Is there a Minotaur in Eden?

Ah, how often she watched a cow with spite in her face and said, “why does that one please my lord? Look how she frisks before him in the delicate grass; no doubt the fool thinks it suits her!” – Ovid, Amores

The Greeks had a golden age, but no Garden of Eden. No initial shock at nakedness. Although there were, of course, the prohibitions. Artemis, bathing, is seen by Acteon, who is punished for his vision. But here it is the goddess who is naked, not the human.

No Eden, then, but a labyrinth.

Pliny, in the Natural History, claims that labyrinths are “the most stupendous works, perhaps, on which mankind has expended its labors; and not for chimerical purposes, merely, as might possibly be supposed.” The Egyptians, in Pliny’s account, got there first. Daedalus was a copier. The Nome of Heracleopolites was the first.

“…that Daedalus took this for the model of the Labyrinth which he constructed in Crete is beyond doubt; though he only reproduced the 100th part of it, that portion, namely, which encloses circuitous paths, windings, and inextricable galleries which lead to and fro. We must not, comparing this last to what we see delineated on our mosaic pavements, or to the mazes formed in the fields for the amusement of children, suppose it to be a narrow promenade along which we may walk for many miles together; but we must picture to ourselves a building filled with numerous doors, and galleries which continually mislead the visitor, bringing him back, after all his wanderings, to the spot from whence he set out.” [340]


Detienne, in his essay, the Labyrinth and the Crane, claims that the matter of labyrinth consisted, at first, of corporal gestures – a dance. The dance was an imitation of the waggle of the cranes, holy birds who, in the Mediterranean world, were recognized for their long flights. Detienne quotes a Greek manuscript that explains how the crane navigated:

“In zoological reports, the crane is a marvelously skilled navigator and so bold that its migration leads it from the coldest parts of the world, the plains of Scythia, to the hottest, Egypt, Libya and Ethiopia. According to a formula in the History of Animals by Aristotle, the crane flies from one extreme of the world to the other, it ties together the two parts of the world. To this performance, the geranos adds the memorable expedient of a preparative that became proverbial. On departing for its flight, each of the cranes in their prudence would carry a pebble, a little stone that would permit them to mark, according to the noise that it made in falling, if the flight was going over the sea or the air. This trick was destined to render credible the fact that the migratory bird oriented itself in actuality in the immensity of the sky. The highflying cranes were thus a given that navigators parting for the open waters search for in the marks and signs above their heads in the middle of the night, when it was necessary to conjecture according to the stars, as the greek sailors said. It is pertinent that the poverb, the cranes pick up their pebbles, was said of those who act with prudence.These great birds possessed in an exemplary fashion the capacity to foresee to the point that they seemed to know intuitively the nature of the airs, the changing of the seasons and, so to speak, the map of the world.”

Detienne moves in his essay from the cranes, the world travelers, to the bulls, which figure so much in the myth of the labyrinth. In the quote from Ovid above, Pasiphae is being figured. Pasiphae could never have given birth to the Minotaur, half man, half beast, if it weren’t for technology – the artisan, Daedelus’ marvelous bull fucking machine. One must remember that the couple Minos/Pasiphae was both cursed in their sexual being – for disobeying Poseidon, Minos could only ejaculate scorpions. Pasiphae, similarly cursed, fell in love with Poseidon’s bull (as always, dynasty is the key to counter-generality – the Cretan royal house stems, after all, from Zeus’s rape of Europa, in which Zeus was the bull).

… and his maneuvers [Poseidon’s] betrayed Pasiphae to unlimited desires which a foreign artisan named Daedalus had the ingenuity to know how to satisfy. Sheathed in wood and bridled in leather, which the whole assemblage giving her the appearance of a virgin cow in heat, the queen coupled with the bull to reproduce, in an inversion of the role of the partners that produced the union which gave birth to Minos himself. By the violence of desire that Poseidon had rise up from the depths of her being, Pasiphae, ensavaged, gave herself up to loves that were as bestial as the embraces of Europa and Zeus were divine, when the god borrowed the guise of the bull in its nature as lover.”

Labyrinths come in many materials, but they all hide some central fact or object. Where there is a secret, there is a labyrinth. And of course there is a clue, a thread, something that binds the secret to the world. The flight of the cranes and the net of Ananke, here, are about that unity binding the two extremes of the earth. Encyclopedias, on the other hand, have as many passages as labyrinths, exhibit as many dead ends and links, but have no middle nor secret. This is their secret. Diderot went to prison for having no secret at all. The Encyclopedia is the labyrinth turned inside out. Seemingly it is all outlets, here, and no middle – except itself. For it is in the encyclopedia that the human limit is erased. It is no longer cranes that bind the world in their flight, nor the dances of the crane, nor perverse desires – which are themselves the object of encyclopedists – but the encyclopedia itself. Man, not Minotaur. If anything, in the encyclopedia, labyrinth sits in the middle of labyrinth.

If we took a mythical approach to the enlightenment, we could, allegorically, imagine the three Critiques as the seraphim around the encyclopedia – and so translate the labyrinth into an Eden. This isn’t far from the allegorical impulse of the great Romantics: remember Novalis’ encyclopedia. If there is a public transcript of the great tradition, it is surely the encyclopedia. According to Scott’s schema, only the little tradition possesses a hidden transcript, uninstitutionalized, jokey, tricky. The wisdom of the buffoon, of Sancho Panza. But is this so? In fact, the modern is full of attempts to show that the powerful also have a hidden transcript. How many Ariadne’s and their threads have been touted for their knowledge of the center of the encyclopedia?

Transgression as innocence

Having tried to get into Paradise through the back door, we have found, instead, a curious gap in the reading of Sade: the fact that Sade’s libertines use a very un-libertine ethnography. Far from extending his hand, so to speak, to his predecessors like Foigny and Lahontan, Sade picks up on the most extreme descriptions of cruelty amassed by the biased witness of priests intent on subduing the savage. Is this irony? Or is this a necessity generated by Sade’s game – the rules of which, as Klossowski points out, depend on a perpetually renewed outrage. In the Sadeian system, the notion of universal perversion – counter-generality – comes into conflict with the ludic necessity for outrage.

In a sense, then, Sade’s system of transgression cancels itself out. It turns out to be the path of pins going forward to the wolf in grandma’s clothing. Counter-generality dissolves in the submission to the iron law that forwards is equal to backwards – the paths are the same. So saith the white magic. Whereas for the black magician…

We are dealing with what James C. Scott, in a series of articles in the seventies, called the conflict between the Great tradition and the little tradition. He took those phrases from Robert Redfield, a University of Chicago anthropologist who studied Mexican villages – like his friend, George Foster, the man who wrote the paper on the image of the limited good. Scott, in the seventies, was mulling over his field work in Southeast Asia. At the time, there was, of course, a lot of interest in peasant revolts – one of them seemed to have blown away the American behemoth in Vietnam. Meanwhile, in the material shadows, the Green revolution was eating away the very substance and fiber of those peasant communities. Scott, in Indonesia, had a chance to see the part world (to borrow Kroeber’s phrase, which had been borrowed by Redfield) of the peasant. Bateson, Geerz, Scott, Danzinger – Indonesia was obviously one of those cold war peripheries in which the metropolitan culture experimented.

Scott’s theory in the early seventies, before he codified it in the book on hidden transcripts and resistance, was that peasant culture exhibited a double structure. On the one hand, it was on the peasant’s ability to supply food that the urban elite culture of the Great Tradition depended. On the other hand, it was on the Great Tradition, implanted by numerous avatars in the part world – the priest, the teacher, the commissar – that the Little Tradition of the peasant depended. But that Little Tradition was not a transcription of the Great Tradition, it was a variation of it, substituting concrete objects for abstractions, and local cults for Great cults. The part world lacked the institutional means to reproduce itself, which is why it reproduced itself, as it were, inside the Great Tradition.

“The very particularism of the little tradition has two important implications. First it means that, by itself, the village lacks the institutional means for a direct confrontation with a vastly more powerful great tradition. The peasantry constitutes a local society or, at best, a county society, while elites are linked together at the provincial and national level. While confrontations may nevertheless be im- posed, the historic strength of the little tradition has resided in dissimulation, foot-dragging, and passive non-compliance. One might even call this kind of Brechtian tenacity the normal pattern of class struggle for the peasantry.139 Second, it means that the peasantry is, by itself, ill-equipped, in terms of both knowledge and interest, to sustain a national struggle for broad goals. Thus, most peasant movements or armies are coalitions of local groups which, like Zapata's forces, operate locally, champion local issues, and are relatively indifferent to national issues except as they affect the fortunes of the local struggle.”

That dissimulation is immediately recognizable in the greatest allegory of the great/little tradition, Don Quixote, although Scott doesn’t mention it. This is where the modern begins. We’ve been circling around transgression because it is central to a form of resistance to the happiness culture that traverses, in effect, our three traditions of alienation (liberal, radical, reactionary). In the doubles which we keep coming across, the sage and the fool, Dom Juan and Sganarelle, Diderot and Rameau’s nephew, we see embodied the versus of the Great/Little tradition. The savage is certainly one of the figures in this constellation. Adario, who, shockingly, speaks in the tones of the Great Tradition – the infallible mark of his ficticity, to Lahontan’s many, many critics – is defending the golden age that the Little tradition dreams of. This is the innocence that forms another modality of transgression.

“In fact there is good reason to believe that within every great tradition rebellion with mass support there is also a little tradition revolt that threatens to usurp that rebellion for its parochial ends. This "revolution in the revolution" is typically denounced by radical elites as adventurism, deviation, or anarchy. Just as often, of course, it is the radical elite which attempts to usurp a rebellion begun by peasants and to put it to ends which its supporters do not recognize and, indeed, might disavow. One may even detect an additive, temporal dimension to these "layers" of rebellion akin to syncretism in religion. That is, the goals of purely little tradition rebellions have something of an ahistorical, permanent quality to them, like animism. When self-consciously revolutionary elites emerge to link up with these older patterns, they tend to add a new dimension to the revolt but not to eliminate the parochial forms in the process.”

