Notes on 'The Crisis of Narration' by Byung-Chul Han (Part 2)

(Matthes and Seitz Berlin 2023) [a]

 

 

I.

 

Byung-Chul Han really likes Walter Benjamin - not that there's anything wrong with that.

 

He makes over a dozen references to Benjamin's work in the opening chapter of his new book and more than another dozen or so references to texts by this quirky cultural theorist in chapter two, which is where I'm picking up this commentary-cum-critical encounter ...

 

In 'The Poverty of Experience' Han - following Benjamin - mourns the fact that communicable experience passed down orally from generation to generation is "becoming increasingly rare" [10]; nothing is narrated any longer; no one tells stories drawn from their own lives any more.    

 

Folk wisdom no longer counts for much when people freed from tradition by technology look to Google for answers and download problem-solving apps: "The new barbarians celebrate the poverty of experience as a moment of emancipation." [11] 

 

And, to be fair, perhaps modernity did provide an opportunity to start from scratch and make it new ... 

 

Benjamin's thought is shot through with ambivalence on this question; as a Marxist, he believes in progress and the revolutionary spirit. But, in the end, his "deep-seated scepticism towards modernity" [13] wins out and he decides that we are ultimately impoverished (and dehumanised) by the disenchanted world of today - and not even Mickey Mouse can save us. 

And for us, in a late-modern (or post-modern) era, not only do we exist without history, but even the future has come and gone. No one even tries to make things new or dares to dream of radical social transformation; no one has "the courage to create a world-changing narrative" [14] and storytelling is now mostly "a matter of commercialism and consumption" [14]. 

 

This is quite a bleak analysis: "It is only with narrative that a future opens up, for narrative gives us hope." [15] But as a Nietzschean philosopher, I can happily do without the morally optimistic idea of hope. Indeed, let me remind readers of my new year's message for 2024:

 

Hope may be one of the great Christian virtues, but in Norse mythology it is simply the drool dripping from the jaws of the Fenris Wolf; and courage is a term for the bravery displayed by the warrior in the absence of hope [b]. 

 

 

II. 

 

Is the past something that needs salvaging - or something in need of salvation? It's an interesting question (assuming the past doesn't just need forgetting). 

 

Han - again following Benjamin - plumps for the latter: "We owe our happiness to the salvation of the past." [16] 

 

I have to say, that's not the kind of sentence I'd write. For it is just as true that we owe an awful lot of misery to the fact that people often can't (or won't) let go of the past and that far from saving the past they ruin the present and sacrifice the future with something else that "has a long tail and reaches back into the past" [16] - ressentiment and the will to revenge. 

 

Nietzsche says that the greater the plastic power of a people, the more history they can embrace and affirm as their own. But he also ties innocence to forgetfulness and insists that whilst it is Christian to forgive, it is noble to forget. So I'm not entirely convinced that we need to resurrect the past and make it a continuing influence upon the present.     

 

Having said that, I do enjoy a certain level of temporal (and personal) continuity; I like to imagine I'm pretty much the same now as I was aged six, for example. And one of the things that's nice about the theory of evolution (or, I suppose, the myth of creation in Genesis) is that it allows one to feel part of a much wider and longer story (though I'm not greatly concerned about this). 

 

 

III. 

 

When it comes to certain things - selfies, social media, and the art of Jeff Koons, for example - Han is very much like a dog with a bone; i.e., unwilling to let go and determined to get to the marrow (or essence) of the thing. 

 

Thus, no surprise to see him taking a pop at Snapchat and Instagram once more and declaring that digital photos are - if not quite the soul-stealing work of the devil - things that "announce the end of the human being as someone with a fate and a history" [20] and mark the birth of Phono sapiens - non-beings who have surrendered to the momentary actualities of experience and are unable to discriminate or be selective. 

Phono sapiens believe they are being playful on their smartphones 24/7 and that this puts them in control, but, actually, they are being manipulated and exploited. 

 

 

IV.

 

Ultimately, Han comes to the same conclusion as the protagonist of Sartre's Nausea (1938): "Only with narration is life elevated above its sheer facticity, above its nakedness." [27]

 

In other words, narrating make's the world and time's passing meaningful; it inhibits that feeling of nausea that Roquentin experiences. But, arguably, la nausée is just a Sartrean synonym for (or another aspect of) what Heidegger terms angst  - and surely the key thing about angst is that it's not something to be overcome or resolved. 

