"When all the world has gone to sleep The hunters to the forest creep From out 'the wild wood comes the call: "The hunt is life ... the hunt is all ..." [Omnia, cernunnos]
The Indo-Celtic parallel of the Horned God...
Cernunnos, the Horned God of Celtic Nature Spirituality, personifies the archetypal energy of the Stag, the Lord of the Woods and of the wildness of nature. This iconography is from the Gundestrup cauldron (a part of that is shown in my second picture- the cauldron is from the Roman Iron Age period and was found in Denmark, but may be of Gaulish origin) which shows how ancient and prevalent the archetype of Cernunnos was.
Those horns, like root stems exposed to the sun, needy, seeking, intrusion upwardly focused.
The upward signifying mind, as opposed to the downward body.
Does the hypnotist will the "victim’s" hypnosis? No, he manipulates the willingness already present.
Does the grifter invent the other's desire? Does the one selling place the need the product satisfies in the brain? Does the faith healer heal? Does the liar lie? Does the hunter create the hunted? Does the farmer construct domestication? Does the magician conjure up forces that do not exist?
Madness is acting in disregard to the fact that the potential costs (risks) outweigh the potential benefits (pleasures). In this regard Hannibal Lecter, as an artistic device, is either a representation of madness, or – this is the frightening part – a creature so superior that the costs are minimal.
In an age where words, mind, is still permitted – but for how long ? - hunting, killing, consuming, fucking, has been reduced down to "mere" words, and metaphors. Even in this realm of innocuous verbal abuse, we sense something primal; something that may not be permitted to translate into something physical (real), but that it could, it may... maybe it should (the moral dilemma).
Modern man indulges in all sorts of substituted pleasures, to deal with that itch he cannot scratch... that he fears touching, because it is still fresh, still bleeding; he hungers for what he is told is forbidden, vile... uncivilized. Then he denies this deep need, finding clever ways to sidestep them, and to cover them up with words. He mocks them when they are presented to him rationally, knowing that if they were as bold as to express themselves freely he would be the first to run to the authorities for help – thusly making them a form of madness he can stand against, while he is seduced by the possibilities.
Behold the modern hypocrite!!!
The pop-cultural icons accomplish two things:
1- They ridicule, by reducing the idea to a caricature.
2- They limit, by connecting the idea to an image, an appearance.
In the first case, they make the idea marketable, playing on those denied internal hungers, and fears. T They nurture the fears so as to discredit the seductive parts.
In the second, they restrict the idea to an iconography, an image. the real manifestation of this type will have to adhere to this popular image, if it is to be taken seriously.
Unjustified cynicism is, after all, a symptom of deep anxiety.
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Last edited by Satyr on Fri Apr 18, 2014 4:58 pm; edited 1 time in total
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
Those horns, like root stems exposed to the sun, needy, seeking, intrusion upwardly focused.
The upward signifying mind, as opposed to the downward body.
Does the hypnotist will the "victim"s" hypnosis? No, he manipulates the willingness already present.
And why is that?
Because the animal is severed from the man...
The beast that roams aimlessly will be the one that is seduced to the pipes of Pan...
Pink Floyd's "The Piper at the Gates"... between conscious and the sub-conscious...
And that's what this thread is about...
The severance of the Beast... and the Sovereign pretending to be Human - like the US of A... when it is the most animaline- Inhuman... as in the animaline-In-the-human...
The beast that roams aimlessly will be the one that is seduced to the pipes of Pan...
Pink Floyd's "The Piper at the Gates"... between conscious and the sub-conscious...
And that's what this thread is about...
The severance of the Beast... and the Sovereign pretending to be Human - like the US of A... when it is the most animaline- Inhuman... as in the animaline-In-the-human...
That which is denied does not disappear, "merely" by being denied, it makes us all the more vulnerable to it.
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Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37249 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Before the artistic device, the metaphor, of Harrison's Hannibal Lecter can be pursued further - despite its pop-cultural castrations - some concepts must be explored;
---Does Hannibal kill indiscriminately? ---Why does he eat his victims? ---Why is he free inside a prison? ---What powers does he posses above and beyond the average, appearing as if they were supernatural? ---Why is he alone, and why does he entertain himself in the way that he does? ---Why does he attract attention even when he is trying to avoid it?
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Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
Those horns, like root stems exposed to the sun, needy, seeking, intrusion upwardly focused.
The upward signifying mind, as opposed to the downward body.
Does the hypnotist will the "victim’s" hypnosis? No, he manipulates the willingness already present.
Does the grifter invent the other's desire? Does the one selling place the need the product satisfies in the brain? Does the faith healer heal? Does the liar lie? Does the hunter create the hunted? Does the farmer construct domestication? Does the magician conjure up forces that do not exist?
Fuller introducing the antlers/deer motif makes the trope of the blond beast all the more richer. Its how he retropolates the psyche of Hannibal into a more spiritual tapestry, taking you yourself to behold the juxtaposition of the wolf and the deer... The deer is a quiet animal, hardly makes a sound, uncannily aware of medicinal herbs in the forest,... intuitions growing silently... The subconscious is so subtle and it makes inroads very quietly... In Indo-Celtic thought, it was believed Fire ran away hiding itself in the antlers of the deer.... The deer symbolized the hidden fire because the antlers look like tree-branches inside which fire was believed to be hidden. So, to hunt or control the deer, was to regain your "fire", to be the master of your fluctuating senses;
"The Hatha-Yoga-Pradipika (4:66-67; 84-88) contains indications on how to use sounds in order to neutralize the mental organ. In the region of the heart some sounds are manifested. The inner sound (nada) at first is strong and resembles various things, such as a bell, waves, thunder, or rain. The mind must keep concentrating on these subtle sounds, excluding all other perceptions, until it becomes fixed and until it has successfully removed the limitation that it represents for the I. "Just like a hunter, the sound first attracts, ties, and finally slays the mind. . . . When the inner organ, similar to a deer, pauses and listens to a sound, a skilled hunter is able to kill it" (4:92, 94, 99)." [The Yoga of Power]
It also answers your question, why the horns are not of a goat's but that of a deer... The goat is capricious, and not sub-liminally subtle as the deer is. The latter leaves no trace almost...
Entering the subconscious of the Other, the Hypnotic activity, is different from Seduction. I believe we have to make a difference here in Hannibal's context atleast.
Seduction [to awaken the other to oneself] works by manipulating the other's weakness, his incapacity to do, act; Hypnosis [sleep] works by manipulating the other's strength, his capacity to do, be, act... The Han in Hannibal does not exploit weakness, it wants to face the other at its best, at its strongest... it prevents the other from comprising itself and creates a thirst for a fuller recknoning, a vital contest..., not an easy capitulation. The Han in Hannibal seeks his Disadvantage.
Hannibal prompts and nurtures the other's belief to act on their desires, by removing a barricade out of their way and widening their scope to act, giving them a sense of freedom from morality, to "feel good about themselves" no matter what their inner design is... Seduction tries to hint at the other of his restriction, of his being trapped... it turns this helplessness into something attractive and re-sells it to him. Hypnosis makes quiet inroads into the other by making them feel powerful... the Dream-state is what N. felt was more richer than the waking life we live,, our untapped potential and all that we could not do in daylight, re-plays itself in dreams... Seduction entices, Hypnosis suggests; it is quiet. Seduction captiv-ates, Hypnosis intrigues.
Metaphorical activity fluctuates like the deer... its the quiet way of saying one thing and making inroads into the other with the other meaning... hypnosis works on silent suggestibility. Our penetration is what makes us call the other mesmerizing like we were seized or overtaken in our 'sleep'... Hannibal is mesmerizing because the pun, the gap in the double-meaning provides a respite, a distance from immediate and threatening danger... and you feel the fear and relaxing humour of the other meaning at the same time...
Quote :
"For a fuller understanding of Hannibal Lecter, we need to go to Freud’s writings on the relationship between jokes and the unconscious. Part of Lecter’s enormous appeal to audiences is his ability to make jokes, to pun and play with the victim/viewer. To one of his intended victims he says, playfully, “I’m giving serious consideration to eating your wife.” Eating is, of course, a metaphor for oral sex – a meaning not lost on Hannibal’s audiences. David Thompson suggests that Clarice Starling, the heroine of Silence of the Lambs, understood perfectly: “The rest of the world dreamed of cannibalism, but Foster’s eyes widened with the sudden vision of cunnilingus. No, not even the vision – the sensation”. What we are screened from is the image of Lecter and Clarice as a couple, making love, having oral sex." [B.Creed, Freud's Worst Nightmare: Dining with Lecter]
The hypnotic gaze puts to sleep, it trans-fixes them like the Medusa which was regarded both threatening as well as beautiful, her blood both poisonous as well as with the power to cure, heal, revive..., a fatal ambiguity... N. referred to himself as Hypnotized by the 'un-blinking' noon-sun he called Medusa that trans-fixed him with its silent and unmoving eternity...
Quote :
"Our fascination with Lecter begins with the gaze. Similar to Dracula, Lecter mesmerizes the viewer through the hypnotic gaze. Lecter’s vampiric gaze, unbounded by his prison cell, bores an incisive view into Starling’s psyche, controlling and threatening her at the same time. The actor playing Lecter, Anthony Hopkins, went so far as to avoid blinking while he was in character, adhering to the fundamental rule that a hypnotist should not blink while performing ‘direct gaze’ hypnotism. This results in his hypnotic gaze resembling the look of the Gorgon, because it transfixes the viewer in a state of willing immobility."
"To understand this, look at how Søren Kierkegaard describes empathy in The Concept of Anxiety:
Often the examples mentioned in psychologies lack true psychological-poetic authority. They stand as isolated notarialiter [notarized facts], and as a result one does not know whether to laugh or to weep at the attempts of such lonely and obstinate persons to form some sort of rule. One who has properly occupied himself with psychology and psychological observation acquires a general human flexibility that enables him at once to construct his example which even though it lacks factual authority nevertheless has an authority of a different kind. […] Hence he ought also to have a poetic originality in his soul so as to be able at once to create both the totality and the invariable from what in the individual is always partially and variably present. Then, when he has perfected himself, he will have no need to take examples from literary repertoires and serve up half-dead reminiscences, but will bring his observations entirely fresh from the water, wriggling and sparkling in the play of colors. Nor will he have to run himself to death to become aware of something. On the contrary, he should sit entirely composed in his room, like a police agent who nevertheless knows everything that takes place. (Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pages 54-55)
To be empathic according to Kierkegaard is essentially to be an actor, and in particular a method actor. In studying serial killers and, vitally, in killing a serial killer, Will Graham is able to act like a serial killer and to imagine, through the "poetic originality in his soul," how the serial killer pulled off the murder. But this does not require mirror neurons, but rather the ability to pull from "what in the individual is always partially and variably present" the source of this originality. In other words, Will Graham sees not what the serial killer did, but what he shares with the serial killer, he is able to see the temptations to kill and the way to kill that are "partially and variably present" within himself. This is why it is so important, as Fuller explains, that Hannibal is trying "to help Will Graham better understand who he is and embrace a purer version of himself that he may have become deluded by." Hannibal sees that Will Graham is sensitive to the murderousness within himself and is thus trying to help him, in a very Nietzschean sense, become who he is."
In an age where words, mind, is still permitted – but for how long ? - hunting, killing, consuming, fucking, has been reduced down to "mere" words, and metaphors. Even in this realm of innocuous verbal abuse, we sense something primal; something that may not be permitted to translate into something physical (real), but that it could, it may... maybe it should (the moral dilemma).
Yes.
Words can 'kill', 'sting', 'cut'... Their animating and animative power shows itself in the metamorphosis of the body, and the rupture of boundaries;
Bakhtin wrote:
"In particular, where people were laughing and swearing in familiar intercourse, their speech is replete with images of the grotesque body - the body copulating, defecating, overeat, it flooded the productive organs, stomach, feces, urine, disease, noses and mouths, dismembered body parts on. But where are the dam of speech rules, this flow of the grotesque body is still breaking out even in the literary speech noses , mouths and stomachs , especially when the speech is expressive nature - a cheerful, or abusive. The basis of universal stock familiarity and warlike gestures is also a distinctly grotesque image of the body." [Rabelais and His World]
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] : The shift from belief in the power of words and Physiological fear of naming that led to certain taboos, to modern Double-speak from a Social fear of political correctness... ostracization.
Profanity is rooted in aggression; profane - the power to Penetrate the sacred temple looking at the history of the word...; profanity was a feared pollution.
Pinker wrote:
"The strange emotional power of swearing--as well as the presence of linguistic taboos in all cultures-- suggests that taboo words tap into deep and ancient parts of the brain. In general, words have not just a denotation but a connotation: an emotional coloring distinct from what the word literally refers to, as in principled versus stubborn and slender versus scrawny. The difference between a taboo word and its genteel synonyms, such as shit and feces, cunt and vagina, or fucking and making love, is an extreme example of the distinction. Curses provoke a different response than their synonyms in part because connotations and denotations are stored in different parts of the brain.