We are going to turn to the science of myth, next.

world class felix culpa

Gabriel Foigny was an underground man of the classical age – a drunk, a lech, an ex-priest. He fled from a monastery in France, where the bonds of chastity were evidently too tight for him, to the Protestant freedom of Geneva, in the 1660s. There he found a job as a teacher – his attempt to go on preaching under the new dispensation was discouraged when he appeared in church drunk – and married a low class slut who proceeded to cheat on him. Being an educated man, he turned his hand to the market for reading matter. First, he created playing cards of a kind, on which there were prayers – or perhaps Tarot signs. Then, in 1676, he published a manuscript he had been ‘given”, La Terre Ausrale. Later on, he admitted that he wrote it himself – by this time he was on the hop again, leaving behind a pregnant maidservant and a set of angry Genevan ministers. The TA is an account of a colonial Sinbad the sailor who ends up, after various adventures in Africa and Portugal, cast up on the Australian shore. Australia, here, is not to be confused with the continent of that name – it was more like More’s Utopia than Van Dieman’s discovery. The account of the naturals of Australia is accompanied by a dialogue between the protagonist and one of their sages. Through this sage, Foigny expressed, as Geoffrey Atkinson put it, his “open and secret revolt against society and its institutions.” [39]

Such a revolt, to be radical, must go back to the very root of society. That, of course, is paradise. Society begins in the annihilation of paradise, as readers of Genesis know. Or I should say, its annihilation for humans – for it is part of the magic of the story that the Garden of Eden is not abolished by the Lord. It exists, but it exists, now, outside of human existence. It is barred. Thus, no sentence in human history has had the effect of Adam’s communication to God that he and Eve are naked. For, as God immediately replies, “who told thee that thou wast naked?” It is one of those moments for which Joyce, in Finnegan’s Wake, devised his long sentence-words, dividing one Viconian epoch from another: “The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonneronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr”.

But if we go around the world, as Kleist’s dramaturge suggests, perhaps we can get in the back way. Foigny’s sage-sauvage is, as Atkinson writes, ‘filled with horror at the idea of wearing clothes”. He cannot be persuaded that clothing is an aid to morality – comparing the Europeans to “little children who no longer know an object as soon as it is covered with a veil.” [63] As without, so within. The colonial process – or the civilizing process – puts into relief superstition as its privileged target, while its subjects, the subjected, gaze with disbelief at the superstitions of the civilizers. Ultimately, what was this, for the Europeans, but the rejection of that peculiar moment in Genesis, when God, for once, stops being a politician or a magician – when he makes clothing of skin for his creatures. As he once made Adam of clay, the act of a worldmaker, so he now clothes them, the act of a colonizer – but colonizer in the most intimate sense. There is no more intimate act ever attributed to Yahweh than this: ‘Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skin, and clothed them.” As though Adam’s announcement made the seals fall from God’s eyes, too. The intimacy in this act is in its superfluity: after all, having condemned humans to labor – and the sexes to division of labor – there’s no reason that Adam and Eve could not have made their own clothes. What kind of divine necessity is on display, here? What kind of cosmic discomfort? We know that the Gods, other Gods, can be moved by human nakedness – can be stirred to desire. Per Ganymede, per Leda, per Daphne, per every metamorphosis, every skin that goes on and every skin that comes off.

These things are in the background against which Lahontan’s Dialogues was read. The problem the early twentieth century readers had with Lahontan’s “noble savage” – an idea that gets its political coloring from early twentieth century conservatism - is increased by Adario’s “obscenity’, for Lahontan has his natural sage speak about the “shameful parts”. The Europeans were very interested in the covering up or not of the shameful parts – in 1509, in the description of the seven naturals that were taken to Rouen, either from Newfoundland or from a boat that was found adrift on the ocean, Eusebius, the chronicler, makes sure to record that the savages wore a belt, to which was attached a purse like vestment for covering up the shameful parts.

Yet the Iroquois and Huron boys, to the often expressed dismay of the missionaries, went about naked. The dialogue between Adario and Lahontan approaches this topic from the point of view not of the naked boys themselves, but of the effect of this nudity on the girls. Lahontan, following in the conventions of the Europeans, connects the power of Huron women to their power of choice. Adario finds the European objection at once absurd and typical – for the notion that the fathers should have power over the girls stems, ultimately, from the power of the mine and thine among the Europeans. Adario’s explanation of the rules of sexual alliance seems to be confirmed by other writers on the Hurons. Women were not forced to marry men chosen by their parents, but they were forced to obey rules against marrying relatives. And the marriage bond was not indissoluble. Adario remarks that after forty, women don’t marry again, not wanting, after that, to have children. Lahontan has two things to say about the Huron system: that the women show cruelty by aborting unwanted children, and that they must give up nudity: “For the privilege of your boys to go about nude causes a terrible rapine [ravage] in the hearts of your girls. For , not being made of bronze, they can’t help it if, at the aspect of members that I dare not name, they go into rut on certain occasions when the rascals [coquins] show that nature is neither dead nor ungrateful to them.” [93]

Rise and fall. Adario, while sympathetic to the argument against abortion [which seems to mean, as well, infanticide], is scornful of the argument against nude children. Far from being a bad thing, it helps girls decide if they want the “big thing” which he won’t name or the medium or small – and he assures Lahontan that the caprices of women are such that the big thing won’t monopolize all hearts. Some want strength, some want spirit, some want big shameful parts.

But this is his judgment of the Europeans:

‘ I agree that the peoples among whom are introduced the mine and the thine have good reason for hiding not only their virile parts, but still all the members of the body. For what would be the good of the silver and gold of the French, if they don’t employ it to adorn themselves in rich garments? Since it is only by the clothing that one makes an estate of people. Isn’t it a great advantage for a Frenchman to be able to hide some natural default under beautiful clothing? Believe me, nudity is only shocking to those people who have property in goods. An ugly man among you, a badly built one discovers the secret of being beautiful and well made with a beautiful wig, and gilded dress, under which one can’t distinguish the thighs and the artificial buttocks from the natural ones.” [92-93]

Thus, briefly, one turns the world around. But the world is moving, all the time, right face forward, with wig and artificial buttocks in tow.

the property I have in my johnson

We have tried to show that the dismissal of Adario as a figment of Lahontan’s imagination, or as the noble savage which romantically stands in the way of the modern admiration of itself – that moment of vulgarity, of the ultimately base, the truly modern – is an intellectually shaky stance. In its movement, it does conceal a truth that it doesn’t recognize – that there is no reason to suppose that all cultures match, as it were, the cultures of Europe. Match as agreeing with, or antithetical too. The possibility that two cultures can miss each other entirely is the possibility of counter-generality, unlimited. Although we like to think that the Gods play on a game board extensive enough that every pawn can find a footing. The myth of the myth of the noble savage is based, as we have said, on the myth of the civilized European, the features of which (belief in science, for instance) took in a very, very small minority of Europeans. On the other hand, as Bruce Trigger has said, the Europeans had developed an adaptability to circumstances that ultimately made them powerful not only outside, with their guns and metallurgy, but inside, with their need to be in the subject, to have the subject believe. It is this level where the savage and the civilized take their real places, masks off. But it is a level in which, to the incredulity of the governors, the slip and slide between one role and the other becomes incredibly easy. Kurz goes native, the native goes Kurz. Nous sommes tous des sauvages.

Adario takes on the system that he knows is killing him at its most vital point: the mine and the thine. This sorting procedure stalks through the pox. It also stalks through the Europe of savages, the interior, the Leibeigne of Hesse, the church governed principalities, the urban mechanics, the accursed estates.

Adario’s attack takes an interesting tack when we come to that issue which must be dear to libertine ethnologues: nudity. If Paradise was the déjà vu of the explorers, Eden just ahead of them, at the center of Paradise was the central and first act of the opened eye: clothing oneself. God’s first animal to cover itself in shame as to what it showed. The Europeans always found the ways in which the natives covered themselves to be disquieting. In the case of the Hurons and Iroquois, what disturbed was not the allure of tits and cunt, the supplement to our voyage of Cytheria, down the trembling female body – no, it was dick. Turnabout that has been muted, even now, among those who would nose out our Orientalist ancestors, and one of the reasons that Lahontan’s biographer finds him slightly obscene. Just as Adario found the European propensity for daring décolleté slightly obscene.

About which, more in the next post.

Lahontan

“Just look at P…, he continued, when she plays Daphne, and, chased by Apollo, turns to look at him – her soul sits in the turmoil of the small of her back; she bends, as though she wanted to break, as a naiad out of the school of Bernini. Look at the young F., then, when he, as Paris, stands among the three Goddesses and hands the apple to Venus. His entire soul sits (it is a shock to see it) in his elbow.

Such mistakes, he added, disconnectedly, are unavoidable, since we ate from the Tree of Knowledge. Paradise is still locked up and the Cherub is behind us; we must make a trip around the world, and see whether perhaps it isn’t still open somewhere in the back.” – Kleist, On the Marionette Theater.

I have danced in these threads so far without, astonishingly enough, mentioning Paradise. But now is the time. Daphne crouches, Paris extends the apple. Once upon a time, when Eve was not coy, the animals could talk, and an island floated up to the people, trailing a cloud above it, on which the Gods were standing. Paradise, of course, it was always a question of Paradise in the Encounter.

