Analerotik and Q

 

“The fantasy idea that a “child is being beaten” is confessed with surprising frequency by persons who have sought out psychoanalytic treatment either for hysteria or compulsive neurosis”.

Freud’s essay, “ A child is being beaten: contribution to research on the development of sexual  perversion” is from 1919, the metapsychoanalytic years. It has not received the love that, say, the essay on narcissism has, but it seems relevant to the current moment. From the Satanic ritual abuse panic of the nineties to the Q panic of the 2020s, the frequency of a fantasized vision of child abuse at the center of a theory of a vast conspiracy is striking. It is a theory that has become a means of identification in the United States. The child abuse image has a long history in the cycle of moral panics that have modulated American history. Mostly, it is classed with a certain grassroots anxiety not shared by the higher social echelon – but that echelon is certainly capable of being moved by fabricated images of child abuse. In 1990, a public relations firm closely tied to George HW Bush placed a 15 year old named Nayira (who turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, although that was kept secret during her testimony) who claimed to have witnessed Iraqi soldiers tossing newborns out of incubators in order to carry them back to Iraq. The story was a huge fabrication, but the NYT credulously reported it and Amnesty endorsed it (and later, shamefacedly, unendorsed it). This was the same time period in which trials were emerging all over the country of day care owners and  low level police officers, among others, accused of practicing ritual Satanic abuse and slaughtering children in gruesome rituals. The Q variation on this story – of thousands of abused children being used for sex by prominent Democrats and hidden, I believe it is, in caves – is connected to some of the same people – notably, Geraldo Rivera.

What’s up with this recurring fantasy?

This isn’t to say pedophilia is a fantasy. We’ve been through the stories of the Catholic church, we’ve been through Jeffrey Epstein, and here in France we’ve been through a number of individuals who have raped girls or boys and still been in positions of power and influence. But the fantasies are curiously indifferent to this reality. It was Satanists, and not the good fathers of the Christian Brothers, who were supposedly raping six year olds. It was the Democrats, and not the President who had the well publicized habit of popping into the dressing room of Miss Teen World to have a look around, who were the pedophiles operating through pizza parlors. Jeffrey Epstein figures much less in the Q fantasy than Hilary Clinton.

Freud’s essay uses the term Schlag and schlagen, which translates as beat or hit, instead of Klaps, or spank – but I think this is due to the regime of punishment in 1919, where paddling was more extensive. In the end, the central image is of spanking. Freud, as is his wont, begins with certain more social suspects in the development of the fantasy, and then traces it back to the family – as Deleuze and Guattari acidly note, it is always a family scene, always theater with Freud. In the case of this fantasy, the patients usually link it, themselves, to school – for D & G, it is always a collective scene, a school a factory, a place where things are produced. Freud writes something interesting:  that his patients report hearing that “countless children” are being beaten in the school. The children come in multitudes, in the fantasy.  “The influence of school was so clear that the patients in question initially tried to link the beating fantasies exclusively to the school period, after the sixth year.”  That is, first grade.

I think Freud did not linger long enough on what he took to be a screen memory. Freud does not link the beating fantasy to the particular punitive regime undergone by the patients in their infancy – many seem to think that their parents were not spankers, and were, in fact, lenient. We don’t have to go all the way back to the Analerotik to see that school itself operates as a sexual factor- in fact, is pervaded by sexual discipline. And this factor comes into play not as “one child” being beaten, but in countless ones, masses of children. It is a mass symbol that demands a correlate mass. Freud suggests we ask” Who was the beaten child? The fantasized self or the other? Was it always the same child or arbitrarily often another? Who hit the child? An adult?” and so on.

These questions seem eminently pertinent to the psychoanalysis of the extreme right, especially as that right is operating as an identity – a subgroup identity of people who are in the know. The victim/redeemer binary that structures this identity seems, to my mind, a key to the way fantasy is sublimated into extreme right ideology.

In the beginning was the pun

 

“I was visiting Kyoto's Fushimi Inari shrine with a friend, who told me that the Japanese word for pun is oyajigyagu, or "old guy gag". Puns are the jokes older men tell. Wordplay does not float free from culture.”