 

Narrating the world may make meaningful and be comforting - may make objects seem less alien and less threatening; may make the fact that being rests upon non-being seem less troubling - but this also insulates us from a fundamental form of freedom.      

 

Ultimately, I think I'd rather be dizzy before the void and bewildered by the (sometimes malevolent) presence of objects than fobbed off with some transcendent narrative, even if that makes the world rhythmically structured and promises blissful order. 

 

By insisting that existentialism is a humanism, Sartre transforms "frightening being-in-the-world into familiar being-at-home" [29] and such domesticity is not something philosophers should be advocating.      

    

V.

 

The thought has just occured to me: I'm Konrad - the boy who cannot tell stories [c]. 

 

For just like Konrad, I lack the inwardness that would allow me to "internalize events and to weave and condense them into a story" [34] and my world, like Konrad's, is pretty much entirely disenchanted. 

 

Perhaps that explains why my dreams of becoming a novelist came to nothing - and why I like fragments and pieces of factual information so much. 

 

But please don't send me to see Ms Leishure ... 

 

For whilst I agree that, utimately, the world is made up of events that resist explanation and that we might question causality, I don't wish to become "a member of the small narrative community" [36] if that means abandoning reason or denying the possibility of objective facts. 

 

If things have a magical aura that's great: but even things that don't possess that radiance which raises them above mere facticity, they're still astonishing and it seems to me that a scientific description of the unfolding of the universe is just as beautiful as a mytho-religious narrative such as the one found in Genesis.     

 

And finally, as readers will know, I hate full-stops and prefer to use an ellipsis whenever possible ... 

 

And that's because, in my view, there's always something left unsaid and even the most perfect of narratives can never really be sealed off in an intertextual universe; can never be a concluding form that has closure as its goal and can't wait to stamp the words The End, thereby passing a kind of death sentence. 

 

There is no end - and there is no origin; we should instinctively mistrust any book or story that opens with the words In the beginning ...       

 

 

Notes

 

[a] This is the cover of the original German edition. I am relying upon the English translation by Daniel Steuer published as The Crisis of Narration (Polity Press, 2024). All page numbers given in the post refer to this edition.  

[b] See the post 'Nothing Changes on New Year's Day' (31 Dec 2023): click here. See also the much earlier but related post 'Happy to be Hopeless this Christmas' (26 Dec 2014): click here.

 

[c] Konrad is a character in a short story by the children's author Paul Maar. Han discusses this story in chapter five of The Crisis of Narration. 

 

 

Part 1 of this post can be read by clicking here.

 

Part 3 of this post can be read by clicking here.

 

 

How Do I Understand the Flies?

Joe Strummer, lead singer of the Clash, looking pensive and posing a question 

that has intrigued punks, philosophers and entomologists alike

 

I. 

 

Someone writes to say that my Insectopunk post was misleading insofar as I "neglected to mention the true character and importance of punk as a socio-political movement, primarily concerned with fighting for freedom and defending truth - not simply with writing inane songs about bugs". 

 

They close their criticism by suggesting that I should "stop listening to arty pop-punk bands and try the real thing, i.e., the only band that matters - the Clash".       

 

 

II.

 

Such idealism is always amusing and often, as in this case, betrays a mix of ignorance and naivety. 

 

Firstly, let us remind ourselves that this (hyperbolic and hubristic) tag line - the only band that matters - was one coined by American musician Gary Lucas [1] whilst employed as a copywriter in the creative services department at CBS Records. Although widely adopted by fans and journalists, one suspects it was something the band always felt secretly embarrassed by; a boast impossible to live up to and impossible to live down.

 

Secondly, it appears my overearnest correspondent has forgotten (or is unaware of the fact) that the Clash also wrote and performed a song about insects; the never officially released How Do I Understand the Flies? [2]. 

 

In this short ditty, Joe doesn't bemoan the state of the nation, but simply expresses his bemusement (and irritation) with the flies buzzing round his head in his basement bedroom, thereby preventing him from sleeping: 

 

In the summer ... the flies buzzing round my head / Every night, I don't understand the flies buzzing round my head.

