The Blond Beast

"In ancient repose
My trust lay eroded by age
The old glory faded
And past times forgotten
My reign given way to my rage

Harmonious the centuries
The land and I were one
My soil, my water, my air
Bringer of light
And master of night
In balance, the earth in my care

But with the passing of days
A new wind came blowing
With whispers of change on its wing
This tide of corruption
Laid siege to my world
Usurping the throne of a king

Your new gods, your new ways
All seek to dispel me
With doctrines of fear built on lies
The hidden one, no longer
I claim my dominion
To the sun of your age, I arise

Of your anger
Your ignorance
Your blindness
Your greed
Your progress
Your conquest
Your mania
Your need
Your sorrow
Your sickness
Your final, parting breath
Your hatred
Your bloodshed
Your future
Your death

I will have none
I will have none
I will have none
I will have none

I, dread lord of shadows
With broken spell
Unto this rotting age
I bid farewell

Blessed be" [Faith and the Muse, Cernunnos]

Quote :

"The beast and the sovereign are connected, Derrida contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law—the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside the law from below."

Quote :

"Derrida has persistent recourse to the figure of the wolf in order to insist on the sovereign's capacity for suspending the law, for therefore resembling an animal, an outlaw, acting like a wild beast, wolf or werewolf:
one cannot be interested in the relations of beast and sovereign, and all the questions of the animal and the political, of the politics of the animal, and man and beast in the context of the state, the polis, the city, the republic, the social body, the law in general, war and peace, terror and terrorism, national or international terrorism, etc., without recognizing some privilege in the figure of the 'wolf'..."

Quote :

"What Derrida points out is the hypocrisy of imperialist missions that operate under the umbrella philosophy of “spreading universal human rights,” which he sees an insidious act of cunning that allows “sovereign” states to treat the other as outlaw, in the name of a law only the former can enforce. I think the paradox is pretty clear: we treat men like “beasts” in a mission take them out of this “beastly-ness, ” in the name of a universal humanity. By identifying the other as less than human we claim to attempt to bring them up to the level of humanity, based on some universal humanity..."

Derrida wrote:

And this is just how La Fontaine describes the sovereign wolf in the fable. The wolf is described as, I quote, "that animal full of rage," ready to launch punitive, even preventive or vengeful expeditions. Listen to the wolf when he takes the lamb to task and prepares 'preventive offensive against the one who might take over his wells or food source':

"Who makes you so bold to muddy my drink? Said this animal full of rage:
You will be punished for your temerity."

Punishment and penal law. The motif of revenge comes to close and seal the fable, as if at bottom the penal law exercised by the strongest, as if the punishment it inflicts ("You will be punished") were always retaliation or revenge, tulio, an eye for an eye, rather than justice, "I must avenge myself', says the wolf at the end." [Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, I]

 

Quote :

"Derrida’s The Beast & the Sovereign , volume I, explores the contradictory appearance of animals in political discourse. Sometimes, as he points out, political man and the sovereign state appear in the form of an animal and, at other times, as superior to animals of which he is the master. Derrida shows how Hobbes’s Leviathan and sovereignty itself are constructed and maintained through an uncanny fear, a fear not in the first place of one’s fellow man, but of the wolf within the self, i.e. , the drive to self-destruction. It is the repression of this wolf, Derrida suggests, which leads to the further contradictory logic (in Hobbes) of excluding both beast and God from the covenant whilst maintaining God as the model of sovereignty. God, in other words, ‘is’ the beast repressed and can therefore hardly serve as the foundation of sovereignty. The self, and ultimately sovereignty, it can be said in view of Derrida’s analysis, is never purely present to itself but instead arrives at itself by way of the ‘binding’ of unconscious forces. Sovereignty in this way ultimately shows itself to be divisible."

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Quote :

"On Derrida’s view, the formation of sovereign power and the methods by which it operates have historically been assumed to be both ‘proper to man’ and positioned in-between two figures: God, a figure of absolute sovereignty above the law, and the beast or the animal, a figure below the law, without recourse to sovereign power or right. The relation between the beast and the sovereign thus rests on the operation of sovereign power as a relation of force. And it is from this sovereign formation, the sovereign like a God, the sovereign like a beast, that the relation between sovereignty and reason, between arguments posed in The Beast and the Sovereign and, later, in Rogues, become enmeshed."

On the one hand, Derrida provides a description of the ways in which sovereign power understood as the reason of the stronger operates. On the other hand, Derrida provides a description of the formation of sovereign power as the reason of the stronger that reveals the beast or the animal to constitutive of it, and thus internal to it. Here, we are reminded of the figure of the Other in The Other Heading, the figure of the enemy in Politics of Friendship, or the figure of the foreigner in Of Hospitality. It is accordingly the function of sovereign power, its actual operation, that provides the conditions for its deconstruction and, as Derrida will argue, provides the conditions for the deconstruction of what is thought to be ‘proper to man.’

Thus, the animal emerges in the seminar as something more than a trope or a figure against which sovereign power is established."

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The feminine beast and the masculine sovereign.

Derrida wrote:

"One at least of the lines of force or one of the silent but insistent connotations in what seemed to me to impose the very letter, down to my unconscious. down to the title's unconscious, "The Beast and the Sovereign", namely the sexual difference as if we were naming in it, ahead of time, a certain couple, a cerlain coupling, a plot involving alliance or hostility, war or peace, mar­riage or divorce-not only between two types of living beings (animal and human) but between two sexes...

Stealthy as a wolf. I'm saying it with reference to the (French] proverbial expression 'a pas de loup' , which in gen­eral signifies a sort of introduction, a discreet intrusion or even an unobtrusive effraction, without show. all but secret, clandestine, an entrance that does all it can to go unnoticed and especially not to be stopped, intercepted, or interrupted, To move a pas de loup is to walk without making a noise, to arrive without warning, to proceed discreetly, silently, invisibly, almost in­audibly and imperceptibly, as though to surprise a prey, to take it by surpris­ing what is in sight but does not see coming the one that is already seeing it, already getting ready to take It by surprise, to grasp it by surprise.

