The Art of Having Something to Say: Part 9 - Oscar Wilde

From: The Critic as Artist (1891)

Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of life and literature. The difficulty the reviewer feels is the difficulty of sustaining any standard. Where there is no style, a standard must be impossible. The poor reviewers are apparently reduced to be the reporters for the police-court of literature, the chroniclers of the doing of the habitual criminals of art.

Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer. The beautiful sterile emotions that art excites in us are hateful in its eyes, and so completely are people dominated by the tyranny of this dreadful social ideal that they are always coming shamelessly up to one at Private Views and other places that are open to the general public, and saying in a loud stentorian voice, "What are you doing?" whereas "What are you thinking?" is the only question that any single civilised being should ever be allowed to whisper to another.

It is to do nothing that the elect exist. Action is limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams. But we who are born at the close of this wonderful age are at once too cultured and too critical, too intellectually subtle, to accept any speculations about life in exchange for life itself. To us the heavenly city is colourless, and the enjoyment of God without meaning. Metaphysics do not satisfy our temperaments, and religious ecstasy is out of date. The world through which the Academic philosopher becomes "the spectator of all time and of all existence" is not really an ideal world, but simply a world of abstract ideas. When we enter it, we starve amidst the chill mathematics of thought. The courts of the city of God are not open to us now. Its gates are guarded by Ignorance, and to pass them we have to surrender all that in our nature is most divine.

Just as Nature is matter struggling into mind, so Art is mind expressing itself under the conditions of matter, and thus, even in the lowliest of her manifestations, she speaks to both sense and soul alike.

For he to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives. To realise the nineteenth century, one must realise every century that has preceded it and that has contributed to its making. To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.

England will never be civilised till she has added Utopia to her dominions. There is more than one of her colonies that she might with advantage surrender for so fair a land. What we want are unpractical people who see beyond the moment, and think beyond the day. Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob. It is through the voice of one crying out in the wilderness that the ways of the gods must be prepared.

The security of society lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of the stability of society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence of any intelligence amongst its members. The great majority of people being fully aware of this, rank themselves naturally on the side of that splendid system that elevates them to the dignity of machines, and rage so wildly against the intrusion of the intellectual faculty into any question that concerns life, that one is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Action being limited would have left Shakespeare unsatisfied and unexpressed; and just as it is because he did nothing that he has been able to achieve everything, so it is because he never speaks to us of himself in his plays that his plays reveal him to us absolutely, and show us his true nature and temperament far more completely than do those strange and exquisite sonnets even, in which he bares to crystal eyes the secret closet of his heart. Yes, the objective form is the most subjective in matter. Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

It is to the soul that Art speaks, and the soul may be made the prisoner of the mind as well as of the body. One should, of course, have no prejudices; but . . .it is one's business in such matters to have preferences, and when one has preferences ones ceases to be fair. It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of Art.

There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it show us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not. But it should not allow poor Tartuffe to write articles upon modern art.

Some limitation might well, and will soon, I hope, be placed upon some of our newspapers and newspaper writers. For they give us the bald, sordid, disgusting facts of life. They chronicle, with degrading avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details of the doings of people of absolutely no interest whatsoever.

The real artist is he who proceeds, not from feeling to form, but from form to thought and passion. He does not first conceive an idea, and then say to himself, "I will put my idea into a complex metre of fourteen lines," but realising the beauty of the sonnet-scheme, he conceives certain modes of music and methods of rhyme, and the mere form suggests what is to fill and make it intellectually and emotionally complete. From time to time the world cries out against some charming artistic poet, because, to use its hackneyed and silly phrase, he has "nothing to say." But if he had something to say, he would probably say it, and the result would be tedious. It is just because he had no new message that the can do beautiful work. He gains his inspiration from form, and from form purely, as an artist should. A real passion would ruin him. Whatever actually occurs is spoiled for art. All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.

The demand of the intellect, as has been well said, is simply to feel itself alive. The critic may, indeed, desire to exercise influence; but, if so, he will concern himself not with the individual, but with the age, which he will seek to wake into consciousness, and to make responsive, creating in it a new desires and appetites, and lending it his larger vision and his nobler moods.

