It's My Name Day (And I'll Decry If I Want To)

St. Stephen: first Christian martyr 
and anti-Semite

As Maria is keen to remind me, today is my name day [ονομαστική εορτή]: a traditional form of celebration in Greece, as in other Orthodox and Catholic countries where the veneration of saints is a popular practice, but which doesn't mean a great deal to me - particularly as I don't even seem to get a cake out of it. 

As for the saint to whom I am connected by name, what do I know of him? 

St. Stephen was a Greek-speaking Jew who made the fatal mistake of outraging the members of numerous synagogues by his unorthodox teachings inspired by Jesus. Accused of blasphemy and perverting Mosaic Law, he didn't help matters by making a long speech at his trial in which he denounced the authorities who were sitting in judgement upon him whilst keeping a holier-than-thou and supercilious expression on his face; a speech which concludes with the following slur which would resonate to murderous effect through the ages:

"You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of the Righteous One, whom you also betrayed and murdered; you who received the law as delivered by angels, but did not keep it." [Acts 7: 51-53] 

This so infuriated members of the Sanhedrin and the people who had gathered to witness the proceedings, that they rushed upon him, dragged him outside, and then stoned him to death; thus making Stephen the first Christian martyr and an inspiration to anti-Semites keen to hold the Jews guilty of deicide.  

Imitating Christ to the last, Stephen asked that God forgive those who were about to slay him (they know not what they do). More interestingly, sparks were said to fly off his body every time he was struck by a stone; sparks that his later Christian admirers would insist were not of anger, but of love, and which ignited the hearts of those who witnessed his death; sparks which we now know actually helped ignite the Auschwitz crematoria.     

An Atheist Responds to Pope Francis

Well, there you go: I've just been insulted by Pope Francis in his first Christmas Day message to the faithful!

Speaking to a crowd of 70,000 people from the balcony of St Peter's, he called on even atheists to share in the desire for peace that fills the hearts of all true believers in God.

I mean, really, it's a bit much, no?  

Even atheists - as if we were the scum of the earth who knew only of hatred and were filled with a lust for violence. I might remind His Holiness that it is invariably religion that proliferates and intensifies tribal, racial, and sectarian conflict in this world: witness what is happening presently in the Middle East and in Africa.   

For ultimately, despite all their talk about desiring peace and being happy to receive their rewards in the next world, the leaders and followers of the great religions want power in this world and will slaughter anyone who might stand in their way - not least of all those who subscribe to a different faith, or to no faith.   

And with that I have done and pronounce my judgement: religion has left nothing untouched by its depravity. I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind ...  

- Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

And so this is Christmas ...

Feigning joy and surprise at the gifts we despise 

over mulled wine with you

  

If there has ever been a better opening line to a Christmas song than this sung by Justin Hawkins of The Darkness, then I'd like to hear it.  

For there is something despicable at the commercial heart of Xmas and something increasingly desperate about our compulsion to celebrate it and insist that everyone enters into the spirit of the season lest they be branded a killjoy. Or a Scrooge. Or in someway suspect (not one of us).

Well, I'm sorry, but like Charlie Brown this time of year always makes me depressed: and a little ashamed. I don't want the bells to end; but I'd like for the tills to stop ringing and for people to not be bullied. And not be afraid.

On the Question Concerning Technology

 

I recently watched The Social Network (dir. David Fincher) and I have to say I enjoyed this fictionalized and stylized account of the founding and phenomenal success of Facebook. Not only did the film contain some memorable scenes, but there were many instances of amusing dialogue; including the following line uttered by Justin Timberlake in his role as Sean Parker:

Once we lived on farms and in cities - now we're gonna live on the internet.

The line was spoken with zeal and in triumph by a young master of the digital universe; someone who clearly viewed the shift from a rural existence to an urban and then to a virtual lifestyle as progressive, if not, indeed, as an opportunity for human transcendence and transformation.

This techno-utopian vision of abandoning the actual world and entering into some kind of online paradise is simply a Platonic fantasy, however; i.e. rooted in a long tradition of moral idealism. And although there are transhumanists who wilfully subscribe to such an anthropomorphic conception of life's becoming based on a linear and perfectionist model of social and biological evolution, others are beginning to wake up to the dangers of surrendering ourselves to the future as an act of blind faith.

They realise that the more we mediate our lives and our relationships via technology, the more we numb and atrophy our own senses. And they realise also that whilst we have spent our time emailing pictures of lol cats to one another, checking status updates, or masturbating to pornography, the rich and powerful have been busy claiming even more of the actual world's resources for themselves.

Where salvation is promised, lies the greatest danger ... 

Fasten Your Seat Belts! (In Support of Pussy Riot)

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina 
Photo: Reuters / Ilya Naymushin (2013)

Obviously the early release from prison of Pussy Rioters Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina as part of Putin's amnesty law is a PR move designed to improve his image in the West ahead of the Sochi Winter Olympics in February and both women immediately condemned it as such. 

That said, I'm happy they are free; though, sadly, in Russia today this is only a relative term for those who hold anti-authoritarian views or practice non-traditional sexual relations. 