Rousseau opposes Grotius and Hobbes as theorists of the political, of the foundation of the po­litical, who reduce citizen to beast, and the originary community of men to an animal community. An animal community the chief of which would be all in all, a kind of wolf, like the wolf-tyrant, the tyrant turned wolf in Pla­to's Republic (book 8 )along with everything I would call the 'Iycology' of Platonic politics, politics as discourse aboout the wolf, lukos) in any case, to come back to Rousseau, a sovereign who would be simply stronger and thereby capable of devouring those he commands, namely cattle.

Imagine animals more different, even antagonistic, than the dove and the wolf, the one rather allegorizing peace, from Noah's Ark, which ensures the future the safety of humanity and its animals, the other, the wolf, just as much as the falcon, allegorizing hunting and warfare, prey and predation.
A great number of idiomatic and quasi-proverbial expressions feature the wolf ("howl among wolves," "cry wolf," "have a wolf in one's stomach," "cold enough for a wolf," " between dog and wolf;' "a young wolf;' " the big bad wolf," etc.). These expressions arc idiomatic lin French. They are not all translatable from one language or culture to another, or even from one territory or geography to another - there are not wolves everywhere, and one does not have the same experience of the wolf in Alaska or in the Alps, in the Middle Ages or today. These idiomatic expressions and these figures of the wolf, these fables or fantasies vary from one place and one his­torical moment to another; the figures of the wolf thus encounter, and pose for us, thorny frontier questions. Without asking permission, real wolves cross humankind's national and institutional frontiers, and his sovereign nation-states; wolves out in nature [dans la nature] as we say, real wolves, are the same on this side or the other side ofthe Pyrenees or the Alps; but the figures of the wolf belong to cultures, nations, languages, myths, fables, fantasies, histories.

If I chose the expression that names the wolf's "step" in the pas de loup, it was no doubt because the wolf itself is there named in absentia, as it were; the wolf is named where you don't yet see or hear it coming; it is still absent, save for its name. It is looming, an object of apprehension; it is named, re­ferred to, even called by its name; one imagines it or projects toward it an image, a trope, a figure, a myth, a fable, a fantasy, but always by reference to someone who, advancing a pas de loup, is not there, not yet there, someone who is not yet present or represented; you can't even see its tail; as another proverb says: "When you speak of the wolf, you see its tail," meaning that someone, a human this time, shows up just when you are talking about him or her. Here you don't yet see or hear anything of what is advancing.

There is only a word, a spoken word, a fable, a fable-wolf. a fabulous animal, or even a fantasy (fantasma in the sense of a revenant, in Greek, or fantasy in the enigmatic sense of psychoanalysis, in the sense, for example, that a totem corresponds to a fantasy); there is only another "wolf" that figures something else-some­ thing or somebody else, the other that the fabulous figure of the wolf, like a metonymic substitute or supplement would come both to announce and conceal, to manifest and mask.

And do not forget that in French we also call loup the black velvet mask that used to be worn, that women especially, "ladies" more often than men, used to wear at one time, in certain milieux, and especially at masked balls. The so-called loup allowed them to see sovereignly without being seen, to identify without allowing themselves to be identified. This woman in the loup would be the feminine figure of what I once called a "visor effect," the upper part of the armor played on by the father or spectral king in Hamlet, who sees without being seen when he puts down his visor. This time, in the case of the loup, the mask nicknamed loup, the visor effect would play especially, or at least most often, on the feminine side.

And the absence of this wolf, ungraspable in person other than according to the words of a fable-this absence bespeaks at the same time power, resource, force, cunning, ruse of war, strategem or strategy, operation of mastery. The wolf is all the stron­ger, the meaning of its power is all the more terrorizing, armed, threatening, virtually predatory for the fact that in these appellations, these turns of phrase, these sayings, the wolf does not yet appear in person but only in the theatrical person of a mask, a simulacrum or a piece of language, i.e. a fable or a fantasy. The strength of the wolf is all the stronger, sovereign even, is all the more all-conquering [a raison dt'lout] for the fact that the wolf is not there, that there is not the wolf itself, were it not for a pas de loup.

I would say that this force of the insensible wolf (insensible because one neither sees nor hears it commg, because it is invisible and inaudible, and therefore nonsensible. but also insensible because it is aII the crueler for this, impassive, indifferent to the suffering of its virtual victims) - that the force of this insensible beast seems then to overcome [avoir raison de] everything because through that other untranslatable idiomatic expres​sion(avoir raison de), to overcome, to win out over, to be the strongest, the question of reason comes up, the question of zoological reason, political reason, rationality in general: What is reason? What is a reason? A good or a bad reason? And you can see that already when I move from the question "What is reason?" to the question "What is a reason?" a good or a bad reason, the sense of the word "reason" has changed. And it changes again when I move from "to be right" [avoir raison]  (and so to have a good reason to bring forward in a debate or a combat, a good reason against a bad reason, a just reason against an unjust reason), the word "reason" changes again, then, when I move from 'avoir raison' in a reasonable or rational discussion, to 'avoir raison de' [to overcome] in a power relation [rapport de force], a war of conquest, hunting, or even a fight to the death.

It is the second line of a fable by La Fontaine that puts on stage the wolf from the fable.

"The reason of the strongest is always the best
As we shall shortly show"

I'm referring to what Pascal places under the titie "Reason of effects,"

It is Just that what is just be followed; it is neccssary that what is strongest be followed. Justice without force is impotent; force without justice is tryrannical. Justice without force is contradicted because there are always bad people; force without justice stands accused. So Justice and force must be put logelher; and to do so make what is just strong and what is strong, just.

Justice is subject to dispute; force is easy to recognize and indisputable. And so one could not give force to justice, because force contradicted justlce and said that it was unjust, and that it was force that was just, And thus not being able to make what is just, strong; one made what is strong, just.