This is a quotation from Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft article on puns in the TLS, which manages to avoid both Joyce and Lewis Carroll, but does stroll a bit with Lacan and Hegel. Wurgaft  begins with the audacious hint that the logos itself might have been a pun: in the beginning was the pun. And the theological paradox, here, is that a pun is inconceivable without a language, as well as the world. If the world begins as a pun, then it begins, as Nietzsche claimed, as a point in the eternal return of the same. Its beginning is as fictitious as its ending, and its puns are literal – the literal being  a pun that hasn’t found out about itself yet.  Perhaps we are living in a Finnegans Wake world, as Joyce-ians have long suspected, and causality is just the universe punning.

Myself, I am not, like Wurgaft, one for the old guy gag. I like jokes that aren’t quite funny, but that, in the telling, move towards funny – that is, that build up ridiculously towards a punch line, Aristocrats-style. The whole point of the Aristocrats joke is to make a joke of creating a verbal edifice that results in a punchline. It is an avalanche event – determinate chaos, the sorites paradox that determines the events in the story – rather like the end of Portnoy’s Complaint.

A high five to Wurgaft for this short essay in the joke asphilosophy. 

Vandalism and the souring of the world

 

 There is a small subset of historians in France who have mulled the politics of vandalism, starting with James Guillaume’s “Gregoire and vandalism” in 1901. The locus classicus, here, is Abbe Gregoire’s speeches in the Assembly in 1794 against “vandalism”, which he saw as harming both the Republic and Christianity. In his memoirs, Gregoire famously wrote: “I created the world to kill the thing.” This is the type of claim that invites counter-claims, especially by that counter-claiming tribe, the philologists. They love nothing better than to trump the claim to some “first use” of a word by finding previous uses. The cross-breeding between the philologist and the historians of the Revolution – also a notoriously bickering tribe – has created marginal firefights for more than a century.

Gabriel Springarth’s article in Annales historiques de la revoluition francaise from 1980 is entitled: On revolutionary vandalism (1792-1794). It is an important summing up of the political imagery associated with the vandal. In the last four years, the political use and misuse of the vandalism charge has suddenly become pertinent both in France and the U.S. When the Gilets Jaunes came to Paris from out there in the fields – or, actually, out there in the suburbs, and from the 20^th arrondissement, where one can still barely afford to live, etc. – the Macronic reaction focused very much on smashed glass and the grafitti on the arc de triomphe – as well as some of the small pickaxe work on said monument to French victory. In the U.S., about the same time, there was, firstly, the battle of the Confederate monuments, followed up by the extreme right’s trampling through the Capitol with Confederate flags fluttering.

  : «... to destroy the statues is not, as they claim, to destroy despotism: it means destroying monuments erected by the arts, and which do honor to the arts. Let me remind you that artists of all nations have have studied their art before the statues of Caligula and Nero which were wrested from the hands of the Goths and the Vandals.”

This touches on the whole field in which politics, symbol, art and history are interconnected.  Springarth connects Reboul’s discourse with the Enlightenment program, which posed itself against “barbarism”, quoting Diderot from 1754: By barbarism, I mean ... that dark disposition which renders a person insensible to the charms of nature and art, and to the sweetness [douceurs] of society. In fact, how else do we call those who mutilate statues which have been saved from the ruins of ancient Rome other than as barbarians?”

The sweetness of society – a major theme for Roberto Calasso in his maddeningly charming book, The Ruin of Karsch, which stages an encounter between the ancien regime and the genocide in Cambodia – the latter taken as the endpoint of one kind of dialectic of the Enlightenment. In his chapter, The Origins of Sweetness, he begins with an anecdote about sacrifice from Frazer. In one ritual that Frazer describes, pieces of cake are put in a hat. One piece is blackened with charcoal. The pieces are drawn out of the hat by a select number of persons in an order, and the one who gets the blackened slice is sacrificed to Baal.

Wittgenstein commented on this passage that the use of cake – of sweetness – to convey a sentence of death is “particularly terrible (almost like betrayal by a kiss)”. One of Calasso’s questions, which may seem different in Italian, where Dolce vita is still a living phrase, is how sweetness fell out of our social order. It was, as per the citation from Diderot, a way of talking about what the good life was about in that moment in the ancien regime in which it was suspected, on a large scale, that God was dead.

