The Ideological Mediation of (Feminine) Desire: Sex and the City of God

As I haven't had time to write much lately on account of moving house and other real world annoyances, here is a piece culled from some comments I contributed recently to a discussion on women, cinema, and mediation on Infinite Thought(henceforth known as IT). It started with this post concerning the absence of women talking in mainstream cinema - about anything other than men, babies, and marriage, that is. Does Sex and the City represent some kind of liberation or is it just the same old patriarchal crap, only repackaged for a modern liberal consumerist audience? One recurring theme in the discussion seems to be the search for 'the one' and the theological underpinnings of this notion...

1. 'The One' and for All

IT:...There is something strange about the weird absence of women talking from cinema. Aren't women supposed to always be talking? Of course, they're not meant to be talking about anything important, which is presumably why the camera only turns to them when men are mentioned.

Films that appear to be 'all about women', such as Sex and the City are paeans to a curious combination of ultra-mediation and a post-religious obsession with 'the one'. You go to the City in search of 'labels and love'; the one mediating the other – the nicest thing your boyfriend can do for you is have a giant wardrobe installed for all your 'labels'. Drinks with 'the girls' are dominated by discussions about whether he is 'the one' or not. What does this obsession with 'the one' mean? The bourgeoisie may have 'drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation', as Marx and Engels observed, but certain religious motifs are harder to shake than others. The 'one' as the transcendent culmination of an entire romantic destiny demonstrates a curious melange of the sentimental ('we were always meant to be together!') and the cynical (if there's a 'one' then the 'non-ones' don't count; the sex with them is of no importance, there is no need to behave even moderately pleasantly towards them).

There is no emancipation here, if all effort is ultimately retotalised onto the project of 'the one'; if all discussions with 'friends' are merely mediating stepping-stones in the eschatological fulfillment of romantic purpose. Contemporary cinema is profoundly conservative in this regard; and the fact that it both reflects and dictates modes of current behaviour is depressingly effective, and effectively depressing.

Deleuzer: The notion of 'the one' on a broader level in its basic religious coordinates (as you suggest) I think provides the link between the different levels on which ideology operates (economy, sex, familial relations) - this is what has always irritated me about the Matrix and its pretense to cult status in the geek/techno/alternative cultural milieu. Aside from Keanu Reeves being better suited to roles like Ted in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, I found the amount of fetishistic reification of his status as 'the one' (who decides these things?) debilitatingly mind-numblingly appalling. The messianic overtone by a kind of short circuit puts it in close proximity to the notion of 'the one' in Sex and the City. (It would be interesting to splice the two together in a montage of sorts, with perhaps some clips of Mel Gibson's crucifixion movie as a possible third...I can just imagine Sarah Jessica Parker in one of those slow-motion fight scenes a la Matrix, karate kicking for a handbag...)

Foucault was right, if we can read him to mean this: that the 'sexual revolution' never took place, or that it wasn't so much a revolution as a repackaging of the same old paradigm for a new era. Two or three thousand bloodyfucking years later, and the mainstream of our culture still revolves around some abstract mass-produced figure of the saviour or messiah, the only original contribution of our post-Fordist age being its reproducibility for personal consumption. (I cannot help but think of the assembly line bread-dough christs in The Holy Mountain, being devoured by a Christ lookalike...)



The absence of women talking (about anything other than men, babies, etc) in mainstream cinema is perhaps not so much an absence as a positive incarnation of what Foucault calls the 'incitement to discourse' - the camera being, for the moment, not an attempt (even a skewed one) at reproducing reality but rather creating it - a directly ideological tool that opens up the space and sets the coordinates within which reality is to take place.

I think the really pressing question is not so much 'does reality pass the test?' but rather 'how do we, or can we, collectively escape from the grip of the incitement to discourse embedded in the cultural output we are daily bombarded with?




2. The (Formula) One of Desire and the Purple Rose of Surplus Value

IT: Dave sent me some comments and a question with regard to the women/cinema debate:

I think it is wrong to assume that, whilst almost certainly an index of unfreedom, women "talking about men" is unambiguously flattering to men. Many men would likely tell you that they find women-talking-about-men-type conversations alienating, in much the same way, perhaps, as they feel alienated and frustrated by an hour or so of Sex and the City.



