘lacuna’ or ‘impossibility’ but rather a positive (non), an absolute limit, the task may be made easier. The greatest suffering, or the height of tragedy (its ultimate birth, even), the true ‘bottom’ may well be the moment in consciousness immediately before the transition from 'survivor' to Musselmann, before Power over the individual is totalized - and therefore not in the negative and subjective experience of the Musselmann but rather the positive experience of the 'survivor' recognizing himself as object in the figure of the Musselmann - his own immediate future, the “fatal threshold that all prisoners are constantly about to cross”, the Musselman as the “great fear of the prisoners.” (Agamben, p 51) This insight may well hold the key – what the Musselman represents may well be the point when horror, reaching its apex, is shut out, excluded from consciousness and transferred to the Other, to the ‘survivor’ who becomes the only witness not merely by virtue of the fact that the Musselman is prevented from witnessing, but by virtue of the fact that there is nothing more profound to witness, no ‘inside’ and no ‘outside’. We are in fact told:

“The Muselmann is universally avoided because everyone in the camp recognizes himself in his disfigured face.” (p 52)

What seems striking is that Agamben never draws out the full implications of one of the central themes in the figure of the Musselman: the fact that a Musselman is, in the lingo of the other prisoners, ‘one who has seen the Gorgon’. The Gorgon is the mythical Medusa whose mien, if looked upon, turns the looker into stone. The Greek hero Perseus, as the story goes, succeeded in slaying this creature by utilizing his polished bronze shield as a protective mirror, in which he could see her reflection without being affected by the deadly charm. If ‘everyone in the camp recognizes himself’ in the ‘disfigured face’ of the Musselman, and the Musselman ‘has seen the gorgon’ – if the Musselman is, then, a kind of mirror of humanity – have the survivors not themselves seen the ‘Gorgon’ too, reflected in this mirror? Derrida, in Memoirs of the Blind, a book-length essay published on the occasion of his curating a collection of self-portraits from the Louvre, uses the metaphor of Medusa to explain the very nature of the self-portrait and the paradox of ‘self-representation’, our ‘blindness’ vis-à-vis ourselves, the impossibility of seeing ourselves with our own eyes except as reflected in a mirror; and by extension the ‘impossibility’ of all ‘representation’, the impossibility of speaking of or from an ‘inside’ except from the perspective of an ‘outside’, and vice versa. The mask worn by Perseus when slaying the Gorgon is a deeper metaphor for this impossibility of ‘seeing’ or ‘representing’ – what he calls the ‘Medusa’ effect, or ‘coming face to face with a petrified objectivity’:

‘Perseus sees without being seen. He looks to the side when he decapitates the monster and when he exhibits her head to his enemies in order to make them flee with the threat of being petrified.’ (p 73)

Is this not all that we can, in the end, do in regarding Auschwitz and the figure of the Musselman? To search for meaning is futile – ‘true’ testimony, representation is not merely impossible, its very insistence in our minds is the trace of a ‘false movement of dialectics’ as Deleuze puts it; all there is to be done in the end, and what Agamben perhaps manages to do, is look to the side, gaze at the Musselman – the mirror, or shield – as we ‘decapitate the Gorgon’ and exhibit its head to our enemies, making them flee.



II. Inside/Outside – Silence, Darkness and the ‘Theatre of Production’ as Bunraku...

What Agamben in the end fails to come to terms with is the death of God as a metaphysical event, or the true implications of what Barthes calls a ‘metaphysics without subject and without god’ - and his search for meaning in Auschwitz, in the figure of the Musselman, may be precisely what obstructs the possibility of comprehending the event, or the 'dust of events'. The point is 'not to solve it...nor to perceive its absurdity (which is still a meaning)' Barthes tells us, and Agamben, at his best, appears to be stuck on the latter option - the 'inarticulate babble'. Or even further, when he tells us that language must 'give way...to a non-language...the voice of something or someone that...cannot bear witness' he remains under the spell of negativity, of a Christian-Platonic belief that there is an 'inside of death' to be borne witness to. This could be taken as indication that the Christian God is embedded in the very way we think and speak about things, woven in the very fabric of our thought-language, even when we speak of the ‘death’ of God. The way forward, then, is clear: to produce a re-birth of language, its re-subordination to act and event, a reversion and de-destabilization of the chain of sign-signifier-signified…