… So what was he thinking, sitting there in 1707. There – in Amsterdam? In Copenhagen? As he took up the quill, was he thinking that he had never ceased traveling? That it was all as if he had never gotten out of that infinite forest, that it was still ceaselessly snowing, as he had first seen it from the deck of a boat, leaving debts he could hardly understand behind him, status, college, a dead father tracked down and staked through the heart by the immovability of a society that knew nothing of progress but everything about prestige. The ancients feuded with the moderns on the torrents of the Pau. Lom d’arc, Baron of Lahontan, his father, cleared the Adour River up to Bayonne. He’d never seen a river like the St. Lawrence. Rivers ran fatally through his life.

Did he think that the blizzard of snow and the forest were mirror images one of the other, both wildernesses through which only the most artful entity, the Manitou, could dodge?

The tricks you learn. Looking at his hand, the souvenir of the stump where his little finger used to be. Left for the filthy bottomdwellers at some Wisconsin portage…

According to his biographer and self appointed judge, Joseph-Edmund Roy, the Baron de Lahontan’s father had exhausted his own resources and a great part of his life in the work of clearing the river. In the end, he succeeded, making Bayonne a commercial port. His reward was to be sued for debt, and to fail, in turn, to collect the debts owed him.

Lahontan. Lahontan was a small village which, at one time, was comprised in the territory held by Montaigne's family. Montaigne mentions it as a funny, primitive place. Peculiarly cut off. The story is that the village kept its own customs, generation after generation, until an outsider married into the place, and introduced all the modern troubles: lawsuits, doctors, exchange.

In the shadow of the Pyrenees. He was eight years old when his father died. The son of the second wife.

17. Baron de Lahontan was seventeen when he first saw New France. Ten years later, he turned his back on it for the last time, a convoluted quarrel such as he always seemed to be getting into. Deserting his post to take sail on a ship that he bribed to drop him off on the Portugese shore. By then, he was suffering from a bit of persecution complex about returning to France. Afraid of being seized for debt, or insubordination. He’d made enemies, god knows. The Sieur de Pontchartrain paid men to silence the like of small fry nobility.

“On the 23 Jume 1699, the parliament in Paris issued an arrest – a warrant – in this affair. It is enough to say that the text of the warrant mentons more than 150 summonses, requests, replies, sustainments, contradictions, arres and sentences, without counting the production of supplementary motions. We find more than sixty parties intervening. They come from Paris, Tours, Rouen and every corner of Bearn. The procedures, which began in 1664, were continued annually up to 1699 when the warrant on the distribution of money was issued, but in 1789, the city of Bayonne was still fighting with the creditors of the Lahontan family.”

Perhaps it is a winter morning. The day is cloudy. He sets his pen to the foolscape. The expriest will visit him later in the day, and they will go over the dialogue. Ex-priest, but still a priest – not the kind of creature he likes. Something about them leaves him breathless with hostility. And the ex-priest was common, there was no denying it. Some peddler’s boy, he imagined. He remembers getting out of a tough spot in Spain, no money for the inn, using the gestures he’d observed used by the Jesuits among the Huron, and the gestures, too, that the local healer used, setting himself up as a montebank, paying the bill, getting a coach. The baron-medecin. Out of Moliere and Don Quixotte. Now, he receives, under a cover name, money from a family friend, which he invests in bills of exchange, creaming off a certain percentage for himself.

He’ll last be seen hunting. In a forest on an estate in Luxemberg. Leibniz mentions him. Leibniz the pious man, Lahontan the libertine sceptic. What is broken in the network, what we don’t see. Only blind guesses.

The snow comes down day after day. He learns an Algonquin tongue. Reads Petronious. Lascivious scenes before going to sleep. A priest, one day, comes into his room, spots the book, seizes it and tears it into shreds. He will always resent this insult.

Did he dine with Bayle? When Adorio arose before him, the Huron philosophe. Who had visions of the undoing of his people in every baptism and ever poxy corpse. Or who was the pious Indian leader who died in Montreal and was given a Christian funeral. What do you know about people?

Lahontan had once wanted to discover something. The Long River. A foolish ambition to garner the kind of prestige that LaSalle, that madman, had gained. His party sailing past a burned out post he never noticed, a post that had been set up by Lasalle in Missouri, where a trunk was emblazoned with the words that would continue eternally return to whisper in select ears in the Artificial Paradise: Nous sommes tous des sauvages.

The Black Robes, impressing the Hurons with the announcement that the world turned around the sun. Meanwhile, back in Lahontan, a man who professed to believe that the world turned around the sun, if anyone had been so foolishly inclined to contradict the evidence of his senses, would have been visited by the priests and the local authorities and would, assuredly, recant. Civilization – not a word in general use. Citizen. Not a word in general use. Subject – ah, subjects. To turn the savages into subjects of the king. That was the project. A word undergoing some strange rhetorical stress, subject.

The ex priest, they say, added details only a cleric would know. Citations from Origen – would the 30 year old Lahontan have read Origen? And of course distance buries everything, even the Huron chief who is disallowed, as time goes by, his own critique of European civilization. No, they would speak in childish metaphors. No religion, these people. Cruel torturers. Will do anything their women tell them to do.

8 Nov. 1710

I hope you will pardon the liberty I take in imposing on your goodness for a subject about which I am going to speak to you.

My friend Bierling asked me, by a letter expressly for that purpose, if the Baron de Lahontan with his voyage and his dialogues is something imaginary and invented, like this Sadeur [the fictional protagonist of Gabriel who has been among the Australian savages and who reports to us their costumes and conversations, or if this is a real man who has been in America and who has spoken to a real savage named Adario. For one judges that an entire people living tranquilly among themselves without magistrates, without trials, without quarrels, is something as incredible as those hermaphrodite Australians. The discourse of Adoria has confirmed these people in their Pyrrhonism.

You will ask me, Mademoiselle, what relevance does this have for me, and shouldn’t I address M. de Lahontan himself. I will tell you why. One wants to know if Lahontan is a real and substantial man. As he was dangerously ill this summer, he could be dead (God forbid), the gout may have risen and killed him since, or he could have been saved through the application of the horns of some dear more savage than the savage animals which are respected in America.

One may perhaps judge that I have a secret reason and that the first serves only as a pretext. But say what you will, only be content with the subject of my letter. If monsieur le Baron of Lahontan is well, as I don’t doubt, he won’t be angry to have become a problem like Homer or more like Orpheus…”

- G.W.F. Leibniz

And so he sits there – where? – scratching on foolscape, the perpetual refugee. As new as the subject, as new as the citizen. Whose home moved out from under him. An island appeared, it trailed clouds, the gods disembarked, and they distributed holy objects.

More on the myth of the myth of the noble savage

It is hard to cut through the scrim. While the Jesuits were trying to impress the Hurons with the latest discoveries in natural philosophy, in 1677, the police in Paris were arresting Magdelaine de la Grange and charging her, at that moment, with murder and forging a marriage certificate between herself and the lawyer she was living with. This was the beginning, it turned out, of the "Affair of Poisons", in which the highly civilized nobility of Louis XIV's court were found to be frequenters of fortune tellers, back ally witches, and implorers, upon the right occasion, of the devil. The affair was investigated by men who assembled in a room in which all the walls were shrouded with black cloth, and the testimonies were elicited by torture.

It is the latter culture that historians call the civilized one, as opposed to the savages of New France. Why? Historians are like shopkeepers in a Mafia dominated section of Queens – they are overly impressed with guns. Civilization equals a lotta guns. Savages on the one side, the urban society with books and guns on the other. In this divide, it is the soft Westerner who praises the lifestyle of the savages as having any advantage over the civilized. Thus, one puts down the myth that they were ecologically aware. The myth that they were gentle. This or that myth. The iconoclasm, however, never gets out of hand – there is not putting down of the myth that the civilized were civilized. Thus, contact testimony to the stature of the Indians (a very good indicator of well being), or the non-hierarchized religious organization of certain Indian nations, or the political and personal power females in certain Indian nations enjoyed is ignored. To emphasize these things is to see the savages through a “soft” focus. It is to lose track of civilization.

Of course, historians of the Americas often are astonishingly ill informed about the history of the European societies, and view European protagonists as, of course, agents who have experienced the city, the mechanical philosophy, the horse, uh, mathematics and all the rest of it. That the Copernican system would have astonished most of the inhabitants of Paris and certainly most of the inhabitants of Lahontan – a little region near the Pyrenees – is something quite beyond the myth of the noble savage argument.

James P. Ronda, in 1977, published a charming article entitled "We Are Well As We Are": An Indian Critique of Seventeenth-Century Christian Missions”, in which he quotes testimony that was sent back in the Jesuit Relations – a sort of newsletter of the missionaries in New France. When the Jesuits came among the Huron to announce the good news and generally accelerate the civilizing process, The Hurons listened with the utmost politeness – which had something to do with the guns, and something to do with wanting allies in the raids against the Iroquois. This paragraph is so lovely it makes me melt:

“Hurons, both converts and traditionalists, found the doctrines of sin and guilt confusing. "How . .. do we sin?" asked one man. "As for me, I do not recognize any sins."'2 When the missionaries attempted to explain how one could sin even in one's thoughts, they often encountered utter disbelief. "As for me, I do not know what it is to have bad thoughts," replied one old man. "Our usual thoughts are, 'that is where I shall go,' and 'Now that we are going to trade, I sometimes think that they would do me a great favor when I go down to Kebec, by giving me a fine large kettle for a robe that I have.' "13 Even among converts the missionaries met considerable resistance to the ideas of sin and guilt. When a recently converted Huron came to confess, the missionaries rejoiced: "He was about to accuse himself," they thought, "of having violated what the Father had taught." They were soon disappointed, however, for the convert came rather to accuse another Indian of stealing his cap. He had assumed that this "confession" would win him another cap from the Jesuit.”

That one old Huron man neatly sums up a whole line of thought in Beyond Good and Evil.