When I say wolf, you mustn't forget the she-wolf. What counts here is no longer the sexual difference between the wolf as real amimal and the mask [loup ] worn by the woman. Here we are not dealing with this double wolf, this "twin" word, masculine in both cases, the natural wolf, the real wolf and its mask [loup] its simulacrum, but indeed with the she-wolf, often a symbol of sexuality or even of sexual debauchery or fecundity, of the she-wolf mother of other twins, for example the she-wolf that, at the foundation of Rome, suckled the twins Remus and Romulus.  

And then. given the pack of mythical wolves is without number, remember Wotan among the German gods (Wotan or Odin in the North). Wotan is a warrior god, a god of warlike fury (cf. wuten in modern Ger­man: to be in a fury, to ravage through warfare), and Wotan decides as Sov­ereign King, as war chief. Sovereignty is his very essence. When he sits on the throne, he is flanked by two wolves who are like the insignia of his maj­esty, living coats of arms, the living heraldry of his sovereigmy. What is more. Odin Wotan also had the gift of being able to change himself at will into a wild animal into a bird, fish, or serpent.

We will keep trying to think through this becoming-beast. this becoming-animal of a sovereign who is above all a war chief, and is determined as sovereign or as animal faced with the enemy. He is instituted as sovereign by the possibility of the enemy, by that hostility in which Schmitt claimed to recognize along with the possibility of the political, the very possibility of the sovereign, of sovereign decision and exception. In the leg­end of Thor, son of Odin, we can also find a terrible wolf story. The giant wolf Fenrir plays an important part on the day of the twilight of the gods. Just to say a word about a long and complicated story. I recall that the gods, threatened by this sinister and voracious wolf, lay for him a highly ingenious trap that the wolf discovers, and to which he agrees to subject himself on one condition; once the condition is met, he ends up closing his jaws around the wrist of the god Tyr. who was to place him in the trap, according to the contract. After which the god Tyr, who had accepted a mutilated hand in order to respect the con­tract and redeem the disloyal trial proposed to the wolf becomes the jurist god, the god of justice and oaths, fixing the code and the rules of what was called the Thing (Ding, read Heidegger), the Thing, the Cause, that is, tht place of assemblies, debates, common deliberations, contracts and litigations and decisions of justice. The god of the Thing, of the Cause of justice, of oaths had his hand devoured, cut of at the wrist by the wolf in the wolf's mouth.

Every law is not necessarily ethical, juridical, or political. Is the law that reigns (in a way that is more differentiated and heterogcneous) in all the so-called animal societies a law of the same nature as what we under­stand by law in human right and human politics?

The minimal feature that must be recognized in the position of sovereignty at this scarcely even preliminary stage, is, with respect to Schmitt, a certain power to give, to make, but also to suspend the law; it is the exceptional right to place oneself above right, the right to non-right, ifI can say Ihis, which both runs the risk ofcarrying the human sovereign above the hurnan, toward divine omnipotence (which will moreover most often have grounded the principle ofsovereignty in its sacred and theological origin) and, hecause of this arbitrary suspension or rupture of right runs the risk of making the sovereign look like the most brutal beast who respects nothing, scorns the law, immediately situates himself above the law, at a distance from the law. For the current representation, to which we are referring for, sovereign and beast seem to have in common their being-outside-the-law. It is as though both of them were situated by definition at a distance from or above the laws, in nonrespect for the absolute law, the absolute law that they make or that they are but that they do not have to respect. Being-outside-the-law can, no doubt. on the one hand (and this is the figure of sovereignty), take the form of being-above-the­ laws, and therefore take the form of the law itself, of the origin of laws, the guarantor of law... as though the Law, with a capital L, the condition of the law, were before, above, and therefore outside the law, external or even heterogeneous to the law; but being-outside-the law can also, on the other hand (and this is the figure of what is most often understood by animality or bestiality),  [being-outside-the-law] can also situate the place where the law does not appear, or is not respected, or gets violated. These modes of being-outside-the-Iaw (be it the mode of what is called the beast, be it that ofthe criminal, even of that grand criminal of whom Benjamin said that he fascinates the crowd, even when he is condemned and executed. because, along with the law, he defies the Sover­eignty of the state as monopoly of violence (be it the being-outside-the­ law of the sovereign himself)- these different modes of being-outside­ the-Iaw can seem to be heterogeneous arnong themselves, or even apparently heterogeneous to the law, but the fact remains, sharing this common being­ outside-the-law, beast, criminal, and sovereign have a troubling resemblance: they call on each other and recall each other, from one to the other: there is between sovereign. criminal. and beast a sort of obscure and fasci­nating complicity, or even a worrying mutual attraction, a worrying familiarity, an uncanny, reciprocal haunting. Both of them, all three of them, the animal, the criminal, and the sovereign, are outside the law, at a distance from or above the laws: criminal, beast and sovereign strangely resemble each other while seeming to be situated at the antopodes, at each other's antipodes.
It happens moreover - brief re-appearance of the wolf­ that the nickname "wolf" is given to a head of state: 'Father of the Nation', Mustapha Kemal who had given himself the name Ataturk (Father of the Turks) was called the "'gray wolf' hy his partisans, in memory of the mythical ancestor Genghis Khan, the "blue wolf:'


I believe that this troubling resemblance, this worrying superposition of these two beings-outside-the-Iaw or "without laws" or "above the laws" that beast and sovereign both are when viewed from a cerlain angle- I believe that this re:semblance explains and engenders a sort of hypnotic fas­cination or irresistible hallucination, which makes us see, project, perceive, as in a X-ray, the face of the beast under the features of the sovereign; or conversely, if you prefer, it is as though, through the maw of the untamable beast, a figure of the sovereign were to appear. As in those games where one figure has to be identified through another. In the venigo of this 'unheimlich', uncanny hallucination, one would be as though prey to a haunting, or rather the spectacle of a spectrality: haunting of the sovereign by the beast and the beast by the sovereign, the one inhabiting or housing the other, the one becoming the intimate host of the other, the animal becoming the host (host and guest), the hostage too, of a sovereign of whom we also know that he can be very stupid [the beast] without that at all affecting the all­ powerfulness ensured by his function or, if you like, by one of the "king's two bodies". In the metamorphic covering-over of the two figures, the beast and the sovereign, one therefore has a presentiment that a profound and essential ontological copula is at work on this couple: it is like a cou­pling, an ontological. onto-zoo-anthropo-theologico-political copulation: the beast becomes the sovereign who becomes the beast; there is the beast and [et] the sovereign (conjunction), but also the beast is [est] the sovereign, the sovereign is [est] the beast.