“After the Revolution, progress forgets sweetness. Its heart does not want it, since it is there that the demon of indefinite process dwells. Its reason does not want it, since reason now claims to be based on the Revolution, hence on the moment when sweetness was killed. And according to reason’s immense fallacy, the sacrificial victim was to be seen as the Enemy. Even its legacy could be contagious. When the very memory of sweetness is eliminated, when all history becomes son et lumiere and no longer cohabitation with protective shadows, then certain well-mening, distressing expressions begin to appear (“leisure time”, “quality of life”), just as people began to talk about “landscape” after nature had already been disfigured.”

Calasso’s thought springs from the roots of reaction. It is not wrong for all of that, although it ignores another Enlightenment theme, which found the roots of sweetness – sugar – and its production to be the imposition of the least sweet of all things, slavery, on a goodly portion of humanity – dark shadows indeed. The transposition from honey cakes to sugar cakes has been perpetually caught in the Middle Passage. It is, even now.

Still, there is something to the idea that sweetness, the sweetness of our compact, or lack of it, is in question when we talk about the politics of vandalism and we ask: who are the vandals? In the case of the Gilets Jaunes, I think the vandals clearly sit on the throne – or in the president’s house – and have sat there for decades. The neoliberal turn is a form of higher vandalism, in which monuments are judged as tourist attractions, and art is a matter of “thought leaders” giving Ted talks. The sweetness is drained form the social compact. And the two forms of diagonal protest, one reactionary, one revolutionary, have emerged around the wound, around a certain fatal sourness in our social arrangements. 

 

 

 

 

A blues for the rich girl - Karen Chamisso

 

A blues for the rich girl

 

Exhilaration and depression

Joined hands above my cradle

One voice

Issued from two mouths

 

How can I

How can I sur...

How can I survive

Such tremendous patronage?

 

Either gloria in excelsis deo

Of mini golf

In the abyss

- darling turn out the light

 

I will run away

And slay giants

On the way to the ruin

Of God’s castle.

 

Uncaught.

Untaught.

the collective fugue

 

“It is precipitated not by a mechanical breakdown but by the descent of an emotional block . Its gravest form , which science has come to call fugue, embraces three classically dramatic phases.  The first of these is a brief interval of complete dissociation, closely resembling somnambulism. This is eventually followed by a period of lighened oblivion, in which only certain facts and events remain beyond the reach of the victim. The final stage, which may occur spontaneously or as a result of psychiatric manipulatin, is a return to full-functioning consciousness. But, whatever its pattern, an attack of functional amnesia is seldom susceptible to either a ready or a reassuring explanation.”

This is a passage from Berton Rouechés classic article on the fugue, Lost, which was published in 1954 in the New Yorker.  Historians have long  been fascinated by  collective memory, following in the trail first marked out by Maurice Hallwachs in The Collective Frameworks of Memory (1925). We have less of a sense of collective amnesia. That a society could go on a fugue seems an overegging of what has always seemed half concept, half metaphor. Yet surely we see things that seem fugue-like, where the desire to forget leads to mass dissociation.

In Roeché’s essay, a subject he calls Uhlan (a significant last name choice – an Uhlan is a cavalry lanceman, and in the folk memory, a very savage soldier) one day is looking through books at a kiosk when he feels something is different. And then he feels that he doesn’t know his own name or where he is. Roeché was well known for his novelistic sense of the causes and effects of disease – for writing medical histories with such a flair that not only was he read by the New Yorker popular audience, but by doctors seeking to understand the feelings and behaviors of their patients. Uhlen it appears was bereft of his mother from the age of six, and preferred to stay with his aunt than his father. He lost touch with his father at 19.

In Hallwachs’ model of family memory, poor Uhlan was lost before he lost his memory. His account shows a man subject to crippling panic attacks and a sort of overwhelming restlessness. At the time he went into his fugue, he was feeling imprisoned by his job and responsibilities. Previously, he had been able to withdraw from such things, but this time he had family responsibilities that seemed to shut down his escape route. Responsibilities depend, crucially, on memory. The routine is laced with memory reminders - the alarm clock going off, the hour you have to arrive at work, the bills you have to pay, the appointments you must meet. All of these have collective counterparts. As routines break down, as language stops fitting the situation at hand, as plagues bring down thousands a day, as the police shoot people in cold blood and are caught on cameras, as we look in horror at monuments to slavers and genocide, our memories seem to conspire against us - the us who had, at one time, dominance in the mainstream. With that mainstream's race and gender, its favorite tv programs and movies, its notion of a good time. 