People sometimes say that fiction is getting too morbid. As far as psychology is concerned, it has never been morbid enough. We have merely touched the surface of the soul, that is all. In one single ivory cell of the brain there are stored away things more marvellous and more terrible than even they have dreamed of, who, like the author of Le Rouge et le Noir, have sought to track the soul into its most secret places, and to make life confess its dearest sins.

It is certain that the subject-matter at the disposal of creation is always diminishing, while the subject-matter of criticism increases daily. There are always new attitudes for the mind, and new points of view. The duty of imposing form upon chaos does not grown less as the world advances. There was never a time when Criticism was more needed than it is now. It is only by its means that Humanity can become conscious of the point at which it has arrived.

England has done one thing; it has invented and established Public Opinion, which is an attempt to organise the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.

It is Criticism, again, that by concentration makes culture possible. It takes the cumbersome mass of creative work, and distils it into a finer essence. Who that desires to retain any sense of form could struggle through the monstrous multitudinous of books that the world has produced, books in which thought stammers or ignorance brawls? The thread that is to guide us across the wearisome labyrinth is in the hands of Criticism.

In art there is so such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true. And just as it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can apprehend the Platonic theory of ideas, so it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can realise Hegel's system of contraries. The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks.

Karl Kraus By Night

The views of the author of Karl Kraus' aphorisms about sex, art or any other matter are categorically not the views of The Great Stage, though they are related hypothetically to the views of The Great Stage. . .

"The truly true truths are the ones that can be made up."

"Life is a struggle that would be worthy of a better cause."

"That which is brought against me as an objection is often one of my premisses. For instance the notion that my polemic tears at life's heart."

"Diagnosis is one of the most widespread diseases."

"The aesthetes had divided things among themselves. Dr. Arthur got death, Richard got life, Hugo got the Church of Holy Devotion together with the evening sky, Poldi got the entire collection of the Ambraser Gallery and Felix got all that together and lots more plus the Renaissance."

From: By Night (1919)

Eros

Woman is dazzled by gesture; man has esteem for content. Since neither type exists any more, I have to rely on that pitiful mish-mash that's ended up in pants and capers round me lustily in love and in hate. I'm forever having to withdraw nine tenths of my respect to get to a useful remainder. How little humanity remains in the world, when femininity has evaporated.

Art

That thought is not clothed by language, but something that grows into language, is something the modest creator will never bring the shameless tailors to believe.

I have only mastered the language of others. My own language does with me what it will.

There’s no language it’s so difficult to make oneself understood in as language.

A professor of literature said he thought my aphorisms were nothing more than mechanical inversions of conventional idioms. That’s actually quite right. If only he hadn’t failed to grasp the thought that is the driving force of the mechanism – that more comes of the mechanical inversion of conventional idioms than of their mechanical repetition. Did you know that is the very Secret of Today? It’s something you have to have lived through. Not to mention the fact that a conventional idiom still has more going for it than a professor of literature, whom you get nothing out of if you leave him to repeat himself and just as little out of if you mechanically invert him.

He alone is an artist who can make a riddle out of any solution.

Art which doesn’t speak against the contemporary world seems to me to be art which will be lucky to last till tomorrow. Art sends the times into retreat and is thus the opposite of a way of passing time. The true enemy of the times is the living power left in language, which is in direct communication with the world of spirit - the world of spirit which the times have roused to indignation. That conspiracy between language and spirit known as art may well arise under these conditions. The sense of universal ease which takes from language whatever it needs is something the times indulge; true art by contrast can only come from an act of refusal. From an outcry against the times, not appeasement of them. When called on as a consolation, true art departs the deathbed of mankind with a curse. It attains to perfection by way of disillusionment not self-satisfaction.

Time


The true miracle of technology – that it faithfully sets about wrecking everything it’s a compensation for.

What the papers have printed on any single day of the last 50 years has had more power to damage culture than the complete works of Goethe had to help culture.

If I only have a mobile, won’t I be able to find a forest to walk in when I want?! The only reason you can’t live without a mobile is because mobiles exist. Without forests you’ll never be able to live – even when the forests have ceased to exist long ago. The same applies to humanity as a whole. He who has put all its ideals behind him simply becomes a slave to its needs and will find a substitute for forests sooner than for mobiles. Human imagination has found a surrogate for itself in technology; technology is a surrogate for which there’s no surrogate. Those who carry within them no forests of the imagination but do have the inner being of mobiles will grow poorer when there are no forests left in the external world. The forests have ceased to exist because people have the inner being of mobiles as well as having them attached to their heads half the time in the external world. The logic of it is this: technology is connected with the world of spirit in such a way that an emptiness arises because the new gadgets exist and a vacuum if they're not at hand. What comes to pass within the temporal realm is the most indispensible form of nothingness.