Whence in the rhetoric of politicians against sovereign states that do not respect in­ternational law or right, and which are called "rogue states", i.e. delinquent states, criminal states, states that behave like brigands, like highway robbers or like vulgar rapscallions who just do as they feel, do not respect international right, stay in the margins of international civility, violate property, frontiers, rules and good international manners, including the laws of war (terrorism being one of the classic forms of this delinquency, according to the rhetoric of heads of sovereign states who for their part claim to respect international right). In German, Schurke which can also mean "ras­cal," bounder, cheat, crook, rabble, blackguard, criminal is the word also used to translate rogue. "Rogue state" in English seems to he the first name (Schurke merely translation I think), for the accusation was first formulated in English. by the United States. Now we shall see, when we go in this direction and study the uses, the pragmatics, and the semantics
of the word rogue, very frequent in Shakespeare, what it also tells us about animality or bestiality. The "rogue," be it to do with elephant, tiger, lion, or hippopotamus (and more generally carnivorous animals), the "rogue" is the individual who does not even respect the law of the animal community, of the pack, the horde, of its kind. By its savage or indocile behavior, it stays or goes away from the society to which it belongs. As you know, the states that are accused of being and behaving as rogue states often turn the accusa­tion back against the prosecutor and claim in their turn that the true rogue states are the sovereign, powerful and hegemonic nation-states that begin by not respecting the law or international right to which they claim to be referring, and have long practiced state terrorism, which is merely another form of international terrorism.

The first accused accuser in this debate is the United States of America. The United States is accused of practicing a state terrorism and regularly violating the decisions of the UN or the agencies of international right that they are so quick to accuse the others, the so-called rogue states, of violating.

The United States, which is so ready to accuse other states of being rogue states, is in fact allegedly the most rogue of all, the one that most often violates international right, even as it enjoins other states (often by force, when it suits it) to respect the international right that it does not itself respect whenever it suits it not to. Its use of the expression "rogue state" would be the most hypocritical rhetoncal strategem, the most pernicious or perverse or cynical armed trick of its permanent resort to the greater force, the most inhuman brutality." [The Beast and the Sovereign]

Quote :

"Beginning with La Fontaine's The Wolf and the Lamb or Hobbes's Leviathan, the human in its most sovereign moments either borrows the trappings of a fable, or takes the form of an artificial animal, an artificial man that is an animal. The thesis of sovereignty, and the possibility of ipseity in general, is thus found to be inseparable from an idea of artificial contrivance.

On the one hand, in the context of the reason of the strongest as incarnated by La Fontaine's wolf, Derrida advances the hypothesis of political rhetoric as a discourse of sovereignty that is inevitably "a strategy to give meaning and credit to a fable … to a story indissociable from a moral, the putting of living beings, animals or humans, on stage".

For what sovereignty trades on above all is fear. Thus, on the other hand, in Leviathan absolute sovereignty functions, and terrifies specifically as "the product of a mechanical artificiality, a product of man, an artifact; and this is why its animality is that of a monster as prosthetic and artificial animal" (27). Hobbes's commonwealth is a prosthesis, which leads Derrida to call it "prosthstatic [prothétatique]" and to emphasize again what is non-natural, and hence historical and deconstructible about it. Sovereignty as artificial soul (Hobbes again) is like an iron lung that both "amplif[ies] the power of the living" and functions as a "dead machine" (28). It is therefore conventional, contractual, institutional, and mortal; yet, thanks to its prosthetic endurance, it is at the same time posited as immortal. While it supposedly excludes the animal on one side, and God -- who has no need of it -- on the other, it appears, in its very technoprostheticity, as profoundly ontotheological. For however much Hobbes may have sought to introduce a purely secular conception of sovereignty, his concept of a commonwealth artificially created by a man who is the summit of a nature created as God's art, retains a structural relation with that divine model.

The articulation of sovereignty within a network that includes both the animal and the artificial, and the animal as artificial, again extends the question concerning the animal to include the relation of living to non-living..."

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Derrida wrote:

"Among all the questions that we shall have to unfold in all directions, among all the things thaI we shall have to ask ourselves, there would, then, be this figuration of man as "political animal" or "political living being" according to Aristotle's so well-known and so enigmatic for­mula (Politics 1.1253:13). It is obvious, says Aristotle, that the polis forms part of the things of nature and that man is by nature a political be­ing; from which he concludes, after having strongly insisted (contrary to what is sometimes understood or read) in the same text, in the same pages, and again just before this, on living and life as (zen), and not as (bios), on the (eu zen), living well - he concludes, then. that a being without a city, (apolis), an apolitical being, is, by nature and not by chance, either much worse (phaulIlos) or much better than man superior to man (kreitton e anthropos) which clearly marks the fact that politicity, the being-political of the living being called man, is an imermediate between those two oIher living beings that are beast and god which, each in its own way, would be "apolitical" - so we return to our point: In his very sovereignty, to the beast that he masters, enslaves, dominates, domesticates, or kills, so that his sovereignty consists in raising himself above the animal and appropriating it, having its life at his disposal, but on the other hand (contradictorily) a figuration of the political man, and especially of the sovereign state as animality, or even as bestiality, either a normal bestiality or a monstrous bestiality itself mythological or fabulous. Political man as superior to animality and political man as animality.

The femine beast, the masculine sovereign...