Perhaps this sense of alienation comes from the fact that "talking about men" points, in a paradoxical way, to the lack of "the one", its eternally elusive character, as if all this Sex and the City-type talk is 'motored' by an absence, by an impossibility of fulfilment. That's perhaps why, watching Sex and the City, it was difficult to imagine how it might be concluded without a catastrophic change in the construction of love relations, or else some 'betrayal' of the 'search', which at its heart is designed to be gratifyingly infinite. To talk about men in the context of "the one" is to talk about no man in particular, just a mirage concealing a no-man-land (sorry).



In short, my question would be: how much "talking about men" really is talking about men?'

It's true - perhaps the only thing worse than wondering about what women are talking about is seeing them actually do it, at least as far as SATC goes. If cinema tends to show women talking to each other only about men (or marriage, or babies) perhaps the most important aspect of this is brevity. An entire film given over to such things would be obscene according to the logic of mainstream cinema, which can barely tolerate a few minutes of such footage, even in its 'unambiguously flattering' mode. I think this is indicated by Dave's comment above that '[men] feel alienated and frustrated by an hour or so of Sex and the City'. A winsome few moments of love-lorn anguish shared between two friends is ok, lengthy discussions of fellatio are not.

Deleuzer: I think it would equally be wrong to assume - if that is being assumed - that because some men find an hour of SATC alienating, this points to some subversive or liberating aspect in SATC. Such an assumption is just one of the pitfalls of the negative in thought...("any enemy of ---...is a friend of mine", etc)

And it is certainly not my assumption that "women talking about men" is unambiguously flattering to men, of course - many conversations I have witnessed in reality, at least, are definitely not, but that's not the point, because the issue is simply the choice of subject matter; nor am I suggesting that talk about "the one" is about any particular man. The reason why the Matrix and the adjective 'messianic' (in the mystical/cabbalistic sense) came to mind is precisely because of the impersonal, fetishistic and continually displaced or postponed character of 'the one'. (I like the characterization 'no-man-land'; could this be what Dylan means when he writes/sings: "Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands/where the sad-eyed prophets say that no man comes..." ?)

Another film that comes to mind - which I think provides a very effective and sublimely comic and touching critique here - is Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo. It makes the very same point (made by Dave) about the search being 'gratifyingly infinite' and 'the one' being a mirage concealing a 'no-man land'. The male lead in the film is split precisely between the fictional, 'perfect man', who literally steps out of the screen, and the real-world actor who plays him. At the end (spoiler alert!), she dumps the fictional guy (who is 'really' in love with her) and goes off with the real guy (who has only seduced her so that they could get the fictional character back into the screen), who subsequently dumps her... When dumping the fictional guy she even says something along the lines of "I'm a real person...I have to live in the real world." The fictional mirage, in other words, is the Lacanian objet petit a. He cannot be the 'messiah' because the messiah is forever-to-come.



But there's a great deal more one could mine out of this, I think very telling cinematic critique, one question for instance being, where does this absence/mirage come from, and whom does it really serve? What I think Woody suggests is that the patriarchal figure of the real-world male asshole nevertheless carries a trace of the idealistic mirage (played by the same actor) - 'the one' - as a kind of lure to trap the woman within the confines of the 'real world'...(Her real-world relationship to the asshole who dumps her is, in spite of everything, mediated by the idealistic mirage of his fictional screen persona who is 'really' in love with her and whom she dumps.)



Or more to the point, in anti-oedipal terms, the notion of 'the one' perhaps serves to trap desire in general (male and female) within the Freudian/capitalist logic of 'desire as lack' by situating us within the matrix of a search whose fulfillment is by definition continually postponed. (And The Purple Rose of Cairo being set in Depression-era US certainly hints at this dimension...)



IT: It's surprisingly difficult to break with the logic of the one, even if everything has been secularised to bits. It keeps coming back.

Deleuzer: It must be that dialectical bent. Bloody Hegel...

IT: I wonder if we could do for the one of love what Badiou does to the one of mathematics. Hmm....

Deleuzer: Brilliant idea! So we simply say: there is no one, only sets...I agree in principle, but how does one go about it, or what does this mean in practical terms? Hmm.... I suppose that perhaps the reason why Being from the Greeks onwards was singular is precisely as a consequence of having an ideal, the one (Being) against which everything else is an imperfect copy or simulacrum, marred by a lack - again that logic of the objet petit a.