Collectively, humans have always needed the escape hatch.  In the fugue state, there is an overwhelming restlessness. It takes on an almost organic quality. To go somewhere is imperative. And this, too, has a collective correlate I think. The collective fugue state crystalizes around issues – escape roots – the more violent the better. There is a sense that the issues have to be resolved, that they define sides, that nobody could not be burdened with the issue. It is, even, irresponsible to question the issue.

In Roeché’s essay, Uhlan eventually wakes up in a bed in Bellevue and remembers who he is. But the collective awakening from fugues is usually bloodier.

Maybe we are in one now.

The curious case of the missing dogs

 Sometimes, a writer finishes his text. Sometimes, the text kicks the ass of the writer so hard that the writer has to stop. This text is one of the latter. It is part of a series of true/fiction Cold War stories that I've been playing around with. With some suggestion from Sebald, some from the classic use of historical fact - from Merimee to Tolstoy - and some from my own dumb curiosity. 

I have substituted, for the protagonist, the first letter of his last name. This is a warning to the reader: character N. is the equivalent to, but not the representation of, the historical personage from whose biography I have ripped these facts. 

The complete work is over on Medium.  

- A

photo is taken in the Bois de Boulogne, January 25, 1937. It is published in Excelsior, a Paris newspaper. Excelsior was in the avant garde of newspapers, trying to combine the photogenic style of Life with the quotidian pace of your usual daily. Its archive is a treasurehouse of photos. This one has a certain dramatic movement. It shows a corpse in a clearing in the bushes. All that remains of the Russian economist N. N.’s “governante”, most likely his housekeeper, from the accounts of other newspapers, stands in her woolen dress at the head of the corpse, and is making some point to the group of detectives who are grouped at the corpse’s side. There’s a rather soggy newspaper at the housekeeper’s feet. In the center of the group of detectives is Commissaire Guillaume, who is bowler hatted. In the background, the trees are bare, wintering. This grouping distinctly resembles certain Renaissance paintings — a pietá for the era of Detective magazine and the gangster.

- Another photo appeared in many papers on January 26, 1937 and afterwards, whenever some event or statement from officials made the murder hot again. It was published on the front page of L’oeuvre, Le Journal, Le Petit Journal, Le Matin, and the Republique among other newspapers. It is an undated portrait photo showing N.’s face. Rimless glasses, a broad bare forehead, a somewhat petulant expression about the mouth, a little moustache.

• The posthumous life of the murder of N. has become a variant in one of the great binary structures that define Cold War mythology. Depending on who one’s favorite candidate for the murderer is, his name figures in two series of victims. One series consists of Eugen Miller, Rudolf Klement, Walter Krivinsky, General Koutiepov, and Ignaz Reiss. This is the Comintern series. Another, opposing series consists of Laetitia Toureaux, Carlo and Nello Rosselli, and Marx Dormoy. This is the fascist series. Left/Right, powerful absolutes. There are other names one could add to the first chain — for instance, Juliet Stuart Poyntz, or Leon Trotski. To the second chain one could add Maurice Juif and Jean Zay. The first series haunted the Cold War liberals; its shades attended parties with the Partisan Review notables and went to Cultural Conferences where, it was decided, Communism was the God that failed. The second series ended up in court in 1947–1948, in the Palais de Justice in Paris, where it was called the trial of the Cagoule — the nickname for the underground, extreme-right group of terrorists that operated in France from 1936 to 1938. More properly the Comité secret d’action révolutionnaire (C.S.A.R.), or as they called themselves, Organisation secrète d’action révolutionnaire nationale. Cagoule means hood, and the word comes, vaguely, from the initiation ceremony, which involved a black hood and an oath that bound the life of the oathtaker to the organization. The ferocity of the ceremony was devised by F. — who in this narrative murdered the Russian economist N.

- The postwar trial was not, by all accounts, a satisfactory reckoning; strings were pulled and the bloodiest perpetrators fled abroad — for instance, F. — to other lives and names. Many of the accused were out of prison in less than a year. One of them, in fact, went on to rise to the head of a huge international corporation, L’Oreal, successfully navigating the postwar world until, at the end of his career, attention was suddenly focused on his anti-semitic salad days. The burning of Paris’s synagogues. Under the approving eye of the German occupiers.