1915

The development of European life took such a turn that religion could get no further: at which point the press turned up on the scene and brought everything to an end. Verily, journalism got closer to the frailties of human nature in order to flatter them than religion had in order to offer them help. In short, journalism can do more to harm human beings than religion can do human beings good. How great that personality would have to be which was capable of remaining itself amid the workings of this powerful means of control - an editor responsible to the whole of humanity! And how strong humanity would have to be to give itself up entirely to his responsibility! Yet this means of control is the means of subsistence for a horde of ethical imbeciles, it is what the frail of spirit could not get by without. The Word that was in the beginning they no longer hear. And so an anti-Christian humanity awaits a New Word - from the Centres of Power and Control.

Between language and war there is the following rough connection: the existence of language that has hardened into cliché also explains the general readiness to trade in substance for a surrogate diction, to confidently find unobjectionable about oneself everything that suffices as a reproach to the next man, just as it explains the rush to indignantly unmask what one rather likes doing oneself, tangle up every doubt in a thicket of bad verbiage and casually brush off every suspicion that things are not in order as if it were a naked act of aggression. These are the prime qualities of a language that today resembles nothing so much as a finished product, the life-goal of whose speakers is to shove it under the nose of the right buyer, a language that shines like a saint’s halo but has the plain soul of the average man – the little man who wouldn’t have time to do anything wrong because he swings to and fro between home and office and when that isn’t enough displays his motives for all to see.

Everything that happens, happens for the sake of those who describe it and those who have no experience of it. An enemy spy being led to the gallows has to go the long way round, so that movie-goers have something really interesting to watch; he’s made to gawp again and again into the camera so that the same movie-goers get the facial expression they’re happy with. We keep our peace. We who lived through it do not describe it. The way of thought that leads to the gallows of mankind is a dark one, I had no desire to travel it as the condemned spy of mankind. Yet I must. And I show mankind my face. For the experience which troubles my heart is a horror of the vacuum represented by those technical devices, the minds of men, when confronted by an indescribable superfluity of events.

By Night


Proverbs only come into being when a language is at a stage where silence is still possible.

The hackneyed language of the everyday originates when they have a bit of a fiddle with Language; when they evade Language like the law, or like an enemy; when they answer questions they’ve not been asked with a thousand circumlocutions. I don’t want to share the company of such language; I want to go the long way round it, it, you, whatever you are, that goes round in my head like a wheel; and at night stalks about like the living dead.

Ornaments and flowers of speech are the favourite dress of an age which has forgotten the sense of such expressive forms; they become all the more favoured the further the age outgrows them, the further, that is, the age’s very substance renders it incapable of creating new ornaments and flowers of speech; and it is thus that the state will “draw its sword”, long after it got used to drawing the pin on the poison gas grenades. Can you imagine something like that ever becoming idiomatic?
Technology can create no new idioms, yet it leaves the spirit of mankind in a position where it is unable to do without its old idioms – now that should give you an idea what technology’s all about. The confusion created when a changed mode of existence drags along past forms of life – this is the very element in which the evil of the world lives and grows. The age does not give shape to idioms, it goes pear-shaped feeding on too many; thus it is that it draws its sword time and again, because it is in incurable conflict with itself. A new turn of events will bring forth no new expressive forms, but to be sure the old forms will bring forth events.

“Conquer the world market.” Because businessmen said it, men of war got busy doing it. In the meantime there’s been quite a lot of conquest, though clearly not of the world market.

(Trans. CS)

Glimpsing Evil - Spiegel Interview with Heidi Kastner

For those of you who, like yours truly, feel consistently underinformed by what passes for journalism in Australia, here's something else from overseas. Crime coverage in this country veers towards two opposite, unpromising extremes, the glum circumlocutions of "mental health professionals" and the trashy metaphysics of the Herald Sun, according to which what there BASICALLY IS in the world are paedophiles lurking behind the rosebushes of childhood.