The mammalian brain contains, among other things, the limbic system, an ancient network that regulates motivation and emotion, and the neocortex, the crinkled surface of the brain that ballooned in human evolution and which is the seat of perception, knowledge, reason, and planning. The two systems are interconnected and work together, but it seems likely that words' denotations are concentrated in the neocortex, especially in the left hemisphere, whereas their connotations are spread across connections between the neocortex and the limbic system, especially in the right hemisphere.
A likely suspect within the limbic system is the amygdala, an almond-shaped organ buried at the front of the temporal lobe of the brain (one on each side) that helps invest memories with emotion. A monkey whose amygdalas have been removed can learn to recognize a new shape, like a striped triangle, but has trouble learning that the shape foreshadows an unpleasant event like an electric shock. In humans, the amygdala "lights up"--it shows greater metabolic activity in brain scans--when the person sees an angry face or an unpleasant word, especially a taboo word. The response is not only emotional but involuntary. It's not just that we don't have earlids to shut out unwanted sounds. Once a word is seen or heard, we are incapable of treating it as a squiggle or noise; we reflexively look it up in memory and respond to its meaning, including its connotation.
The biologists Valerie Curtis and Adam Biran identify the reason. It can't be a coincidence, they note, that the most disgusting substances are also the most dangerous vectors for disease. Feces is a route of transmission for the viruses, bacteria, and protozoans that cause at least 20 intestinal diseases, as well as ascariasis, hepatitis A and E, polio, ameobiasis, hookworm, pinworm, whipworm, cholera, and tetanus. Blood, vomit, mucus, pus, and sexual fluids are also good vehicles for pathogens to get from one body into another. Although the strongest component of the disgust reaction is a desire not to eat or touch the offending substance, it's also disgusting to think about effluvia, together with the body parts and activities that excrete them. And, because of the involuntariness of speech perception, it's unpleasant to hear the words for them."
Pinker describes swearing as ‘using language as a weapon to force a listener to think an unpleasant (or at least an emotionally charged) thought. Thus, if we look at thecontent of swearing, it falls into certain categories of the ‘unspeakable’:
a.Supernatural forces (Eng. Jesus Christ, damn, hell, goddamnit, etc; Rus. Bozhe moy, chyort, dyavol, etc)
Before the artistic device, the metaphor, of Harrison's Hannibal Lecter can be pursued further - despite its pop-cultural castrations
if we are to go only by Harrison's representation, I believe Hannibal was named after Freud's hero of ressentiment 'Hannibal of Carthage' who destroyed the mighty Rome, that Freud admired - the book 'Ordeal of Civility' goes into those details of Freud's life... psycho-analysis itself as an abject reaction to Civilization's 'Civility'... or in reality - its Rudeness. It is this rudeness that Hannibal finds unforgiveable, intolerable. Rudeness is an attempted penetration, a transgression from one's proper place. Intrusion is a rudeness. Given Hannibal's lithunian history and the death of his family at the hands of the Intruding Nazis and their colloborators, Harrison's Hannibal is easily a Tribute to Freud.
Freud wrote:
" Freud on Hannibal
When I finally came to realize the consequences of belonging to an alien race, and was forced by the anti-Semitic feeling among my classmates to take a definite stand, the figure of the Semitic commander assumed still greater proportions in my imagination. Hannibal and Rome symbolized, in my youthful eyes, the struggle between the tenacity of the Jews and the organization of the Catholic Church. The significance for our emotional life which the anti-Semitic movement has since assumed helped to fix the thoughts and impressions of those earlier days. Thus the desire to go to Rome has in my dream-life become the mask and symbol for a number of warmly cherished wishes, for whose realization one had to work with the tenacity and single-mindedness of the Punic general, though their fulfillment at times seemed as remote as Hannibal's life-long wish to enter Rome.
And now, for the first time, I happened upon the youthful experience which even today still expresses its power in all these emotions and dreams. I might have been ten or twelve years old when my father began to take me with him on his walks, and in his conversation to reveal his views on the things of this world. Thus it was that he once told me the following incident, in order to show me that I had been born into happier times than he: "When I was a young man, I was walking one Saturday along the street in the village where you were born; I was well-dressed, with a new fur cap on my head. Up comes a Christian, who knocks my cap into the mud, and shouts, 'Jew, get off the pavement!'" -- "And what did you do?" -- "I went into the street and picked up the cap," he calmly replied. That did not seem heroic on the part of the big, strong man who was leading me, a little fellow, by the hand. I contrasted this situation, which did not please me, with another, more in harmony with my sentiments -- the scene in which Hannibal's father, Hamilcar Barcas, made his son swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since then Hannibal has had a place in my phantasies." [Ordeal of Civility]
Now the further pop-cultural castration of his portrait is still another matter.
What I see is the Han in Hannibal. Because I could easily argue, if Intrusion is a Rudeness, then the most Rude are the jews - so said Freud! Freud's hatred towards his own fellow-men, those jews who put on the mask of Civility to mimic and mingle, become one of the gentiles, at par with them is what drove him to psycho-analysis. The schizoid behaviour of those gentile-jews, civilized-jews ashamed of and repressing their polish and lithuanian heritage, their poverty, their low-status, pretending to be more than that past, wiping it clean in their new civil masks and feigning superiority, and yet their coarseness, their profanity breaking out in their words, gestures, humour..., their vulgarity lurking beneath their masks and mannerisms of civility is what Freud thought the most Rudest of all... and psycho-analysis a way to deal with this anti-semitism he was feeling, his internal conflict with himself being born a jew and living like a gentile himself, a way to cope with his inner demon... "No better than White Trash changed accents" is what Hannibal says to Clarisse... that could be a dig at Freud and his masquerading civility, hiding his vulgarity and perversity under the mask of a reputed psychoanalyst, and Clarisse was one of sorts... his fake accent, his behavioural theories, his duplicity, his double-life, his double-lie...
Isn't Hannibal's distortion and toying with the methods of psychoanalysis, an attack on Freud and freudian psychoanalysis itself? I think so.
In this sense, the Han in Hannibal is to overcome even that self-conflict of Freud's, his guilt, his self-hatred...
A re-discovery of Pride.
Remorseless Pride. Unconflicted Pride. Ruthless Pride. The beast And the sovereign...
Han.
If I were smart and wanted to expose jewish nihilism, wouldn't I, like Harrison, give a lithuanian history to Hannibal and have him kill some Nazis, while all the while, I am showing, I am tearing, I am ripping the masks of the same people I am supposedly paying a tribue to?? Wouldn't I be subtle as a deer.....?
Could Harrison have been that smart?
I don't know, I haven't read the novels. But I do know, Fuller is better... the new Han-Hannibal with his latest self-calling as a "Nietzschean fish" is tantalizing... a blonder beast than Harrison's...
What's fantastic for me to observe is Han-Hannibal's friendship - it is born out of appreciating the other's Honesty, the other's abs. Cleanliness even as it continues to manipulate that other... It is fascinated with Will's Cleanliness... Han-Hannibal's choices are Intense. Its like watching all that I've been talking about... Han-Hannibal is No Romantic, No Feminine naivete, No Compassionate Motherly type, No Emotional-Dionysian...
Just perfectly Ruthless. Disadvantage-seeking *because* it is Self-first. Clean. It is Against seduction. It plays from the lowly to the tops... its self-esteem is never worn on its face...
Han-Hannibal is my kind of Design ; ) Till 2.8 anyway. I hope they don't desecrate this character and all the metaphors it makes me pull from all of I.E. history...
Because they are worse than animals, or to put it differently, some men are no different than animal when cooked in the right way. He gives form to what annoys him to make it enjoyable. What is obscene is turned into a delight; an artist's self-joy...
He un-does the work of "God", where humans are supposed to be more evolved than animals in that progressive linearity. Humans pretend like they are above it all, but. Its the fake civility and the repressing of the animal, that makes them all the more animaline-Inhuman, as in animaline-In-the-human emerge... And Hannibal exposes this hidden animal when he kills and eats it.
When someone's loved one is dying of cancer, the one trying to save them is "good", is "heroic"... But when a whole society is becoming cancerous and dying, the one trying to save it is "evil", a "monster", a "criminal"...
This hypocrisy that he cooks and serves humanity back, making them eat their own excretion.
Hannibal derives Amusement watching how the herd that hates him, are the ones relishing his art, his be-ing... Didn't N. openly boast and laugh, how the same herd he was poking at were the ones eating his words, relishing his thoughts, thinking how delicious and magnificent his writings are? N. exposed how the herd can't help but take to him, compliment him... even when he was mocking them, destroying them...
N. spoke in EH of his nature as one returning honey to his enemies' sending him poison...
Hannibal also sees himself as this man who has reversed crime into hospitality. He's raised worthless humans into dignifying food. He's uplifted a part of the world, His world. He has set something straight. He's made it happen. In a world where everything has gone sick, he's healing something. He's putting things back in the proper place, in the proper Order.
When Hannibal feeds his guests, when the 'criminal' who is supposed to be served sentence is one serving nourishment and nurture with food and thought, he's reconnecting the herd with its own animal nature. He's making a meaningful world. He honours nature when he kills. To dine together with your guests and eat the same flesh you feed them, without opting out and serving them alone is to show, he partakes of humanity as much as he loathes them. If he himself doesn't cannibalize on the art he's made out of the profanity, if he doesn't affirm himself by eating it too, that would have been a sign of ressentiment, both as human and as an artist. But he's a true host. He wants to animate all the "pale criminals" or so-called guests, the hypocrites with their masks. The hypocrites do not bloody their own hands, they let others do that for them. And then they consume what they have no connection to; they consume with no dignity, without giving homage to that which they are consuming, not caring how it got there.
And its this "grotesque reality", the "grotesque body" of the consuming zombie that munches mindlessly, Bakhtin calls Carnivelesque. Bakhtin is a Marxist seeing in a permanent carnival and abolition of all hierarchy, the dreamed of utopia and equality... The Carnival of permanent festivity and consumption, the non-repression of unlimited hunger and the abnormal enlargement of one part of the body over the rest, resulting in the Grotesque effect;
Bakhtin wrote:
"Exaggeration, hyperbolism excessive, the excess is, admittedly, one of the main signs of the grotesque style . Therefore, the most significant role in the grotesque body are the parts of those places where it grows itself, beyond its own limits, conceives a new (second) body : the belly and the phallus . They have a leading role in a grotesque image of the body, they are the predominant positive exaggeration - hyperbole, and they may even become detached from the body, lead independent lives as they overshadow the rest of the body as secondary (to stand apart from the body may in part and nose ). Next in importance after the role of the stomach and penis is the grotesque body of his mouth , which is absorbed by the world, and then - back . After all, these convexity and holes are characterized by the fact that it is in them overcome the boundary between two bodies and between the body and the world , there is their interchange and vzaimoorientatsiya. Therefore, the main events in the life of the grotesque body, acts of physical drama - eating, drinking, bowel movements (and other emissions: sweating, blowing nose, sneezing), mating, pregnancy, birth, growth, old age, sickness, death, torn apart, dismembered into pieces absorption of another body - are committed on the boundaries of the body and the world , or at the boundaries of the old and the new body , in all these events corporeal drama beginning and end of life is inextricably intertwined with each other .
Thus, the artistic logic of the grotesque image ignores the closed, flat and desolate plane (surface) of the body and captures only the convexity - shoots, buds - and the holes, that is, only that lead outside the body, and that leads into the depths of the body [ annotated.: Incidentally, this grotesque logic applies to the images of nature and images of things,
Grotesque, as we said, ignores the blank surface, which encloses and delimits the body as a separate and complete effect. Therefore, the grotesque image shows not only external but also internal shape of the body: blood, guts, heart and other internal organs. Often, internal and external appearance are mixed into a single image." [Rabelais and His World]
"'The Renaissance saw the body in quite a different light than the Middle Ages, in a different aspect of its life, and a different relation to the exterior nonbodily world. As conceived by these canons, the body was first of all a strictly completed, finished product. Furthermore, it was isolated, alone, fenced off from all other bodies. All signs of its unfinished character, of its growth and proliferation were eliminated; its protuberances and offshoots were removed, its convexities (signs of new sprouts and buds) smoothed out, its apertures closed. The ever unfinished nature of the body was hidden, kept secret; conception, pregnancy, childbirth, death throes, were almost never shown. The age represented was as far removed from the mother's womb as from the grave, the age most distant from either threshold of individual life. The accent was placed on the completed, self-sufficient individuality of the given body. Corporal acts were shown only when the borderlines dividing the body from the outside world were sharply defined. The inner processes of absorbing and ejecting were not revealed. The individual body was presented apart from its relation to the ancestral body of the people.'" [Rabelais and his World]
"Bakhtin states that Renaissance saw the body as a complete whole, and a deathless one. I suggest that today, the carnival spirit is deeply hidden, because of the tendency of enlightenment to keep death hidden. Adorno and Horkheimer suggested the notion of “mimicking death”; that humans turned themselves into “things” because they were afraid of death. There were no universal spirits and gods, everything were explainable with numbers and positivist knowledge, which later constituted the myth of enlightenment. Grotesque imagery at this sense seems something resisting against enlightenment. It is revolutionary and distorting; it seems to me like that while enlightenment tries to demythologize concepts, grotesque brings up new concepts that are between life and death, actuality and art. It is “demythologisable” to a certain degree, but not totally ever, or it is something as an escape route from demythologizing of enlightenment. Modern Grotesque is practiced in art today and maybe popular culture (or pop culture) can be said to include a kind of carnival spirit in itself."