 

It's not the greatest song in the world and by the end of 1976 it had been dropped from the band's live set and subsequently forgotten about. 

 

As a cultural entomologist, however, I'm really happy to know this song exists and I like to imagine that Strummer was having an existentialist moment inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre who was also troubled by flies - and insects generally [3] - as this passage from Les Mots nicely illustrates: 

 

"I go to the window, I spot a fly under the curtain, I corner it in a muslin trap and move a murderous forefinger toward it. [...] Since I'm refused a man's destiny, I'll be the destiny of a fly. I don't rush matters, I'm letting it have time enough to become aware of the giant bending over it. I move my finger forward, the fly bursts, I'm foiled! Good God, I shouldn't have killed it! It was the only being in all creation that feared me; I no longer mean anything to anyone. I, the insecticide, take the victim's place and become an insect myself. I'm a fly, I've always been one. This time I've touched bottom." [4]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Lucas discusses this in a short 2013 interview available on YouTube: click here.  

[2] This song - also known as 'For the Flies', or simply 'Flies', was written in the summer of 1976 and first performed at the Screen on the Green on 29 August 1976. Click here to listen to a bootleg recording made at the Roundhouse on 5 September 1976. 

[3] Indeed, for Sartre, all nature was de trop - an undifferetiated and threatening substratum of non-human and inhuman existence for which he feels not only contempt but a visceral disgust, as readers of La Nausée will recall. 

      For an interesting essay on this, see Shannon Mussett, 'Nature as Threat and Escape in the Philosophies of Sartre and Beauvoir', in The Sartrean Mind, ed. Matthew C. Eshleman and Constance L. Mui, (Routledge, 2020), pp. 515-527. Click here to read this essay online.

 

[4] Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words, trans. Bernard Frechtman, (George Braziller, New York, 1964), p. 247.   

 

 

This post is for KV who kindly reminded me of this little known song by the Clash and for Sophie Stas, the patron saint of flies.   

Notes on Byung-Chul Han's 'Non-things' (Part 2)

Byung-Chul Han: author of Non-things,

trans. Daniel Steuer (Polity Press, 2022).

Page references given in the post refer to this work.

 

 

Note: This post is a continuation. To go to part one (sections I - VI), click here. We continue our reflections on Byung-Chul Han's new book by discussing things in their evil and magical aspects ...

 

 

VII.

 

Han argues that things have lost their malevolent or villainous character; that objects, if you like, no longer seek revenge upon subjects - even when those subjects are cartoon mice or silent film stars like Charlie Chaplin. Material reality has become a safe space and offers no resistance or dangers. 

 

Things, in short, are now subordinate to our control and "even Mickey Mouse leads a digital, smart and immaterial life [...] and no longer collides with physical reality" [47]. Now there's an app for everything and a quick solution to all life's problems. Objects behave themselves; even if we build our world upon their backs, they'll no longer attempt to shrug us off. 

 

But, just in case those pesky objects are still up to no good when we're not around to keep an eye on them, we have invented the Internet of Things: "The infosphere puts things in chains. [...] It tames things and turns them into servants catering to our needs." [49]

 

In the past, we accepted the independence of things; the kettle might start whistling before we were ready to make the tea; the door might start creaking or the window begin to rattle in the middle of the night, keeping us awake. 

 

Even Sartre remained familiar "with what it means to be touched by things" [50] and this filled the protagonist of Nausea (1938) with terror. On the other hand, for Rilke things emanated warmth and he fantasised about sleeping with his beloved objects. 

 

But then things cooled down and no longer warmed us, touched us, or seduced us. And now, things are not even frigid: 

 

"They have neither cold nor warmth; they are worn out. All their vitality is waning. They no longer represent a counterpart to humans. They are not opposing bodies. Who, today, feels looked at, or spoken to, by things? [...] Who feels threatened or enchanted by things?" [52].

Perhaps a handful of object-oriented philosophers and a small number of objectum sexuals - but that's about it. It's a bit depressing to realise just how poor in world we have become as we sit staring at screens (and this has nothing to do with the so-called cost of living crisis or rising inflation):

"The digital screen determines our experience of the world and shields us from reality. [...] Things lose their gravity, their independent life and their waywardness" [52], says Han. And he's right. 