The beast and the sovereign, the beast is the sovereign, that's how our couple seems first to show up, a couple, a duo or even a duel, but also an alliance, almost a hymen... which seems to pose, oppose, or juxtapose them as two species arriv­ing beings radically heterogeneous to each other, the one infrahuman, the other human or even superhuman, and, on the other hand, the copula (is [est]), which seems to couple them in a sort of ontologico-sexual attraction, a mutual fascination, a communitarian attachment, or even a narcissistic re­semblance, the one recognizing in the other a sort of double, the one becoming the other, being the other (the "is" then having the value of a process, a becoming, an identificator, metamorphosis), the beast being the sovereign, the sovereign being the beast, the one and the other being each engaged, in truth changed or even exchanged in a becoming-beast of the sovereign or in a becoming-sovereign of the beast, the passage from the one to the other; the analogy, the resemblance. the alliance, the hymen depending on the fact that they both share that very singular position of being outlaws, above or at a distance from the law - the beast ignorant of right and the sovereign having the right to suspend right, to place himself above the law that he is, that he makes, that he institutes, as to which he decides sovereignly. The sover­eign is not an angel, but, one might say, he who plays the sovereign plays the beast. The sovereign makes himself the beast, has himself the beast." [ Derrida, The Beast and The Sovereign, Vol. I]

"What have I become?..."

"This is My Design." [Hannibal]
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Lying and Dissimulation.

Quote :

"Derrida remains with Arendt’s distinction between premodern and modern lying. Whereas the former is based on the hiding of a truth that is known, the latter involves the very destruction of the reality to which the lie refers. That is, the modern period is based on the substitution of simulacra “all the way down” for a belief in a reality that exists and can then be hidden (an argument perhaps most widely identified with Jean Baudrillard, although Derrida doesn’t mention his name). “Because the image-substitute no longer refers to an original, not even to a flattering representation of an original, but replaces it advantageously, thereby trading its status of representative for that of replacement, the process of the modern lie is no longer a dissimulation that comes along to veil the truth; rather it is the destruction of the reality or of the original archive.”

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Quote :

"The distinctions on the basis of which the human species is separated from other animal species, properties that the human is supposed to possess whereas animals don't, are all called into question by Derrida. And he extends most provocatively, to the point of calling it "necessarily indefinite" (130), the list of those distinguishing characteristics: language, speech, reason, response, logos, the sense of death, technique, history, convention, culture, laughter, tears, work, mourning, burial, institutions, clothing, lying, pretence of pretence, covering of tracks, the gift, respect (167, 130). However, to call those supposed or professed differences into question is by no means to say that there are no distinctions to be made, no differences between a human and an equine or canine or Cetacean animal, or between a protozoon and an amoeba. Instead, such a questioning calls upon thinkers to recognize new, more operative, better founded differences;

"As always, to stick to the schema of my recurrent and deconstructive objections to this whole traditional discourse on 'the animal' (as though any such thing could exist in the general singular), one must not be content to mark the fact that what is attributed as 'proper to man' also belongs to other living beings if you look more closely, but also, conversely, that what is attributed as proper to man does not belong to him in all purity and all rigor; and that one must therefore restructure the whole problematic...
The only rule that for the moment I believe we should give ourselves in this seminar is no more to rely on commonly accredited oppositional limits … than to muddle everything and rush, by analogism, toward resemblances and identities. Every time one puts an oppositional limit in question, far from concluding that there is identity, we must on the contrary multiply attention to differences, refine the analysis in a restructured field (16-17)."

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Derrida wrote:

"And as for orality between mouth and maw, we have already seen its double carry, the double tongue. the carry of the tongue that speaks, carry as the carry of the voice that vociferates (to voci-ferate is to carry the voice) and the other carry, the other devouring one, the voracious carry of the maw and the teeth that lacerate and cut to pieces. Vociferation and devourment, we were saying, but let us not hasten to attribute speech to the mouth of man supposed to speak and voracity or even the vociferation of the cry to the animal's maw.
It is precisely this simple and dogmatic opposition, the abuses of this oversimplification that we have in our sights here." [The Beast and the Sovereign]

Quote :

"There is a scene in which Lecter adopts Gumb’s technique of entering into his victim’s skin.  Late in the film, Lecter makes a daring and brutal escape by disguising himself as a policeman he has attacked.  He bites and cuts the skin off the face of the policeman he has killed, then uses the mutilated mask and the officer’s uniform to impersonate him so that he can be carried off in an ambulance from which he makes his escape.  Like Gumb, he has taken on the identity of his victim by getting inside his skin.

Oral desire and pleasure can be expressed in many ways other than literally swallowing or biting.   As this film demonstrates, the act of looking and observing may carry secret oral gratifications.  Early on, we are made subtly aware that Starling is the object of men’s eyes.  On her way to meet Jack Crawford, who heads the FBI Behavioral Science section, Starling enters an elevator filled with male students.  They look at her, a small feminine figure amidst a sea of men.  This is repeated later when Starling is surrounded by a group of police officers in a small town where the body of a murdered girl has been found.  Throughout the film, men turn to look at her.  Lecter will later use that to make a point about the relationship between orality and voyeurism.

Lecter:  “First principle, Clarise, simplicity.  Read Marcus Aurelius:  ‘Of each particular thing ask what is it in itself. What is its nature?’  What does he do, this man you seek?”

Starling:  “He kills women.”

Lecter:  “No, that is incidental.  What is the first and principal thing he does?  What needs does he serve by killing?”

Starling:  “Anger, um, social acceptance, sexual frustration–”

Lecter:  “No, he covets.  That is his nature. And how do we begin to covet, Clarise?  Do we seek out things to covet?   Make an effort to answer now.”

Starling:  “No, we just–”

Lecter:  “No.  We begin by coveting what we see every day.  Don’t you feel eyes moving over your body, Clarice, and don’t your eyes seek out the things you want?”

Lecter connects the act of looking with the act of taking and claiming something as your own.  This is only a hair’s breadth from saying that the function of observation may gratify a wish to devour and make a desired object part of ourselves.