Grotesque realism understands the body as a principle that goes beyond the individual, and the grotesque body thus acts as a utopian and unifying principle within the cultural sphere. In a striking contrast to the modern conception of the body, the grotesque body defines a sphere of interconnectedness and dissolution of boundaries between what we have learned to call “individuals”: “The material bodily principle is not contained in the biological individual, not in the bourgeiois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed.” (Bakhtin 1984, 19) The body is thus not a self-contained, closed sheath; it is open, and it is the openings of the body and the things done with the opening that define the conception of the grotesque in Bakhtin: the devouring mouth, the defecating anus, the birthgiving vulva, the various bodily liquids, the process of death and rebirth, growth and decay, etc. – a continuum of flesh that Bakhtin describes as utopian because it transcends the boundaries of men and women in a material-bodily as well as in a social sense: inevitably, the bodily motives seem to outrun each other in their exaggerated, excessive, hyperbolic crudeness, their degradation of anything or anyone that has a claim to superiority, be it in the realm of society, or within the body itself, e.g. the superiority of the brain or eye over the lower body parts. At the very center of the cultural forms in Bakhtins analysis was the banquet: there is hardly a page in Gargantua and Panagruel on which there isnʼt a reference to the pleasures of eating".
""Exaggeration, hyperbolism, and excessiveness are also fundamental attributes of the grotesque style according to Bakhtin. The grotesque body is constantly in a state of “becoming” as it incessantly conceives itself anew through exaggeration, dismemberment, and consumption. The anatomization or fragmentation of the body either through comic enlargement (such as of the ears) or grotesque dismemberment is another means through which the body evolves. The fragmentation of the grotesque body also witnesses the enlarging of parts (stomach, bowls, phallus) during the consumption of food and wine at the communal banquet feast.
It is through the consumption of food and drink that the close interconnections between Bakhtin’s concept of the banquet and the grotesque body are laid bare. Bakhtin traces banquet imagery of popular medieval festivals—“food, drink, [and] swallowing”—in Rabelais’ work to the openness of the grotesque body, with its gaping mouth “on the borderline between body and food images” and the “fusion of the devouring and devoured body”. Physical engorgement of this devouring body through the banquet’s abundance of food and drink is then re-connected to the body’s fecundity and procreation. Ultimately, the action of eating collapses barriers between the physical body and the external world surrounding it as the body literally transgresses “its own limits: it swallows, devours, rends the world apart, is enriched and grows at the world’s expense”. Through the grotesque body’s relationship with the cycles of birth and death, consumption and regeneration, Bakhtin views the grotesque body as a positive one that embraces the materiality and baseness of the human body with transgressing boundaries and upending hierarchies."
This kind of carnival is different from the noble cannibal...
The carnivalesque hunger of the zombie is from self-ressentiment, nihilism, hatred towards limitations of life, self, free-will, boundaries, etc. It wants to collapse these. It wants to erase distinctions, eat them away. What emerges as a result - the Grotesque, is really a self-annihilation. The lopsided enlargement of the ear or the belly over the self, over classical form, balance, is a spiritual atrophy and base hedonism.
Hannibal's cannibalism is the reverse of the carnival, of restoring distinctions, of restoring form to what has lost its dignity, of showing what has wandered - its proper place and position. It is the reverence for the self, and the acknowledgement that life is a perpetual sacrifice, and affirming it. Hannibal gifts himself opera. He gifts himself challenges, the pride in the risk of living an honest life. He is not afraid of death. He affirms the human condition. He is No Modern.
---Why is he alone and why does he entertain himself in the way that he does??
He wants to find someone like-minded, he wants to be understood by those sensitive enough to get his reasons, how he views life. He despises the vulgar, those that insult his aesthetic.
He wants to see if someone can live upto his dignified aesthetic and be a part of his world. Someone like him, to share things.
The dinners are a private joke. One he shares with no one. He partakes but mostly watches as these pretentious fools act all civilized while they eat human flesh – human flesh being an extreme for flesh in general... the modern Hedonists, the zombies. These "upper-class" imbeciles wear the attire of sophistication but are no more than animals, the worse kind. Not predators, but parasites, vultures, foragers. Its why Derrida distinguishes between the noble beast and the animal.
Hannibal finds amusement in seeking the disadvantage. He wants to be caught, and show the world exactly who he is, to show the world exactly who they Are.
Establishing that Distance, that Pathos of distance is where he finds redemption, and so what entertains him the most.
---Why does he attract attention even when he is trying to avoid it?
Because he's the Real thing. Genuine power, indifference, grace fascinates the powerless... they take to him like one would to good nourishment. The anaemic zombies and vampires smell Health on him, and want it.
It becomes ironic when they hate what they are attracted to.
I can't believe that Harrison wrote this unintentionally. There's too much depth in the character for it to be accidental. But, you never know.
Yes, Hannibal is what you would call a westernized Han character. He does not kill indiscriminately. His reasons are always aesthetic, if they are not forced upon him due to circumstances, to protect himself. He is attracted to finding himself in an other. Will, and Clarice become this other. In the book only Clarice manages to stay the course. Many have picked-up on this Will/Hannibal relationship and its Hellenic homoerotic connotations - harkening us back to that olde male younger male relationship.
He eats only particular parts, and for ritualistic reasons, I think - a connection to Paganism and how in many traditions eating of your enemy was a sign of respect and a symbol of dominance. One eats what is the far beneath him.
His isolation, and absence of loneliness, reminds us of that ancient Greek saying about madmen and gods being the only ones who could live alone....and philosophers, was added later - perhaps a combination of God/Madman. I still think there is loneliness, because of his desire to find himself in otherness. He is condemn to be along, though he easily attracts attention. He is alone in a crowd. There's nobody there to share what he sees, what he smells, what he perceives.
He is a tragic figure full of humor. He plays jokes only he can appreciate. But he also wants to give a sign that something is amiss; something is happening which is more than just a killing for the sake of killing.
The distance is the natural distance of Being, yet to be. The skin, the exoskeleton, is a first detachment, a primary pushing away, creating a distance. Existence is a solitary journey. The closer to being you come, the more isolated you become. Oneness, the singular, is the absolute solitude of Being.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"Within the single figure of Achilles, there is on one hand the Hellenic hero's defiance of military institutions, taking the specific form of his challenge to Agamemnon in Iliad I as well as his rejection of the Embassy in Iliad IX. On the other hand, his treatment of Priam in Iliad XXIV reflects a stance of ultimate military etiquette. Or again, there is his solitary disposition as manifested in his refusal to aid the philoi despite the entreaties of the Embassy. Only after the death of Patroklos, who is to him more philos than anyone else, is Achilles finally reintegrated with the rest of his philoi.
Achilles had even expressed the wish that he and Patroklos should be the only Achaeans to survive for the grand event of capturing Troy:
ai gar, Zeu te pater kai Athênaiê kai Apollon, mête tis oun Trôôn thanaton phugoi, hossoi easi, mête tis Argeiôn, nôïn d' ekdumen olethron, ophr' oioi Troiês hiera krêdemna luômen
Father Zeus, Athena, and Apollo! If only not one of all the Trojans could escape destruction, nor a single one of the Argives, while you and I emerge from the slaughter, so that we two alone may break Troy's sacred coronal. (Illiad, XVI 97-100)" [Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans]
"Achilles lamenting the death of Patrocles. Whenever he is mentioned in the Illiad, Patrocles seems to be defined by his empathy. He became Achilles in the field of war, died from there wearing his armour. Hiding and revealing identity is a constant theme throughout the greek epics as are battle-tested friendships. Achilles wished all greeks would die, so that he and Patrocles could conquer Troy alone. It took divine intervention to bring them down...
I have an understanding of your state of mind, you understand mine. We are just alike." [Hannibal, 2.12]
Like the twinning function of Achilles and Patroclus was marked by the term Therapon, Hannibal and Will are Therapeutic for each other;
Quote :
"Two ancient Greek words that will figure prominently in my argument are therapōn, conventionally translated as ‘attendant’, and philos, meaning ‘friend’ as a noun and ‘near and dear’ or ‘belonging to the self’ as an adjective. The uses of these two words, as we will see later on, are interconnected in shaping the plot of the Iliad, since Achilles and Patroklos care for and about each other, and they care more for each other than for anyone else. Such caring, as we will also see, is at the root of the meaning of both words, therapōn as well as philos. To say it another way, such caring determines the identification of Patroklos as the virtual twin or body double of Achilles in Homeric mythmaking.
So what does it mean in general, for Patroklos to be the personal therapōn of Achilles? As I will now argue, it means that Patroklos is doomed to die as the other self of Achilles.
I return here to the ritual background of the word therapōn: it was borrowed into the Greek language, as we have seen, from Anatolian languages, sometime in the 2nd millennium BCE. The corresponding word in those Anatolian languages meant ‘ritual substitute’. Someone who is notionally close to the king, as we have also seen, may have to die in place of the king.
Such a death, I argue, has the effect of healing society by way of healing the king, who is viewed as the embodiment of society, of the body politic. In Greek visual art, I must now add, the dead hero Patroklos can be represented as a sacrificial ram, who is shown with his throat slit open and with blood streaming from the gaping wound: such a picture is painted on an Attic vase executed by the “Triptolemos Painter,” dated around 480 BCE. [41] Similarly in Hittite rituals of substitution, as we have seen, rams can be sacrificed in place of kings.
The meaning of the Greek word therapōn as ritual substitute and the function of such a therapōn as a healer helps explain why the related Greek word therapeuein means not only ‘be a therapōn’, as we have seen at Odyssey xiii 265, but also ‘heal, cure’; we still see such a meaning embedded in the English-language borrowings therapy and therapeutic. Patroklos as the personal therapōn of Achilles is thereby also the nearest and dearest of all the companions of Achilles. This closeness is measured in terms of the word philos in the sense of being ‘near and dear’ to someone.
This word philos defines identity by way of measuring how much you can identify with someone else: the more you love someone, the more you identify with this special someone - and the closer you get to your own self. That is why Patroklos is truly the alter ego of Achilles. In his essays on morality, Aristotle defined a true friend as an allos egō ‘another I’ – and this terminology helps explain the use of the pseudo-scientific Latin term alter ego in English-language translations of the works of Freud.
Such an idea of Patroklos as the other self of Achilles is surely parallel to the idea of twinning, and this parallelism helps explain other features of Achilles and Patroklos that they share with the Dioskouroi, such as the power to heal. The therapeutic powers of Achilles and Patroklos are analyzed in this light by Douglas Frame in his twin essay." [Nagy]
"Friendship can sometimes involve a breach of individual separateness." [Hannibal]
The Achillean psychic economy is one continuity.
The love of Achilles is pure. The wrath of Achilles is pure.
Unhesitant. Uninterrupted.
It is one.
Derrida wrote:
"What do “being alone” and “I am alone” mean? But as being alone also means being singular, unique, exceptional, set off, separated, we shall have also to say that if the beasts are not alone, a sovereign is always alone (that is both his absolute power and his vulnerability, or his infinite inconsistency). The sovereign is alone insofar as he is unique, indivisible and exceptional, he is the being of exception who, as Schmitt says — and this is his definition of the sovereign — decides on the exception and has the exceptional right to suspend right, thus stand- ing, in his own way, as we were saying last year, like the beasts or the were- wolf, outside the law, above the law. The sovereign is alone in exercising sovereignty. Sovereignty cannot be shared, it is indivisible. The sovereign is alone (sovereign) or is not.
Beasts you eat or that constantly threaten to eat you (the great gesture, the great phantasmatic gesta of the book, which rules its whole vocabulary, its speech, its mouth, its tongue and its teeth, is that of eating and devouring, eating the other, that’s all we ever hear about, the fear of being devoured by wild beasts or by savage cannibals, and the need to eat beasts, beasts that you hunt, that you raise or that you domesticate. Whose skin you always keep. You will have noticed on a hundred occasions: those beasts, he’ll have their hide. He keeps it and uses it to clothe himself, protect himself, to build, but also as an emblem of sovereignty, etc. The skin of beasts is like the origin of his technology and supremacy as a man. So there are all the animals in the world, the most “ravenous, furious, venomous, poisonous” beasts, but no women. No trace of woman’s step." [The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. II]
Spengler continues in the same vein,
Quote :
"But the eye of the preying animal gives a target. The very fact that, in the great carnivores as in man, the two eyes can be fixed on one point in the environment enables the animal to bind its prey. In that hostile glare there is already implicit for the victim the doom that it cannot escape, the spring that is instantly to follow. But this act of fixation by two eyes disposed forward and parallel is equivalent to the birth of the world, in the sense that Man possesses it — that is, as a picture, as a world before the eyes, as a world not merely of lights and colours, but of perspective distance, of space and motions in space, and of objects situated at definite points.