- After the postwar excitement of the purges, the collaborators, the lovers of German soldiers with their shaved heads, the affair was buried under the non-gaze of the turned backs of the French establishment, generally.

- N.’s corpse is one of the facts in our universe of facts, we hold this truth to be self-evident. As for everything else about the scene, from January 1937 until now, self-evidence has not been the order of the day. The blurring began with the first newspaper reports, with their conflicting details (mostly small) and their heavy implications about who did this (a bigger and bigger argument), and none of this was really cleared up.

- There were witnesses: one, M. Theophile Levoeuf — sometimes misspelled Leveuf or Le Veuf. The ligature is often bobbled. Use your search spelling accordingly. Two, M. Mallet. A cantonnier. That is, a roadworker, streetsweeper, repairer of the trails in the park, general presence in the streets of this part of Autueil. He’d been operating on Rue Michel-Ange, he’d often swept the sidewalk in front of 28 Rue Michel-Ange, “a pavilion” that went for at least 24,000 francs in rent per annum (the corpulent corpse it appeared, lived well, on an income estimated at “300,000 francs” per year). Three, the people who fled when the cops arrived, which always happens. Four, the anonymous sources feeding info to the police, or to private investigation agencies, blackmailers, informants, whisperers, who play it back to interested parties and the press. A political assassination is what we have here, with the attendant confusions, both real and designed. Agendas out the ass.

- Mr Levoeuf, January 25, 1937, 10:20 a.m. The weather is — as all accounts agree — “glacial”. Mr. Levoeuf, an unemployed accountant, living at 25, Rue Le Marois (the addresses in this story are, oddly, of a specificity…) is making for the bus stop near the gate to the Bois de Boulogne park, the Porte de Prince, across from the Roland-Garos stadium. “The witness crossed paths with an elegant, corpulent man with a still young face, under a crown of white hair, dressed in a beige tweed jacket and gray flannel pants, accompanied by two dogs, a white fox terrier and an auburn haired spaniel.”

- The clock is ticking.

- M. Levoeuf moves forward. Somewhere on the street the roadworker, M. Mallet, is busying himself with his usual observations of the neighborhood. M. Mallet, we suspect, was the kind of man who had a drink with the cops now and then. Had a second source of income, perhaps. His tips, their tips. As we will learn from the papers in the days ahead, M. Mallet is no ordinary streetsweeper, but a man of parts in his own way. He spent time, in his youth, in a Russian speaking milieu. He prides himself on accents, and can tell proper French from sloppy French, a Slavic accent. What an appropriate streetsweeper for the Russian economist N.’s street!

- M. Levoeuf is now at an angle from the gate into the park. He can look over the barrier into the park. ‘The gate of the Princes, which gives access to the woods, faces the street of the same name. The place where the body fell is thirty meters to the left of the [walking] path, which is to say, seen from the gate, slightly to the left of the line going perpendicular to the gate. Levoeuf… was on the side not of the woods, but on the opposite side, near the busstop where he was waiting to attend to his “business”. The distance between these points is 150 meters.”

- Does M. Levoeuf have any idea that his face, with a black beret, his everygull’s face, is going to be on the front page of many of Paris’s papers tomorrow? He does not. Did his friends goof about it with him? Or did he have friends? We know little about the life of this unemployed accountant at the beginning of 1937. After the difficult year, 1936. Year that Leon Blum was elected, on the Left. The Popular Front. Year of the strikes, the reforms. The civil war breaks out in Spain. But M. Levoeuf is a minder of his own business, from the brief bit of his life that surfaces in the paper. So when he sees the man with the dogs and another man arguing, it doesn’t attract his attention. Maybe they are exercise partners. Not M. Levoeuf’s world, frankly. This is Autueil, where the residents have the big francs, and perhaps M. Levoeuf is even here this morning to dream a little about becoming, one day, a success and getting a villa or apartment here.