 

Right also to argue the impossibility of forming a genuine relation with a world that consists more and more of digital objects (or non-things). People talk about a mental health crisis, but depression is "nothing other than a pathologically intensified poverty in world" [53].   

 

VIII.

Han argues that we perceive the world primarily through (and as) information. Information not only covers the world, but "undermines the thing level of reality" [56] in all its intensity of presence. 

 

One way to counter this would be to establish a magical relationship with the world that is not characterised by representation, but by touch (an idea that will appeal to witches and Lawrentians alike). This is really just a question of greater attentiveness paid to things as things and forgetting of self for a moment or two: "When the ego gets weak, it is able to hear that mute thing language." [57] 

 

This may of course be disturbing, but Han wants human beings to be disturbed by the world; to be "moved by something singular" [58], to be penetrated from behind and below, so that we are thrown into a condition of radical passivity and presence is allowed to burst in. This is what creates epiphanic moments (as well as erotic joy). 

Apart from magic, there's also art ... At its best, art creates things, or material realities that are born of handwork, as Rilke says. 

 

A poem, for example, has a "sensual-physical dimension that eludes its sense" [60]. And it is because a poem exceeds the signifier and isn't exhausted by its meaning, that it constitutes a thing. One doesn't simply read a poem - any more than one simply drinks a glass of fine wine - both invite one to experience and enjoy them (to know their body, as it were).

 

Unfortunately, art is - according to Byung-Chul Han - moving away from this materialist understanding of its own practice. And what is particularly depressing about today's art "is its inclination to communicate a preconceived opinion, a moral or political conviction: that is, its inclination to communicate information" [64].  

 

In brief: "Art is seized by a forgetfulness of things [...] It wants to instruct rather than seduce." [64]  

 

Artworks today lack silence, lack stillness, lack secrecy; instead, they shout and insist that we interact with them. This probably explains why I would now rather sit in my backgarden amongst the daisies, than visit a bookshop, gallery, or theatre.   

 

 

IX.

I'm going to refrain from commenting at length or in detail upon sections in Han's new book dealing with Kakfa's struggle against ghosts and the philosophical importance of the hand in the work of Martin Heidegger (something I have previously discussed in a couple of posts published in June of 2019: click here and here).   

 

However, I very much like Han's observation that, were he alive today, the former would reluctantly resign himself to the fact that "by inventing the internet, email and the smartphone, the ghosts had won their final victory over mankind" [54] [a]. 

 

And it's always good to be reminded how the latter raised his hand (and stomped his foot) in a vain attempt to defend the terrestrial world against the digital order. He was a bit of a Nazi, but it's hard not to admire many aspects of Heidegger's thinking. But, as Han concedes, human beings have long since stopped dwelling between Earth and Sky:

 

"Human beings soar up towards the un-thinged [unbedingtheit], the unconditioned [...] towards a transhuman and post-human age in which human life will be a pure exchange of information. [...] Digitilization is a resolute step along the way towards the abolition of the humanum. The future of humans seems mapped out: humans will abolish themselves in order to posit themselves as the absolute." [72]

 

There will be no things close to our hearts - but that won't matter, for we won't have hearts, nor hands, feet, or genitals in the disembodied time to come. 

 

What was that line from Proverbs again ...? [b]

 

 

X.      

 

Why do so many people have headaches today? (I have one now.)

 

Could it be because the world is so restless and noisy; because no one knows how to keep still and stay silent; because no one can close their eyes or shut their fucking mouths for a moment?

 

As Arthur Fleck says: "Everybody is awful these days. It's enough to make anyone crazy. [...] Everybody just yells and screams at each other. Nobody's civil anymore. Nobody thinks what it's like to be the other guy." [c] 

 

But you don't have to be a mentally ill loner to recognise this - Byung-Chul Han pretty much tells us the same thing: "Hypercommunication, the noise of communication, desecrates the world, profanes it." [76] 

 

Learning to listen is a crucial skill; as is learning to be still if you wish to know the transcendent joy of the Greater Day and gaze with wonder upon the immensity of blue (this includes the blue of the sky, the blue of the sea, or the blue of a butterfly's wing, for example). 