The psychoanalytic answer is, of course, to formulate that remainder of the unconscious/real; but if the object petit a is as Zizek has it, a surplus meaning or a 'hole at the centre of the symbolic order', then 'plugging the hole' is no way out of the predicament. Going back to the analogy with Marx and surplus value on which Lacan draws, by formulating desire one still remains within the symbolic, within language: no revolutionary seizing control of the means of production there, for the process that generates the surplus in the psychoanalytic case transcends the symbolic order.

To break out of the dialectical/capitalist/theological cycle of production of the one/objet petit a, there must be a (revolutionary) disturbance to the ordinary process of production, a fundamental change in power relations. One must work not through language, but through the (desiring) body itself to grasp that there is no 'one'; or that, as Deleuze and Guattari claim, desire is a productive force; rather than searching for objects to fill a pre-existing lack, we encounter objects that as a result of specific couplings produce desire in us. As Leonard Cohen puts it, "I am not the one who loves...It's love that chooses me."

The object itself does not by definition fall short of some ideal ('the one' does not exist) or haunted by the spectre of a lack that by definition remains unfulfilled. The byproduct it generates, far from being a lack or an unfulfilled ideal is merely an excess of desire - an added value - that keeps the productive-desiring machinery in motion by maintaining a connection to the social body.

In Badiouian terms, if we imagine a set containing a single element(the real, physical object of desire), the surplus value or remainder (objet petit a) - the excess - is a term in the equation defining the set that leaves open the possibility of incorporating other objects and sets into that set. Which I think makes it even clearer why the transposition of this excess into 'the one' is a trompe l'oeil. It is precisely the opposite of 'the one' - it is what keeps the set open, connected to other sets, to the social body.



This is not quite the contradiction in terms that it may appear to be - the one/set, the unambiguous 'one' that contains the germ of a multiple. The point is simply that the excess of desire produced is necessary to keep the desiring machine moving; it is produced not because desire is never fulfilled, but precisely because it is fulfilled: object encountered, desire produced, fulfilled. Yet without the excess then produced, the machinery at this point would grind to a halt; it must always pump out that excess or surplus value (desire=object+x) in order to remain operational, to breathe. So although that excess is something more in relation to the given object (mistaken for 'the one'), it is neither a lack nor another object (a two), but simply a placeholder, an empty place in the set.

Blah blah blah. Well that's about the best I can do with two hours' sleep in oversimplifying D&G (Dolce & Gabbana or Deleuze & Guattari?) and Badiouizing the notion of desire as a productive force.


3. Objectively Fucked: Diamanda's Revenge and the Transmission of Ideology



IT: Mainstream cinema mediates the relationship between men through the odd woman, who rarely gets to mediate anything at all through anyone else. But in the 'real world' do women mediate their relationships through discussion of men? I think this is Dave's point when he asks 'how much "talking about men" really is talking about men?' One could ask a similar question about make-up and fashion. Prettifying for the boys or warning signs for the other ladies? Obviously the idea that straight women are constantly 'competing' for men is an awful one, but they are most definitely supposed to, according to the batshit crazy logic of scarcity that consumerism depends upon. He's the one! That handbag is the one! Hands off my bag/man!



Diamanda Galas has a fine solution to this problem, which acknowledges the issue of mediation but, ahem, subtly undermines it:

'I think women should have an "ideal": the only people you treat as equals are other women. And when you want subordinates, you can fuck a man in the ass! That basically is probably the future. Some men get angry because they think I view them just as sex objects. But I say, "You don't need to read to me - I can read. And conversation - I can get that from my friends. So you should feel lucky that you at least have this service you can offer me.' - from Angry Women, Re/Search #13, 1991.

Perhaps a little harsh, but it might definitely mean that straight women could talk to each other about things other than whether-they-should-ring-him-back-or-wait-for-him-to-call or-is-that-too-forward?'

Deleuzer: Is that a German word? Hm... Yet she is still the subject of mediation between two (or more) men. I mean, it is obvious that she is bitter because - like many women - she has been fucked over by men. So her answer is 'fuck a man in the ass'? Yet this means in effect that through her, the asshole(s) who fucked her over also fuck(s) over the (potentially) nice guy whom she 'fucks up the ass', turning him (potentially) into just another male asshole. (sic)



This is, needless to say, only another way of remaining within the service of dominant (male/chauvinist) ideology; or even more, ideologizing personal relations by turning what was initially subjective violence (getting fucked over by individual assholes) into systemic or objective violence (by/against all men...'if you want subordinates...fuck a man up the ass'). Through her, the dominant chauvinist ideology is communicated/propagated from one man to another. She becomes the incubating medium of ideological transmission, or even better, the ideological 'egg'.