The subject of the following interview from Germany's Der Spiegel, Heidi Kastner, is more than moderately refreshing dealing with sex and violence within the family - a subject which stinks not just on account of the ugly deeds it involves, but equally because of the mainstream media's unblinking instrumentalisation of it. To go by her Spiegel interview, Kastner has a mind of her own - a preparedness to take it up to her interviewer, an awareness of the limitations of her knowledge and an ability to theorise realistically in public about atrocious acts committed within families - in a way that neither absolves abusers nor fudges the mixed feelings of victims. When was the last time you heard an Australian forensic expert ask "Do you have to give in to people's every voyeuristic twinge?" when confronted with one of 7, 9 or 10's self-righteous agents of provocation? Not that the Spiegel fares as badly as all that - where need be it challenges the expert to justify the very form in which she presents her sensation-saturated material.

The result is media-conscious media coverage - an interviewer and an interviewee who make each other mutually aware of the danger of overspicing the soup in every representation of their unpleasant topic - who, moreover, seem to accept that families are sites of inter- and intra-psychic stress and strain and of the total commercialisation of society - in part by means of the very media that provide them with the means to communicate. CS

***

Kastner, 47, become known as an expert witness in the case of Joseph Fritzl. The culprit in the so-called incest-drama of Amstetten was sentenced in March this year to life imprisonment. For Kastner, the Friztl case is just one of many in which she has dealt with violence committed by fathers within their own families.

Spiegel: Ms. Kastner, you write about terrible acts of extreme violence against children. Who would voluntarily read something like that?

Kastner: I don’t know. I’m confronted with these cases regularly. Maybe in the meantime I’ve lost a sense of how it affects others. If you work in garbage disposal, at some point you don't get worked up about the smell of toilet buckets any more.
Spiegel: The book teems with psychopaths, human beings running amok and other insane cases. Don't you overspice the soup a little?
Kastner: I present the really tough cases of paternal abuse - that's true. But I'm a forensic psychiatrist and I've been working in the field for twelve years. Someone who gives their child a clip over the ears on public transport is not going to land in my office.
Spiegel: What interests you about the cruelty of fathers?
Kastner: For me above all it's about the motivation of the culprits. Hardly any light has been thrown on it - for example, in the case of so-called family tragedies, where a man obliterates wife and child. In preparing this book I found three studies in total and one of them came from Fiji.
Spiegel: What have you discovered?
Kastner: As I looked more closely at the cases, it became clear that one thing was the same for all the men who run amok in their families - their lives had reached tipping point on two levels. They had been left by their partners and at the same time lost their jobs or were in major financial trouble.
Spiegel: That can happen to women too.
Kastner: Sure, though there we're dealing more with mothers who are so depressive that they take their children with them when the take their own lives. In almost none of the cases involving men that I've come across is there a depressive illness lurking in the background. They're more likely to be suffering from wounded narcissism.

What is The Great Stage?

"A review of the reviewers might at long last yield an idea or two about art and writing. For wouldn't such a meta-review make clear one or two authentic feelings of distress about Art's pitiful condition in this an-aesthetic era of artistic over-production? The poetry, novels, essays and anthologies themselves have nothing to say. They refer, if they refer to anything, to a lost time in which these forms of literary art had form, when Time itself had time and made a present of it to Art, which can manifestly not arise in a world that no longer believes in Eternity, when no one with the ability to write could have faith that the future would grant him readers that are any different from those he sees around him: those infernal writer-readers who are all just about to drop the pose of readerly attention and begin to shout into the latest digitised megaphone of egotism. You seek in vain amid the literature of today for world-views. You look up from your book and find tvs and billboards and inadvertently come across the closest you can get to Weltanschauungen nowadays: Anschauungen, which is to say – rapaciously multiplying percepts."

- or so I thought three years ago.

The Great Stage is turning out to be something more than than the open-ended exercise in criticism it was originally intended as. Still, for the sake of partial self-definition, here's a draft of the answer to the question "What is the Great Stage?" that dates from the early days.