Agamben seems to hover over two parallel utterances which are mentioned at the outset and returned to at the end of the book - the 'inarticulate babble' of Celan's poetry, and the solitary and repeated utterance of the child Hurbinek (mas-ti-klo) – which he suggests may be the closest we can get to ‘true’ testimony from Auschwitz. They recall two similar themes. On one hand, the impossibility of testimony from the gates of hell (as Agamben himself puts it), except, perhaps, by way of the inarticulate babble emanating from the florid imagination of a poet - "The Shoah is an event without witnesses in the double sense that it is impossible to bear witness to it from the inside of death, and there is no voice for the disappearance of voice - and from the outside - since the 'outsider' is by definition excluded from the event..." Is this not the very theme, or one of the many themes, woven through Dante's Inferno? The 'shade' speaking in the quotation above agrees to speak to Dante for precisely this reason - the (presumed) impossibility of bearing witness from the 'inside of death', the impossibility that Dante will return among the living, or depart from the inferno. While Agamben's vision at first appears thoroughly secular, and while he seems to have come to terms with a Godless world in which there is no Hell and no poet to descend into Hell and bear witness to it from the inside, to death 'from the inside of death' - he is only half-way there, for in believing that there is an 'inside of death' to be borne witness to he is still trapped in Occidental-Christian thought, in conventional transcendental notions of inside/outside, of the afterlife, of this world and the next. Turning again to Barthes, we are told that in Western theatre, the aim is to "manifest what is supposed to be secret...while concealing the very artifice of such manifestation." On the other hand, in Japanese Bunraku:

'the agents of the spectacle...are at once visible and impassive...what is carefully, preciously given to be read is that there is nothing there to read...what is expelled from the stage is hysteria, i.e. theater itself; and what is put in its place is the action necessary to the production of the spectacle: work is substituted for inwardness...In Bunraku, the puppet has no strings...no more metaphor, no more Fate...the inside no longer commands the outside.' (p 61-62)

What is suggested here does not import 'aestheticizing testimony' as Agamben claims in criticizing Felman and Laub - for they, like Agamben, are also trapped in notions of inside/outside, only seeking to create a connection between them through the 'deus ex machina of song'. (p 36) The point here, rather, is to take the Christian-Occidental bull by the horns and bring it down to the ground all the way, rid ourselves of this mythical, transcendental 'inside of death'. Does not Dante, by the very act of writing his 'experience' of passing through hell and returning, destabilize the very Christian notion of the Afterworld? Is not the very idea - of paying a visit to the underworld without being detained there - if not secular, at least thoroughly pagan, and by that route, by reducing the three afterworldly realms to the imagination, to literature, to the possibilities of imagination and visitation, becoming secular - levelling, reducing the afterworld to the same plane of reality as this world, casting it in the same mold, turning it into something 'imaginable' and 'sayable' and 'accessible' to the living? It is after all Virgil, the great pagan poet of antiquity, who guides Dante through the realms.

Here we may recall Werner Herzog's The Land of Silence and Darkness - a documentary about the deaf and blind filmed in the 1970s in Germany, which follows the activities of one woman, Fini, who is an activist for the deaf/blind, and is blind herself. Through her, we are told the stories of the various people she visits, in institutions, at social gatherings, in their homes. In one scene, we are made to observe uninterrupted for several minutes (in typical Herzog fashion) the bodily movements (accompanied by some ‘inarticulate babble’) of Vladimir, a 22-year-old Russian who was born deaf, blind, and practically speechless. At first sight one may be struck by the thought - it is impossible to know how this feels. The first temptation, that is, is to take up Susan Sontag’s suggestion (taken out of context here but still relevant) that we have “never experienced anything like what they went though…We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like…how dreadful, how terrifying…and how normal it becomes.”( p 126)

But then another thought comes to mind – that it doesn’t matter, for neither can this congenitally blind and deaf human being perceive how we feel, how we live. There is no reference point between us. One can never relate one’s own subjectivity, and this is only an extreme case: the 'silence and darkness' of Vladimir's world is not only inaccessible and incomprehensible to us, but it simply cannot be - for precisely the reason that it is inaccessible - morally, ethically, politically, or in any other way relevant to us as a thing in itself on or from an 'inside', as something to be borne witness to 'from the inside', or from an ‘impossible inside’, one that has no reference point to the outside - the only way in which it ever can be relevant is the way in which we can comprehend it from what we are told of it, what we can gather by 'ruminating...until the tooth falls out', establishing our own maximal relation to it, at the limit of our conscious ability to perceive; by recognizing ourselves as objects in the deaf, blind, speechless human beings of 'silence and darkness', or the Musselmanner of Auschwitz. That is the limit. There is no 'inside' beyond what can be established. We may blindfold ourselves, plug up our ears, sew our mouths shut for a time, but precisely due to the temporality and optionality of such an experience, it brings us no closer to the reality of this mythical 'inside'.