Of course, it would be as easy to be as cynical about the media-stunts of Pussy Riot as it is about Putin's new found humaneness. Indeed, more people seem to take pleasure in violently abusing and condemning Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina than in speaking out against the Russian regime's clamp down on political rights and socio-sexual freedoms.

Doubtless it is this hostility that they generate that makes me love them so; that and the sheer courage that they demonstrate. Both have promised to continue their protest: "We will try to sing our song to the end", said Alyokhina. Whilst Tolokonnikova warns with a smile: "Everything is just starting, so fasten your seat belts!" 
  

In Praise of Stalking (The Case of Sophie Calle)

Stalking - be it of an actual kind in what remains of and passes for the real world, or a virtual activity conducted online - doesn't have a great reputation. Doubtless this is due to the fact that stalking is often related to harassment and intimidation and because it can be not only predatory but creepy in character; no one, it seems, likes to be followed and spied on by strangers (even in a world of Facebook and CCTV).

And yet, is it not possible that we might understand stalking not in terms of physical and psychological abuse, but rather as a fascinating instance of neo-courtly love in an age after the orgy ...?

For it is certainly the case that many stalkers feel a strong and genuine bond of affection for the person they choose to secretly shadow and, in essence, there's a striking similarity between medieval erotico-spiritual practice and this illicit postmodern phenomenon: both are a highly specialized expression of a love that is all too human and yet transcendent; passionate and yet restrained; true and yet founded upon fantasy. 

The stalker, whilst accepting the independence of the object of their desire, nevertheless attempts to bring themselves to the attention of the latter by various means and often goes to extraordinary lengths in order to prove the seriousness of their ardour and commitment. They may or may not be hoping for sexual intimacy, but this hardly seems to be the point and it would be mistaken, I think, to posit this as the ultimate goal; there are certainly easier ways to get a date or get laid, even for the most incompetent or inadequate of would-be lovers. 

        

Indeed, in certain cases of stalking there is no sexual motive involved at all: consider the famous case involving French conceptual artist, Sophie Calle. Here is an example of a woman stalking a man - known as Henri B. - without having any particular interest in him and certainly no erotic aspirations or expectations. It was Calle's indifferent determination to follow Henri B., without motive or any identifiable type of psychoses or neurotic compulsion, that made her story so intriguing to Jean Baudrillard, who - as we shall see - interprets her actions in terms of his theory of seduction (i.e. an ironic and fatal game of hide-and-seek to do with power, appearance, reversibility, loss of will, and being led astray). 

For those of you who don't know this case, the facts are these:

After stalking several strangers through the streets of Paris, Calle met Henri B. at a party. He told her he was travelling to Italy the following day and so Calle decided to go to Venice herself and track him down. After phoning round a large number of hotels, she finally found him. Then, suitably disguised, she spent the next few days following Henri B. around the city; photographing his movements and encounters with others and recording details in a diary alongside her own musings. 

Eventually, Henri B. spotted and confronted his stalker and the game was effectively over - although Calle still contrived to arrive back in Paris at the same time as her object in order to get one last secret picture of him disembarking from the train on which he had made his way home. She eventually published the black-and-white photographs accompanied by a text as Suite vénitienne (1983).

The book also included a typically insightful essay by Baudrillard entitled 'Please Follow Me' which contains the following passage on the seductive joy of becoming-other and becoming-object:

"To stalk the other is to take charge of their itinerary; it is to watch over their life without them knowing it. It is to ... relieve them of that existential burden, the responsibility of their own life. Simultaneously, she who follows is herself relieved of responsibility for her own life as she follows blindly in the footsteps of the other. And thus a wonderful reciprocity exists in the cancellation of each existence, in the cancellation of each subject's tenuous position as a subject. Stalking the other, one replaces them, exchanges lives, passions, wills, transforms oneself in the other's stead. It is perhaps the only way one can finally find fulfilment."


Note: An English edition of the Calle/Baudrillard work, trans. Danny Barash and Danny Hatfield, is available from Bay Press (1988). 

  

Notes on the Conflict Thesis

The conflict thesis proposes that there is intrinsic antagonism between persons of faith and those who prefer to rely upon reason. Although this mid-19th century idea is now thought untenable by academics who have researched the long and complex historical relationship between science and religion, in my view it's one which demands revision rather than abandonment; particularly in this new age of religious fundamentalism and wilful stupidity.

For as a philosopher, I can't quickly overlook the trial of Socrates nor fail to remember that one of the charges made against him was that of impiety. Nor, if I'm honest, can I forget the treatment handed out to Galileo by the Roman Inquisition; or the mockery and abuse of Charles Darwin and other evolutionary scientists which continues to this day within certain religious circles almost ninety years after the Scopes Monkey Trial.     

These and other isolated episodes may be exceptional rather than typical and the Draper-White thesis may offer us a greatly distorted and simplified view, but it seems to me that their basic proposition still resonates and that the faithful would - if they could - make a violent sacrificium intellectus.