This is why Nietzsche talks about breaking the cycle of revenge - it is precisely about the pitfalls of dialectical mediation. I am afraid that our dear Diamanda simply reverses the roles, replacing one form of domination with another, sublating one within the other in a dialectical reversal that hardly undermines the patriarchal order. Let's imagine that instead of her, we have a man writing the same..."If you want subordinates, fuck a woman up the ass..." etc. My question is, what's the difference? Because I see none. This is just how the initial propagator - the asshole who fucks over Diamanda in the first place - might have put it. So we come full circle.



In fact, by fully internalizing the logic of chauvinist domination, she is - perversely enough - perhaps the ultimate prototype of female subordination, insofar as this is precisely the kind of behaviour that male domination is meant to produce in the female as its dialectical counterpart under the conditions of late capitalism...

IT: I meant, she solves the problem of mediation between women by sidelining men to their sexual role. I don't agree with her, I just thought it was an interestingly aggressive point.

Deleuzer: I see...But you started out saying that mainstream cinema mediates the relationships between men through the 'odd woman'...Anyway, the point still holds - the price of this rediscovered immediacy in relationships between women is more alienation, more mediation (of another kind), deferral of the real struggle against the status quo...By sidelining men to their sexual role, she also sidelines the struggle itself, and any possibility of being truly subversive and effecting a change in sexual relations...This is simply an act of ineffectual subtraction.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love ‘Disaster Capitalism’, PART 3

The God-Suicide, or Unmasking the Fetish: How to Disappear Completely as Subject and Instigate a Revolution That ‘Will Not Be Televised’

‘Folk songs are evasive – the truth about life, and life is more or less a lie, but then again that’s exactly the way we want it to be…A folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff. A folk song might vary in meaning and it might not appear the same from one moment to the next. It depends on who’s playing and who’s listening…’
-Bob Dylan, Chronicles, (71)


That there
That's not me
I go
Where I please
I walk through walls
I float down the Liffey
I'm not here
This isn't happening
-Radiohead

When Bob Dylan ‘went electric' at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, the overwhelming reaction of his horrified folk fans was that he had shamelessly ‘sold out' to the establishment and ‘gone commercial'; and in a purely superficial sense this may well be true. But turning over the content of his work from the crucial period of the mid 1960s now in retrospect, one cannot help but wonder whether Dylan's fans missed the point entirely: the transition from folk-Dylan to electric-Dylan may well be a transition from the conventional or modern form of resistance to power to an even ‘higher' one; from the modern ‘protest' song or ‘fingerpoint' song form grounded in a politics of contra-diction and opposition, to a post-modern but also more profoundly Marxian politics of ‘subtraction' or as Deleuze puts it, ‘vice-diction' – a searching out of the true antagonisms, of real movement, a formulation of resistance informed by a Foucauldian notion of power as a ‘multiplicity of force relations…a complex strategical situation in a particular society' – a notion of power in which the negative and opposition are only secondary, and in relation to which resistance must move away from representation... (Asked why he stopped writing ‘protest songs', Dylan replies “All my songs are protest songs. You name something, I'll protest about it.”)

Is this not one of the most pervasive themes of Highway 61 Revisited , in particular the title song itself and ‘Desolation Row' – while the ‘folk' Dylan made a career out of ‘sticking it' to the folks in power, the Dylan of the ‘electric' era undertook to perform a gesture of ‘sticking it' to the whole of Western civilization. In both of these songs (and others to a lesser extent), Dylan goes through a kind of inventory of cultural motifs, clichés, icons, and figures, and in ‘Highway 61' in particular, what takes place is a flattening of the horizon, a reduction of these disparate themes and characters - from the biblical dilemma of Abraham to ‘Louie the King' to ‘the next world war' – to a plane of equivalences, expelling any whiff of taxonomy: it's all out on Highway 61.