The outcome of elaborating this insight further should be to expurgate all the faces of negativity – the ‘hidden’ or ‘impossible’, etc – from the Deleuzian ‘theatre of production’: constructing this theatre on the model of the Japanese Bunraku – where the inside no longer commands the outside.



III. From Horror to Discourse: The Hegel in Nietzsche Whose Face is Well Hidden

The second theme arising here, propping itself up in the imagination out of the closing reflections of Agamben’s first chapter (‘The Witness’), the second motif of ‘non-language’, which Agamben suspects that Primo Levi, on whose writing he draws heavily, “discerned in the ‘background noise’ of Celan’s poetry” – comes from the speechless, nameless ‘child of Auschwitz’ whom the other prisoners named Hurbinek, and who ‘at a certain point…begins to repeat a word over and over again, a word that no one in the camp can understand and that Levi doubtfully transcribes as mass-klo or matisklo…They all listen and try to decipher that sound, that emerging vocabulary…despite the presence of all the languages of Europe in the camp, Hurbinek’s word remains obstinately secret.” (p 38)

Hurbinek’s word – is it not a bit like Kurtz’s word, the Kurtz of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness? Just as ‘all the languages of Europe’ could not decipher Hurbinek’s word, ‘All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’, the ‘universal genius’, the son of Europe who, before his ‘unlawful soul’ was ‘beguiled beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations’, was destined for great things. Kurtz’s decipherable but hardly intelligible word – ‘The horror! The horror!’ – designates the inverse of the apoplexy of Hurbinek. The two seem to meet in what Agamben calls the ‘gray zone in which victims become executioners and executioners become victims’, a ‘brotherhood in abjection’ (p 17) – the site (in our collective consciousness, perhaps) designated by Auschwitz. But it is also by this very recognition, by the inclusion of Kurtz in it, the site of European colonialism – the two are not only historically contingent, as some (like Sven Lindqvist) have argued, they also share in our collective memory what Deleuze might call a ‘dark precursor.’



The theme woven throughout Heart of Darkness is one of civilizational displacement and inversion of paradigm, of false binaries – Marlow, the narrator within the story, seeing Kurtz on his deathbed finds him “avid of lying fame, of sham distinction, of all the appearances of success and power” – and returning from Africa to Brussels, the ‘sepulchral city’ finds himself “resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence… commonplace individuals… outrageous flauntings of folly…I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance.” (113-114) And at the very end as Marlow completes the spinning of his yarn and the group sailing on the Thames are reduced to silence, the final revelation which silently pervades the story up to that point, teeming below the surface, is finally crystallized and brought out in the last paragraph of the novel:

'Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. 'We have lost the first of the ebb,' said the Director, suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky - seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.'

Thus all the rivers of humanity – the Thames no less than the Congo - are reduced to one impenetrable waterway leading to an immense darkness, the darkness of the human heart. But another cultural displacement is performed here – we are told of Marlow sitting 'in the pose of a meditating Buddha'. This is important - for what Conrad leaves us with here may be precisely what Barthes repeatedly suggests of the universe of his ‘Japan’ - that there is nothing beyond, no 'inside', no 'meaning', nothing 'signified'. The last words spoken by Kurtz, that phrase we are left with – ‘The horror!’ in spite of the various attempts by critics to get behind it, is the sum total of what there is to be said 'from the inside' - of death, or simply the darkness of the human heart - there is nothing to be interpreted, taken apart, or analyzed. That is the limit. Here at the end, in a closing feat of cultural and civilizational displacement we see Marlow, the 'meditating Buddha', awakened to what Barthes calls the ‘truth of Zen.’ And by that same movement, the truth of European colonialism and of what follows it - Nazism, Auschwitz - is fully constituted on its outside, which is all there is - we may not yet have pondered it sufficiently, ruminated long enough on the cosmic trail left in its wake by the sacral 'dust of events', we may not have submitted this long enough to meditation - but all the elements are in place, nothing more is needed in order for us to 'awaken to the fact.'