- As an unemployed bookkeeper, he is probably not on the side of the factory worker. Petit bourgeois, this guy. These distinctions count in 1937. The headlines in the great dailies are about Stalin’s show trials, with the fantastic confessions of the great group that once made the Russian revolution. One of the accused was a friend of the man in the park, L’Humanité -the Communist newspaper — thunders that they are traitors all. Le Jour, on the right, goes in for the irony of quotation marks: The accused Trotskyists of Moscow continue their “spontaneous confessions”. LeVoeuf is likely more interested in the Petit Parisien story about the soccer match Sunday at Roland-Garros: “The Austrians squarely beat France.” Being unemployed, though, does M. LeVoeuf even give the newsvender 30 centimes for a paper, or does he simply forage among the newspapers left behind on benches and bus seats?

- M. Levoeuf is taken out of whatever daydream he is nourishing by the sight of the conclusion to the dispute in the park. “The two men appear to be boxing!” “Suddenly one of them collapses”.

- One account of what happened at some point between 10:30 and 11: “The witness heard no cry, no shot. Two small dogs walk around the fallen man, barking furiously. M. Levoeuf hurries to where the pugilist lay. He found the corpulent man, comfortably clothed in a beige tweed sweater and flannel pants, with expensive moccasins, extended, face down. He leaned over, wanting to help the wounded victim. He turned him on his back. But he saw, with horror, that the blood was escaping in abundance from a gash in his left cheek. A red spot was growing larger and larger on the gray wool vest of the victim. M. Levoeuf saw instantly that the man was dead. He cried for help. A park guard came, stopped for a moment, stupefied, and said he knew the man.” (Le Journal, January 26, 1937).

- Or: perhaps: “In his clenched hand he [the victim] still held the two leashes of his dog. The two dogs were there, a spaniel and a fox terrier, at the foot of the master, two poor beasts who understood nothing of what had just happened, whose worried looks seem to await an order.” (le Petit Journal, Jan. 26, 1937)

- Or perhaps: “the dogs were howling” (Le Jour, Jan. 26, 1937). Or perhaps: M. Levoeuf had “a difficult time separating the dogs, a fox terrier and a German shepherd [sic], who vigorously defended the remains of their master as he approached.”(Petit Parisien, Jan. 26, 1937). Or perhaps, as Candide, a weekly, reported later, after Levoeuf turned the body over, and saw the man was dead, “at that moment a road mender was passing by with his cart. Levoeuf hailed him and asked him to remain by the body, while he himself, stopping a car, went to find a guard.” (Candide, Feb. 25, 1937).

See the rest here. 

False flags - the 2020 strategy of tension

 

I'm sorta interested in the false flagging, by rightwing groups, of leftwing groups. It has been a common thread in rightwing extremism since at least the 1930s, and flowered into the strategy of tension in Italy in the 1970s. The explosion that destroyed the Bologna railroad station and killed 85 people in 1980 was plotted by extreme righwing groups with the intent that the government and media would blame the left. There has been a long struggle in Italy to hold the neo-fascist perpetrators responsible. In the U.S., the strategy of tension has fallen into the hands of clueless militia members and the like. However, aided by high officials in the Trump administration and rightwing cops, this will eventually work some pissant masterpiece of a massacre here. Starting with the famous "umbrella man" who tried to provoke a looting riot during the protests in Minnesota this summer - who turned out to be connected to a white supremicist group, as was suspected by protesters at the time - to the Boogaloo bois who killed two cops in Oakland with the intent of throwing blame on the protesters to the man who firebombed a police station in Minnesota who, in contact with the Oakland killers, was trying to throw the blame on the BLM - a mini strategy of tension has been going on, favored by conservative media. The intersection between rightwing media and these groups is essential.

The strategy of tension rarely works to achieve the intended coup. In the 30s, the C.S.A.R., a right wing French group, tried to pull this off to overthrow the Popular Front government and failed. However, many of the members of this group got a fantasy chance to do their business once the Nazis occupied France. The people who supervised the blowing up of the synagogues of Paris were ex C.S.A.R. members. After the war, they were given light punishments, and went on to important places in French society - one of them, Mitterand's boyhood friend, Jacques Correze, eventually became the CEO of L'oreal, which was for a while your perfume company to meet all your anti-semitic needs - so heavily did their employee force depend on former collaborators.

That the Washington Times has printed that there were no antifa people among the Capitol incursion group is a real blow for the time being. But the lie that it was really antifa is being shaped right now, and will eventually come out of Donald Trump's mouth.