This way of seeing which all the higher carnivores possess implies in itself the notion of commanding. The world picture is the environment as commanded by the eyes. The eye of the beast of prey determines things according to position and distance. It apprehends the horizon. It measures up in this battle field the objects and conditions of attack. Sniffing and spying, the way of the hind and the way of the falcon, are related as slavery and dominance. There is an infinite sense of power in this quiet wide-angle vision, a feeling of freedom that has its source in superiority, and its foundations in the knowledge of greater strength and consequent certainty of being no one’s prey. The world is the prey, and in the last analysis it is owing to this fact that human culture has come into existence.
And, lastly, this fact of an innate superiority has become intensified, not only outwards, with respect to the light-world and its endless distances, but also inwards, as regards the sort of soul that the strong animals possess. The more solitary the being and the more resolute it is in forming its own world against all other conjunctures of worlds in the environment, the more definite and strong the cast of its soul. Such is the difference between the destiny of herbivores and that of the beast of prey. The one destiny only menaces, the other enhances as well. The former depresses, makes mean and cowardly, while the latter elevates through power and victory, pride and hate. The former is a destiny that is imposed on one, the latter a destiny that is identical with oneself. And the fight of nature-within against nature without is thus seen to be, not misery, as Schopenhauer and as Darwin’s “struggle for existence” regard it, but a grand meaning that ennobles life, the amor fati of Nietzsche. And it is to this kind and not the other that Man belongs." [Man and Technics]
The Beast is the origin of the Sovereign, his Technique. The Blond Beast is the Clear allignment of this integration - i.e. to say, of his "Integrity".
As I had mentioned in the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] thread, Clarity is the highest art of Cunning;
Lyssa wrote:
"Cleanliness is a warrior-asceticism, a weapon - the slowness of the han-voyeur, building his protracted links from the lowliest to the highest has the firmest/unshakeable or unperturbed Ego-consciousness.... the association of every link with every nook and corner is well-defined, and so the emerging consciousness is Clean enabling an "effortless effort" - you act spontaneously, direct, open, no cunning, simply be-ing oneself. The effortlessness turns to Mirth.
Achilles is spontaneous, N. can afford to Hammer effortlessly because they are Voyeurs who have paused and lived their way out of the labyrinth of the mundane, making their own fate, linking together their own Ariadne's thread...
Voyeurism is Being Clean, 0 noise - intense mirth.
"That no one might see down into my depth and into mine ultimate will - for that purpose did I devise the long clear silence. Many a shrewd one did I find: he veiled his countenance and made his water muddy that no one might see therethrough and thereunder. But precisely unto him came the shrewder distrusters and nutcrackers: precisely from him did they fish his best-concealed fish! But the clear, the honest, the transparent - these are for me the wisest silent ones: in them, so profound is the depth that even the clearest water doth not - betray it. -" [TSZ, On the Olive Mount]
This is Male-Cunning. Silence through Speech. Concealment through Clarity, being Straight, direct [Achilles, Dionysos, N.] - IS a Male-Cunning, while Odysseus/Zeus represent Metis - the Feminine kind of Cunning - Oblique."
Between 2:20-2:40, Hannibal says, lying is an ignoble Rudeness, a Vulgarity;
Han is a deep brooding silence that Is a speech, a speaking, a doing.
While Homer intended the Odyssean intelligence to get out of snares, the Achillean intelligence is that of the ruthless predator designed to hunt with near zero dialectic.
Achillean Cunning knows no breach or interruption between the beast, sovereign, and god that it is. This also reflects in its speech.
Quote :
"Hannibal doesn't coerce, he persuades." [Hannibal, 2.12]
Persuasive rhetoric in thymotics and as Aristotle defines, is a "capacity for capacities"; it is the stamina of the Great Health standing fearless in the open, Uninhibited and Clean, self-reverent about itself, that is its "cunning", as opposed to the oblique cunning of odysseus.
Battle-tested friendships involve the hiding and revealing of identity. In this sense, Aletheia is the care towards the Continuities that the self Opens into. A bonding of the individual separateness of Beast, Man, God... that Achilles and Hannibal signify.
Intimacy is about unconcealed Communication between selves. Beast, Man, God... joined and rootedly branching off, communicating, evolving higher together, like the antlers of the deer...
The modern rupture in this self-continuity between these branches, divorcing the conscious from the unconscious, man from animal, signification from self, metaphor from reality, mind from body, words from actions, speech from silence... takes on the form of a steady regression similar to money.
"There are at least four types of money:
gold (or silver) money, of fully intrinsic worth;
representative paper money, with guaranteed convertibility;
fiduciary paper money, incompletely guaranteed; and,
conventional paper money, sometimes referred to as "fictional (or fictive) money," which is inconvertible and circulates only as forced currency." [Goux]
Words and speech when unanchored to reality, follow a regressus similar to fictitious paper money that is not backed by any gold as is the situation today. When there is no real back-up, one then either introduces abstracted substitutes or totally unties any binding connection allowing a circulation of rootless radicals. Evola demonstrated a similar pattern in his notes on the 'Regression of the Caste System' - how the deterioration from the gold of the sacral order, to the silver of the warrior order, to the bronze and the iron of the last-men, affected every rung of culture across architecture to philosophy.
As a result, like demonetization of currency value leads to money inflation, and likewise speech too inevitably becomes hyper-inflated. Narcissism and schizophrenia as so thoroughly examined by Satyr shows the dis/ease of modernity.
The over-circulation of false money and likewise, polysemic words (words with any number of multiple meanings) block the circulation of any real money or real concepts in possession one has. They lose all meaning or are rendered meaningless when circulated into the simulacra. It forces one to hoard, to repress, de-thymotize oneself.
Good money and sound concepts are what cannot be Metabolized today. What constitutes health, the excess, is forced into repression. The predator is forced into a schism, to rupture himself from his vital excess.
Nietzsche compared modernity to the spirit of a stomach whose power for digestion has weakened. When a society doesn't have the strength to absorb, metabolize healthy, vital nutrients, it turns sick, and even anorexic from over-metabolization of indiscriminate conscumption. Hedonism.
Pigs.
Food becomes that which fills the stomach without nourishment, like words which fill the space without any real communication, any growth of ideas, that society munches on.
However, the Blond Beast Faust is a symbol of this very Cor-Ruption.
Quote :
"A society in which corruptions spreads is accused of exhaustion... But what is generally overlooked is that the ancient national energy and national passion that became gloriously visible in war and warlike games have now been transmuted into countless private passions and have merely become less visible. Indeed, in times of "corruption" the power and force of the national energies that are expended are probably greater than ever and the individual squanders them as lavishly as he could not have formerly when he was simply not yet rich enough. Thus it is precisely in times of "exhaustion" that tragedy runs through houses and streets, that great love and great hatred are born, and that the flame of knowledge flares up into the sky.
Third, it is usually said... that such times of corruption are gentler and that cruelty declines drastically, compared with the old, stronger age which was more given to faith. All I concede is that cruelty now becomes more refined and that its older forms henceforth offend the new taste; but the art of wounding and torturing others with words and looks reaches its supreme development...The men of corruption are witty and slanderous; they know of types of murder that require neither daggers nor assault; they know that whatever is said well is believed.
Fourth, when "morals decay" those men emerge whom one calls tyrants: they are the precursors and as it were the precocious harbingers of individuals... In these ages bribery and treason reach their peak, for the love of the newly discovered ego is much more powerful now than the love of the old, used-up "fatherland"... Individuals--being truly in-and-for-themselves-- care, as is well known, more for the moment than do their opposites, the herd men... The times of corruption are those when the apples fall from the tree: I mean the individuals, for they carry the seeds of the future and are the authors of the spiritual colonization and origin of new states and communities. Corruption is merely a nasty word for the autumn of a people." [Nietzsche, JW, 23]
He hovers between the wild and the market-place, the dark unconscious and technics of knowledge, the deer in the middle of the path with karma accumulating on its antlers, its Design Evolving, Brooding...
Faustianism is an intense Brooding.
It is a Pure soulful longing. Han...
Goethe wrote:
"A longing Pure and not to be described drove me to wander over woods and fields and in a mist of abundant tears I felt a world arise and live for me." [Faust]
Spengler wrote:
"The mad Lear between fool and reckless outcast on the heath, in the night and the storm, the unutterably lonely ego lost in space--here is the Faustian life-feeling!" [Decline of the West]
Spengler wrote:
"If, in fine, we look at the whole picture--the expansion of the Copernican world into that aspect of stellar space that we possess today; the development of Columbus's discovery into a world-wide command of the earth's surface by the West; the perspective of oil-painting and the theatre; the sublimation of the idea of home; the passion of our Civilization for swift transit, the conquest of the air, the exploration of the Polar regions and the climbing of almost impossible mountain-peaks--we see, emerging everywhere, the prime symbol of the Faustian soul, Limitless Space. And those specially Western creations of the soul-myth called "Will," "Force" and "Deed" must be regarded as derivatives of this prime symbol." [Decline of the West]
When the predator is not allowed to eat, to hunt, to prey, the strong type begins to brood... and protract its tensions.
The Hunt turns lofty into a deep search and prowling for act-ive knowledge. The greek scholar Douglas Frame connects the I.E. custom of Hunting and Raiding of cattle, with Intelligence; home-coming Was a winning of light...
Quote :
"How terms as semantically distinct in English as “mind” and “return home” were once closely related in the Greek language. The origin of this tradition has to do with the etymology of the Greek word nóos, “mind,” which I propose to connect with the Greek verb néomai, “return home.” ...nes- originally had to do with “returning to life and light”. That “intelligence” was a highly traditional element in myths of the Sun’s cattle is supported by a comparison with Vedic Sanskrit. In Vedic mythology cattle are closely associated with the phenomenon of sunrise; in particular, the “winning of cattle” and the “winning of light” are closely related mythical deeds." [Douglas Frame, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]
Hannibal remarks,
Quote :
"Your choices affect the physical structures of your brain, changing the way you think. Blood and breath are only elements undergoing change to fuel your radiance, just as a source of light is burning." [Hannibal, 2.11]
The Sovereign-beast is a monster of energy, of becoming fuel to create a world on one's own terms.
Achilles turns Odysseic. Wiley and wandering...
Han-nibal turns Faustian. Daemonic and restless...
Quote :
"...at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast, prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory; this hidden core needs to erupt from time to time, the animal has to get out again and go back to the wilderness.” [Nietzsche, GM]
When the world makes you shed your decency, and puts a price to buy you off - like money thrown in the face of Achilles, when someone forces you to apologize for who you are, then it cannot but be a Fight to the end. Desecrate them like Achilles almost cannibalizes on the corpse of Hector. And then life comes in only one flavour... the Han is essentially bittersweet. A bittersweet life...
Quote :
"A discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me. Whenever feasible, one should always try to eat the rude." [Hannibal, 2.12]
Will continue on that; following, a comprehensive elaboration on all of the above points.
"Tommaso Campanella compares existence with the very terminus of a line, wherein we reach the capacity of ourselves, coming right up against our non-being (all of what we are not). Speaking can threaten our capacities to be if we do not fully deploy ourselves within it. Teachers must speak fully. And silence is often a power that can be drawn on.
Achilles from the Hellenic contingent, and his self-imposed silence because he had no proper “being” in the speech that was available to him... Eventually, in the ninth book, he will address the hall, and speak in a unique what that defies and re-defines the language game before him.
On the difference between the heroic figures of fierce and woeful Achilles and the table-turning, wandering Odysseus, I pointed out that Western Philosophy, particularly in its modern manifestations, took on the wrong Greek hero. Instead of the radiating Achilles who defines himself by his bonds and presents himself as a pure man of action (or inaction), of which speech was a considerable means, philosophy concerned itself with the No-man traveler of endless turns, the serial human being whose only defining characteristic is his mind’s capacity to dexterously articulate itself amid the contingencies of Being, all the while largely homeless, spread across the earth.
There is an important factor in the story of Achilles though that narrows the point and brings us directly back to the comparison to language games. And this is Achilles’s linguistic strategies as found in his speech of the Ninth Book of the Iliad. For those who are unfamiliar, or need to be refreshed, Achilles the greatest warrior of the Greeks has withdrawn from the Trojan War because his rightfully awarded prize Briseis was taken from him by Agamemnon who is nominally the chief of the Hellenic contingent, as some sort of recompense for his own war-prize, a daughter of a priest of Apollo having to be returned. The Hellenic warriors now are loosing the battle without their most powerful ally, and Agamemnon is faced with the shame of having acted unrightfully. Achilles has been convinced to come to a great hall meeting where he is to make a plea articulating his being wronged. As it has been put, “Achilles needs to be paid, but he cannot be bought off”.
He is a master of the lute and song, learned in the secrets of medical arts, and adroitly mesmerizing in speech (muthos). In his speech to the hall, in rebuttal to Odysseus’s finely constructed argument, he combines personal expression and ethical character argumentation (I am this way, Agamemnon is that way) to present a plea which strains the very form of the heroic hexameter verse in which it is to appear.