It is on this ground that Nietzsche fails us, and is in fact counter-productive. Conrad, from the vantage point of an unwilling participant in European colonialism, as one who has seen it 'in the flesh' so to speak - a witness, and a 'true' one at that (one could call him a sonderkommando of the vast ghetto that the African continent was eventually turned into) - indeed strikes at the very core, at the very idea of a Europe, a European subject - in a sweeping, leveling gesture that (especially extraordinary for its time) reduces and relegates any and every notion of civilized 'European man' to the same dark matter where Europeans had by then long relegated all non-Europeans. Nietzsche's operation, on the other hand, is one of substitution - he merely substitutes the classical self-reflecting notion of Europe with a vision more to his taste, exchanging one form of 'racialization' for another. And it seems to me insufficient merely to say 'despite the unsavoury reasons for this civilizational dislocation...' as Savonarola does, given that the exchange, the substitution he performs is not merely a 'reason' but precisely what constitutes the dislocation, its goal, what is embedded in it – Nietzsche, in an exquisitely Hegelian-dialectical turn, falls pray to the Big Other. (Incidentally, for all it’s worth – both Conrad and Nietzsche were of Polish descent, both orphaned at an early age, and both wrote exquisite, cynical prose.)

There is a profound moment in Foucault, a recurring element of his thought which follows a line very similar to Lacan's 'Big Other', but on a more exhaustive register - and this is where Foucault, in spite of being influenced by Nietzsche, supersedes him - it is his ability to expose continuities where there are none apparent, or where conventional historical thinking has seen discontinuities, even conflicts. From the earliest of Foucault’s works (Civilization and Madness) to the latest (History of Sexuality, vol. 1), this central theme in Foucault can be summarized in the question: have we really made a break with the past? Does this or that historical development (psychoanalysis, modern medicine, liberal humanism, the sexual revolution) truly represent a break with what preceded it, what it has traditionally defined itself as being opposed to? For this very reason, Foucault has been accused (by Derrida, I believe, among others) of being Hegelian, but this accusation is misplaced - he may be the only true anti-Hegelian, or one of the few who have truly grasped and come to terms with Hegel and grasped the true enormity of the task before us. In other words, in seeing continuities and immanences where we have been taught to see breaks and ruptures, Foucault serves as a lookout, an agent of warning, a reminder that we should always be alert, suspicious of all-too-easy victories, false breaks, wolves in sheep’s clothing - be wary of false prophets, in one way of putting it. If Foucault is Hegelian, he is the Hegelian on our side, who may help us defeat Hegel-the-liberal-totalitarian. (Just as Woody Allen says "Yeah, I'm a bigot. But for the Left.") What we should always be wary of when claiming to have made a break with the past is that we may merely be developing its inherent or immanent potential, playing the same old dialectical game that, beneath all apparent changes and revolutions, only serves to preserve the status quo.

(It is entirely possible that, as Zizek put it in a lecture, Nietzsche's 'madness' was the result of his final realization - he 'finally got it' - having reached the very brink, and in the very moment when he believed himself totally free of Hegel, he turned around only to see the slimy slithering Hegelian monster right behind him, breathing down his neck, waiting to devour him whole.)



And this is where we return to the problem of the EU Constitutional Treaty and the preamble. It is not merely that by engaging in the ‘game’ of interpretation even to contest the particular ‘self-representation’ of Europe embodied in a particular vision or to contest the link between that vision and the lived reality, we affirm (mistakenly) the subjective possibility of such a ‘self-representation’. What we should at all times be asking ourselves in this context is what any particular expurgation from or addition to a text really means, what implications any particular silence truly carries: whether what is excised from the text is truly silenced or repressed (or if repressed, what that repression truly constitutes, i.e. whether it is merely sublimation and the rendering of a different kind of voice), whether the repressed element is truly severed from action or event, from the discourse of power, or whether its continued operation in the shadows only serves to transform, extenuate, and precisely extend the very discourse of power we believe we have just overcome, as Foucault argues:

“Silence itself – the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers – is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies. There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things…There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.” (p 27)