Against Healing!

Susan Sontag, I think of you!

In Illness as Metaphor, when she went after the “anti-intellectual pieties and a facile compassion all too triumphant in contemporary medicine and psychiatry”, she was well aware of the insertion of a illness metaphoric in politics too. In fact, one of the prized sentences in American political rhetoric is Abraham Lincoln’s use of a battlefield injury metaphor, “binding our wounds” – subtexting the Jesus story – to describe the national process of unification. Lincoln, like Bismark, helped forge a new, modern state. It was noticed early on that Bismark’s German was, like Lincoln’s English, a thing of folk poetry. But instead of using the metaphor of injuries (which presupposes the more extensive field of the “body politic”), Bismark was more inclined to peasant metaphors and similes, where the state is pictured as a plough horse, or “putting Germany in the saddle”.

Lincoln’s metaphors are often celebrated, seldom subject to the critical examination we should give to classic texts. What, after all, did “binding up the wounds” of the Civil War mean?

That meaning, in terms of Lincoln’s life, was of course fated not to be. Lincoln swerved a lot. It is hard to know whether he would have swerved towards the Sumner side of radical Reconstruction, which would have built a different America, or the course taken by the Northern bourgeoisie, who threw African-Americans on the pile – there’s a metaphor for ya! – and healed right whitely. But the healing metaphor was on its legs and since then has done a lot of work. Much of it in support of anti-intellectual pieties and compromises with oppression that normalized and spread oppression.

Lindsey Graham, a straw stuffed non-entity who, as Senator of South Carolina, has succeeded in impressing other non-entities, political reporters mainly for center-lib publications, just used the healing metaphor in the way it is always used – to creep around a gross act of oppression and violence.

“As President @realDonaldTrumpstated last night, it is time to heal and move on. If Speaker Pelosi pushes impeachm ent in the last days of the Trump presidency it will do more harm than good.I’m hopeful President-elect Biden sees the damage that would be done from such action.”

Time to heal. We’ve had so many healing moments! Sparing Jeff Davis and General Lee hanging. Sparing the Confederate leaders. Sparing the Jim Crow enforcers. Sparing every eminence, every rich man or woman who ever violated a federal law or salted away criminal proceeds in an offshore account. We’ve healed ourselves into a jolly little corner, where Aryan Nation Cosplayers accompanied by thugs looking to kill a couple of hate figures or two, Pelosi, a coupla Dems, those bitches, mainly, and peeing on the carpet as they went, and killing a cop – all of this is just healable fun and games. The price of healing is put off, and put off. That is, the price paid by comfortable white folks. The price is quite evident on the streets of Columbus Ohio, Ferguson Missouri, in the cancer gulch in Louisiana, in Kenosha, in Louisville, in every metro in this great healed Republic of ours.

But there comes a time to ask a question: what is the difference between healing and the disease?

The Aryan Nation revolution will be televised

 Blow after blow, the Trumpkins must be coming down from their high. Frist "Mr. Trump", as the NYT has taken to calling him - which is a sign that he really is expelled from the countrfy club - made a video in which he said his beloved Patriots were naughty naughty to try to take over the capitol and burn the electoral college ballots. Apparently, his aides said he could be prosecuted. Then the WSJ editorial board, which is close to God - that is, the God of the Right, Rupert Murdoch - said Trump should be impeached. A rare conjunction of AOC and the WSJ! So, shockingly, the fallback story that this was just an antifa false flag is shredded from the top, although I'd guess 90 percent of Trumpsters will soon be assuring all and sundry that the Capitol takeover was a Democratic Party plot. Then it appears the "protestors", as the NYT persistently calls the Aryan Nation gang that took over the Capitol, did kill a cop.

On the plus side, we know that the hearts of every police union president in America is with the Aryan nation and their preznit. So, same as it ever was.