“Indians tended to view the conceptions of heaven and hell with even less regard. The Huron, Montagnais, and New England native Americans all Indians tended to view the conceptions of heaven and hell with even less regard. The Huron, Montagnais, and New England native Americans all anticipated an afterlife but assumed that it would be spent in morally neutral surroundings, not in a place of heavenly reward or hellish punishment. The Hurons spoke of a "village of souls" populated by the spirits of the dead. Life in those villages was believed to resemble life on earth with its daily round of eating, hunting, farming, and war-making. Missionary efforts to impress Indians with the delights of heaven met with disbelief and derision. Because the Jesuits described heaven in European material terms, the Hurons concluded that heaven was only for the French. When one Huron was asked why she refused to accept the offer of eternal life, she characteristically replied, "I have no acquaintances there, and the French who are there would not care to give me anything to eat.""15 The father of a recently deceased convert child urged the missionaries to dress her in French garments for burial so that she would be recognized as a European and permitted entrance into heaven.'6 Most native Americans rejected the European heaven, desiring to go where their ancestors were. The mission compounded this rejection by telling potential converts that heaven contained neither grain fields nor trading places, neither tobacco nor sexual activity-surely a dreary prospect. Some Indians resented the notion that one had to die in order to enjoy the blessings of conversion, while others observed that an everlasting life without marriage or labor was a highly undesirable fate.'7 Missionaries provoked an even stronger negative response when they preached about everlasting punishment in a fiery hell. The hell the Jesuits described must have profoundly affected their Indian listeners, for the Huron and Montagnais were no strangers to the horrors it was said to contain. The torture by fire of captured warriors was a customary part of Iroquoian warfare, and Huron and Montagnais men knew that such would be their fate if they fell into enemy hands. They themselves practiced torture rituals on their own captives, applying burning brands and glowing coals to the bodies of the condemned before execution. Men and women who had participated in such events must have responded emphatically to the idea of hell. But the evidence suggests that most responded in disbelief. Though the torments of hell were all too imaginable, they were rejected because they seemed to serve no useful purpose. In fact, the most common objection to the Christian hell was that it only lessened the delights of earthly life. "If thou wishest to speak to me of Hell, go out of my Cabin at once," exclaimed one Huron. "Such thoughts disturb my rest, and cause me uneasiness amid my pleasures." Hurons resented what seemed to them a Christian obsession with death and punishment. This resentment may have sprung from Huron anxiety about death and about the uneasy relationship between the living and the spirits of the dead.'8 Whether or not disturbed by this prospect, one Huron spoke for many when he said simply, "I am content to be damned.''19

Other native Americans went beyond rejecting hell as an unpleasant place to question the basic Christian assumptions about postmortem punishment. "We have no such apprehension as you have," said a Huron, "of a good and bad Mansion after this life, provided for the good and bad Souls; for we cannot tell whether every thing that appears faulty to Men, is so in the Eyes of God."20”

Given these responses, it is peculiar that Baron Lahontan’s dialogues with Adario, in actuality a Huron named Kondiaronk, have been almost unanimously judged by historians as gross fictions, attributing words to this Huron that could never have come out of his mouth. After all, the argument runs, many of those words are sharp criticisms of religion in the vein of Bayle himself – and the Indians obviously weren’t capable of such complex concepts. Or so say those who are anxious, very anxious, to use the “myth of the noble savage” to close down the discussion of the Encounter. If you run the myth of the myth of the savage to earth, you will find that it arose in a painfully familiar context in the early twentieth century. One of its most influential designers was a historian and literary critic named Gilbert Chinard. Chinard began writing in France before World War I, and settled in the U.S. after the war. He was prolific. And, from the beginning, he was carrying a torch for an essentially reactionary political philosophy. Chinard’s thesis was that Lahontan created the noble savage myth which was appropriated by Rousseau, and used to spread a diseased notion of egalitarianism of which the dire effects were seen in the Revolution. It is interesting that a thesis which, in 1913, was so obviously attuned to a certain political current in France. Chinard was basically a reactionary modernist, with all the identifying marks: the attack on Rousseau as the precursor of a dangerous romanticism; the nostalgia for a certain image of the ancien regime; the notion of classicism as clarity; the almost hysterical language about the French Revolution. From the Action Francais to T.S. Eliot, these were themes of the radical conservative program. Translated to the U.S., these themes really became pertinent after World War II, in the Cold War reaction to the 30s leftist culture. Partly the success of the myth of the savage was due to Chinard himself, who loomed largely in the study of colonial and revolutionary Americo-Franco relations between the wars. He published both in French and English, and was a brilliant scholar of the colonial/Revolutionary period, one of the few scholars with a grasp of the full trans-Atlantic scene in which the intellectual history of the Enlightenment unfolded. In this history, certain testimonies were given weight, and certain were tossed out. Lahontan, whose works – to give Chinard his due – were edited and republished by Chinard, was dismissed without, evidently, first hand reading. For instance, this is George R. Healy in an article from 1958 entitled, The French Jesuits and the Idea of the Noble Savage, in which one is astonished to read this: “The men most influential in popularizing the notion of savagery as a condition superior to contemporary civilization – Lahontan and Rousseau, for example – were surely more given to the manufacture of titillative paradox than to research among the hard sociological facts.” As if George R. Healy had ever met a 17th century Huron or spoken his language, or drank chocolate in an eighteenth century Parisian salon. If anybody had a comparative sense of ‘civilization’ vs. ‘savagery’ in 1707, it was surely Lahontan, who spent his young adult years in French Canada, learned a Algonquin tongue, and eventually escaped from duty in French Canada by bribing a vessel to take him to Portugal, from which he made his way, avoiding France, to the Netherlands – surely not in a tenured cloud, but probably paying carriage drivers and staying in flea infested inns where every night’s sleep was among the hard sociological facts.

Mais assez! Now that we have done a little work with a battering ram, let’s get down to Lahontan’s life.

The myth of the noble European

It is, of course, much too late in the day to call back the myth of the myth of the noble savage.

Curiously, attacking the myth of the noble savage seems to be a sport that every generation of historians engage in. Yet, the sport is curiously foreshortened, on the principle of the White magic: As without, so NOT within. The White magic is so powerful that the historians who operate within this principle seemingly are unaware of it – unaware that they are taking as a norm a certain view of European “civilization” which, in actuality, was a rare thing in 16th and 17th century Europe. In fact, it might not be a thing at all.

Some progress here has been made. As Terry Ellingson has pointed out, the term noble did not originally mean “morally elevated” when applied to the Indians. The first appearance of the phrase “noble savage” in English occurs early in the 17th century, in a translation of Marc Lescarbot’s account of French Canada. Why did Lescarbot call the Indians he met noble? Because they hunted, a privilege legally reserved, with some exceptions, to the nobility.

“Upon this privilege is formed the right of hunting, the noblest of all rights that be in the use of man, seeing that God is the author of it. And therefore no marvel if Kings and their nobility have reserved it unto them, by a well-concluding reason that, if they command unto men, with far better reason may they command unto beasts…

Hunting, then, having been granted unto man by a heavenly privilege, the savages through all the West Indies do exercise themselves therein without distinction of persons, not having that fair order established in these parts whereby some are born for the government of the people and the defense of the country, others for the exercising of arts and the tillage of the ground, in such sort that by a fair economy everyone liveth in safety. [Quote Ellingson, 2001: 23]

However, among the mass of accounts of the savage (accounts that are invaluable as records of the first encounter, which were subsequently – and anachronistically - criticized from a latter vantage point, by which time disease, warfare, trade and technology had done their work), there soon appeared a divide, at least among the French. The main French writers were Jesuits, and as an early twentieth century historian, Gilbert Chinard, remarked, the Jesuits were torn between the Christian imperative to depict heathen monsters, and a classical training that allowed them to spot the eerie congruities between classical Mediterranean civilizations and the Indian peoples. Et ego in arcadia was alive beneath the cassock. Hence, a dualism in the representation of the savage.

This, then, is one layer of the myth. Another layer – a layer that has to do with our principle, and the building of the myth of the myth of the noble savage – involves movements which were happening on both sides of the Atlantic at the same time. Take, for instance, the privatization of women.

Jesuits settled among the Montagnais-Naskapi people in the 1650s and 1660s, and left descriptions of this tribe of Algonquin speaking hunter gatherers who they encountered on the banks of the St. Lawrence river. These reports are summed up by Karen Anderson as follows:

In the early years of their contact with the Jesuits, Montagnais-Naskapi men and women were reported to have had an equal right to free choice in marriage and divorce and to initiate sex or to reject a suitor. Both men and women controlled their own work, and the Jesuits remarked that both knew just what they were supposed to do:”Neither meddles with the other.” Women decided when to move camps. The choice of plans, of undertakings, of plans, of journeys, of winterings,” the Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune reported, “lies in nearly every instance in the hands of the housewife.” Men left the arrangements of household affairs to the women, who distributed both their own and their husband’s produce without any interference. “I have never seen my host,” Le Jeune commented, “ask a giddy young women that he had with him what became of the provisions, although they were disappearing very fast.” “Women,” he further remarked, “have great power… A man may promise you something and if he does not keep his promise, he thinks himself sufficiently excused if he tells you that his wife did not wish him to do it.”

All this was soon to change with the Jesuits’ plan to convert the Montagnais-Naskapi to Christianity and to turn them into settled agriculturalists and, ultimately, French citizens.”
[Anderson, Commodity Exchange and Subordination: Montagnais-Naskapi and Huron Women, 1600-1650 Karen Anderson, Signs, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 48-62]

…

If we look at a history of women in, say, England during the same period, one finds the same process at work. Alice Clarke, in her seminal The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919) records the complex process by which women were both forced out of trades and traditional routines in agriculture and urban areas, while at the same time laborers in agriculture and urban trades were being squeezed. This resulted in the inevitable disjunction between the necessity to work – for women – and the image that working outside of the home was shameful – for women.