"The Great Stage is a response to a three-fold critical malaise:

1. Print media in Australia is visibly faltering. At present the only dynamic aspect of Australian newspaper culture would seem to be the interaction between the business models of the supermarket managers in command and the tabloid-cum-glossy fare they judge can be sold to the largest number of readers. Under such conditions, the public function of revieweing and criticism is becoming harder to sustain as the culture pages of major broadsheets fill up with monster-sized pictures, interview-pieces, endless food and wine tips and the diary-like musings of celebrity columnists. The 800-word book review – already of limited use for the purposes of the critic – is itself coming to seem a luxury; for a long time it has formed part of the penumbra of a life-style journalism with most of the qualities of advertising (even if it appears above the line separating paid publicity from what claims the reader's attention on other grounds).

2. Universities have ceased to offer critics meaningful points of intellectual contact, much less places of refuge. Our educational institutions were once one of two indispensable reference points of critical activity: in the person of the critic, the relatively heady world of academic scholarship remained connected with the everyday reality of the theatre, the studio and the writer’s corner. By contrast, today universities’ very intellectual function is under threat as "serious scholarship is replaced by an entrepreneurial striving for research money and media attention." (Harry Redner) In short, criticism and academic life until recently belonged together as part of the same cultural manifold – both offered something to the artist, because both sought to give shape to free intellectual perspectives. In an era like our own when university education is subject to the equally sterile logic of bureaucratic control and free market economics, that ceases to be the case in a radical sense. Free critical activity and routinised academic life have come to mutually exclude each other; the social sciences and humanities in particular have increasingly become the haunt of radical academic conformists who dish up their sensibilities for the book market, shuffle their specialities between journals and conferences, deliver up their mechanical models of mind and society to a passively assenting public or join the ranks of administrative power-brokers and let fly with that disgraceful mixture of bombast and blandness with which our universities are expected to procedurally justify themselves.

3. The net poses a range of very different problems, though as the social domain freest of political constraints it remains the obvious place to launch a venture in general criticism. Yet the dilemmas of specialisation which present an obstacle to general criticism in the world-beyond-the-net are often reproduced online at a higher level of complexity; the generalism required to interpret art in relation to the social and cultural problematics of our day is even less likely to emerge in a virtual world where every fragment of an idea generates its own authoritative-looking pronouncements within its own teeming online enclosure. And that’s not even getting started on the raft of further problems the web generates for the critic. Foremost among them is the problem of.taking critical responsibility: in a medium where too many writers let fly with their opinions from behind a veil of anonymity, criticism either fails to develop or degenerates into self-important snark; where speech acts take on the quality of sound-bites for quasi-technical reasons – where the sheer volume of speech determines the speaker’s visibility – two essential aspects of criticism, analysis and interpretation, fall away and a third, evaluation, is radically abbreviated. . . So if yours truly is going to get a spot of criticism going, he might have to take evasive action against all sorts of things – against the purveyors of cheap ironies – against the army of sub-commentators for whom being online means first and foremost giving up on self-control - against all who spare themselves the labour of the concept, in order to be ready with the snappiest instantaneous assessments of everything the world of art and writing have to offer." 

Truly,

CS

Animals and Other Humans

Animals are more truly amused by tv than any human being I know. They intuitively realise that what they see there are just human beings forming colourful patterns by going through the motions. Whereas human beings can’t help looking to tv for signs of a reality beyond tv that is either not there in any sense or that tv itself induces to purport to exist.

The heavenly dispensation represented by the reign of communications technology will be a paradise indistinguishable at times from a devilish conspiracy to keep our dear ones at a distance, to garble their words of encouragement, to blur and invert their looks of longing, warmth and love, to translate their deeds into gestures and their gestures into signs of problems.

Most men and women who once acted with a degree of social or intellectual independence nowadays have to be their own secretaries. Which means they have to do the bidding of super-secretaries from marketing and accounts. The latter don't wield power absolutely, they wield it super-absolutely, transcendentally - in such a way that its cruelties, irrationalities and inanities appear to happen of their own accord.

Word or Image

The question is not how to have The Spirit (a.k.a soul, wit, Geist, esprit) without The Word. The question is how to have The Word with The Image? The Master Image of today’s world is the female body ready to be acted on, an instant before it is spurred to sexual action or rises to that action in an ecstasy all its own - a blank space onto which both men and women believe blindly that they can project themselves to infinity, while in reality they manage only to inoculate themselves against desire by uniformity. Having invented Pornography of sublime technical perfection, we haven’t traduced Poetry, we’ve invented its pure opposite. Poetry, we think, could not mean anything. But that is because Porn to us is All in All.