It is specifically at the nexus of valuation that Achilles draws his distinction within the heroic realm. There are two kinds of men:
1. Men who feel and love, who can fight, who have proper joy of their possessions.
2. Those who rely on “things” to defend themselves against heroic strength [sthenos], who seek to be kinglier than others, whose possessions are nothing good to them, who do not even know what a life is worth.
Beneath this division is really the instrumentality of valuation, the unbodied, placeholder conception of “things” (objects and situations) as separable units of deploy vs. the lived and built bonds of enfleshed alliance. It is the difference between instrument and prosthetic grafting. Achilles forms his words out of his very fleshed circumstance, fully committed to what he can do. Agamemnon (and Odysseus) has politically weighed and buried self-interest against the possibilities of advance.
Nimis, taking both interpretive positions of relative alienation in hand, then qualifies Achilles’s speech act within the linguistic distinction of rule-governed creativity, and rule-changing creativity.
Achilles’s is not an ontological alienation under which he is somehow removed from his very Being, but a contingent insufficiency of expression, wherein his constitutional bonds are stretched. In this way, Achilles creatively stretches the heroic form, and with great expense steps away from the game so to affect it with his absence. A great portion of the tale is told with his absence as the main actor until finally it is only his armor that arrives. Achilles is the full inhuman and divine breadth that is in what’s human.
When I suggest that the Achillean answer to the traditional Odysseus problems of philosophy is available, it is this that I emphasize (to select a few).
1. A substanced capacity to live through your bonds and attachments, and not simply use or deploy them.
2. The capacity to realize that speech acts are fully material acts, and that we can readily use rule-changing creativity to express what is within a rule-governed game.
3.The rhetor and the gnostic become the same person because the difference between the political and performance is collapsed.
4. Maintaining the hyper-human (divine) and trans-human (inanimate, elemental forces) spectrum of action, drawing on all our capacities to manifest (Solar Achilles).
5. Employ the immanence of one’s power as necessarily a limit reachable by mercy, the affirmation of custom renewed (Priam).
6. The value of things is fate.
7. Don the Achillean armor of immanence carefully, prudently (Patroclus); you are already wearing it.
8. When you make the corpse (Hector), turning the living into surface through the inscription of your desire, you must release it.
This is far from the self-negating existentialism of Odysseus (at least before he comes home to Ithica, as he becomes qualified by later Attic Tragedy). The human being takes its place within a panoply of historical objects, each fighting to bring forth its full expression. And bonds formed between living an inanimate things are as solid as atomic bonds, the forceful living through, and by the others around us. Man does not travel on his own temporal river, sequestered from the world, blessed/cursed only with the negating power of his consciousness. Man does not travel cloaked with the negating power of his own mortality. In the figure of Achilles it is not the illusion that man is both angel and animal, and therefore neither, the gap between them, but rather as all things are so constituted, man is a spectrum of forces brought to bear in their moment of history, finding the articulation that is best possible for them, those voices and those continuities.
Odysseus was he man of many turns, polytropos. The word is rich in meanings. Because clever he can turn in any direction, he is a swiss-army knife of mentality and action, full of devices. Yet because of this, his life (despite the homecoming at the Odyssey’s end) is also in quintessential Heideggerian and Holderlinian fashion, a life of wandering, turn upon turn, endlessly thrown into and against the world. He is thought to be in many ways the essentially modern man. To some degree he embodied both the positive and the negative values of contemporary Athenian citizen ideas.
But Achilles was a different sort of figure, a man of a different sort of Age, someone who the Athenian Greeks often felt put the Odysseus of tricks to the pale. A man perhaps who no longer it seemed could exist. Contrary to Odysseus’s adaptability, Achilles was someone who exerted the pure force of his ability to act and manifest itself directly (even it its absence). He was something like a direct radiation of Being. His story in the Iliad told of how man is to act amid social injustice, when one’s nominal leaders lack the community of values which are required to lead. It is told that he is both a rhetor and a doer in such a way that we understand that speaking is a kind of act and not something readily separable.
There is a very real sense that as the history of Western philosophy, particularly in its modern form, turned to the Greeks for their blueprints of questions and answers, the wrong, or least desirable Greek ideal was absorbed. People like Heidegger rejoiced over the alienations of Odysseus, his homeless machinations, and did not see the simplicity of force found in Achilles. A man conditioned by his loves (Briseis, Patroclus, Thetis, the Myrimdons, then lastly affimed custom, reconsiliation and mercy), and driven to personal yet mutual justice, someone who bent the rules of the very discourse available to express his dissatisfaction, and through a combination of refusal and action morally shaped both his community and historical events. Achilles was man before Man, something that could manifest both itself in surplus of the spectrum of the human, and become god-like, or in deficit of what’s human and become a mere force of Nature. It was the necessary capacity to bestride these two that he embodied to a far greater degree “what is human” than did the later Odysseus who articulated a specific historical domain, which he remained within.
In the Orphic mythologies that informed Plato's own theories of truth, the depiction of Lethe and not-Lethe is expressed in very physical terms, in terms of refreshingly cold water as drink. The soul in the land of the dead has passed through extreme heat, and is bewildered by its thirst. It has been instructed not to drink of the fountain on the left, but on the right. Here I quote the already cited Orphic passage from the Republic:
[621a] "And after it had passed through that, when the others also had passed, they all journeyed to the Plain of Oblivion [tes Lethes pedion], through a terrible and stifling heat, for it was bare of trees and all plants, and there they camped at eventide by the River of Forgetfulness [Ameleta potamon], whose waters no vessel can contain. They were all required to drink a measure of the water, and those who were not saved by their good sense drank more than the measure, and each one as he drank forgot all things."
The word-choice here is telling. The soul has passed across the Plain of Oblivion (tes Lethes pedion), and the river that the reincarnating soul drinks from is not the River of Lethe, but the River of Ameleta, the River of Uncaring. Under Orphic telling, the aletheia is not the “uncovered” but “the not-uncaring”. Clearly, those that drink from the River of Mnemosyne instead of Ameleta, retain their cares and concerns. Quite to the contrary of Heidegger’s lexical reversion which will eventually make a “cloaking” out of human Dasein engagment with the pragmata (affairs, things of concern), the very nature of aletheia is that of retaining concerns and care. It is only through the retention of cares that the soul is refreshed of the heat of oblivion. Heidegger tells us in his history of the concept of the truth that “This uncoveredness [of aletheia] does not apply to things insofar as they are, but insofar as they are encountered, insofar as they are objects of concern.” Notice how this differs from the Orphic/Platonic tale of elementary care and concern. The concern is not with “objects” but with thirst itself, with the state of one’s own body. It is the purity of this sufferance, as a care, which in turn orients the soul both toward the gaurdian and the spring. And contrary to Heidegger’s assessment, it is indeed the care of the soul which orients it rightfully to the pragmata, “insofar as they are”. One must, in examining the history of the Greek notion of the truth acknowledge this fundamental equation.
It is for this reason that the optical metaphor of covered and uncovered that Heidegger adopts, while suited to the Idealist heritage he keeps, actually is insufficient to the Greek concept of truth (insofar as we can historically generalize). The the failure of cares in Oblivion is the detachment from one’s own state, to dissipate. It is not a condition of veiling, or coveredness, of something coming between the subject and the world, but rather is a constitutive internal relation, a failure of orientation towards one’s own health and dynamic expression, a failure to recall in one’s concerns the connections which “as they are” have constituted you.
In this correction we must keep track of Heidegger’s smooth move towards Aletheia of speaking being: “Now the most immediate kind of uncovering is speaking about things.” One wants to stretch back to some time more distant than the benchmark for truth, Aristotle, and turn to Homer, the Iliad. Achilles is furious and in attendance of the Assembly where he is told that Agamemnon will take from him his beloved Briseis. Achilles has his hand on the hilt of his sword which he is in the act of drawing. Agamemnon is finished, yet:
The white-armed goddess Hera had sent her forth, [195] for in her heart she loved and cared for both men alike. She stood behind him, and seized the son of Peleus by his fair hair, appearing to him alone. No one of the others saw her. Achilles was seized with wonder, and turned around, and immediately recognized Pallas Athene. Terribly her eyes shone. (Book One, lines 195-200)
What is the “truth” status of Athena’s terribly flashing eyes? None of the others in the hall saw her (literally, she was coming to light [phanomene] to him alone, not the others). Not only did he perceive her [gignosko] as generally present, but seemed to do so as particularized by the very manifestion of her eyes [phaanthen]. These eyes are the very epithetic status of the goddess herself, “Flash-eyed” Athena. I suggest really that it is not on this occasion of words (debate in a hall) that the most immediate form of “uncovering” is words, but rather of bodily seizure and distinctive identification. The pragmata of Achilles’ concern, that of Agamemnon’s unworthy stewardship of the Greek contingent, his love for Briseis, suddenly is invaded by the pragmata of his own condition, exposed in the glinting revelation of things as they are, the concerns of his very thumatic soul. But it is not a condition of layering, of things standing between what is and the perceiver. Nothing is hidden, rather the richness of connection is accomplished in care. We find this in the poem when Achilles finally achieves the ῎Ελεος of compassion for Hector’s father and his sworn enemy King Priam, Eleos, the God of Mercy. This is what is missing from Heidegger’s notion of “truth” as kinds of covering and uncovering, in an optical metaphor of distance.
The rhetor and the gnostic are no longer divided. Speech is an act, one becomes a praktēr of mythos, and in language use one is a rhetor of ergon. The using of language is a kind of doing; knowing how to use words, how to “follow a rule” is the inscription of the realm of knowing itself, through the production of “meaning”. Meaning as practice.
With the unsustainability of verificationist claims of epistemology, rhetoric, that is the effective use of words, becomes the horizon of knowing. Consider Aristotle’s definition of Rhetoric in this respect.
Aristotle in Rhetoric wrote:
"Rhetoric then may be defined as the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion in reference to any subject whatever. This is the function of no other of the arts, each of which is able to instruct and persuade in its own special subject; (translation J.H. Freese.)"
"Literal: Rhetoric thus is the capacity (dunamis) upon of each of the beheld (theōrēsai) to take in its own persuasiveness (pithanon), and not of each different thing (heteras) [this] is this skill’s (technēs) work (ergon). For each of the other kinds, the underlying (hupokeimenon) of its own, it is instructive (didaskalykē) and persuasive (peistikē) of that sort. (1.2.1)"
The literal translation brings about a certain richness.
Rhetorical “Faculty” is actually capacity, or power. A “Subject” is each thing beheld, seen, considered (from which we famously get the word “theory” ). The “Persuasion” of a perspective, it should be noted, is derived from Peithō, Persuasion a goddess attendant of Aphrodite.
Theorizing in the rhetorical sense, is beholding and taking upon oneself (endexomenon) the inherent persuasiveness in the thing considered, that is it is the capacity of capacities. It is interpreting in terms both of sense, and in the power to convince others in a social sphere. It requires a certain discernability that will be marked in terms of a power (dunamis), to join language games to each other, bringing about consent. Instead of epistemologies, there are capacities. It is notable that the capacities are performed in rhetoric through forming arguments (enthymemes) through the identification of topoi (that is literally places), which are ways of relating. The forms (topoi) of Aristotle argumentation it can be said correspond to the rules of Language-games (and in the end Lebensform) of Wittgenstein. The rhetor is gnostic."
"Whatever I say or do, there's always one part of myself which stays behind, and watches the other part compromise itself, which laughs at and hisses it, or applauds it. When one is divided in that way, how is it possible to be sincere? I have got to the point of ceasing to understand what the word means." [Andre Gide, The Counterfeiters]
Quote :
"By seeking to pass themselves off as true to pass their seeming off for being, to deceive at any price, to masquerade as valuable currency they end up not knowing their true worth. The question of being and seeming is directly related to that of value, for when value becomes exclusively exchange value, then appearance counts for more than being on the intersubjective market. For others, value is in a surface that no longer coincides with the inner being, with the self." [Goux, The Coiners of Language]
"Was it purely by chance that the crisis of realism in the novel and in painting coincided with the end of gold money?* Or that the birth of ''abstract'' art coincided with the shocking invention of inconvertible monetary signs, now in general use? Can we not see in this double crisis of money and language the collapse of guarantees and frames of reference, a rupture between sign and thing, undermining representation and ushering in the age of the floating signifier?
André Gide's novel The Counterfeiters is in this connection an exemplary work of literature. Until now, it has not been thoroughly examined with these developments in mind. The "counterfeiting" of the title reaches beyond monetary fraudulence to broach the question of the ground upon which values and meaning are based: counterfeiting becomes the central metaphor for calling into question the role of general equivalents. Considered as a whole, the internal economy of The Counterfeiters is revealing: not only do language and money, in their closely homologous relation, come under attack, but in addition the value of paternity, and all other values that regulate exchanges, are questioned. Gold, father, language, phallus: continuously serving mutually as metaphors for each other, these structurally homologous general equivalents, with their respective functions in measurement, exchange, and reserve, simultaneously undergo a fundamental crisis...
Gide fictionalizes the shift from a society founded on legitimation by representation to a society dominated by the inconvertibility of signifiers, that refer to one another like tokens in infinite slippage, with no standard or treasury* to offer the guarantee of a transcendental signifier or referent.