In other words, what we should be wary of is that, as Bob Dylan puts it, “the executioner’s face is always well hidden…” What is repressed (i.e., in the formation of a European subject, even one of Nietzsche’s design) always returns, but more importantly, while still ‘repressed’ is capable of functioning in and operating on reality. A hidden reference to Christianity, for instance, may be only more dangerous than an explicit one – we have less possibility of acting on it, shifting its meaning – and this is another reason not to think in terms of binaries. Or, in another way of putting it, the very fact that the preamble does not say anything about the ‘accumulation of capital in the hands of fewer and fewer of Europe’s citizens’ may make this unspoken project all the more dangerous – for it is nevertheless there. The text of any constitutional document (or any text, for that matter), rather than a ‘reflection’ or ‘self-representation’ to be set against a ‘reality’ and lambasted for its hypocrisy, should for our purposes (whatever it says) be thought of instead as a locating device, like Perseus’ shield – which does indeed serve to emit an imperfect reflection of the Gorgon (it is after all only polished bronze, and spherically shaped), but a ‘reflection’ (precisely for this reason) meant not to convey the image, but to the contrary, insulate us from it, from the stony gaze of the Medusa while at the same time locating the monster, this monster we may in our day call ‘Europe’, so that we may slay it.



IV. Remaining Human, All Too Human – the Yellow Rose and the ‘Gaze Veiled by Tears’

This brings us back by a side route to Agamben and Auschwitz. Both he and Foucault set themselves the task of ‘interrogating silence’, of investigating and interpreting what is not said or ‘hidden’: the difference being in that Foucault never wanders into the territory of negativity, into strictly or simply binary oppositions – language/non-language, hidden/not hidden, possible/impossible, absurd/meaningful, etc – and in fact explicitly makes it part of his project not only to avoid but to reject such oppositions and divisions. For Foucault, the ‘silence’ or what at first appearance ‘one does not say’ is not a ‘lacuna’ in discourse or in language (as it is for Agamben), but merely what is not explicit, what is said or expressed in a different way, and therefore must be listened to and thought in a different way. Similarly, for Barthes (cited above) “what is posited must develop neither in discourse nor in the end of discourse: what is posited is matte, and all that one can do with it is to scrutinize it...not to solve it…nor even to perceive its absurdity.”

What is posited is matte: “By a singular vocation, the blind man becomes a witness; he must attest to the truth or the divine light. He is an archivist of visibility,” Derrida tells us. After all the talk of blindness and darkness, 'inside' and 'outside', it may be a good idea to turn to a blind writer – a true seer – for the simplest, most succinct, and most profound expression of everything that Barthes, Derrida, and others spend volumes trying to illuminate. Borges, in a half-page vignette pondering the last dying hours of the poet Giambattista Marino, ends with this thought:

‘Then the revelation occurred. Marino saw the rose, as Adam had seen it in Paradise, and he realized that it lay within its own eternity, not within his words, and that we might speak about the rose, allude to it, but never truly express it, and that the tall, haughty volumes that made a golden dimness in the corner of his room were not (as his vanity had dreamed them) a mirror of the world, but just another thing added to the world’s contents.’

Just another thing added to the world’s contents – that is how, in the end, we should view the EU Constitutional Treaty: something to be used, discarded, rejected, accepted, repackaged, modified, preserved, utilized – but never something whose relation as sign to represented reality should be either affirmed or contested. Instead of pondering the relation of language to reality, the possibility/impossibility of representation, we should embrace all language as something added to the world, as another way of acting on and in the world rather than representing it, embrace our metaphysical ‘blindness’ and go forth, speak and act. Even Conrad gives us this hint, ironically putting it in the mouth of Marlow, the narrator within the text, the frame narrative:

‘No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence – that which makes its truth, its meaning – its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream – alone…’ (p 57)

And so the Lessons of Darkness continue, as Herzog puts it. (Out, out brief candle!) There is another Nietzsche here who may be rescued from the jaws of Hegel, the Nietzsche who truly felt, the truly visionary, truly ‘blind’ Nietzsche of Zarathustra who, rather than merely substituting bid us to ‘break the old law-tables’, to clear the slate as an act for itself. The Nietzsche who wept, and in that weeping felt his thoughts, not as reflections of things, but as the things themselves. Derrida:

‘…And Nietzsche wept a lot. We all know about the episode in Turin, for example, where his compassion for a horse led him to take its head into his hands, sobbing…if tears come to the eyes, if they well up in them, and if they can also veil sight, perhaps they reveal, in the very course of this experience, in this coursing of water, an essence of the eye…if the eyes of all the animals are destined for sight…scopic knowledge of the animal rationale, only man knows how to go beyond seeing and knowing [savoir], because only he knows how to weep…The revelatory or apocalyptic blindness, the blindness that reveals the very truth of the eyes, would be the gaze veiled by tears. It neither sees nor does not see: it is indifferent to its blurred vision. It implores…’ (p 127)

And Sontag, also writing of tears, and (incidentally) of Bunraku, makes this observation:

‘Performances of Chushingura, probably the best-known narrative in all of Japanese culture, can be counted on to make a Japanese audience sob when Lord Asano admires the beauty of the cherry blossoms on his way to where he must commit seppuku – sob each time, no matter how often they have followed the story (as a Kabuki or Bunraku play)…They weep, in part, because they have seen it many times. People want to weep. Pathos, in the form of a narrative, does not wear out.’ (Sontag, p 82-83)

This is perhaps the greatest ethical gesture then, going back to the meaning of Auschwitz. To turn suffering into narrative – not to forget. To say, as Borges does in another story, incidentally titled ‘The Witness’, that “the world will be a little poorer when this Saxon man is dead.” Agamben, after carefully introducing, proposing and methodically rejecting every conventional rationalization of the specific ‘ethical problem’ to humanity posed by Auschwitz (it is not about remaining ‘human’, or about human dignity, respect, ethics, or the degradation of death, etc.), deconstructing and flattening all hitherto known ‘ethical categories’ to their juridico-theological origins, at the end concludes that “What cannot be stated, what cannot be archived is the language in which the author succeeds in bearing witness to his incapacity to speak…Just as in the starry sky that we see at night, the stars shine surrounded by a total darkness that, according to cosmologists, is nothing other than the testimony of a time in which the stars did not yet shine, so the speech of the witness bears witness to a time in which human beings did not yet speak…” (p 161-162) The mistaken assumption here is that now is a time in which human beings ‘do’ speak and understand each other in a way in which the witness cannot speak and be understood, that there is a difference. To use another metaphor from science, parallel to Agamben’s, the problem of ‘testimony’ as he lays it out is analogous to the ‘measurement problem’ in quantum mechanics – the impossibility of ‘witnessing’ the state of a wavefunction ‘from the inside’. According to the Schrödinger equation, the wavefunction evolves a ‘linear superposition’ of different (possible) states, but any measurement made on the system finds it in a definite state – indicating that the measurement itself ‘skews’ the operation. The Copenhagen interpretation of this problem, however – the most widely accepted – concludes, rather, that this means simply that our universe is in fact probabilistic. It is not that it is impossible to get accurate or complete knowledge ‘from the inside’ but rather, the universe itself is not at all times entirely sure, has nothing definite to tell us about itself.