 

But, paradoxically, learning to gaze also involves learning how to close one's eyes and look away, because gazing has an imaginative component. And that's important, for as Han writes:

 

"Without imagination, there is only pornography. Today, perception itself has something pornographic about it. It has the form of immediate contact, almost of a copulation of image and eye. The erotic takes place when we close our eyes. [...]

      What is so ruinous about digital communication is that it means we no longer have time to close our eyes. The eyes are forced into a 'continuous voracity'. They lose the capacity for stillness, for deep attentiveness." [79]

 

Staring at a screen is not the same as gazing at the sky; if the latter produces wonder, the former results only in eyestrain and a slavish inability not to react to every stimulus (which, as Nietzsche pointed out, is symptomatic of exhaustion and spiritual decline). Noble and healthy souls know that doing nothing is better than being hyperactive; that philosophy, for example, is born from idleness. 

 

Han terms this ability to do nothing negative potentiality:

 

"It is not a negation of positive potential but a potential of its own. It enables spirit to to engage in still, contemplative lingering, that is, deep attentiveness. [...] Stillness can be restored only by a strengthening of negative potentiality." [82] 

And where is all this leading? Towards the loss of identity - the surrender of self - towards happy anonymity: "Only in stillness, in the great silence, do we enter into a relation with the nameless, which exceeds us [...]" [83]

 

 

XI.

Byung-Chul Han closes his book with an excurses which begins with him falling off his bicycle (talk about the villainy of things) and then falling in love with a jukebox (talk about things close to the heart).  

Han likes old jukeboxes from the 1950s; they are erotico-magical things to him which "makes listening to music a highly enjoyable visual, acoustic and tactile experience" [87]. The records played on the jukebox give him "a vague sense that the world back then must have been somehow more romantic and dream-like than it is today" [88].  

Admitting that Heidegger would probably not have been a fan of the jukebox, Han insists nevertheless that apart from playing tunes, it imparts presence and intensifies being, which is something Alexa can never do.

 

This does kind of hint at the fact that Han awards thing status to whatever objects he happens to favour: J’aime, je n’aime pas - Oh, Miss Brodie, you are Barthesian ...

 

  

Notes

 

[a] I keep telling members of the D. H. Lawrence Society that whilst Zoom is extensive it lacks intensity and that being connected is not the same as being in an actual relation. Like it or not, digital communication negates physical presence and "accelerates the disappearance of the other" [55]. 

      Unfortunately, they either do not listen, do not understand, or do not seem to care. To read my post on this subject: click here. 

[b] I'm referring to Proverbs 4:23: "Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life." According to Byung-Chul Han, this was placed above the front door to Heidegger's house. 

[c] Joaquin Phoenix in the role of Arthur Fleck (Joker) speaking to Robert De Niro's character Murray Franklin (shortly before shooting him) in Joker (dir. Todd Philips, 2019): click here to watch on YouTube. 

 

 

Musical bonus: as Byung-Chul Han loves French singers and jukeboxes so much, here's Serge Gainsbourg on TV in 1965 performing Le claquer de doigts.

 

    

Sartre's Lobster (l'existentialisme est une peur des crustacés)

 

Sartre and the Lobsters by Dan Meth

tumblr.com

 

 

I. 

 

Usually, when one thinks of the lobster and its role within the cultural imagination, one immediately recalls Salvador Dalí and his surrealist telephone (and also, of course, his Dream of Venus exhibition in which semi-nude female models wore fresh seafood costumes, including lobsters covering their sexual organs). 

And one remembers also the 1978 single by the B-52s, Rock Lobster, which quickly became their signature tune: click here to view an amusing performance of the track on the popular music show Countdown in 1980.  

 

What I didn't know about until very recently, however, was the story of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and his (drug-induced) relationship with an imaginary lobster and a cast of crabs ...

 

 

II.

Many people are familiar with the fact that Sartre liked to smoke a pipe. And, being French, it can be taken as a given that he also puffed his way through a fair few packs of fags in his time and liked to knock back the red wine and black coffee. 

 

But not so many people know that he also consumed an impressive quantity of illicit drugs, including amphetamines and the naturally occurring psychedelic compound mescaline; the latter known for its hallucinogenic properties and the drug of choice for many artists and intellectuals (including Aldous Huxley, who famously described his experiences in the 1954 work The Doors of Perception). 