At the close of the album, in ‘Desolation Row', a basic taxonomy is re-instituted: ‘Desolation Row' is a metaphorical space of true freedom or subtraction, a space of exemption from the binary politics of opposition, negativity, and false choices. Cinderella, Romeo, Ophelia, The Good Samaritan, ‘Einstein disguised as Robin Hood', ‘Dr Filth' (one can only suspect Freud), The Phantom of the Opera, secret agents, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, are all figured in. But as we learn at the end, these are not models but real people, and they are not 'representations' either; the narrative rather constitutes an exercise of a transcendental memory – that is, neither a contingent past, nor a reminiscence, but the pure being of the past as such, in which forgetting is “no longer a contingent incapacity separating us from a memory which is itself contingent: it exists within essential memory as though it were the ‘nth' power of memory…that which can only be recalled” ( D&R , 177):

…I received your letter yesterday…[]
All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they're quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name
Right now I can't read too good
Don't send me no more letters no
Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row

Faces ‘rearranged' and given other names – is this not Dylan's ultimate folk rebuke of recognition, a ‘superior and transcendent exercise the faculties', sentiendum, memorandum, cogitandum ? “Each faculty must be borne to the extreme point of its dissolution, at which it falls prey to triple violence: the violence of that which forces it to be exercised [ I had to rearrange their faces ], of that which it is forced to grasp and which it alone is able to grasp, [ don't send me no more letters…unless you mail them from… ] yet also that of the ungraspable.” ( D&R , 180) The ‘ungraspable' is then that which is outside the sphere of ‘Desolation Row' and which one therefore ‘can't read too good'… Here is a definitive refusal of recognition, and models are invoked only to be lambasted. In a courteous and understated nod to Dylan's folk fan base, the first verse of the song contains a fairly detailed but concealed reference to a lynching of three black circus performers in Dylan's hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota, at the time when his father was a child… But the subtraction from the ‘spectacle', or the spectacular aspect of such moments, comes in the form of a re-contextualization:

All except for Cain and Abel
And the hunchback of Notre Dame
Everybody is making love
Or else expecting rain

The effect of this gesture is an unhinging of the imagination from the paradigm, a prototypically Deleuzian overthrow of the original or model : the primordial fratricide of the first martyr (derived from the ancient Greek ‘ witness' ) by the first murderer, which in classical Western Judeo-Christian consciousness lies at the root of all human wars and conflicts and guarantees our cursed conflicted human fate, is here removed from centre-stage and reduced simply to a function of itself: two fellas called Cain and Abel are caught in the grip of opposition (hunchback of Notre Dame thrown in for good measure), but everybody else on the social-imaginative plane of Desolation Row, Dylan tells us, is just making love or…'expecting rain.' (different non-opposing activities) “Critiques of the negative are never decisive so long as they invoke the rights of a first concept…” ( D & R , p 253) We are not the slaves of the past, imprisoned in the paradigm; we are not children of Adam and Eve, or in any sense descendants of Cain and Abel, or of Isaac and Ishmael (from whom Jews and Arabs are mythically said to be descended) – we “shall not gaze backward, but outward… fugitives from all fatherlands and forefatherlands,” as Nietzsche puts it. ( Zarathustra , ‘Of Old and New Law-Tables') The false choices we are given, the false movement of dialectics in representation and negativity, are all crystallized toward the end:

Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody's shouting
"Which Side Are You On?"
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers

Is this not this Dylan's ultimate mocking gesture of resistance and refusal, a swell of Nietzschean laughter in the face of Western civilization's follies? Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, the two great modern poets, roughing each other up (opposition, false movement) in the captain's tower (Titanic, the ship of Progress) while calypso singers just ‘laugh at them…and fishermen hold flowers.' The power of Dylan's metaphors – disfigurations and rearrangements, transformative gestures of a ‘verbal cubism' – is in actualising an Idea without representing, in discovering (with Deleuze) the only true opposition: between the Idea and representation; between Desolation Row as Idea or virtual multiplicity and Cain/Abel as model, paradigm, representation; between the virtual/actual positive-positive and the represented positive-negative…

This shift in fact emerged in Dylan's oeuvre long before he ever went ‘electric' – it was present from the start in a subtler form, and in a sense even the opposition of ‘folk' and ‘electric' must be questioned. Among the series of harbingers on Dylan's last ‘folk' album, Another Side of Bob Dylan , we already clearly hear a burning evanscence of the positive in what may be one of the greatest love ballads ever written, in the last verse where Dylan's writing truly sets itself apart from just the ordinary love song:

Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me
“How good, how good does it feel to be free?”
And I answer them most mysteriously
“Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?”