It is noteworthy that Agamben, whose book is titled Remnants of Auschwitz, reflecting towards the end on the ‘non-language’ that testifies to the impossibility of testimony (Celan’s ‘inarticulate babble’, mastiklo), speaks of ‘remnants’, both as a ‘theologico-messianic concept…the remnant of Israel’ and as ‘remnants of a dead language’ – a metaphor for the impossibility of testimony from Auschwitz; and that Derrida, whose book is titled Memoirs of the Blind: the self-portrait and other ruins, speaks of ‘ruins’, with reference to the impossibility not only of ‘self-representation’ but by extension, any ‘representation’ at all, for we see ourselves, like others, from an outside, reflected, and even our own language, our own words, constitute an ‘outside’: “If what is called a self-portrait depends on the fact that it is called ‘self-portrait’, an act of naming should allow or entitle me to call just about anything a self-portrait, not only any drawing…but anything that happens to me, anything by which I can be affected…[the self-portrait] is like a ruin that does not come after the work but remains produced, already from the origin…In the beginning…there was ruin.” (p 65) This is precisely what Zizek, in a recent lecture, noted of Europe and the 4th movement of Beethoven’s 9th, the ‘ode to joy’ which – he argues – from the very outset deconstructs itself into the ‘Turkish march’ at the end, before we even hear the latter – the 'ode' shows up an ‘empty signifier' in the concept of 'Europe'…But Derrida goes on, “The ruin is not in front of us; it is neither a spectacle not a love object. It is experience itself…this memory open like an eye…that lets you see without showing you anything at all, anything of the all.” (p 69) Yet this memory - is it not the memory of a 'pure past' in Deleuzian terms, the object=x - the past that exists only in memory, always 'displaced in relation to itself'? The virtual object that is 'where it is only on condition that it is not where it should be...found only as lost...[existing] only as recovered...' (Deleuze, p 126-127) Does this not apply, not only to Agamben's idea of testimony, but also to Hurbinek's and Kurtz's word - 'esoteric words' which "state their own sense but do so only by representing it and themselves as nonsense...esoteric words are properly linguistic cases of the object=x...two series of heterogeneous differences...call forth their own communication through various signs...until the inauguration of a dark precursor...which plays the role of a differenciator of their differences...relates them to one another." (Deleuze, p 150) The 'testimony' from Auschwitz, together with what Agamben makes out of it, together with the 'esoteric words' of Kurtz and Hurbinek, is only another series contemporaneous with the others, carrying an object=x and linked to the others by means of the 'dark precursor' - none deriving from the other or following on the other. What Agamben finally achieves, it could be said, is to address this lacuna on his own terms, adding another series.

This, it could be said, is what does indeed make us human, and what encapsulates the ‘ethical problem’ of Auschwitz, contrary to Agamben but (perhaps) unwittingly proved by his gesture – not any particular meaning or testimony that can be drawn from Hurbinek’s word or Kurtz’s horror, nothing reflected in the text, nothing to be witnessed or represented, nothing to be drawn from the inside. It consists simply in the gesture that Agamben (among others) performs in relation to Auschwitz by writing his book, the language he creates, orders, accumulates, and adds to the world as another object for contemplation, ‘decapitating the monster’, the Gorgon – like the hero Perseus, and showing its head to the enemy – this uniquely human ‘revelatory or apocalyptic blindness,’ this ‘gaze veiled by tears’.


***



Drawing by a child in Terezin Camp
(Pinkas Synagogue, Jewish Museum, Prague)


***


V. Instead of a Conclusion, Another Spin of the Wheel: Away From State Politics, Representation, and the Cinema of Truth; Toward ‘Ecstatic Truth’ and the Sweet Inferno of Revolutionary Politics

To construct on this fertile ground a ‘politics of truth’ one must first ask – what kind of ‘truth’? Given the ‘blindness’ of language and the impossibility of representation, we must isolate a site of ‘truth’ founded in language that does not vainly seek to represent or distribute reality; language-as-object, language that instead of trying to mirror the world is contiguous with it, is added to it as another object – to transform, ignite, create real movement, rather than the ‘false movement of dialectics’. This site, borrowing a notion from Werner Herzog, we may call ‘ecstatic truth’. Herzog, in his fervent opposition to ‘cinema verite’ – whose ‘truth’ he calls the truth of ‘facts’ or the ‘truth of accountants’, a futile search for a ‘hidden’ truth – notoriously rejects the strict binary categorization of his films as either ‘documentary’ or ‘fiction’. In his ‘Minnesota Declaration’ he states that “fact creates norms, and truth illumination…there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” A ‘truth of the eyes’ as Derrida puts it.

Is this not where all literature and religion derive their force of meaning? Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, despite being ‘fiction’, is more ‘true’ and is bound to outlast most ‘factual’ or accountants’ truth accounts of European colonialism (especially the pro- ones)…Does not the value of many religious texts derive from precisely their double or triple status (and the constant interplay of ‘levels of meaning’), among believers and non-believers alike, as historical document, literature or ‘fiction’, and ‘word of God’? Does not Nietzsche himself, most notably in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, straddle the gap between ‘fiction’ and ‘philosophy’, between ‘literature’ and ‘commentary’, between metaphorical, elusively poetic writing and direct commentary, between invention and representation? Demanding of language the impossible, demanding that it ‘represent’, sometimes only serves to debase our purpose. We should be seeking instead to construct a narrative of action, a narrative not tangled up in representation.