Thus, where Allan records an increase in the brutality to which women of the Montagnais-Naskapi were subjected (a social fact that rides in tandem with the special resistance of Indian women in the St. Lawrence valley to Christianity - contra the myth of Christian missionaries coming in on humanizing missions, women saw very well that the death of the beliefs of the culture was the end of life as they knew it), Clarke records the expulsion of poor women from the social body in England:

“No one doubted that it was somebody's duty to care for the poor, but arrangements for relief were strictly parochial and the fear of incurring unlimited future responsibilities led English parishioners to strange lengths of cruelty and callousness. The fact that a woman was soon to have a baby, instead of appealing to their chivalry, seemed to them the best
reason for turning her out of her house and driving her from the village, even when a hedge was her only refuge.

The once lusty young woman who had formerly done a hard day's work with the men at harvesting was broken by this life. It is said of an army that it fights upon its stomach. These women faced the grim battle of life, laden with the heavy burden of childbearing,
seldom knowing what it meant to have enough to eat. Is it surprising that courage often
failed and they sank into the spiritless, dismal ranks of miserable beings met in the pages of Quarter Sessions Records, who are constantly being forwarded from one parish to another.

Such women, enfeebled in mind and body, could not hope to earn more than the twopence a day and their food which is assessed as the maximum rate for women
workers in the hay harvest. On the contrary, judging from the account books of the period, they often received only one penny a day for their labour. Significant of their feebleness is the Norfolk assessment which reads, " Women and such impotent persons
that weed corne, or other such like Labourers 2d with meate and drinke, 6d without." 1 Such wages may have sufficed for the infirm and old, but they meant starvation for the woman with a young family depending on her for food. And what chance of health and
virtue existed for the children of these enfeebled starving women?” [89]

Once your eyes are opened by black magic to the communication of within and without, one notices a continuity of movements in the Transatlantic communities. This isn’t to say that the movements were entirely in synch. For instance, George Eisen has picked up accounts of sports, among the Indians, that indicate a sense of fair play still lacking among the English.

“A difference between the European and American style of sporting was readily emphasized by all observers. Sports and games were vigorous and violent affairs among the Indians as well as among the English. Nevertheless, English sports, not yet pervaded by the concept of fair play, were often rough and tumble pastimes in which a wide range of activities bordering on foul play were permitted. Contests of the Indians were conducted in an atmosphere of correctness and mutual respect. Cheating was almost unknown among them. One may compare the contemporary English and French sporting scene with the observation of Father Lalemant. In witnessing a Huron feast, the Jesuit wrote that, "everything was done with such moderation and reserve that - at least, in watching them - one could never have thought that he was in the midst of an assemblage of Barbarians, - so much respect did they pay to one another, even while contending for the victory" (Thwaites 1896-1901:23:221-223). For English spectators, the Indian football was perhaps the most familiar pursuit. The chroniclers repeatedly noted the fact that the English style of the game was violent and sometimes unfair. Spelman's, Strachey's, and Williams' testimonies clearly indicated this fact. Henry Spelman, a member of Captain Smith's expedition to Powhaton's country wrote that the Indians "never fight nor pull one another doune" (Spelman 1872:114). Strachey, the first Secretary of Virginia, also presented a curious comparison between the American and European codes of conduct in the course of the game: "they never strike up one another's heeles, as we do, not accompting that praiseworthie to purchase a goale by such an advantage" (Strachey 1849:84). In 1686, Dunton observed a football game in Agawam. He, too, elaborated on the difference: "Neither were they to apt to trip one anothers heels and quarrel, as I have seen 'em in England" (Dunton 1966:285). A contemporary of Strachey, William Wood, made valuable observations on football as played by the Indians of Massachusetts. His work, New Englands Prospect, is an account of Indian life as the author saw it between 1629 and 1633. "Before they come to this sport, [football] ," wrote the observant Puritan, "they paint themselves, even as when they goe to warre, in pollicie to prevent future mischiefe, because no man should know him that moved his patience or accidentally hurt his person, taking away the occasion of studying revenge.”

[George Eisen, Voyageurs, Black-Robes, Saints, and Indians Ethnohistory, , Vol. 24, No. 3 (Summer, 1977), pp. 191-205]

…

To return, then, to Sade. I have presented Sade so far from Klossowski’s viewpoint. Klossowski sees the system of counter-generality in Sade; what he doesn’t see, or what he mutes, is the Voltairian irony. It is that irony that takes the Christian, rather than the libertine, interpretation of other cultures – or rather, to return to the duality spotted by Chinard, Sade takes the image of the heathen as a monster as his template, even though he was well aware that there was another image – in fact, an image that exists in libertine literature, which made extensive use of ethnography. Here, Sade is not the systematist – instead, he is the traditional enlightenment philosophe. The strategy of the philosophe, from the Persian letters to Voltaire, is to take a normal case – the case for pious belief, for instance - and presses it to the most extreme of conclusions. If God kills his son, isn’t it permitted for human fathers to do the same? If God descended on the Virgin Mary and impregnated her, doesn’t that allow sex outside of wedlock – indeed, doesn’t it allow rape? The system of counter-generality is utopian and messianic; the nuances of irony are cautionary, ambiguous, and novelistic.

But what is this libertine tradition of ethnography? Which takes us back to the Baron Lahontan. As one commentator puts it, Lahontan was Dom Juan in America.

editorial changes

As some of my readers have remarked, LI’s posts lately are a lot more dense. There is a reason for that. For the past year and a half, I’ve been using this site to do a sort of research note experiment. Usually, when you are researching a book, you type up your notes in various computer folders. But I thought it would be interesting to do this in the open, on a blog. Among other posts, The Human Limit posts would show the way research happens in real time. The principle was really the same as in those 24/7 webcams showing hot hot hot sorority girls dressing, undressing and living the vida loca with dildoes – just, you know, everyday life. Same with my research notes.

THL is not meant to be a philosophy text or a regular history. It is ‘an unofficial view of being’ – to use Wallace Steven’s definition of poetry. I’ve laid down almost all the themes I need, and now I have to start tying them together.

But I’ve decided that this will require a little more order on this blog. Which means that the current affairs commentary has to go. I am finding it too annoying, wading through my always irritated and futile remarks on the oligarchy and their wars, heists, and shiftlessness, looking for this or that thread. So I’ve decided to put them on another blog, called News from the Zona. At the moment, it is little more than template. I’ll have to fill it up eventually with links and stuff.

So, got it? If you want to read the exciting adventures of Baron Lahonte among the Huron, stay tuned on this channel. If you want to read a buncha raven like croakings about our doomed system, go to News from the Zona.

As Without, So Within

A history could be written in the time honored manner of horror movies, which take old characters and pit them against each other: Dracula vs. Frankenstein, Godzilla vs. the blob. This episode could be called anti-christ vs. the universal, with both corners suitably decked out in lowrent F/X. Would the philosopher-villain, arising from his unmarked grave among the roots of great oaks – if, indeed, they scattered acorns on his plot as he requested– have found a place at last in B movie limbo? He would, at least, have recognized that the mad scientist was none other than the philosophical fucker, lightly transposed, but still dreaming an outsider cosmology, a metaphysical explanation for every horror. It was the beta ray accident that awoke the dead, Gidget!

The history of the human limit – that is, the history of its erasure - obeys a formula that transforms the old alchemist’s principle, as above, so below, into the principle of universal history – as without, so within. That is, the European encounter with the savages and the barbarians catalyzed the consciousness of savages and barbarians within Europe itself. The savage evokes the peasant, the slave the serf. Universal history, which proceeds by experiments – the plantation, the factory, free trade, representative government, the reservation, the labor camp, etc. – is coded from the beginning to separate the without and the within, even as every discovery produces this two fold effect. The compromise solution was to posit a homunculus within. The ideal Western man.

Sade, however, takes the experiments as narratives, fables, that can be applied, devastatingly, within. On the fair white bourgeois bosom, he applies the slavemaster’s branding iron. As we have pointed out, the ethnographic accounts of tortures and strange customs in the seventeenth century led to an estrangement from the ancients, who could be seen, more and more clearly, in terms of shamans and tribes, and then to a renewal of myth, as the romantics embraced the new barbarous classicism. Sade definitely figures in this history. Klossowski is an excellent guide to the combination of strategies which makes up the Sadeian totality – that self devouring whole. But he misses, we think, the exchanges of the without and the within. The Iroquois and the Kongo.

Klossowski’s work on Sade is a precursot to his work on Nietzsche. In both writers, Klossowski grasps the work done by the notion of the differed totality, or the eternal return of the same. It is this that, within universal history, pushes back against the satisfaction of the modern, that fatal symptom of vulgarity. Marx saw the moment of vulgarity as one of the poles of the modern, in which the determinants are satisfaction and dissatisfaction (thus creating, within the sphere of capitalism, a shadow economy, which delimits the culture of happiness). Neither of those poles is sufficient, for Marx – and thus the revolutionary, or at least the critic of the modern political economy, must oscillate between them, or find some way to exit them entirely. However, it is not so easy to get out of the Artificial Paradise.

Justine’s sorrow was to find this out the hard way.

But to return to Klossowski. Using repetition as a key helps him understand the puzzle of Sade. That puzzle is simple: on the one hand, Sade has staked all pleasure on transgression. On the other hand, a world in which the norms are knocked down – a world in which transgression wins – would seem to be a world without pleasure.

Sade needs a strategy to hold these two things apart. That strategy is outrage.

“If Sade had sought (given that he would have ever been concerned with such a thing) a positive conceptual formulation of perversion, he would have passed alongside of the enigma he sets up; he would have intellectualized the phenomenon of sadism properly so-called. The motive for this is more obscure and forms the nodus of the sadean experience. This motive is outrage, where what is outraged is maintained to serve as a support for transgression.”