There is no illusory negativity here, no opposition, no freedom/unfreedom, only ‘actualisation or differenciation', only ‘difference and the problematic', only freedoms or intensities of freedom – only the sky, and beyond it another sky, and beyond it yet another, and so on, nothing represented, only repetition, the Idea, the problem or Idea in its fully positive manifestation; no negative, not even limitation as such , only the question (‘are birds free…?')…This is the “infinite power to add an arbitrary quantity…a question of a throw of the dice, of the whole sky as open space and of throwing as the only rule.” ( Difference and Repetition , 248) Even the title of the song, addressing its musical-thematic structure – ‘Ballad in Plain D' – rejects the opposition of major/minor, happy/sad: the nominal key is D major, but the strong insistence of a B minor chord in the structure relays a melancholy concatenation that Dylan appropriately names ‘plain D'. This is the non-(being) of difference – pure, internal difference - “the non-being which is by no means the being of the negative, but rather the being of the problematic”. Already here the post-modern fractured (non-)subject emerges, the ‘electric' Dylan whose continually shifting, acid-flashback, stream of (un)consciousness evolving identity with his post-Symbolist word plays and permutations (recalling perhaps the Kabbalistic practice of recombining letters of the Torah “…he just smoked my eyelids/An' punched my cigarette” in Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again ) is perhaps a real-life exemplar of what it is in Marx that Deleuze holds over Hegel:

“…in Capital the category of differenciation (the differenciation at the heart of a social multiplicity: the division of labour) is substituted for the Hegelian concepts of opposition, contradiction and alienation, the latter forming only an apparent movement…to Marx, fetishism is indeed an absurdity, an illusion of social consciousness…While it is in the nature of consciousness to be false, problems by their nature escape consciousness…Social problems can be grasped only by means of a “rectification” which occurs when the faculty of sociability is raised to its transcendent exercise and breaks the unity of fetishistic common sense …revolution is the social power of difference, the paradox of society, the particular wrath of the social Idea… Practical struggle never proceeds by way of the negative but by way of difference and its power of affirmation , and the war of the righteous is for the conquest of the highest power, that of deciding problems by restoring them to their truth, by evaluating that truth beyond the representations of consciousness and the forms of the negative …” ( Difference and Repetition , 258-260)

Beyond the representations of consciousness, the forms of the negative, and fetishistic common sense : is this not precisely what the ‘electric' Dylan is after in rejecting identity, meaning, and representation, as at the series of well-publicised and controversial press conferences following his falling-out with the folk crowd – is it not precisely about harnessing and unleashing this revolutionary power of the unconscious to reveal the true antagonisms in rejecting the ‘fetishistic common sense' imposed by critics, journalists, and other determinants of popular culture? (When asked how many ‘protest singers' like him there are in the country, he mockingly replies ‘Oh, I reckon there are about…136.') Is not the post-modern decentring of ‘meaning' and the de-throning of the ‘author' – taken as a political project – precisely the way to go about de-fetishizing culture and revealing the social relations and interactions implicit in its creation? Meaning is a social relation or set of fluctuating social relations whose true internal structure is obscured by the illusion of a unitary ‘author' or ‘consciousness'.

And even further, isn't the modern fixed self or subject itself a form of fetishism that we should rid ourselves of? The claim has never been that the fixed subject is non-existent in any sense, only that it is (like the fetish) an illusion of consciousness. There is no ‘fixed subject'; but there is an illusion of the same which exists . By instilling a ‘soul' in the body, in the process of producing the ‘disciplined body' of the modern subject (Foucault's terminology in Discipline and Punish ), by concealing behind the individual a whole set of ‘pre-individual singularities' (Deleuze), isn't modern society essentially concealing the set of social relations that constitute the individual, which far from being merely those of the mother and father (Oedipus) extend to a whole range of social influences that constitute the individual whose by-product is the ‘subject' which in this sense is neither original nor fixed? The fixed individual is a fetish, a product of capitalist society and its law: the post-structuralist project taken this way may in fact be the ultimate culmination of Marx at its purest. The commodity-fetish and the subject-fetish are both effects of capitalist power-relations, not in the sense of law and obedience, but precisely as the exercise of ‘free' choices, of “new methods of power whose operation is not ensured by right but by technique, not by law but by normalization, not by punishment but by control, methods that are employed on all levels and in forms that go beyond the state and its apparatus.” (Foucault, 89)