 

Sartre took mescaline shortly before publication of his first book, L'imagination in 1936.* Unfortunately, he had what might be characterised as a bad trip and for many months afterwards imagined he was being stalked by crustaceans (mostly crabs). 

 

Even when the effects of the drug must surely have worn off, Sartre remained convinced when feeling low that he was being followed by a giant lobster, always just hidden out of sight, and consulted Jacques Lacan in the hope that he might free himself of his invisible marine companion (whether this helped, I don't know; Lacan concluded that the philosopher simply had a fear of loneliness).  

 

 

Notes

 

* It should be noted that Sartre didn't go off, like Artaud, to the Mexican desert in order to experiment with mescaline; he had it injected under controlled conditions and observation at the Sainte-Anne hospital in Paris, at the invite of his old school chum, the physician and psychoanalyst, Dr. Daniel Lagache.  

 

For an interesting essay on how Sartre's crustacean obsessions influenced his work, see Peter Royle, 'Crabs', in Philosophy Now, Issue 67, (May/June 2008): click here.

 

For a related post on Elsa Schiaparelli's lobster dress (and Kosmo Kramer's lobster shirt), click here. 

Thanks to Tim Pendry for kindly suggesting this post.

Existentialism is a Disappointment

 

 

I. 

 

We all know Heidegger's magnificent response to Sartre's post-War declaration that l'existentialisme est un humanisme; let's just say he wasn't impressed [a]. But rather less well known is the effect it had on a generation of young French intellectuals who had previously adored the author of L'Être et le néant (1943). 

 

This generation includes Michel Tournier, whose recollection of this time is worth sharing at length as it perfectly illustrates the intense punk rock seriousness with which philosophy was then taken and how sexy and scandalous Sartre's phenomenological ontology appeared to be - before he sold out to humanism ...

 

 

II.  

 

"In the darkest days of the War, some of us, depressed by the oppressive restrictions, formed a small group united by a common idea of philosophy - a narrow, even fanatical idea that might well have gone in hand with tumbrils and the guillotine. I was foolishly about to write that Deleuze had been the 'soul' of this group when suddenly I had a vivid image of the brickbats and howls with which that hated word would have been greeted by the adolescents we were then. [...] In any case, Deleuze did set the tone of the group, and it was he who sustained our ardour." [b]

 

"One day in the autumn of 1943 a meteor of a book fell on to our desks: Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. After a moment's stupor there was a long mulling over [...] the book exuded irresistible power; it was full of exquisite subtleties, encyclopedic, proudly technical, with an intuition of diamondlike simplicity running through it from start to finish. Already the clamour of the anti-philosophical rabble could be heard rising in opposition in the press. [...] We were exultant. Like Socrates's disciples in fourth-century Athens or Hegel's students at Jena in 1805, we had the extraordinary good fortune of seeing a philosophy born before our very eyes." [131]  

 

"On October 28, 1945, Sartre called us together. It was a mob scene. An enormous crowd pressed against the walls of the tiny venue. The exits were blocked by those who had not managed to gain entry [...] and women who fainted had to be piled on a convenient grand piano. The wildly acclaimed lecturer was lifted bodily over the crowd and on to the podium. Such popularity should have alerted us. Already the suspect tag 'existentialism' had been attached to the new system. [...] So what was existentialism? We were soon to find out. Sartre's message could be stated in six words: existentialism is a form of humanism. [...] We were devastated. Our master had retrieved that exhausted old figure of Man, still stinking with sweat and 'inner life', from the rubbish heap where we had left him [...] And everyone applauded." [132]

 

"That night we gathered in a café to mourn our loss. One of us thought he had found the key to what went wrong in a novel that Sartre had published in 1938 called Nausea. [...] Suddenly it was all too clear [...] Sartre had [... become] the Autodidact. Around the table we were unanimous in our forecasts of disaster [...] And the future seemed to bear us out [...]" [132-33]

 

It should be noted that, looking back over thirty years later, Tournier is prepared to admit that the reaction experienced by himself and his philosophical comrades was probably a bit harsh:

 

"This reaction to Sartre should be taken for what it was: a liquidation of the father by overgrown adolescents afflicted with the awareness that they owed him everything. With hindsight I can see all the juvenile excess in our condemnation." [133]