On balance

 

 While the aesthetic sphere is full of objects corresponding to the sense  of sight or of hearing, there are no objects directly correlating to the the sense of balance. Dance and sports are the closest we get. Roger Caillois was clever in noticing the role of dizziness in certain kinds of games, which he categorized under the rubric ilynx. Caillois was not a systematic thinker; he was also a Cold War liberal of the very anti-marxist type. These two facts have to be held in mind when reading Jacques Ehrman’s terrific attack on Caillois in “Homo Ludens revisited” (1968), which holds a special place in the history of deconstruction in America.  Ehrman’s attack must have sounded like Martian in 1968, while now it is part of our lingo:

“For finally, if the status of "ordinary life," of "reality," is not thrown into question in the very movement of thought given over to play, the theoretical, logical, and anthropological bases on which this thinking is based can only be extremely precarious and contestable. In other words, we are criticizing these authors chiefly and most seriously for considering "reality," the "real," as a given component of the problem, as a referent needing no discussion, as a matter of course, neutral and objective.”

Still, given the limitations of Caillois ideological adherence to the White Mythology, it is also true that Caillois provides the elements for throwing into question – that is, getting dizzied by – the “very moment of thought given over to play.” Ehrman’s thesis has still not inflected our official historiography, which looks towards vast economic forces, or a high concept notion of politics, as its objects, and leaves aside such things as drugs, inebriation, sport, etc. as minor concerns. You will find much more about drugs and drug smuggling in journalistic history accounts than you will find in any recent academic history of, for example, Cold War America, thus separating “ordinary life” from the “extraordinary” life of the historical process.

The meeting of ordinary life and extraordinary life in the governance of our somatic chemical structure does, I think, go back to how an official sense of balance is maintained and idealized in the moral sphere. Ilynx is not easily exorcized, and it pops up in philosophy too – that very peculiar discourse of extraordinary life. Marx’s notion, or non-notion, of revolution plays an illynx like role in his larger framing of modernity.  Nietzsche’s notion of the “eternal return of the same” – that reactionary version of revolution – is, I think, a form of vertigo, of getting lost in time and space, in as much as time and space are themselves lost, never original, always copied.

Emile Cioran, in the Twilight of Thoughts, writes about vertigo as an existential expression of the most radical doubt. I think vertigo is an important, maybe a governing condition in Cioran’s work. For Cioran, the verticality of the human animal is primary to that animal’s domestication – it precedes language. Vertigo is thus a strike against the empire of the human.

“Everything that is not inert must, in different degrees, support itself. And how much more must man, who only accomplishes his destiny inventing certitudes and only maintains his position by the tonic of illusions. But he who begins to face himself, who slips into the transparency of his own position, who is a man only through the indulgences of his memory, can he still call upon the traditional support, his animal verticality, can he still hold himself up when he is no longer himself?”

For Cioran, the fall into time is really a fall, a threat to the backbone, a passage down and down the dark well.  In Cioran’s opinion, a romantic anarchic one, all of history is an injury to the sense of balance.

 

Which brings me to an instance of balance finding itself. I saw this. I saw it this Sunday, in Parc Royal, when Adam showed me how he could ride a bike. He had tried bike riding last year in Montpellier, but he never made it past the stage  of his parents holding him up. This year, after ardently wishing for a bicycle, one appeared under, or not really under but leaning next to, the Christmas tree. We took him out to Parc Picasso, one cold Thursday, and went racing about with him. It was A. who figured out that the perfect thing was to hold onto the back of his coat while he pedalled along, his little helmet slopping jauntily over to one side. She would let go for ten seconds, twenty. Then, catching up, hold again. Saturday, I did not go with them to the Parc. And as I was sitting at home, pretending to work, I received a video from A. It showed Adam biking by himself. Biking all around the course in the Parc Royal! I was filled with a parent bird feeling. The nestling spread its wings. The vacant air became a living thing. The boy, 8 years old, attached to a metal frame and two wheels, found his balance Tao. Joy filled the world.

The part that is left out by the thinkers of vertigo.

Le bateau ivre, part 2 by Karen Chamisso

 

 Mickey Mouse came to the new world

with his ancient paraphernalia

- a cauldron, a wand

boosted from the paleolithic.

 

The wilderness was full of strange forces

that Mickey could bind, but not understand.

Chop down all the trees, all of them

boil the Indians in the cauldron.

 

Around our tables we eat

good food, a peasant dream of calories.

Steamboat Willy takes the river down

to sell his slaves at all the river towns.

 

Will he ever be forgiven

for his innocence, that mouse?

He’s gone now. Died in a quagmire

of his own devising.