We are thus led inevitably to the problem of repetition – for if the point is not, by way of outrage, to overthrow the norms that make for transgression, then outrage has to be become a sort of strategic constant that the mad professor/philosopher-villain manages to make not quite powerful enough to shake the social structure, but still powerful enough to satisfy the desire for staging the transgression. Our monster accepts the terms of the game in order to play the game – the endless repetition of further b movie plots, of an endless “versus”:

“Transgression (outrage) seems absurd and puerile where it does not succeed in resolving itself into a state of affairs where it would no longer be necessary. But it belongs to the nature of transgression that it never be able to find such a state. Transgression is then something other than the pure explosion of energy accumulated by means of an obstacle. Transgression is an incessant recuperation of the possible itself-where the existing state of affairs has eliminated that possible from another form of existence. The possible in what does not exist can never be anything but possible; for if the act were to recuperate this possible as a new form of existence, it would have to transgress it in turn. The possible then eliminated would have to be recuperated yet again. What the act of transgression recuperates from the possible in what does not exist is its own possibility of transgressing what exists.

“Transgression remains a necessity in Sade's experience independent of the interpretation he gives of it. It is not only because it is given as a testimony of atheism that transgression must not and never can find a state in which it could be resolved; the energy must constantly be sur- passed in order to verify its level. It falls below the level reached as soon as it no longer meets an obstacle. A transgression must engender another transgression. But if it is thus reiterated, in Sade it reiterates itself in principle only through one same act. This very act can never be transgressed; its image is each time represented as though it had never been carried out.”

venus' booty

Montesquieu, on his travels through Italy, toured the Uffizi in Florence. He made copious notes, which were published in 1892. He was impressed by the statue known as the Medici Venus, about which he wrote:

Her front side is small, neither too flat nor too round. Her eyes, neither too deep, nor too little, well curved. A head, small. Cheeks, fresh and firm. The part which joins the ear, admirable. The ear, mediocre and well turned. The mouth, big enough for it to be proportionate to the lips. The neck, which is gradually enlarged from the head to the shoulders, and which appears flexible. Beautiful shoulders, but less large than a man’s. Her arms, round and which join to the arm [sic – probably meant hand] by degrees. They have the appearance of firm flesh. Her hands, long and as though made of flesh. Tits, separated, not too low, nor too high. Thighs, admirable: they are elevated a bit from the mons pubis and then diminish little by little to the knee. Her foreleg is admirable: you would think it was flesh. A little more high than the cheeks, you see a little dimple pressing on the back bone, as if from which they are given birth. One knows her attitude – she has a hand upon her tits and the other on her private part, and squats just the littlest bit, as though to hide herself as well as she can in the state she is in. “

After this, he goes through two other Venuses to return to his favorite:

Returning to the Medici Venus – how it serves as a rule, and how what is like it in its proportions is admirable, and what departs from it is bad, one can hardly describe it to much and remark on it.

Behind, just above the cheeks, there is, on each side, two small dimples, and one in the middle, which comes from the back bone; then two small eminences: and at last, the curve down which goes under the coccyx. The cheeks are round, and, on each side of them, there is a little dimple in order to mark their roundness. The cheeks, lower down, make a short curve, and when they are reunited with the thighs, there is a new, little bump. Then, a little hardly noticeable dimple for a new small bump.”

Jacques Guicharnaud has noted that Sade, too, made his tour of Italy, for almost a year, from 1775 to 1776. He too visits the Uffizi. Later, he lends his experience to Juliette and friends. Guicharnaud remarks on the coincidence between Montesquieu and Sade – although of course Montesquieu’s journal had not been published at that time. But the point isn’t the influence but the contrast.

When the heroine, accompanied by Sbrigani and their suite, stops in front of “that superb morsel,” she is gripped by the “sweetest emotin,” and remarks: “it is said that a Greek blazed with passion for a statue… I admit it, I might have imitatied him near that one. The the statue is hardly described at all. Juliette merely points out, very flatly, “the gracious cuves of the bosom and gthe buttocks…

Still in the Uffizi, in front of Titian’s Venus of Urbino, Montesquieu remarks “An admirable Venus; she is lying down naked; you think you’re seeing flesh and the body itself.” Taken literally, this notation is chaste. But before the same painting Juliette gives many more details, without being verbose, and her description leads to an act: when Sbrigani mentioned that “this Venus looked incredibly like Raimonde,” one of their friends, Juliette, in a blaze of passion, “pressed a fiery kiss to the roselike mouth” of the young woman.

To go on with the parallel between these two forms of tourism – or art criticism -: the few works chosen by Juliette are always sources of erotic reactions. Whereas before an ancient Priapus, Montesquieu proves brief and objective, Juliette immediately considers the possibilities – and impossibilities – of the same statue.” (Jacques Guicharnaud,The Wreathed Columns of St. Peter's, Yale French Studies, No. 35, (1965), 31)

Although Sade’s image is of the coldest of the aristocrats, this description is of an extreme vulgarity – Marx’s vulgarity of the modern in all its glory. It resembles Montesquieu less than the famous visit of Gervaise’s wedding party to the Louvre in L’assommoir:

M. Madinier kept quiet in order to manage his effect. He went straight to Ruben’s Kermesse. There, he said nothing, but contented himself with nodding at the canvas and rolling his eyes gaily. The ladies, when they had their noses up into it, uttered little moans; then turned away, very red. The men held them back, jokingly, looking for particularly dirty details.
-- Look-it this!, repeated Boche, this is worth the cost of admission. And here’s one who is puking, and here’s one who is watering the dandylions. And here’s one, o, this one – well, they are a proper lot, they are.

Kant, when he codified the enlightement response to the art work, was drawing on a repertoire which, in part, Sade must have known. Surely Sade was aware of poor old Wincklemann, robbed and murdered by the boy he’d picked up to fuck, all alone in the port of Trieste – it was such a Sadian nuance. But Sade was not interested in art, in any real sense. He could not understand an object that was fundamantally unassimilable to a use. And this is a key to one of Sade’s peculiarities – his invention of the fastforward. True, in the history of porn, the fastforward had to wait for the invention of video and the channel changer. But the temporal foundation of it is already there in Sade. For Montesquieu, the description of the Medici Venus (so eerily reminiscent of advertisements for slaves – or an advertisement for the Venus Hottentot, although she came along long after Montequieu was dead) – is about allowing the object, in the time of the observation, to become what it is, to announce itself, to be seen and more than seen. This time, in turn, served the enlighenment system of the senses. In that system, touch is fundamental. Sight, especially the sight of a sculpture, is in a separate, derivative sense domain. The slow, lubricious stroll around the statue is rooted in the libertine code that allows for a nature without God, but also without man. A nature, that is, removed from the use of men. Of course, one can shift this by some small degree and arrive at the slave holder, and by another degree, at Don Juan.



Sade, however, is not on that channel. He is, at least here, a fast forward libertine, for whom the object is becoming generic, and must have a use. Use will reduce the Greek statue and the Titian to a joke or a proxy for sex. This is Sade’s own vulgarity, prefiguring the bourgeois moment of satisfaction that, really, there is nothing in art. It is either a pinup or a moneymaker. Or – a form of vulgarity perhaps more common in the U..S. - it gives pride to some ethnic group, some gender position; it is critical, it resists, it has a proper political content.

We too hastily identify Sade’s orgies with the Dionysian. But his fast forwards betray him. Calasso points out that Dionysos, unlike the other gods, ‘doesn’t descend on women like a predator, clutch them to his chest, then suddenly let go and disappear. He is constantly in the process of seducing them, because the life forces came together in him. The juice of the vine is his, and likewise the many juices of life. “Sovereign of all that is moist.’ Dionysos himself is liquid, a stream that surrounds us. “Mad for the women,” Nonnus, the last poet to celebrate the god, frequently writes. And with Christian malice Clement of Alexandria speaks of Dionysos as choiropsales, ‘the one who touces the vulva.” The one whose fingers could make it vibrate like the strings of the lyre.” [Calasso, 14]

philosopher-villains

Klossowski, in the essay on the “philosopher-villain” that begins Sade, my neighbor, uses Sade’s own mocking division between the philosophers in his “own” works, who are decent people, and the philosophers in Justine, where, in an ‘inexcusable clumsiness that was bound to set the author at loggerheads with wise men and fools alike,” “all the philosophical characters in this novel are villains to the core.”

In a sense, what Sade is doing is employing the Russellian distinction between types, here – the philosopher-villains exist in quoted space. In one’s own work, where the citational melts away, the philosophers are decent – as decent as any lab worker who operates on the human product, as they used to say at the AEC when feeding selected American detritus – the poor, the non-white – bits of plutonium.

I remarked last time on Magris’ notion that transgression is embodied in the Nazi bureaucrat and the leader, which I think is a typical argument against Bataille’s notion of transgression. The argument that is mounted against Bataille ignores the opposition to power encoded in it, or claims that the opposition, being circumstantial, falls away from the generality claimed by the transgressor. Opposition is hypocrisy. Resistance is resentment. After all, if one supposes that all ideas and systems strive for power - and didn't Bataille claim not only to be a Nietzschian critic, but, in a sense, to be Nietzsche - than that opposition stands revealed as a hypocritical strategem, thrown away when the transgressor gains power and can do as he wants. Otherwise, it would seem, we are talking about organized futility – as we approach sovereignty, the institutional bonds all dissolve that give sovereignty meaning. Foucault, whose essay on the experience-limit touched that logic, began to backtrack in the seventies, for Magris like reasons – in fact, by becoming popular, transgression was actually lowering the real level of transgression in society.

I like Klossowski’s explanation of the Sadeian strategy, which is based on counter-generality. I like it because it goes so nicely with how the human limit was erased, on the theoretical level, by universal-making – making, for instance, universal history. Making universal emotions. Making universal subjects. Making a universal system of production in which universalized labor leads to infinite substitutability among the workers.