How Murder of the Other Ends in Self-Destruction

Whilst an adversary is often accorded respect and even admiration, an enemy is always despised and frequently demonized. Because an enemy, unlike an opponent, is not merely set against us, but seen as fundamentally alien and other - culturally, morally, and even physically; they look repulsive and they smell bad. 

This long and shameful tradition of depicting our enemies as monstrous and inhuman - enemies who can never be defeated and assimilated into our world, only exterminated like vermin - is nowhere better illustrated than in Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda which displays an irrational (at times insane) level of racial hatred. What we might term the metaphysics of enmity clearly acted as the murderous dynamic of National Socialism, as well as the indispensable precondition that made genocide not only inevitable but, for many Germans, acceptable. 

Of course this hatred might be contextualized within the religious, cultural and social history of Germany. But it's never fully explained by placing it within such a context. For there is something else - something almost incomprehensible - about Nazi anti-Semitism for those who do not share this obsessive mania and the Final Solution results from a mystical as well as an ideological and biological fantasy to do with health, strength, and purity.

Ironically, of course, the idea of a master race is inconceivable without the Jews being assigned their role as the eternal Other whom it is necessary to annihilate, in order that the Aryan superman might live. But there is a further fatal irony all the time unfolding here: for this murderous fantasy is as suicidal as it is homicidal and war becomes not simply a means of eliminating a mortal enemy, but of regenerating one’s own blood via self-sacrifice. Ultimately, Hitler is as happy to shed the blood of those he promised to protect, as those he desired to exterminate. Indeed, it might even be argued that the objective of the Nazi Regime was not really the demonization and destruction of the Jews, but the idealization and subsequent sacrifice of the German people themselves.

In a brilliantly insightful passage, Michel Foucault writes:

      "The destruction of other races was one aspect of the project, the other being to expose its own race to the absolute and universal threat of death. Risking one’s life, being exposed to total destruction, was one of the principles inscribed in the basic duties of the obedient Nazi, and it was one of the essential objectives of Nazism’s policies. It had to reach the point at which the entire population was exposed to death. Exposing the entire population to universal death was the only way it could truly constitute itself as superior race and bring about its definitive regeneration once other races had been either exterminated or enslaved forever.

      We have, then, in Nazi society something that is really quite extraordinary: this is a society which has generalized bio-power in an absolute sense, but which has also generalized the sovereign right to kill. The two mechanisms … coincide exactly. We can therefore say this: the Nazi state makes the field of the life it manages, protects, guarantees, and cultivates in biological terms absolutely coextensive with the sovereign right to kill anyone, meaning not only other people, but also its own people.”

- Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey (Penguin Books, 2004), pp. 259-60.

And this is why the Third Reich ends not only with the Final Solution, but also the infamous Nero Decree [Nerobefehl] in which Hitler calls for the total destruction of German infrastructure in the face of impending defeat and occupation, regardless of the consequences to the population.

Who Killed Bambi?

Gentle pretty thing / Who only had one spring 

You bravely faced the world / Ready for anything

Whilst it's true that Steve Jones in his role as an amateur detective is only interested in finding Malcolm and piecing together the clues that might explain where it all went wrong for him and his fellow band members (tragically so, in the case of Sid Vicious), there is, nevertheless, another question at the heart of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle which transforms the movie from an amusingly mythologized history of the Sex Pistols into a profound murder mystery and morality tale: with one big shout we all cry out - who killed Bambi?

It is, of course, a rhetorical question: when McLaren screams it into the faces of the assembled reporters at Henley Airfield, he's not expecting an answer. And neither is he simply giving reference to an off-screen incident involving the shooting of a deer by a decadent rock star, although, clearly, this scene - which belongs to the originally proposed film to be directed by Russ Meyer - is a non-too-subtle visual metaphor.   

So what, if anything, do we learn from Lesson 10 of the Swindle?

That innocence is easily lost? That it's a good thing to be disillusioned and believe only in the ruins of belief? That we should never trust a hippie? That the spirit of punk will never die; or that Johnny Rotten was a collaborator and that big business will always find a way to assimilate and market youthful rebellion? It's probably a (qualified) yes to all of these ...


Note: The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, directed by Julian Temple, was released in cinemas in 1980; probably you can now find it on YouTube, or elsewhere online. Those old punks and film-buffs who are particularly interested, might like to read the script written for Who Killed Bambi? by Roger Ebert, which he has kindly made available on his website: http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/who-killed-bambi-a-screenplay

Caliban

Mirrors don't reflect flesh, only history
and so his own face made him rage.

Ah Caliban! You task me, moon-calf, you task me! For what am I to make of you; malevolent monster and would-be child rapist, or indigenous subject dispossessed of your native land and enslaved and brutalized by European colonialism?

It's impossible to hate you: my liberalism won't allow it. But it's also difficult not to find you repugnant. For you fail to reflect my image and my values and you suggest the pre-dawn or twilight of my own kind. Your ugliness is both sign of a thwarted development and symptom of degeneracy compounded by cambionic origins. 

Indeed, for the ancient Greeks your hideous aspect would constitute a telling moral objection in itself and the fact that you spoke with a certain lyrical power on occasion would do little to redeem you in their eyes: As the face, so too the soul.