 

However, Tournier then importantly qualifies this:

 

"Yet I cannot help thinking that it contained a grain of truth. Sartre seems always to have suffered from an excess of moral scruple. Acute fear [...] undeniably diminished his powers and his creative potential. I am convinced that one cannot live a full and healthy life without a minimum of indifference to the woes of others. [...] Sartre's misfortune was that [...] he was a Marxist who was never able to give up the secret ambition of becoming a saint." [133]

 

And with that Tournier sticks the boot into Sartre in an even more brutal manner than Heidegger ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] For those who don't know ... L'existentialisme est un humanisme (1946) is a text by Jean-Paul Sartre, based on a lecture of the same title given in Paris on 29 October 1945. 

      Invited by Jean Beaufret in November 1946 to comment on Sartre's work and the development of existentialism in France, Martin Heidegger composed a response known in English as the Letter on Humanism (revised for publication in 1947). In this text, Heidegger distanced himself from Sartre and dismissed his thought as merely a reversed form of metaphysics which is oblivious to the truth of Being. 

      Those who wish to read a transcript of Sartre's lecture for themselves can do so by clicking here. Heidegger's response is also available as a pdf online or can be found in his Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Routledge, 2010). My reading of Heidegger's Letter on Humanism can be found here.

 

[b] Michel Tournier, The Wind Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Collins, 1989), p. 128. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the post. 

      Note that I have very slightly modified the translation by Goldhammer in places. The original French text was published as Le Vent Paraclet (Gallimard, 1977) and readers who (rightly) worry about issues of translation are free to consult this if they wish.       

 

Aujourd’hui, Juliette Gréco est morte

Juliette Gréco by Erwin Blumenfeld (1951)

 

 

Juliette Gréco - the face (and voice) of chic postwar Paris and muse to numerous Left-Bank poets and philosophers, including Jacques Prévert and Jean-Paul Sartre - died today, aged 93, and, despite the fact she refused to collaborate on Malcolm's Paris project (I only sing in French), that's still sad news for all of us who loved everything about her; from her style to the fact she was an Aquarian.

 

 

Play: La Javanaise - a song originally written and composed by Serge Gainsbourg for Juliette Gréco in 1962, after they had spent the evening together listening to records and drinking champagne. It was released as a single in March 1963 (with Gainsbourg's own interpretation of the song as the B-side). Click here to listen, or here to watch her performing the song on French TV in 1972.      

On Textual Cruising (with Reference to the Case of Camus)

Photo of Albert Camus by Henri Cartier-Bresson (1944): 
with his upturned collar, cigarette, and slicked back hair, 
Camus embodied the essence of French cool in this period

One of the (many) ideas I've absorbed from Roland Barthes is that of textual cruising as a key component of the art (and erotics) of reading. 

To cruise the body of a text is both to slowly drift through it in an aimless but pleasurable manner and to make oneself sensitive to the play of signs and those few details, preferences, and inflections (what Barthes terms biographemes) that seem to reveal something of the author and "whose distinction and mobility might go beyond any fate and come to touch, like Epicurean atoms, some future body, destined to the same dispersion".*

I mention this, because I do often wonder not only about the (intertextual) relationship between written works, but also about the (homotextual) relationship between myself and those authors for whom I feel a good deal of affection and which is absolutely not based on any intellectual appeal.

Take Camus, for example. He's by no means a favourite writer and I have only a very casual relationship with his work. But I'm fond of him nevertheless, in a way I never could be about Sartre - monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo - and it makes me wonder if it isn't simply due to the fact that Camus was so damn good-looking and his biographemes so seductive ...?**

* See: Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller, (University of California Press, 1989), p. 9.  

** I'm not simply trying to be funny here: one commentator recently described Camus as "the Don Draper of existentialism" and several others have remarked on his physical attractiveness and beautiful writing style. See Adam Gopnik, 'Facing History: Why We Love Camus' The New Yorker (April 2, 2012): click here to read online.

On the Ethics of Ambiguity

Jastrow's ambiguous figure of the duck-rabbit made famous by 

Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), II, §xi

As a writer, one lives more in fear of being understood than misunderstood. Thus, like Nietzsche, one greatly values ambiguity ...