The French word trésor is rich in possible translations: the same word can mean "treasure," "treasury," and "thesaurus." While the primary sense intended here is a repository or reserve of wealth in the form of money or precious metals, the other registers of meaning evoked by trésor are not without pertinence, as will become clear; rather than rigidly adhering to a single word in English, the translation will vary according to context.
Thus the structural homology between money and language, expressed in the coherent interplay of metaphors in literary fiction, makes it possible to locate a historical turning point. The bygone era of "gold-language," the basis for realist and expressive mechanisms of classical representation, has been succeeded by the present age of "token-language" with its vanishing frames of reference and floating signifiers.
Is there not a complex homology between language and money a homology far more subtle than it first appears, and one that, if deployed according to its own logic, ends up challenging major conceptual categories? Values, law, exchange, idea, nature, sign, representation: all these notions are enlisted in the parallel between language and money. ...counterfeiting becomes the central metaphor for the historical crisis of a certain type of value-form. Values not merely economic but also semantic, ethical, religious, and juridical are riddled with suspicion.
The bankruptcy of a circulation of values based on gold money becomes a metaphor for the failure of the realist or representational system of language. It is as if the inability to maintain an exchange system based on gold value becomes the best metaphor for the inability to take for granted a literary language based on time-honored values of realism and of expressivity. In the end, money turns out to be a mere token, the last remaining vestige of its civil sacredness vanishing in the numismatic masquerade whereby the weight of value and the value of weight no longer count. The token is a parody of money. It imitates gold money just as the monkey apes the man. This toy monkey-money makes a mockery of what it mimics." [Goux, The coiners of Language]
"The various forms taken by money can be arranged in a gradationwhich also constitutes a degradation. There are at least four types of money: gold (or silver) money, of fully intrinsic worth; representative paper money, with guaranteed convertibility; fiduciary paper money, incompletely guaranteed; and conventional paper money, sometimes referred to as "fictional (or fictive) money," which is inconvertible and circulates only as forced currency. The general equivalent begins as a small ingot, a fragment of the treasury that is released on the market; in the end, it is a mere paper token whose value is purely fictional. language can no longer be compared to gold money, or even to representative paper money; it has been demoted to the status of a token with no backing, to a conventional or "fictive" money.
As a result, two solutions are available: admit and protest the bankruptcy of language, denouncing the illusion of convertibility through a writing that explicitly presents itself as inconvertible. This is the iconoclastic path, or pretend to remain within the economic system of gold-language or of representative language while at the same time evading this system by means of a clever trick. The result of this ambiguitythe solution chosen to maintain it is in the production of false currency: money that is ostensibly faithful to the old regime of circulating gold but is in fact an ingenious forgery that masks an absence of gold. This counterfeit money makes it possible to perpetrate deception on the medal market; reduced to a mere token, a conventional or fictive currency, it will be revealed as such to those who know how to wear away its metallic surface.
What is the precise correspondence between conceptions of language (and thus of literature) and the four types of circulating general equivalent that I have just enumerated in order of increasing disembodiment of value?
The type of language that could be compared to gold money would be a full, adequate language. In it and through it, the real would be conveyed without mediation, both as the objective reality of the external world and as the subjective reality of the internal world. This type of language would be expressive in its subjective aspect, relating to the soul and to others, and it would be descriptive in its aspect of relation to the external world. Such a gold language formulates truth immediately, thus dispensing those who avail themselves of it from questioning the linguistic medium. It is conceived as the adequate vehicle of meaning, as that by which soul and world are fully signified, and this plenitude of linguistic signification completely obviates any question as to the value of language in its relationship to being.
If we now consider a system in which language is compared to representative paper currency, we encounter another situation. In this case, the relationship between language and being begins to be problematic. Just as in the economic sphere there arises the question of convertibility, that is, the existence or not of a deposit serving to back the tokens in circulation, likewise in the domain of signification the truth value of language will become a crucial concern.
Language will no longer be conceived as fully expressing (or as being capable of adequately expressing) reality or being; it will necessarily be conceived as a means, a relatively autonomous instrument, by which it is possible to represent reality to varying degrees of exactitude. Here the risk of speculation divorced from the real will no longer be conceived simply as an intellectual deviation, but rather as the risk of all language when it is removed from the narrow confines of experience. In other words, the metaphysical confidence according to which Being can be expressed in language will gradually disappear before the less reassuring notion that language is an instrument that, under certain conditions (such as intuition and experience), makes it possible to give a valid representation of reality.
A certain uneasiness regarding the existence or nonexistence of reserves guaranteeing the convertibility of conceptual language is betrayed in utterly explicit monetary metaphors used by Schopenhauer and Bergson. Thus Schopenhauer wrote that while the scholar may have the advantage of those with natural understanding or intuitive knowledge by virtue of his "possession of a wealth of cases and facts (historical knowledge) and of causal determinations (natural science), all in well-ordered connection, easily surveyed," still "the much knowledge of the ordinary scholar is dead... because it consists entirely in abstract knowledge.... Such a mind is like a bank with liabilities tenfold in excess of its cash reserve, whereby in the end it becomes bankrupt."
Finally, when language is conceived neither in an imaginary of gold money, nor even in the imaginary of a convertible banknote, when it is identified with conventional or fictive money, a forced currency, we have reached a moment of true crisis of confidence in the value of language. It is certain that one of the major movements in contemporary language theorythat is, the movement beginning with Saussure and developed in linguistic structuralism is wholly based on an imaginary of inconvertibility. Saussure's affirmation that linguistic value has no root in things and their natural relationships, and Hjelmslev's assertion that when commercial value and linguistic value are compared, the standard has no parallel in language, correspond faithfully to a conception of language that would make it the homologue of a conventional currency.
Nothing anchors linguistic value in a space outside of language. This is why language is a game; it is only a system of pure relations, a relational and differential system, with nothing comparable to the guarantee of a treasury or reserve, or to a standard of measure.
This conception of language is tied to a whole imaginary of structure, of pure relation, of game, convention, and pure symbol reduced to mathematical operativity. This imaginary of the operative and autonomous signifier constitutes a coherent epistemological, philosophical, ideological, and literary configuration that pervades modernity...
And here two solutions suggest themselves: one would aim directly at an a priori and abstract construction, producing a crystal that refers only to its own formal regularity and its intrinsic relational coherence; the other, in a seemingly opposite movement (which actually belongs to the same moment), would register the radical absence of any transcendental treasury of meaning, debunking the illusion of an extralinguistic referent and affirming in a tragic key the play of a floating signifier now recognized as meaningless. There is then constructivist approach (which harks back to a Platonic and Kantian idealism, though in the intellectualist form of structure) and the tragic-destructive mode (which sees the senseless drift of signifiers as semiotic proof of Nietzsche's affirmation of the death of God, the head cashier at the central bank of meaning)." [Goux, The Coiners of Language]
"There is a progressive loss of the power of direct representation and a movement toward complete inconvertibility. In the first type of substitution, the inscribed paper is still linked to metallic funds held in reserve. In the second form, based on confidence, the value of the note is still guaranteed by right. But in the third (conventional or fictive) form, there is no longer any guaranteed backing, either in fact or by right: this is the monetary regime of the empty repository. Strictly speaking, this case cannot even be described as one of substitution, since the paper represents nothing but a purely conventional notion of value. Its worth consists wholly and solely in a decision.
As Charles Gide emphasizes, the value of paper money is precarious, for it depends entirely on the legislator's will and can be annihilated by the very law that created it. If the Law demonetizes paper money, the bearer of notes is left with nothing but useless scraps of paper: the loss of legal value is the loss of all value. Clearly this loss could not result in the case of wealth in the form of metallic money, for behind its legal value, such money also has a "natural" value. This "natural" or intrinsic value is actually the underpinning of its legal value. Thus in gold money there is a sort of harmony between law and nature: nominal value (Greek nomos: law) is in tune with natural value. There is thus a Law of the law.
Such is not the case with paper money, which is totally dependent on legislative convention: the value of paper "depends solely on the will of the legislator." And not only is this dependence on the law so total, so absolute, so complete that it resembles enslavement to a despot, but the law guarantees value only as empty value. The only value signs have is the value conferred upon them by the law, and this value is at bottom an absence of value, since the paper note (a mere token) is not convertible. True, it can be used on the market, but it lacks the "vertical" guarantee that would make it a value outside of exchange on the market. Its value is strictly operative, and only on condition that this operation is a commercial exchange. Thus the depotism of the law is combined with its utter lack of vertical guarantee.
From the moment when the function of circulating money is reduced to that of a forced currency, no more than a conventional sign, its arbitrary value is entirely dependent on government regulations. The shift from gold money to paper money, and then to inconvertible currency, is therefore part and parcel of a qualitative growth in the economic role of the state.* And it is indeed the case that the disappearance of gold money in France and England is precisely contemporaneous with the oft-described shift from a liberal economy to a monopolistic economy, in the first decades of the twentieth century. In this new phase, money can be defined quite accurately as an "instrument of government policy," whereas "the orthodox economists of the nineteenth century would have shuddered at this definition"...
Charles Gide in his Political Economy: "In every country where two kinds of legal moneys are in circulation, bad money always drives out good.'' These words express one of the most curious laws of political economy. Charles Gide cites Aristophanes' treatment of the monetary metaphor:
I'll tell you what I think about the way This city treats her soundest men today: By a coincidence more sad than funny, It's very like the way we treat our money. The noble silver drachma, that of old We were so proud of, and the recent gold, Coins that rang true, clean-stamped and worth their weight Throughout the world, have ceased to circulate. Instead, the purses of Athenian shoppers Are full of shoddy silver-plated coppers. Just so, when men are needed by the nation, The best have been withdrawn from circulation.
Intending to signify that mediocre citizens make noisy careers in the agora, where they circulate interminably, entering and remaining in social commerce despite their negligible value, whereas the best citizens remain at home, treasured by their families and friends (or else they are ostracized, forced to leave the city to make their value felt elsewhere), Aristophanes employs a cleverly calculated economic metaphor, actually articulating a law that applies to the circulation of coins.
But why is good money used only at home (for hoarding) or abroad, while it is excluded from the most current circulation?
Those who wish to accumulate coins for a possible emergency, explains Charles Gide, keep the best ones for themselves, returning the less good ones to circulation. Thus, during the French Revolution, those who wanted to save money held on to gold louis rather than to assignats.* A large quantity of good money thus disappeared at critical moments and the invasion by assignats only escalated. The bad money (the assignats or promissory notes, which were not only legal tender but also forced currency until widespread bankruptcy precipitated their depreciation) drove the shiny, full-weighted gold into hiding in individual coffers. This noncirculating monetary mass might be released into circulation only when a foreign creditor refused all other means of payment.
What circulates best, and most quickly, is a form of language that is loaded with conventional meaning, expressing "feelings which have been taken for granted once for all" -
The reader latches on to it because it is written, and because "he believes everything he sees in print". Writing, the letter, the printed object appear to guarantee value as did the assignat, which, by virtue of being printed, was given credence. Thus, although language is padded with hollow, inauthentic meaning, its currency is assured by the credence accorded to the letter. Still further, this convention seems to render an authentic money suspect, unworthy of credence, and drives such a money to the margins of linguistic circulation, expelling it from the market of established significations. Only bad tokens continue to circulate. In a shocking and yet persistent inversion, authentic money is suspected of being false, for it is rare; whereas the currency in circulation, that which conventionally passes as good, is actually false. And if it is inevitable that all meaning becomes communal, conventional, then the only possible act is to "destroy," to "pull things down," to "make a clean sweep'' (332) [319-20].
What is called for is a massive inflation of words, their demonetization. The absence of any profound signification, any transcendental signified behind the frenetic circulation of printed notes, must be acknowledged as desirable and intentionally sought after. Poetry will thus give up on representing anything, and even on signifying anything. Like the assignat, poetry will be a sign without intended meaning. "I don't ask for more than two years before a future poet will think himself dishonoured if anyone can understand a word of what he says". Poetics will no longer strive for more authentic meaning. The universal counterfeiting of affective expression will be answered by a single strategy: a purge of meaning, a thorough scouring as by scavengers. "All sense, all meaning will be considered anti-poetical".
This Nietzschean mania for positive nihilism seeks to induce linguistic purification by promoting to excess, to the point of absurdity, the release into circulation of inconvertible signifiers.
In this double repulsion of true meaning in the circulation of values, with meaning driven toward both Inside and Outside (inward to the individual's hidden hoard, and outward to an alterity that goes beyond the commonly met forms of the other) can be detected a law of linguistic economy that has much to teach us about what we call the Unconscious and about Transfer(ence)of funds, or of some fundamental depth of being. Authentic individual significations can never be completely negotiated on the trivial language market, but are necessarily held back in the innermost private treasure chest; or else they can be metabolized only in a foreign transaction, over the heads of the individual's everyday others, in a place that cannot fall for the illusion of false money: it is somewhat surprising to what degree this enigmatic arrangement in the economy of signifiers dovetails with a more general logic of exchange. If what we call the Unconscious and what we call the Other exist, it is perhaps because, by virtue of a law that rules signifying exchange as imperiously as it does political economy, bad money drives out good; that is, among individually experienced significations, it is by definition always and only the least that can actually serve as general equivalent in common circulation. It follows that the Unconscious is the treasury of significations that cannot be metabolized: the "good" money withdrawn from linguistic commerce, in which only everyday tokens are rapidly exchanged. Only in the extraordinary relation to a stranger (the Other), who transcends the boundaries of the arbitrariness of forced or conventional currencies, can this authentic money possibly surface from the closely guarded vaults of interiority.