On the contrary, he devours his patients, both literally and by getting them to talk about themselves.  He is presented as having incredible powers of observation and verbal (i.e. oral) persuasion.  His preference is for the talking cure."

Orality and Cannibalism.

Quote :

"The Silence of the Lambs is a text obsessed with orality – with mouths, lips, teeth, tongues, and, of course, ‘gumbs’. Warned in Hannibal to be careful of Lecter’s mouth Clarice Starling does not know whether she should be more careful of Lecter’s teeth or his words. While under physical restraint, Lecter’s oral-sadistic impulses seem to find temporary outlet in the psychiatrist’s biting tongue. Lecter has the power to enact murder through walls and cages, through use of words and the control of minds. He drains minds before he feeds on the bodies. Lecter has the rhetorical power to induce Miggs to swallow his own tongue, resulting in death. The killers in Silence are reduced to mouths; Gumb by his name, Miggs by literally swallowing himself, and Lecter is defined by his oral crimes. Lecter’s ferocious orality and perverse appetite make him primitive, savage and ogre-like. He is also, however, erudite and cultured, luring Starling and reader/viewer to a desire to know him better. He consumes human flesh but he accompanies it with fine wines, fava beans, garlic, and candlelight. Lecter’s mouth is the locus of his power in both its sharp gnashing teeth and its articulation of verbal trickery and persuasion. This preoccupation with orality is suggestive of the underlying warning in many Gothic urban cannibal tales – rapacity is monstrous. Hannibal the cannibal, he whose powers of consumption are limitless, is one of our latest heroes of consumer culture.

This is particularly evident in city narratives where isolation and anonymity lead to a sense of a fragmented existence and a deep need to create a sense of wholeness. The monstrous appetite of American Psycho’snotorious protagonist is a horrific projection of his inner emptiness and the fantasy of omnipotence. He constantly refers to himself as empty or shell-like. And while there are frequent scenes in restaurants, Bateman often has difficulty swallowing or eating, despite his seemingly aching hunger. Food, for Bateman and his cronies, takes on the role of status symbol. Eventually, he begins to manically ingest everything in sight and the ability to consume becomes the locus of power. Bateman initially starts out by investing food with enormous power and believes that by consuming it he will increase his own potency. However, what he finds is that, firstly he cannot eat the fine food he so desires, and secondly that even when he does, it does not satisfy his rapacious hunger since this hunger speaks of a spiritual rather than a purely material craving. It seems that certain versions of food/dining have become fetishised but (ironically) leave their consumers as physically and spiritually empty as ever. Appetite is out of control in contemporary America in an economic environment where ‘greed is good’. To a mouth everything looks good, but to a soul not everything will provide fulfilment.

Sex, and indeed murder, is, for Bateman, extremely oral-centric. Bateman is obsessed with orality and the mouth is the locus of power. The cannibal bites off nipples, guts girls like fish and pulls out intestines with his teeth. He seems concerned with orifices and access. He seeks new areas and ways of entry into another person. In the novel the human body is rendered a mere commodity through representing the Manhattan traders as replaceable robots and the female characters as flat, interchangeable mistresses or as literal commodities through prostitution. Thus, for Bateman, the taboo against eating them becomes less relevant, the edible-inedible binary becomes redundant. Bateman is turned on by a prostitute standing under a red neon sign flashing M.E.A.T. This awakens something in him, a desire to consume her; she is produce, just like meat, available for him to consume as he sees fit. Another of Bateman’s victims is literally butchered, cut into meat, eaten, and her corpse is treated like a carcass.

Can these Gothic biters say something about modern isolation, urban anonymity, and the privileging of consumption in contemporary society?

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Satyr wrote:

"The werewolf is the result of this disparity between the current nihilistic, anti-natural, milieu, and the nature of the organism being forced to assimilate within it.
This disparity creates frictions, above and beyond the usual self-repression and emasculation, involved in integrating within a social hierarchy where the dominant position is already occupied.
The organism is forced to integrate within a social structure which is totally alienating; abstracting its contexts to the point where they lose all reference to the real.
This alienation, this out of place, out of sorts, feeling builds until it explodes as rage. The beast awakens, in the dark, and it must be released, to run and to feed.
But it cannot, and so it inebriates itself. It must find a way to calm those parts down, contain them, make its self artificially happy, wag the tail, to get along.    

Werewolf = The instinctive rage, finding an outlet out of its nihilistic repression innate energies still lingering under the civilized surfaces."

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Scream.

Quote :

"The blurring of the boundary between the human body and food. This is a boundary we have long held to be a firm one, hence the taboo status of cannibalism, but we certainly find the collapse of this boundary fascinating and indeed unsettling. Gothic texts relish the blurring of boundaries and unsettling us. Hence, I find a plethora of Gothic texts concerned with the question of the human body as food, and the mouth as a site of danger, contamination, death or corruption. In this and the following entries I will, therefore, examine the idea of the Gothic mouth.

The mouth, of course, is the site of this symbolic ingestion. Mikhail Bakhtin sees the mouth as the locus of speech and consumption. Therefore the mouth plays a leading role in the interpretation between the Self and the world. For Bakhtin, it is through the mouth that man “tastes the world, introduces it into his body, makes it part of himself…The limits between man and the world are erased”. This is, according to Bakhtin, to man’s advantage. Julia Kristeva, however, is a little doubtful. For her, “the fact remains nevertheless that all food is liable to defile”. Food, as an oral object, signifies the boundary between the Self’s clean and proper body and the possibly abject Other. For Kristeva food becomes abject when it is a border between two distinct entities or territories; a boundary between nature and culture, between the human and the non-human.