The ‘electric' Dylan is only the de-fetishized, de-reified ‘folk' Dylan, – and in that sense, one could say, even more ‘folk', or ‘folk' in a more fundamental sense, beyond the superficial representations of musical forms and structures – ‘Dylan' becomes simply the skeleton, the ‘empty vessel', medium, or relay, a stream of continuous perceptions (in Buddhist terms), the focal site of undisguised social relations that constitute his ‘work'…The work of an author and its meaning, the author itself, the modern subject, are finally revealed as fundamentally determined at every step by a flux of social relations :

Q: Do you think that a lot of the young people who buy your records understand a single word of what you're singing?
Dylan: Sure…[mockingly]
Q: You reckon they do?
Dylan: Sure…[laughs]
Q2: Why do you say they do? How can you be so sure?
Q: I mean there are complicated songs, aren't there?
Dylan: Yeah, but they do, they understand them...
Q: How do you know they understand them? Have they told you that they do?
Dylan: They told me! Haven't you heard that song, um… ‘She said so'…What was the singer…[laughter]
Q: Would you say that you cared about people particularly?
Dylan: Well yeah but, but, you know, I mean, we all have our own definitions of all those words… ‘care' and ‘people'…
Q: Well, we surely, I mean we know what ‘people' are…
Dylan: Well, hm, do we?

Q: How would you describe yourself?
A: I don't describe myself. How do you describe yourself?
Q: I have no idea but I don't have to sell your talent.
A: Neither do I. Write whatever you like. I'm a tree-surgeon if you like.
Q: Why have you started playing rock'n'roll?
A: Is that what they call it?

Q: Are there times when you can't stand yourself?
A: How could that be possible? I don't know myself. I don't know who I am. There's a mirror on the inside of my dark glasses - otherwise I don't interfere with my own private life.

Is this revelatory blindness, this pushing of the conscious limit in order to develop the productive potential of the unconscious, the ‘unconscious of pure thought' – is this not precisely what is needed, what is lacking in the anti-capitalist struggle today, which ultimately takes itself a bit too seriously? (and this already in the anti -) Revolution as the actualisation of the virtual originates in (as the kabbalists put it) the ayin or nothingness that spawns being ‘from nothingness and being together'…In order for revolution (the concrete universal, Idea, God, Buddha) to ‘clothe itself' in us, we must think of ourselves less as subjects and more as ‘empty vessels' or ‘streams of continuous perceptions' – Deleuzian ‘flows'. At this juncture where the subject disintegrates, Dylan's gesture of defiance is not the killing but the symbolic suicide of the god , the fetishized ‘folk prophet' – and one by which we are all the more truly given the ‘folk prophet' as a profound gift, through his own self-revelation of this mythical figure as a fetish disguising social relations of meaning, a mask that can be worn by anyone – “everything I'm a' sayin'/you can say it just as good” as he puts it in ‘One Too Many Mornings'… Dylan thus appears at this juncture as simultaneously both Christ and Judas (an irony in light of the notorious accusation by an angry fan, we could here say ‘JewDas', after the name of one radical Jewish organization) – both ‘true prophet' and the ‘traitor' who exposes the true prophet as false; both fetishized mask and the empty redeemer who, by severing the mask from the face (only to reveal more masks), lays bare the profoundly unstable nature of identity, including our own. (And one should note here a marked distinction between Dylan's gesture and that of Nietzsche proclaiming himself to be Christ and Dionysos; for Dylan in actuality performs this gesture, or completes it in action, real time and real movement– he was idolized and ‘fetishized'; and he authentically rejected the idol-mask thrust upon him...)