The Other accepts only good money: this is precisely what is meant by transference in psychoanalysis. In the market of signifiers, the Other is the transcendent partner in an external exchange, a "foreign trade" that accepts only genuine signifying money. From these multiple homological connections emerges a generalized Gresham's law that applies both to human subjects, as Aristophanes suggests, and to language. Just as subjects, objects, and signs manifest certain common structures of exchange, they are governed by a single law of circulation. Gresham's law is not exclusively economic but concerns exchange in general: communication.
This linguistic version of Gresham's law is echoed by Ernst Jünger in a metaphor that takes a slightly different tack. What happens, Jünger asks, when the mind refuses to enter into commerce, to trade on its ideas? In his view, it gains in purity and in richness, for "the inexpressible is debased by trying to express itself and become communicable; it resembles gold which must be mixed with copper if it is to be used in exchange." [Goux, The Coiners of Language]
"Gold money is not alone in fulfilling the "general equivalent" function; in other registers, where it is a question not of economic value but of other types of value, this function belongs variously to language, to the father, and to the signifying element designated as the phallus in the dialectic of the unconscious. Gold, the Father, the Phallus, and Language seem thus to occupy perfectly homologous positions, all functioning as the general equivalents of exchanges in a universal logic of exchanges and values.
the Father becomes the general equivalent of subjects, Language the general equivalent of signs, and the Phallus the general equivalent of objects, all in a way that is structurally and genetically homologous to the gradual accession of a single element, Gold, to the rank of general equivalent of commodities. Thus analyzed in its structure and genesis is the mono form (monocentrism, monovalence) of substitutions and exchanges in the Western mode of symbolizing.
Counterfeiting is also, and emphaticallyeven first of allthe demonetization of the value of paternity.
Fathers have lost their legitimacy.
The signs of paternity have been divorced from the being of the father. The signifiers produced by fathers no longer refer to a Truth that, going beyond their appearance as signs, constitutes their transcendental guarantee.
It is not difficult to see this suspicion as corresponding closely to a certain crisis of linguistic and monetary legitimacy. Language, money, father: simultaneously metaphorizing each other in reciprocal homological interplay, their fundamental crisisthe crisis of a historical form of valueis exposed. Monetary falseness confers a title upon the crisis of the dominant value-form, a crisis that affects language and the father as well.
The history of value in the West is the inexorable shift from Archetypes to tokens, a shift that some would call a degradation, or even nihilism.
The "history of metaphysics" is the monetary history of the economy, the evolution of what used to be a divine, numinous standard, situated above exchange the inestimable source of what is valued into another value on the exchange mart. The numen has become idea, idea has become concept, and the concept itself is no longer signification but merely a pure value in the "arbitrary and differential" system of the play of signifiers.
The age-old quest for the philosopher's gold in the alchemist's laboratory has been converted to the objective of political economy: "Of this last aim primarily was alchemy the glorious, hurried, and dark forerunner." To make gold, not from lead in some obscure crucible of concoctions, calcinations, solutions, and coagulations, but in the surplus value of industry, trade, and financial speculation: in our present-day economy, the philosopher's stone has become the prosaic money in the ledgers of capital. "The null stone, called the philosopher's, dreaming gold: but it heralds, in finance, the credit of the future, preceding capital or reducing it to the humility of currency." From alchemy "prodigious dreams have been transferred'' to political economy.
The poet, as the willing martyr of the eternal cause of philosopher's gold, opposes the established power of common gold. Never will he consent to enter the marketplace, to exchange his work for a salary that would equate the written page to a sum of money, a quantitative evaluation of market price. ''No sale but that man traffics with his soul, or else he does not understand". (Others have pointed out the etymology of talent (Greek talanton, Latin talentum). properly speaking a unit of weight measurement in ancient Greece, and by extension a coin representing the value of an amount of gold or silver weighing one talent; whence its figurative use to designate either a person's aptitude (value) for certain pursuits, or the person himself. In this phrase Mallarmé, equating the poet with a value, coin, or gold a cut above the rest, reactivates the monetary figure of literary talent). He is resuscitating a dimension of original, almost prephilosophical Platonism, which placed poets and philosophers together under the same patronage, that of the Muses and of Apollo.
The poet, the solitary sacrificial opponent of the omnipotence of money, resists currency's universal claim to reduce all values to market value. The exceptional attitude assigned to the poet, his job, is to resist the numéraire or the political-economization of truth." [Goux, The Coiners of Language]
"In the West, the representatives of the divine royalty and the leaders who embody the two powers (spiritual and temporal), in what I have called "spiritual virility" and "Olympian sovereignity," belong to a very distant and almost mythical past. We have seen how, through the gradual deterioration of the Light of the North, the process of decadence has unfolded... Once the appex dissapeared, authority descended to the level inmediately below, that is, to the caste of the warriors. The stage was then set for monarchs who were mere military leaders, lords of temporal justice and, in more recent times, politically absolute sovereigns. In other words, regality of blood replaced regality of the spirit. Then a second collapse ocurred as the aristocracies began to fall into decay and the monarchies to shake at the foundations; through revolutions and constitutions they became useless institutions subject to the "will of the nation," and sometimes they were even ousted by different regimes. The principle characterizyng this state of affairs was: "The king reigns but he does not rule." Together with parliamentary republics the formation of the capitalist oligarchies revealed the shift of power from the second caste (the warrior) to the modern equivalent of the third caste (the mercantile class). The kings of the coal, oil, and iron industries replace the previous kings of blood and of spirit. Correspondingly, this era was characterized by the theory of the social contract. At this time the social bond was no longer a fides of a warrior type based on relationships of faithfulness and honor. Instead, it took on a utilitarian and economic character; it consisted of an agreement based on personal convenience and on material interest that only a merchant could have conceived. Gold became a means ad powerful tool; those who knew how to acquire it and to multiply it (capitalism, high finance, industrial trusts), behind the appereances of democracy, virtually controlled political power and the instruments employed in the art of opinionmaking. Aristocracy gave way to plutocracy, the warrior, to the banker and industrialist. The economy triumphed on all fronts. Trafficking with money and charging interest, activities previouly confined to the ghettos, invaded the new civilisation.
In reality, the codification of the traffic with gold as a loan charged with interest, to which the Jews had been previously devoted since they had no other means through which they could affirm themselves, may be said to be the very foundation of the acceptance of the aberrant development of all that is banking, high finance, and pure economy, which are spreading like a cancer in the modern world. This is the fundamental time in the "age of the merchants".
Finally the crisis of bourgeois society, classs truggle, the proletarian revolt against capitalism, the manifest promulgated at the "Third International" in 1919, and the correlative organization of the groups and the masses in the cadres proper to a "socialist civilization of labor" -all these bear witness to the third collapse, in which power tends to pass into the hands of the lowest of the traditional castes, the caste of the beasts of burden and the standardized individuals. The result of this transfer of power was a reduction of horizon and value to the plane of matter, the machine, and the reign of quantity. The prelude to this was the Russian Revolution. Thus, the new ideal became the "proletarian" ideal of a universal and communist civilization.
We may compare the above mentioned phaenomenon of the awakening and gushing forth of elemental subhuman forces within the structures of the modern world to a person who can no longer endure the tension of the spirit (first caste), and eventually not even the tension of the will as afree force that animates the body (warrior caste), and who thus gives in to the subpersonal forces of the organic system and all of a sudden reacts almost magnetically under the impulse of another life taht replaces his own. The ideas and the passions of the demos soon escape men´s control and they begin to act as if they had acquired an autonomous and dreadful life of their own. These passions pit nations and collectivities against each other and result in unprecedented conflicts and crises. At the end of the process, once the total collapse has ocurred, the awaits an international system under the brutal symbols of the hammer and the sickle.
Such are the horizons facing the contemporary world." [Evola]
"If we did not already know, says Charles Gide in 1883, that paper money can replace metallic money, we might have difficulty believing such a thing possible; and the title of his chapter ("Whether metallic money can be replaced by paper money") might astonish us. For, he continues,
"Obviously it is impossible to substitute for wheat, coal, or any other form of wealth, mere pieces of paper with the words '100 bushels of wheat' or '100 tons of coal' written on them. Pieces of paper can neither feed nor warm us."
Writing does not replace the object. The word dog does not bite. The signifier and the referent are not identical. The word wheat cannot feed us, any more than the word coal can make a locomotive run. We are indebted to Charles Gide for having dared begin his treatment of the economic question of paper money with so obvious and fundamental an ontological and logical (semantic) question. He does not fail to reduce this question, almost ineluctably, to that of the relations between word and thing, signifier and referent: that is, to a question of language. He has thus spared us the necessity of demonstrating that the structures of economic exchange and those of linguistic exchange are not merely parallel but, in certain radical dimensions, fully congruent. That the word is not the thing, and that there even exists an unbridgeable gap between word and thing, is something of which we are constantly reminded by the circulation of paper money.
The token, a word or money that has lost all evocative capacity, is thus in turn a symbol of formalized reason. The token is a minimal element figuring in calculation; it is the sign reduced to its operative value. In a token economy, the sign is a mere instrument manipulated and combined by calculating rationality. With the token, exchange no longer involves values themselves, but only arbitrary signs that refer to values by conventionbut which are not these values. Thus all exchange is effected by means of an interposed substitute, or a substitute for a substitute, and so on with infinite referral such that nothing enters the market "in person" anymore. Replacement is everywhere, presence is absent, deferment eternal, the treasure nowhere to be found. Invaded by a certain unreality, all relations are reduced to a few minimal formal conditions, a metabolism excluding any possibility of "totality," of the "implicit,'' of "truth" or "depth.''
Or again, to speak in more philosophical terms, regulatory ideality and poetic "depth" are ignored.
This domination corresponds to the total loss of the dialogical dimension of language. It is no longer by exchanging significations in person through argumentation, or in the reversible space of bargainingthat meaning (parliamentary rationality) is fixed, the way a price is established as a stable point of common accord, a fulcrum agreed upon by two parties present to each other. Language, no longer a means of living dialogue, has become detached from its interlocutors, reduced to a chain of autonomous signs that can enter into mechanical operations of division, combination, and recomposition. Thus, in a perversion that is symptomatic of a whole wave of contemporary thought, the mechanographic sign becomes the very model of all signifiers, and proof that the signifierfunctioning like the calculating machine, outside the bounds of intuitive thoughtconstitutes an order that is autonomous with respect to living subjects. Soon the subject, stripped of dialogical initiative, is conceived in return as despotically subjugated to the autonomous games of the signifier. It is no more than an effect of this all-powerful game, a "pawn of the signifier."
For the unconsciousness in which these mechanical operations are produced is easily couched in terms of the unconscious. The human subject is now conceived as no more than a corpselike slave obeying the despotic law of the signifier. Lacan clearly saw the shift from living dialogical speech to the machine; but he privileged the latter as an epistemological model, reducing the symbolic to what a machine can manipulate. "Speech is first of all that object of exchange with which one recognizes oneself .... The circulation of speech begins thus, and it swells until it constitutes the world of the symbol as if apart from the activity of the subject. The symbolic world is the world of the machine." From simple dyadic exchange to extended circulation, and from this type of circulation to the triumph of the pure substitute, detachable, interchangeable, and autonomous: not content merely to describe this movement, Lacan seizes upon its effects to develop his conception of the symbolic. Lacan speaks of the unconscious as the play of a language machine that is detached from the activity of the subject and, like a computer combining algorithms, able to function without the subject. This mechanical conception of the symbolicwhich alone makes possible Lacan's distinction between the symbolic and the imaginarybetrays the technicist nature of the epistemological configuration to which Lacanism belongs.
The elevation of the purely symbolic to the height of an absolute determinant, after the cybernetic and mechanical model, is an attempt to palliate the disappearance of systems of referencebut in a way that, far from contesting this disappearance, confirms and consolidates it. In this sense the extraordinary metaphysical promotion of the purely symbolic, the virtually theological glorification of the token (in the form of the letter and the pure signifier) is the last possible stance, the last stab at staving off the irruption of a new relation to the dimension of Measure." [Goux, The Coiners of Language]
In this sign everyone finds grace abundant. (6066-82; Arndt 153)
The emperor is astonished.
It circulates like gold of true assay?
The Court, the Army take it in full pay?