Sade, according to Klossowski, saw how he could game this enlightenment program:

“The peculiarly human act of writing presupposes a generality that a singular case claims to join, and by belonging to this generality claims to come to understand itself. Sade as a singular case conceives his art of writing as verifying such belongingness. The medium of generality in Sade’s time is the logically structured language of the classical tradition: in its structure this language reproduces and reconstitutes in the field of communicative gestures the normative structure of the human race in individuals…

With this principle of the normative generality of the human race in mind, Sade sets out to establish a countergenerality that would obtain for the specificity of perversions, making exchange between singular cases of perversion possible. These, in the existing normative generality, are defined by the absense of logical structure. Thus is conceived Sade’s notion of integral monstrosity. Sade takes this countergenerality, valid for the specificity of perversion, to be already implicit in the existing generality. For he thinks that the atheism proclaimed by normative reason, in the name of man’s freedom and sovereignty, is destined to reverse the existing generality into this countergenerality. Atheism, the supreme act of normative reason, is thus destined to establish the reign of the total absence of norms.” [Sade, my neighbor, trans. by Alphonso Lingis, 14-15]

Sade, then, is rejecting – or perhaps I should say, creating an antithesis - to one of the fundamental enlightenment discoveries – Bayle’s notion that the society of atheists would be every bit as moral as the society of believers. That is, Bayle took it to be a truth about human beings that belief and action are, in practice, forever divided. To believe we should love our neighbor as ourself, and to roust out our neighbor from her house and roast her, as a witch, on the nearest tarred pole, were not anthropologically contradictory things. To believe that the universe came together at random, and to denounce witch burning, were also not anthropologically contradictory things. By which I mean that Bayle did not come to this conclusion by going outward from a logical analysis of belief, but by suspending any analysis of belief and looking at what people said and did.

The image of the moral society of atheists was an immense shock in a culture that had sacralized belief. It runs through the enlightenment like pain ran through the princess after she’d spent the night sleeping on the pea. Tolerance, Mandeville’s cynicism, Adam Smith’s invisible hand, they all come out of the methodological imperative of beginning first with what people did and said, and suspending belief. But, until one gets used to it, this is a highly unnatural stance to take. It seemed to eat away at any belief, since after all, what function did it have?

On the one hand, the space opened up by tolerance made possible the social notion of happiness – for it was intolerance of belief, more than anything else, that had acted the role of nemesis in European culture and in the global conquests of that Europe. On the other hand, it was felt as a sort of numbing of a once vital organ.

Ps – in some ways, the gothic horrors of Sade are too infernal, too brightly lit by the Christianity that follows his every step like a shadow. One could extract another logical line, from the dissolution of all norms to poshlost’ – the world of banality. Magris, in a sense, goes wrong by not putting in this vital step. Contra Hannah Arendt, Eichman’s evil is not something that accidentally arises from banality – banality is the original and primal form of evil in the world. We follow Gogol here, per Merezhovsky. Instead of Juliette, the Petty Demon. From which I take this wonderful extract – Peredonov, the “hero”, a schoolteacher, has just come home to his mistress, Varvara, who he calls his cousin. He’s promised to marry her, but is suspicious that she won’t come through on her end of the bargain, which is to make him an inspector. Besides, Peredenov is suspicious that she is poisoning him. He is also suspicious, every time he hears someone laugh in front of him, that they are laughing at him. And, to finish up this summary of his qualities, he prefers not to think, but believes anything he is told. So Peredenov naturally decides to torment Varvara by making her believe he has been over at the next door neighbors, paying court to their daughter, Marta:

She's covered with freckles," said Varvara, spitefully.
" And she's got a mouth that stretches from ear to ear. You might as well sew up her mouth, like a frog's."
"Anyway, she's handsomer than you," said Peredonov."I think I'll take her and marry her."
" You dare marry her," shouted Varvara, reddening and trembling with rage, "and I'll burn her eyes out with vitriol !"
"I'd like to spit on you," said Peredonov, quite calmly.
"Just try it !" said Varvara.
"Well, I will," answered Peredonov.
He rose, and with a sluggish and indifferent expression, spat in her face.
"Pig !"said Varvara, as quietly as if his spitting on her had refreshed her. And she began to wipe her facewith a table napkin. Peredonov was silent. Latterly he had been more brusque with her than usual. And evenin the beginning he had never been particularly gentlewith her. Encouraged by his silence, she repeated more loudly :
"Pig ! You are a pig !"

This joyful scene is interrupted by the entrance of a friend, Volodin. Drinks and jam tarts are served. And then:

“Suddenly Peredonov splashed the dregs of his coffee cup on the wall-paper. Volodin goggled his sheepish eyes, and gazed in astonishment. The wall-paper was soiled and torn. Volodin asked:
" What are you doing to your wall-paper ?"
Peredonov and Varvara laughed.
"It's to spite the landlady," said Varvara. " We're leaving soon. Only don't you chatter."
"Splendid !' shouted Volodin, and joined in the laughter.
Peredonov walked up to the wall and began to wipe the soles of his boots on it. Volodin followed his example.
Peredonov said :
" We always dirty the walls after every meal, so that they'll remember us when we've gone !"
" What a mess you've made !' exclaimed Volodin,delightedly.
" Won't Irishka be surprised," said Varvara, with a dry, malicious laugh.
And all three, standing before the wall, began to spit at it, to tear the paper, and to smear it with their boots. Afterwards, tired but pleased, they ceased.

Peredonov bent down and picked up the cat, a fat, white, ugly beast. He began to torment the animal, pulling its ears, and tail, and then shook it by the neck. Volodin laughed gleefully and suggested other methods of tormenting the animal.
"Ardalyon Borisitch, blow into his eyes ! Brush his fur backwards !"
The cat snarled, and tried to get away, but dared not show its claws. It was always thrashed for scratching. At last this amusement palled on Peredonov and he let the cat go.”

And I got an A + in Macro and Onanism!

The attack on the stimulus plan is unsurprising, coming as it does from the usual redoubts of the gated community wealthy – the NYT business page, Rush Limbaugh, the Democratic and Republican parties.

The plan is one wing of the Obama schizophrenia. On the one hand, we are given a stimulus supposedly big enough to combat a recession that will last at least the year. On the other hand, we are given a bank plan tacitly premised on the idea that the financial section will be returning to its old glory any day now, thanks to the splendor of the self-adjusting market.

The little thread that ties these things together is the housing market. It is as if the media sphere decided to throw Marx a surprise party: in his honor, they are demonstrating just what commodity fetishism means. The housing market has been curiously disembedded it real location in the world of social labor, and transported into the never land of econospeak and graphs. In the never land, there is never and there will never be any mention of the one overriding fact about the housing market, which is that houses are actually bought by people.

As I have pointed out again and again, like an erotomaniac compulsively returning to the habit of masturbating in public when released from his straight jacket, this is what happens when inequality reaches a tipping point. The half baked neo-liberal theory upon which the American economy has stood for three decades supposes that certain social goods (retirement, healthcare, education, etc.) can be ultimately provided for in the private sphere. How is this accomplished? By making the average household not only a unit of production, but also a source of investment. Thus, X and Y, the double wage-earners in the household, will enjoy a progressively better lifestyle even if their combined earnings stagnate or advance slowly, because they will have socked away money in their 401(k)s and IRAs and they will have invested in an asset, a house, that will bring them a healthy return even as they live in it. It is a bubble gum vision of the good life, worthy less of the American Economic Journal than Teen Beat magazine.

The flaw, of course, is that income counts. It counts so much that if you freeze it or slow down its increase in order to feed the wealthy (who, after all, are investors like all of us! It is the solidarity of capital, here, one for all, or – getting real, heh heh heh – all for one), who, pray tell, are X and Y going to sell their asset to? Another X and Y, in basically the same circumstances? Any child can tell you that no matter how often two poor shits sells a commodity back and forth to each other at higher and higher prices, which they borrow, the end result is not going to be that each gets infocommercial wealthy – it is going to be that each gets financially broken. The commodity didn’t do that. What did that has been doing that for a long time. It is called your Government. Plus your private sector. Check it out. Open your eyes. The Fed has openly tried to batter the bargaining position of labor for years. The commerce department, for decades, has held seminars for businesses about how they can move to labor cheap locales. The industrial policy of the U.S. government – which claims it has no industrial policy – has been directed, for years, at keeping incomes down and credit lines at high interest open.

The houses are just the cargo in the zona.

This story is not complex. Any junkie can rehearse that narrative arc.

Thus, it rather breaks my heart to see how the debate on the stimulus, among the liberal bloggers and pundits, so quickly turned into a debate about who could make smarter references to the economist’s abracadabra. This is what happens when your liberal pundicrats were brought up on debating and going to a good college. Matters of fact get entangled with the meritocrats favorite thing: taking a test. Having been malformed by an educational system that identifies thinking with test scores, the meritocrats, in Pavlovian synch, all salivated when the right attacked with “economics”, and they are busy having fun chasing fallacies off the cliff in some distant part of the world. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will be gained by showing that Krugman is right and Fama is wrong. Or rather, much will be lost. For instance, the opportunity to point out that the “economist’s” standard model of the U.S. economy is a fantasy that hasn’t been true since 1929. That, in fact, if full employment really meant full employment by the private sector, the Great Depression never ended – for the private sector can not and will not and will never employ even 85 percent of the employable population in any developed state, and in the U.S. in particular, is doing good when it employs 80 percent of the population. “Fiscal policy” isn’t some newfangled government toy, but the structure that has held up the American economy for seventy years. It is crazy to talk about “crowding out”, or “Ricardian equivalence”, before understanding the composition of the target economy. An economic theory that technically disallows the economic reality all around us for the last sixty years is, well, did I mention public masturbation already?