Orality, the metaphor of the mouth, and voice, are critical issues in discussing Gothic texts. Both Walter J. Ong and Penny Fielding look at notions of how orality is considered close to the primitive. Ong explains how print encourages a sense of closure and irrefutable truth. The term “orality”, on the other hand, is associated with irrationality, temporality and the marginal. The oral is always other: of writing it is speech, of culture it is the voice of nature, and of the modern it is a pre-modern past. Fielding points out the significance of this phenomenon in the nineteenth century when orality was placed in contrast to modernity and argues that in order for orality to be contained and managed, it is usually located elsewhere than in the temporal centre. The opposition, in psychoanalytic terms, associates writing, the visual, phallic sign, with the creation of the conscious while the oral is repressed into the unconscious. What does this mean for Gothic texts, preoccupied with orality and peopled with a range or oral criminals, monsters or victims?

In their studies on orality, Ong and Fielding do not consider the cannibalistic link to the oral through the mouth. However, in Gothic texts we can make this link in a number of ways. Cannibalism is, above all else, an oral crime. Primitive in its biting, pre-civilised in its ignorance or rejection of accepted morals, and savage in its cruelty, it powerfully aligns the mouth and the oral to the primitive. Cannibalism, within the system of dietary codes, is generally deemed unnatural and monstrous because it disregards widely accepted norms of eating practices. The human body is considered the pinnacle of the food chain.

Cannibalism creates ambiguity because it both reduces the body to mere meat and elevates it to a highly desirable, symbolic entity; it is both disgusting, and the most rarefied of gastronomic tastes. Cannibalism is a forceful reminder of how the human appetite is a life-driving force, and is the ultimate transgression of cultural mores. Furthermore, fear of the Other is often expressed through images of being literally and metaphorically consumed by that Other. Popular representations of the cannibal remind us of the voracity of human hunger and the potentially limitless nature of appetite. The cannibal figure represents the fear that our appetite for consumption knows no end, and indeed reminds us of our own potential inhumanity.

In Gothic texts, the above themes are often embodied in the image of the wide open mouth. I am thinking here of Kurtz’s gaping maw wanting to swallow the world in Conrad’s colonial Gothic nightmare, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, Wes Craven’s iconic mask from Scream, Bertha Rochester’s rants from the attic inJane Eyre, a plethora of final girls
and scream queens shrieking their way through 1970’s horror films, Janet Leigh in the shower, Regan’s spitting, drooling, snarling, gnashing potty mouth in The Exorcist, along with a veritable host of vampires, zombies, werewolves and cannibals populating Gothic texts throughout the last two centuries. I believe these examples convey our terror at being consumed and the wide open mouthed scream echoes through our popular culture.

It seems to me that Gothic orality involves:

i) dangerous food in the form of poison, grotesque overeating, addictive eating habits, or indeed starvation;

ii) dangerous voices in their power to control (I am thinking here of Svengali in George du Maurier’s Trilby, Hannibal Lecter, Dracula, Richard Marsh’s Beetle); and,

iii) dangerous mouths in the form of various biters and consumers."

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Homeric Lyssa.

Quote :

"In war, the warrior who is possessed by the god of war experiences this kind of fury, which is typically bestial. For example, martial fury in Greek is lussa, meaning ‘wolfish rage’. Comparable is the Old Norse concept berserk rand the Old Irish concept of ríastrad ‘warp spasm’ or ‘distortion’." [Nagy, The Epic Hero]

Quote :

"Lyssa, the daughter of Nyx, dominates as the personification of madness in fifth century tragedy (appears only three times in Homer, all in the Iliad: 9.239, 305, 21.542); she goads men to disaster and destruction, has a canine aspect and is associated with the outward signs of madness, meaning rabies and ‘wolfish rage.’ In Euripides’ Heracles she causes Heracles’ madness: he tosses his head, rolls his eyes and cannot control his breathing."
"The violence that possesses Herakles is equated in the words of Lussa with the cosmic violence of earthquakes and storms. Just as Herakles’ mind and body become shaken up, so also, by metonymy, the palace collapses in an earthquake. By metonymy, the storm within Herakles is coextensive with a cosmic storm.

“I will dance you even more quickly and will play the flute [reed] of terror.”
The “wolfish rage” of the warp spasm induced by Lussa will make Herakles perform a sinister song-and-dance: it will “dance him.”"

Quote :

"Ares' demeanor was typically described by such epithets as lyssa, signifying "martial rage, raving, frenzy," andmania, signifying "madness, frenzy."
The Latin god Mars was virtually synonymous with the rage and fury of war. A frequent epithet coupled with Mars is saevio, "to rage, be fierce, vent one's rage." Yet as Dumezil observed, it is the epithet caecus, "blind," which best captures the essence of the god:
"The ambiguous character of Mars, when he breaks loose on the field of battle, accounts for the epithet caecus given him by the poets. At a certain stage of furor, he abandons himself to his nature, destroying friend as well as foe... By virtue of these very qualities of furor and harshness, Mars is the surest bulwark of Rome against every aggressor."

It is doubtless no coincidence that this description of Mars is equally applicable to the Celtic Cuchulainn. Thus, an ancient kenning preserved the epithet "Cuchulainn the Blind."
Fundamental to the blindness accorded the Latin war-god and Celtic hero -- indeed to the concept of blind rage itself, which so often characterizes the rampage of the warrior-hero -- is the fact that the planet Mars itself was deemed to be blind.  De Santillana and von Dechend drew attention to this particular point in Hamlet's Mill:

"There is a peculiar blind aspect to Mars, insisted on in both Harranian and Mexican myths. It is even echoed in Vergil: 'caeco Marte'."

Quote :

"[Odin's] own men went without byrnies, and were as
mad as dogs or wolves, and bit on their shields, and
were as strong as bears or bulls; menfolk they slew,
and neither fire nor steel would deal with them: and
this is what is called Bareserks-gang." [Snorri, Ynglinga Saga]

Quote :

"The hymns have strengthened Agni the devourer along (the extent of) his own royalty. He has assumed every beauty.
May we unharmed stand under the protection of Agni, Indra, Soma, of the gods; may we overcome our foes." [Vedic Hymns, SBE 46.8]

Agni, the Vedic Fire god is called the devourer at numerous places and is not only the lord of speech and truth and order, but of poetic wealth of in-Sight, sacred hymns, and the fury of time devouring the enemies...