I scarce believe it, though you say I ought. (6083-85: Arndt 153)
That the idea of paper money is inspired and its theory propounded by a diabolical character indicates to what extent Goethe belonged to an era that still saw this economic practice as a demonic artifice. The device of paper money confers an enormous power upon writing (a few words written in the chancellor's hand declaring simply: this paper is worth ten, and so on for the various denominations); but at the same time, this power is so easily come by that it becomes suspect. Writing acquires this apparent power of creating wealththis power of separation, representation, and delegationonly through a diabolical detour. The operation of substitution by which a written sign takes the place of gold suddenly opens up a new world of relations, but it is a world tainted with the spirit of evil. Implicit in Goethe's myth of paper money is an anticipatory critique of that regime of signifiers characterized by floating, inflation, uncontrolled slippagea far cry from the treasure held in reserve, guaranteeing authentic value.
Paper wealth makes it possible to avoid going underground, descending into the realm of Plutus (the Greek equivalent of Roman Hades). The circulation of pure signs of value (and of meaning) obviates the need to go digging in the dangerous depths of the earth, where gold exists in its molten, deadly hot state. It is no longer in the chthonian vaults of the god both of the underworld and of wealth that originary values must be sought, but rather at the surface. The implication is clear: in this transformation of the signifying regime, the treasure of profound meaning does not enter directly into circulation, which has now become purely operative. Henceforth only superficial tokens, of dubious convertibility, are to be exchanged, while the gold of Plutus in Hadesthat is, the luminous images of psychic depths (the Unconscious)has lost all connection with the everyday circulation of signs. This very schism is what is diabolical. The purely combinatory and operative intelligence has been severed from the more profound, "richer" significations, the deeper levels where meaning is in a permanently melted state, a molten magma.
There is no doubt that for Goethe the economic device of paper money serves, beyond its proper meaning, as a metaphor for a semiotic process that involves a complex relation to truth, to the unconscious, and to language.
Paper money is a symbol of deception by the calculating intellect that has lost contact with deeply buried treasure. In other terms, it is a symbol of the loss of the symbolist dimension: instrumental consciousness manipulates conventional tokens, which have no ties to the significations of the unconscious. Once this contact has been broken, the calculating intellect can think itself capable of creating meaning, and ever more meaning, through a simple scriptural operation, the mere combination and manipulation of signs. The power of delegation (referral, deferment) that belongs to the sign has become utterly disproportionate, beyond all sense of measure. Paper money symbolizes the hubris of the pure sign.
Structurally, the banknote belongs to a mode of signifying that is cut off from the wealth of Plutus and Hades, a mode that is therefore founded on the denial of ''depths." This operative mode of signifying does not admit the passion of Persephone, who is cruelly kidnapped by the god of the underworld and forced to become his wife. In other words, the soul's mediating function between the bright world above and the dark world below (the world of interiority, of images, of depth as well as deathbut not that of the "devil") is discountedand this is what is truly Mephistophelian. The soul has lost all connection with its treasure: Mephistopheles is the one who buys the soul. The "selling of the soul" corresponds to the overbearingly instrumental intellect that performs operations upon signs (which are now autonomous, their meaning reduced to the operative function) with no further connection to any backing or reserve, which alone can guarantee convertibility in terms of "profound" reality. The excessive ease with which banknotesthese bits of writing that are nominally "worth'' gold (though gold is absent or unavailable)can be placed in circulation symbolizes the excessive cleverness of an intellect devoid of soul (of anima) manipulating linguistic tokens, reducing meaning to a mere game of signs and losing all contact with the profound sources of meaning (the wealth of Hades: molten gold). Thus Plutus in Hades embodies what is necessarily connoted by the imaginary, by "depth": for depth, in its turn, signifies. It is not something that we can simply "take or leave" without consequence." [Goux, The Coiners of Language]
"The soul is treasury, deposit, backing: this wealth is what guarantees the meaning of circulating meaning. It is buried treasure, hidden, lying deep below the surface.
For the movement from productive memory to a simply reproductive memory entails a loss of imagination. Reproductive memory holds the name for the thing, and the thing for the name, "apart from intuition and image" (219, §462). There is thus an iconoclasm in the process of becoming a sign in language. Words excuse us from imagining; they enable us to do without intuition and imagination. "Given the name lion, we need neither the actual vision of the animal, nor its image even: the name alone, if we understand it, is the unimaged simple representation. We think in names" (220, §462).
What we have witnessed here, along with Hegel, is the formation of the word as the circulating general equivalent, along with the effacement of images entailed by this nominal circulation. In this elimination of the image through the iconoclasm of name, concept, and alphabet, production is also forgotten. Commerce with its universal exchange values reigns supreme, repressing the very production that makes it possible; for as Hegel writes, the store of images, this dark mine or pit, is the site of a production, the "internal studio" (211, §457) where the "creative imagination" is active: "the imagination which creates signs"; the "productive imagination" (211, §457)* or the ''symbolic, allegoric, or poetical imagination" (209, §456). Thus it is in an activity of
production or of creation that the treasury or wealth originates and it is always a treasure of the soul, rather than of thought: the latter knows only general categories, abstract "values" belonging to the understanding.
Remarkably, this psychological process, moving from the unconscious poetics of the image to imageless nomination, is also the shift from production to exchange, or from the "internal studio" to the market. It is as if Hegel, theorizing the eviction of the image by the name, also theorized the dominion of exchange (in the form of the general equivalent) over production. It seems to me that this congruence is no mere coincidence; the "psychological" movement that Hegel sets forth is part and parcel of a logic of social exchanges that involves, simultaneously, both linguistic signs and the economy.
For the movement from productive memory to a simply reproductive memory entails a loss of imagination. Reproductive memory holds the name for the thing, and the thing for the name, "apart from intuition and image" (219, §462). There is thus an iconoclasm in the process of becoming a sign in language. Words excuse us from imagining; they enable us to do without intuition and imagination. "Given the name lion, we need neither the actual vision of the animal, nor its image even: the name alone, if we understand it, is the unimaged simple representation. We think in names" (220, §462).
What we have witnessed here, along with Hegel, is the formation of the word as the circulating general equivalent, along with the effacement of images entailed by this nominal circulation. In this elimination of the image through the iconoclasm of name, concept, and alphabet, production is also forgotten. Commerce with its universal exchange values reigns supreme, repressing the very production that makes it possible; for as Hegel writes, the store of images, this dark mine or pit, is the site of a production, the "internal studio" (211, §457) where the "creative imagination" is active: "the imagination which creates signs"; the "productive imagination" (211, §457)* or the ''symbolic, allegoric, or poetical imagination" (209, §456). Thus it is in an activity of
"production or of creation that the treasury or wealth originates and it is always a treasure of the soul, rather than of thought: the latter knows only general categories, abstract "values" belonging to the understanding."
Remarkably, this psychological process, moving from the unconscious poetics of the image to imageless nomination, is also the shift from production to exchange, or from the "internal studio" to the market. It is as if Hegel, theorizing the eviction of the image by the name, also theorized the dominion of exchange (in the form of the general equivalent) over production. It seems to me that this congruence is no mere coincidence; the "psychological" movement that Hegel sets forth is part and parcel of a logic of social exchanges that involves, simultaneously, both linguistic signs and the economy.
Advanced forms of exchange, on the principle of eliminating all iconic content, produce universal simple signifiers: these are the letter and the name. For Hegeland this point is striking enough to bear repeatingletter and name correspond to one and the same principle of abstraction and universalization; both constitute the same decisive moment of extreme poverty of intuition and image, an utter dearth nevertheless deemed a gain in pure thought, a surplus value in the element of formal universality.
Thus emerges a chain of striking solidarity. Belonging to the same moment in the logic of exchanges are not only the letter, the name, and being but also the self as the centralizer of various names and the guarantor of their order. This is the moment of the circulating general equivalent, the culmination of iconoclasm in the logic of exchanges.
It also becomes evident that what we designate as the unconscious (the hidden store of images, the deep mine or well) is an effect of this same iconoclasm in the logic of exchanges, an effect in return of the nonmetabolism of images in a consciousness that, given over exclusively to exchange, is now but an empty linkage between names, devoid of intuition and images.
Since in the nonrepresentational logic of social exchanges it is no longer possible for a single body simultaneously to measure (as ideality), to circulate (as symbolicity), and to be present "in person" (as reality), the three functions are disengaged, and certitude collapses, forcing us to delve again but this time at another historical moment of transposition into what was repressed, what these functions governed, by disimagining it to the status of a token." [Goux, The Coiners of Language]
"The conjunction of diet and discourse in Futurist culinary theory ultimately gives way to a vision of the gradual closing of the Italian mind under the weight of spaghetti and tagliatelle, a vision which culminates in the “piggish enjoyment” experienced by an eater who aspires to a state of perfect fusion with his daily meal: Our pasta is like our rhetoric, only good for filling up our mouths; its enjoyment lies entirely in the way it forces the jaws wide open, the way it demands voluptuous self-abandonment, the way it sticks to the palate and the intestines, the way the eater feels he has become one with it, knotted into a sticky ball and re-fashioned.
More than anything, it is the pig’s eating habits that Ponge fi nds repellent on the grounds that they are dictated by the animal’s hurried fear of “missing or losing something.” It has been suggested by Bernard Beugnot (Ponge 1999: 907) that the irruption of the swine in Ponge’s object poem may be a response to Paul Claudel’s 1896 “The Pig,” which is in the poet’s fi rst published collection, Connaissance de l’est. The following passage from Claudel’s poem compares the pig with a ploughshare penetrating the soil:
It is a solid, monolithic piece; jointless and neckless, it rushes forward like a ploughshare. Trundling around on its four stocky hams, it is a walking trunk collecting food, ingurgitating every smell into its pumplike body. Once it fi nds the right hole, it wallows in it with enormity. It is not the duck’s impatient wriggling, it is not the dog’s sociable exhilaration; it is a deep, solitary, conscious, integral delight. (Claudel 67)
The morphology of Claudel’s pig evokes that of a walking stomach: the pig is literally a “gastero-pod,” a “stomach on foot” whose “jointless and neckless” body, “solid and all of one piece,” “pump[s]” the food out of the fresh mud. Like Ponge’s snail, who “does not have many friends” and “does not need them to be happy” because “he is so well stuck to nature, and he so perfectly and closely enjoys it” (Ponge 26), Claudel’s pig is essentially a solitary eater. Its instinct drives it to “two fundamental things: earth and fi lth” (Claudel 67). The confl ation of earth and dirt into a single, undifferentiated substance, which is both nutritive and excremental, is paralleled by the ambivalence of the pig’s ingestion of edible matter (“It snorts, sips, samples, and one does not know if it is drinking or eating; round-shaped, it quivers forward and dives into the fat heart of the fresh mud”). It also attributes a positive value to the collapse of the solid and the fl uid into a muddy, intermediary state which, unlike the Sartrian viscous — or, to some extent, Ponge’s “sickening” bread mush—does not entail the risk of “losing” oneself in ambivalent compromise between self and object, being and consciousness, action and passivity. On the contrary, far from being disparaging, the speaker of Claudel’s poem implicitely envies the pig’s “deep, solitary, conscious and integral joy” in surrendering to the joys of the earth and ends on an optimistic, possibly redemptive, note with the promise of a material and spiritual transsubstantiation (“I do not forget that pig bloodserves to fixate gold”.
Saladin’s “Cubist Vegetable Patch” had more affinities with the simple, proto-minimalist geometrical design of the Russian constructivist variety than with the more dynamic and perspectival tensions of analytical and synthetic Cubism:
1. Little cubes of celery from Verona fried and sprinkled with paprika;
2. Little cubes of fried carrot sprinkled with grated horseradish;
3. Boiled peas;
4. Little pickled onions from Ivrea sprinkled with chopped parsley;
5. Little bars of Fontina cheese; (156)
Saladin’s specifi cation that “the cubes must not be larger than 1 cubic centimeter” is symptomatic of the Futurist emphasis on form as a means of controlling and limiting the body’s appetite. The Futurists, who believed that “modern man must have a fl at stomach, under the sun, to think clearly” (55), favored servings which were only a few mouthfuls in size. This reductionist bend climaxes in Marinetti’s advocacy of synthetic food and vitamins, which would achieve “a real lowering of the cost of living and of salaries,” as well as the complete separation of food from nourishment. As suggested above, the Futurist cult of harmonious and pure forms is typical of a movement caught between its cult of formal freedom, imagination, experimentalism, and its entanglement in fascist politics. The conservative nature of the Futurist “geometrical meals”—which also found its architectural correlative in the shining, streamlined furniture of their real and imaginary dining rooms and restaurants—betrays the need for order, symmetry, and uniformity which lurked beneath the “revolution of the senses” promoted by the movement as a whole. As epitomized by the perfect cube of beef of “Raw Meat Torn by Trumpet Blasts” and the identical discs of chicken meat of “The Flavor of Steel” (77), the Futurists’ devotion to perfect forms reflected their phantasmagorical and libidinal investment in a mechanically ruled world devoid of the messiness and contingencies of the subjective and the organic. As Peter Nicholls aptly puts it, “the triumph of the mechanical over the natural” in Futurist poetics “encapsulates the capacity of the modern subject to experience himself as pure origin, as uncontaminated by tradition” (Nicholls 86)." [Michel Delville, Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption]