What needs to be done will be done too late. Cut the juice to the banks. Capitalize a national back for reindustrialization, and one to extend consumer credit at @ 7 points higher than the Fed loans money to banks. Pump money into the states. Massive command and control interventions by the government to coordinate at least two major changes in the national economy – the energy sector and transportation. Politics, in other words – politics should play the major role in our economy at the moment. Not “the market”, god help us.

the image of LI's art

The symbol of Irish art, for Stephen Daedelus, was the “cracked looking glass of a servant.” Ah, those mirrors – surely Buck Mulligan’s was related to Stendhal’s, who wrote, in The Red and the Black, that a novel is a mirror that one walks along a street. But such handling of mirrors requires care – they so easily slip out of one’s hands. And once they get a crack in them, the crack will leap out, like an imp, from realism to the real. For instance, Stendhal’s phrase is actually attributed to someone else – Saint-Réal. And who was Saint-Réal? Some critics say that he was no person, but Stendhal himself – who thus quotes a saint of reality who doesn’t exist, carrying a mirror in which he doesn’t look at himself - for what would he see - down a street. Lawrence Scher, in his book on French realism, writes: “by all accounts, the reference to Saint-Réal is spurious, for the quote has never been found in Saint-Réal’s work; thus we can immediately consider the remark to be an ironic commentary on the very process of verisimilitude.”

Others would say that this Saint-Réal must be the same as the author of the Conjurations des Espagnols contre Venise, which Saintsbury claims is a masterpiece of style. Also according to Saintsbury, Saint-Réal associated with the libertines around Saint-Evremond and ended up as the historiographer for the Duke of Savoy.

Scher's remark would seem to answer all questions except one – why did Stendhal feel the need to invoke Saint-Réal at all? Which helps us notice that Stendhal does not quote from one of Saint-Réal’s works, but quotes the man - as though this were a phrase in a conversation, an oral delivery. This is all the more possible in that Stendhal, like Saint-Réal, frequented circles in London and Italy which were infused with both the moraliste precept that history is a great reserve of exempla and the hardheaded materialist psychology of amour-propre (which was transmuted, via Cabanis, into a mystifying discourse about nervous impulses). Of course, a full century stands between Stendhal and Saint-Réal, during which even the wittiest remarks tend to be forgotten. So perhaps Scher is right, and Stendhal made up the remark and hung it on Saint-Réal as a joke. Although the joke depends, for its success, on there being such a thing as “realism”, which wasn’t the case when the Red and the Black was written.

We walk down the street and turn and walk down another street and turn and we are back on the street we began with. Thus, the phrase is not only a spurious attribution to the saint of realism, but a joke of which the punchline is also a prophecy. Well, as Wittgenstein said, he could imagine a work of philosophy consisting entirely of jokes. Which is not a thing he wrote down himself – he said this in a conversation with Norman Malcolm, who wrote it down in a memoir. And there it stands, the mirror of Wittgenstein’s thought, not Malcolm’s – to whom the phrase is never attributed.

All of which is by way of a preface to another symbol of the art of the novel. This comes from the Ludwig Hohl. As is always the case in the Notizen, Hohl’s jottings seem to come out of the air of the ordinary – a walk down the street with no mirror at all, or blue days in his little room under the bar in that working class section of Berne. So, Hohl is writing about strength and exercise – or performance, Leistung. Hohl, as always, seems on the edge of losing control of his topics. This is fatal, since it is the equivalent of becoming boring, even to oneself. I, for instance, am almost always at that point, as this blog abundantly illustrates. But the crooked genius inside of Hohl understands, like a shape shifting messiah, that the air of the ordinary is only a disguise, only another disguise. Hohl ends the note on muscular strength with this story:

“Hard earned strength”, they say – do they imagine that the opposite is stolen strength? I once saw a man in the circus who lifted with one arm a weight on which was written, 200 Kilos. He lifted it up to his head and, always using just one arm, over his head, with obviously the most extreme effort; and as the weight had reached the end of his outstretched, upward arm, then it lifted itself all alone somewhat higher and – o unforgettable sight! – kept climbing up to the ceiling of the circus, pulled by a string – for it was made out of cardboard.”

O unvergesslicher Eindruck! Here, indeed, is an image of art for you. Here, among the popcorn chewing innocents, we suddenly catch a glimpse of the imp of realism, that most fabulous of cryptozoological creatures, as it tries to make its escape.

spies from the house of love

In Gunzberg, on his itinerary down the Danube, Claudio Magris was reminded of one of its most famous citizens, Joseph Mengele. Mengele was hidden by the monks at Gunzberg after WWII, who then helped him ratline it to South America. In 1959, he was so confident that Adenauer’s Germany wasn’t too interested in his ass that he returned for his father’s funeral. Upon Mengele’s story – the banal bureaucrat who used to “hurl babies into the fire, tear infants from their mother’s breast and dash their brains out, extract fetuses from the womb… gouge out eyes, which he kept threaded on strings and hung on the walls of his room, and then sent to Prof. Otran van Vershauer (Director of the Berlin Institute of Anthropology, and a professor at Munster University even after 1953)”, Magris hangs his complaint about the cult of transgression. Magris starts by laying down a liberal principle that perhaps two thirds of Americans would disagree with – “As long as transgression is applied to codes of sexual behavior things are easy, because infractions of erotic taboos do not constitute evil if performed by responsible persons and inflicting no harm on others” (92) – a strangely naïve view of sexuality. But having laid this down as an “easy” principle – it being easy to argue for if one simply pays no attention to history, experience, the cultural codes that have been in place for millennia, and other trivialities – Magris makes the ‘hard” argument – or is it easy? that transgression equals Mengele.

Joseph Frank’s group evidently crystallized around transgression – in fact, the rumor about Frank is that he destroyed a Talmud in front of his followers. He also, like many Sabbataians, found no reason not to seem to convert – in his case, not to Islam, as did Sabbatai Zev, but to Christianity, signaling to those who could read the signs that he was the successor to Jesus Christ. To do this in Poland in 1760 was a transgression against the very survival of Judaism, or at least so the rabbis thought. And they had an excellent case.

Magris, of course, is not arguing against the messianic impulse, but rather, against the notion, made intellectually fashionable in the 70s by the posthumous edition of Bataille’s work, that transgression was a way out of the iron cage of the liberal, bourgeois lifestyle – a lifestyle in which, among other things, it is “easy” to argue for infractions of erotic taboos, since after all, sex is exactly equal to and only about pleasure. As such, tabooing consensual fun and games is silly – it is all chocolate, anyway. Chantilly. Lace.

However, Magris (I am being harsh about him here, but I do like the little essays that make up the Danube) has at least found the right problem. Of course, that problem was found long before – Artaud found it in Heliogabule, and Bataille took it up as his life task. Given an unequal social order, how can the powerful possibly transgress? Mengele received a salary from the state. When Beria had Meyerhold, the greatest theater director of the twentieth century, some say, taken to the Lubyanka and beaten on a regime that soon left him so crippled he couldn’t stand – then had his wife murdered – then moved into his apartment in Leningrad, perhaps on the same day they shot Meyerhold, burned his body, and mingled his ashes with a thousand others that they dumped in a grave – he was not transgressing.

And it was against this “glitch” in the social order, a glitch that caused and forgot the wars, the terror famines, the conquests, that the idea of transgression came about.

I’ve already given a hasty outline of libertinage in a number of posts from last year. In brief, my idea was that the standard story was skewed a little too much by the end of the story, the decline of libertinage in the eighteenth century. Volupte, I claimed, was a central and crystallizing libertine idea, but it was not, in the seventeenth century, synonymous with sensual pleasure. Rather, it was a social pleasure, firstly, and it was closer to what Edmund Burke, in his Essay on the Sublime, called delight. It was a delight that waited at the portals of the senses as the senses opened to nature, as the senses became nature. And that opening was made in defiance of the supernatural order – but it preceded the very idea that the world was human. In its defiance, it generated a code of revolt that naturally gravitated to the great Christian model of revolt: Satan’s. Those who read Paradise Lost and identified with Satan at the end of the 18th century were not engaged in a total misreading: after all, the Milton who wrote that epic was a regicide. In France, alas, the wrong king was beheaded –surely Louis XIV deserved that honor. A maker of battlefields and hunger. But the Fronde, which gathered free thinkers, “bold spirits” to itself, failed.

So when the volupte of the libertines was transformed, in the eighteenth century, to sexual pleasure, the transformation was part of the collapse of the original libertine agenda, in which the human limit existed, briefly, outside of any sacred sanction. However, even as volupte was being transformed, the gesture of defiance, dimly linked to Lucifer, transposed itself to new modalities. The mechanical libertine and the mesmerist met on unexpected psychological and social levels. Just as there is a Marxism of the people, symbolic understandings of commodity fetishism that crop up where a more fully developed capitalism meets an economy in which exchange value has not yet become hegemonic, so, too, messianic movements that center around transgression are a form of the libertinism of the people. At least, one can hypothesize that this is happening, in the oddest way, at the intersection of Poland, Russia and the Ottoman empire in the 18th century.

Of course, the fantastic conjunction of gnosticism and libertinage has a long presence in our collective dream life. Norman Cohen has shown that the story of a esoteric group that engages in sexual orgies to break the social ties of the members and incorporate them into the worship of strange gods – that total cosmic reorientation – is told and retold about the Christians (by the Romans), the Cathars, the witches, the Jews, the Templars. Galinsky’s report could be put in the category of myth, except for the fact that we know such things also happen. There is something psychologically plausible in the fact that Jacob Frank became the seigneur of sexual bestiality, keeping a cold eye on the couplings of his followers, after his wife died. Was it at this point that he made his daughter, Eva, the mother of God?

Eva Frank. Driving about Offenbach in a carriage, visiting respectable houses, dying well off. One wonders, I wonder, about her story.

Fringe viewpoints, and yet it is here that I see so many crossings – Marx with Michelet’s Sorciere, Nietzsche with Jacob Frank, Hazlett with Huene-Wronsky. All the spies in the artificial paradise, sleeper cells from the very beginning.