When Deleuze and Guattari argue that capitalism continually strives toward its limit whilst simultaneously deploying complex strategies to avoid reaching this limit, are they not simply repeating Marx? The ‘limit' is the point when a fully developed capitalism transmutes organically into socialism; and the approach of this limit is perpetually delayed by, among other strategies, ‘ not abiding [fully] in the notion' of practising capitalism (in Marx's terminology, forgetting the social relations that enter into the production of the fetishized product), sublimating capitalist processes into the productive factory of the unconscious, and relating to the Absolute as an object of desire. By tying us up as fixed subjects – by producing our truth and thereby ‘constituting us as subjects' (Foucault) in a false dialectical game of opposition, ensuring our subjection - capitalist fetishism ‘freezes' its own virtual development and actualization. Is this not why American capitalism, being in ways more ‘primitive' than say, European or Japanese capitalism, is also in a substantive way farther away from socialism? Not to mention Russian capitalism, whose primitive state is a matter of course. (One could even argue that today's Russia is the site of not only a more primitive capitalism, but that its overall virtual-historical development has substantially regressed; and this perhaps because its progress under communism was too ‘weak', too forced and artificial…) With this in mind we can view the drive to ‘privatization' of the state a as form of ‘primitive accumulation', a ‘primitivization' of capitalism, and at the same time a form of historic regression to an earlier and more secure state of capitalism; within the neoliberal corpus, the drive to ‘privatization' emerges from its libertarian (in the American sense) component – and what is libertarianism but right-wing anarchism, both being based on a rejection of the state, and this not in the progressive, communist sense (the ‘withering away' of the state through the historical development of capitalism into socialism, communism, etc), but rather in a fundamentally regressive historical sense? (Bakunin was, after all, inspired by the idyll of Russian village life)

The Bolshevik revolution which undoubtedly would have disappointed Marx, was perhaps the highest or farthest that a politics founded on opposition and negativity could reach – it was a ‘fake' revolution…The true Marxian revolution would have to be Deleuzian, in the sense of becoming, the organic and positive traversal of the limit, and the searching out of new antagonisms not traced from negativity – and here Deleuze, Dylan, perhaps Debord (at least in his early phase), Buddha, and Marx are all on the same page, together with Gill Scott-Heron: ‘The revolution will not be televised' . It will not be televised because the true revolution cannot be ‘represented' or consciously forced into being, it can only materialize to the extent that we forget our selves and release the productive power of the unconscious by ‘ not abiding in the notion'; and even ‘materialize' is already a form of representation which suggests a false negativity . It is only by ‘abiding in the notion' of practising capitalism in going about our daily lives, by being ‘conscious' of our participation in the capitalist system, by fully developing consciousness as such (which by definition is ‘false') and taking it to its own limit, thus eventually reversing the processes of fetishism, that we unleash the productive, transformative, revolutionary forces of the unconscious to inaugurate a new historical phase. ‘Abiding in the notion' of practising socialism, opposing socialism to capitalism, posing realistic goals, only ‘freezes' historical development. The point is to ‘not interfere with our own private life' as Dylan puts it – to ‘go electric', ‘kill the Buddha' (the revolution as constituted in representation and the negative ) and become an ‘empty vessel', become ayin ; to resist the fetish of the subject and resist our own subjection to capitalism by fully recognizing that it is here, at the very level of the individual subject, in its very constitution as such, as anything, that we are subjected – ‘power comes from below' as Foucault puts it. In order to grasp this, to take hold of a force that comes from below and is composed of ‘mobile power relations' we must ourselves become internally ‘mobile'…We must focus and re-centre on this below, on the very point where power is exercised and where our subjection is ensured, at the level of its “innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations…economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations.” Instead of opposing capitalism with socialism, the aim should be to develop and transform the one into the other through the revolutionary power and wrath of the social Idea emanating from the chaosmos of the entropic unconscious. (It is always the unconscious which acts, as Deleuze puts it) The point is to ‘practice socialism without abiding in the notion of practising socialism' or 'socialism that no longer calls itself socialism' in order to drive capitalism through its own internal development to the entropic point of transition, its own annihilation in the Absolute – the serpent must eat its own tail. This is the lesson learned by Luke Skywalker in the finale of Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi – rather than succumbing to the temptation to confront the ‘evil' directly in a struggle of opposites, we must realize that the Force is fully positive and that ‘evil' is only an excess of the ‘good'; therefore by confronting it directly (except for the odd skirmish here and there) with our anger, we only make it stronger. Positivity and affirmation – just as Dylan said of his own success, when confronted by aggressive reporters demanding to know the secret of his rise to fame (“I have no idea…”) – the revolution will happen, if it happens, "like anything else happens."

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