Ambiguity enables one to appear transpositional and to create an open text in which meaning is always subject to interpretation and, ultimately, deferral; i.e., it allows one to have it not only both ways, but all ways and no way.

(I suppose that's why criminal defence lawyers also like ambiguity. Only prosecutors hoping for a conviction or judges looking to pass sentence, worry about certainty and establishing the facts of a case beyond a reasonable doubt.)    

It's naive, of course, to think that meaning can ever be fully determined; for language is never innocent. Not only does it lack transparency, but ambiguity is built into every word. If grammar is the presence of God within language, then ambiguity is the devil hiding behind every sentence.

 

Thus it is that man - a being who dwells within language - is the ambiguous animal par excellence. Even if we faithfully dot our i's and cross our t's, our relationship to the world, to others, and to ourselves is never straightforward.

Sartre famously follows Heidegger here and, interestingly, Simone de Beauvoir attempts to base an entire ethics on ambiguity, arguing that we need to accept the latter and, indeed, learn to love our fate: 

"Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us, therefore, try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting."

Ethics, she goes on to say, cannot be based on the mathematical certainty of science and the attempt to think the world and ourselves in such clear and absolute terms invariably leads to fascism and to genocide. It's not grey uncertainty but black-and-white conviction that should trouble us.

Thus we should learn to love those philosophers who privilege the dangerous perhaps; for it expresses not only vagueness concerning the present, but future possibility - which is why, of course, ambiguity is also the basis of creativity.       

Notes:

Joseph Jastrow's duck-rabbit (or, if you prefer, rabbit-duck) illustration originally appeared in 'The Mind's Eye', Popular Science Monthly, Issue 54, (1899), pp. 299-312.

Simone de Beauvoir's, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman, (Citadel Press, 1949), can be read online by clicking here.
 
Nietzsche speaks of Philosophen des gefährlichen Vielleicht in Beyond Good and Evil, Pt. 1. 2. 

For a sister post to this one waxing philosophical on insincerity, click here.

Le Visqueux: Notes on Existential Slime and Ontological Sexism

I've never been a great fan of Jean-Paul Sartre and fully endorse Heidegger's repudiation of the Frenchman's attempt to characterize existentialism as a humanism. Mostly though, my dislike of Sartre is an irrational one. Simply put, I've always found him physically repulsive; one wouldn't want to cruise his body, as Barthes would say.

To me, there's something slimy about him - which is ironic, since Sartre offers a controversial account of slime and the danger of all things gooey (including women) towards the end of his most famous and sustained work of philosophy, Being and Nothingness (1943).

Le visqueux, says Sartre, compromises the masculine, non-sticky, sugar-free nature of consciousness or being-for-itself and threatens to submerge the latter in what Camille Paglia memorably describes as "the fleshy muck of the generative matrix" - just like a wasp drowning in the jam.

Slime, in all its base viscosity, affords us neither the reassuring inertia of the solid, nor the liquid dynamism of a fluid. It sticks to us and it sucks us in: it is the feminine revenge of non-conscious being that exists in itself beyond our knowledge of it.

The gynephobic character of this language - and let's not even get started on what he says about holes and the nature of the obscene - would be shocking, were it not so ludicrous and dated. But one can't help wondering what, privately, Simone made of it ...?

In her own writings, she happily adopted Sartre's ontology and seemed to turn a blind eye to his sexism. But what about in the bedroom? One likes to think she might have had a word in his ear about the nature of embodiment and how, whilst a dry soul is best, a moist cunt is the bestest thing of all.   

See:

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (Routledge, 1969), pp. 610-12.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, (Yale University Press, 1990), p. 93.

See also Margery Collins and Christine Pierce, 'Holes and Slime: Sexism in Sartre's Psychoanalysis', in Philosophical Forum, (vol. V, 1973), pp. 112-27.

Raise the Scarlet Standard High

Sartre declared that anyone who isn't a communist is a filthy swine. 

I don't think that's true. However, it's undeniably the case that there is shit in the hearts of all Tories, extending from members of parliament to those who vote for them or offer financial support.

And it also includes those useful idiots in the Liberal Democrats who collaborate with and, indeed, maintain the present government and its shameful policies.