Rather than provoking subjects (as cinema verite filmmakers tend to do) to extract from them some ‘hidden’ truth or meaning, we should construct and seek the ‘truth’ of the surface, of what is there already, there for the taking if we hang onto it – what we get by watching Herzog’s deaf and blind subjects in Silence and Darkness, or in the footage of gushing, flaming oil wells during the Gulf War in Lessons of Darkness - the gushing, poetic, ecstatic truth to be gotten simply by staying with the subject, lingering, observing, meditating, keeping it in the frame and either posing it or simply waiting for that illuminating glimmer of cinematic magic that will sometimes flicker past, if we are patient – less passive but more ‘truth’, for we are not simply given it as an audience, it requires from each of us individually our active participation and effort, our own personal anguish of apprehension. This may be precisely be the answer to the politics of ‘sound bites’ and snap elections – not getting caught up in or playing the game, not letting our attention float from one sound bite to the next but keeping everything in the frame…

Thus what is required is indeed a ‘politics of truth’, but a very different kind of ‘politics’ involving a very different kind of ‘truth’: bypassing the politics of the state, in whole or in part, building from the ground up, out of the socius, and ridding ourselves of the notion that ‘truth’ can be found in representation, would certainly seem to require an even greater measure of ‘truth’ – as Bob Dylan (incidentally, paraphrasing a line in Don Siegel’s 1958 film noir, The Lineup) puts it, in Absolutely Sweet Marie: ‘to live outside the law, you must be honest.’ This may mean some kind of direct or absolute democracy as a final sign-post, a Hardt-Negrian ‘multitude ruling itself.’ To recall Dante again (not only as another proponent of courtly love, though this will be relevant below), with reference to the state of souls in limbo (the first circle of hell), those who ‘have not sinned’ but only had the ‘misfortune’ of being born before Christ and (not being baptized) are therefore not subjected to punishment, we are told -

In this alone we suffer:

Cut off from hope, we live on in desire.

This on a secular reading we may take as expressing on one hand the modern human condition – living on in desire, we are all effectively pagans, unbaptized, in Limbo: the ‘hope’ we are cut off from (something that is lost in translation) is the hope ‘of seeing God.’ Being ‘cut off from hope’ for our purposes then must necessarily correlate to, as Barthes puts it, ‘awakening to the fact’ in a pre-Christian universe ‘without subject and without god’. And in this condition, in this element of desire we may find the true form of all revolutionary politics – the point, to put it in proto-Marxist terms, is to change the social body, and the mind will follow. “Build it, and they will come.” For a revolution to be successful, it is necessary for the work never to be thought completed – and this is precisely why it is necessary to liberate the signified – the body – from the signifier: we must never settle once and for all, never set in stone any particular signifying relation - break the old law tables, as Nietzsche exhorts us in Zarathustra. Hence it is worth remembering that the true object of desire is by definition beyond our grasp (as C.S. Lewis put it, “we live in the shadowlands; The sun is always shining somewhere else...around a bend in the road...over the brow of a hill.”).

The same is true of revolution: the only truly successful revolutionary movement is one whose ultimate goal is continually postponed – hasta la victoria siempre, ergo ‘we live on in desire’ – and if we remember that desire is (by definition, again) the remainder we are left with when our demand for love is unsatisfied, here is one straight from the horse’s mouth, Che Guevara: “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” Thus the only truly successful revolution is one that is continually repeated, or one that always in turn spawns its successor, always leaving ‘something more to be desired’ as the expression goes, a 'remainder' – if we think of a continually spinning wheel, a social revolution is precisely what it is literally – one full turn of the wheel, nothing more. But the wheel must keep turning, revolving. Or, as one Buddhist proverb puts it: ‘when you get to the top of a mountain, keep climbing.’






Some References

Agamben, Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitz : the witness and the archive, New York, 1999.

Alighieri, Dante, The divine comedy. Volume 1, Inferno, New York; London, 2003.

Barthes, Roland, Empire of signs, New York, 1982.

Borges, Jorge Luis, Collected Fictions, New York, 1998.

Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, London, 1983.

Derrida, Jacques, Memoirs of the Blind, Chicago; London, 1993.

Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition, London, 2004.

Foucault, Michel, The history of sexuality. Vol. 1, The will to knowledge, London, 1998.

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Penguin. (transl. R.J. Hollingdale)

Sontag, Susan: Regarding the pain of others, New York, 2003.

Herzog’s Minnesota Declaration