The Cannibalist obsession with words, with eating must also explain the same semantic nexus in the etymology behind the name [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Wut is the beserker rage of the werwolf, the bear, its Fury, while also coming to mean poetic inspiration, speech, heightened intoxication, visionary awareness. Wotan is the storm-rush, the frenzy seizing one...
He is also the lord of the runes, the secret possessor of its whisperings, as Agni is of the chants and the knower of the hidden mysteries in the sacred syllable OM.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] is a phenomenon that combines the two. Devouring and Vociferation.

Quote :

"The calkins clinkered to a spark
The hunter called the pack;The sheep-dogs' fells all bristled stark
And all their lips went back.

"Lord God," the shepherds said, "They come,
And see what hounds he has;
All dripping bluish fire and dumb,
And nosing to the grass.

"And trotting scatheless through the gorse,
And bristling in the fell:Lord, it is death upon the horse,
And they're the hounds of hell!"

—John Masefield
from "The Hounds of Hell"

    Even in Winter, you are not safe. Stay indoors, attend your hearths. Try to keep the night at bay by the telling of your tongue. Remember your kin, honor your ancestors. For at this time the dead begin to stir, riding upon hallowed and familiar roads, galloping through villages and wastes, flying through the forests of the mind. Such raids are reminders that the past is not a dead thing, but may return, like a hunter, to follow us for a time.

    One of the earliest writers to refer to the Hunt is Tacitus, who recorded accounts of the tribes of Germania at the end of the first century C.E. He writes of the Harii, a Gaulish tribe who conducted fearful raids against their enemies:

". . . [they] are a fierce people who enhance their natural savageness by art and the choice of time. Their shields are black, their bodies painted black, and they choose black nights for battles and produce terror by the mere appearance, terrifying and shadowy, of a ghostly army. No enemy can withstand a vision that is strange and, so to speak, diabolical; for in all battles, the eyes are overcome first."

In France we find the Hunt under the name of "The Family of the Harlequin." Two theories persist on the origin of this name.
    Ranging in England's Windsor Forest, Herne the Hunter is well known from both folklore and literary traditions. Herne's name possibly relates him to the earlier Celtic deity, Cernunnos, who, as an antlered lord of animals, had a widespread cult stretching from continental Europe to Ireland. Though a frequent apparition in local folklore, he is perhaps best known from his brief mention on the early English stage:

There is an old tale goes, that Herne the Hunter
(Sometimes a keeper here in Windsor forest)
Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd horns,
And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle,
And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner.
You have heard of such a spirit, and well you know
The superstitious idle-headed eld
Receiv'd and did deliver to our age
This tale of Herne the Hunter for a truth.
(Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, 4.4.28-38)

Here, Herne and Cernunnos, who is often met in the forest seated upon a mound, bellowing to a congregation of assorted wild beasts, are made one by England's greatest dramatic folklorist."

More:
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Likewise, in Vedic mythos, the chthonic personification of Agni in its destructive form devouring time itself - Rudra-the-Hunter like Herne or Cernunnos is also the Howler of the subconscious...
The propitious hymn to Benign Rudra, to auspice him goes...

Quote :

"Namasthe Rudhra manyava Uthotha Ishave Nama
Namsthosthu Dhanvane Bahubyam Uthathe Nama.

Salutations to your Ire, Rudhra and also salutations to your arrow..
Salutations to your bow and also to your both arms." [Sri Rudram, 1.1]

Quote :

"Avathasys dhanusthvam sahasraksha sathe shudhe,
Niseerya salyanaam mukha shivo na sumana bhava.

Oh God with thousand eyes,
Oh God with hundreds of bows,
Please break the sharp ends of arrows thine,
Please slacken the string of your bow,
And become God who does us good,
And God who has a calm mind. " [Sri Rudram, 1.11]

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The Vedic chant of the Sri Rudram:



The modern version of the Sri Rudram:

Time the Devourer.

Quote :

"Time ripens and dissolves all beings in the great self, but he who knows into what time itself dissolves is the knower of the veda." [Maitrayani Upanishad]

Quote :

"Much I have travelled, much have I tried out,
much have I tested the Powers;
from where will a sun come into the smooth heaven
when Fenrir has assailed this one?"

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Derrida wrote:

"He reminds him that every time a ravenous animal ("like the wolf," says Freud ) enters the scene in a story, "we shall recognize as a disguise of the father". And Freud explains that we cannot account for these fables and myths without returning to infantile sexuality. In the series of the devouring father. we will also find he says, Cronus who swallows up his children after having emasculated his father Uranus and before being himself emasculated by his son Zells, saved by his mother's cunning." [The Beast and the Sovereign, I]

Karma and Nietzsche's 'Innocence of Becoming':
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The Deer is symbolic of Karma, of fate and encountering the uncanny and heightened awareness in the sense I discussed in the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

"Life is dangerous, and to venture into it without a self-binding, can prove fate-al, in the sense, Jung said,

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.",

"Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event."

Fate is the unconscious that Befalls us,,,Destiny is the conscious that we stake, that we Hazard."

Encountering the Deer is a karmic encounter with Fate;

"Fate is like the waves playing, alluring; Man finds his Destiny without succumbing to Fate, with Balance."


The Indian Dionysos Shiva-Pasupati akin to the deer-god Celtic Cernunnos and the Anglo-Saxon Herne-the-hunter whom Robin encounters show this victory of Destiny over Fate, of the appropriating, Devouring consciousness Vociferating the subconscious...


The iconic representation of Shiva-Pasupati shows him holding the deer.

It indicates that he has removed the fluctuations of the mind. A deer jumps from one place to another swiftly, similar to the mind moving from one thought to another. He is the Master of his Fate.

Zarathustra says, "what Fate could befall me now that Is not Already My Own?"...

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Hence among the Indo-Celts, the deer was symbolic of poetry, intuition, uncanny awareness and Fate-al/Fatal karma - Nietzsche's "Innocence of becoming"...

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Encounter with the Fate...

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-antler

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