February 13, 2010

Axel Honneth: Against Sloterdijk (Die Zeit, 24 September, 2009)

An English translation of Peter Sloterdijk's "Revolution of the Open Hand" ("Die Revolution der gebenden Hand" - FAZ, June 13, 2009) is yet to appear and to go by Axel Honneth's response to the piece (below), it might be better if an English version never saw the light of day. For those readers who feel they need something to go by in English from the object of Honneth's attack, a translation of a similar argument by Sloterdijk can be found here.

Honneth's views appear here in translation, not because they are sanctioned by The Great Stage, but because they are expressed with a flair that our local journalism, our local "public philosophy" radically excludes. Honneth's are impassioned arguments of intellectual substance. From the point of view of Australia's degraded media landscape, it must surely seem remarkable that they appeared in a broadsheet newspaper at all; however Honneth himself might recoil from the "childishness, superficiality and useless blather" that thrive as part of the democratic culture of today, reducing the idea of democracy to a nonsense, it nonetheless says something about the possibility of expression and argument in current-day Europe that his own antinomian views became available in a mainstream print medium (Die Zeit, September 24, 2009).

Honneth's attack appears here, in short, as an implicit - and no doubt ineffectual - rebuke to the print media of mainstream Australia - to the self-infatuated schizoid ramblings of Catherine Deveney, the brainless navel-gazing of Kate Holden, the interviews and monster pictures that make up The Age's former book pages, and to the small fleet of "stream-lined, slickly got-up semi-intellectual magazines that give the reader the feeling of being 'advanced' without actually forcing him/her to think."

CS

"Fatal Profundity" - by Axel Honneth

Nothing of what Peter Sloterdijk has written over the past couple of decades has seemed compatible either with the dominant spirit of the times or with the adversaries of that spirit. A principled scepticism about all the achievements of social modernity separated him from the advocates of extending the economy into all corners of life; a proud refusal to take the side of the weak and disadvantaged distinguished him from the hesitant objections of the critics of capitalism. A tone of militant anti-conformism meant however that he was met from many sides with reverence and admiration. As The Critique of Cynical Reason (1983) seemed to signal, a true free spirit had here stepped on to the intellectual stage again at last, someone who, with the lonely resolve and radicalism of a Nietzsche, took issue with all the habits of thought that had long ago given our era an almost unbearable sloppiness.

Where Sloterdijk’s intellectual calculations fell flat because he had done violence to morally well-founded principles, he was quick to shoot off further argumentative smoke grenades; their effect was that the atrocity ended up shrouded in further darkness, taking on the grandiose status of previously unthinkable thoughts. It was tough to get a handle on Sloterdijk’s thought over the years from any real moral or political angle.

However, Sloterdijk has himself recently put an end to the game of cat-and-mouse that the arts pages of our newspapers have ingloriously taken part in. In an article for the FAZ [Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung], he has let slip what historical developments actually capture his interest as a philosopher of history. Readers may have always suspected that his own resentment was at the bottom of that Nietzschean critique of ressentiment he has successfully mimicked. That his own resentment now shows its face in so petty-minded a way must simply have dumbfounded them though.

From the start, Sloterdijk’s preference for essayistic philosophy was connected with the rise of a social group that had nothing but contempt for the capitalist welfare state’s forms of cultural expression, though without having any workable idea of its own how to shape the future politically. In their academic youth, which fell in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the representatives of this new elite had read the words of Michel Foucault; because of their unfixed, elastic intellectual attitude, their readiness for bold intuitive leaps, they had quickly ascended all the conceivable heights of power, where they now found themselves awaiting inspiration – a transcendent word of clarity that could provide our epoch with an intellectual signature. In this milieu, which included the editorial desks of broadsheet newspapers, the cafeterias of banks, architecture offices and advertising agencies, there was agreement on one thing alone – that the welfare mentality of the social democratic age should be brought to a decisive end. The majority of Germans seemed too dependent; the culture was too attached to the open hand of the state for it possibly to give birth to any sort of powerful idea or way of life.

Admittedly their contempt was directed less towards the needy classes themselves and much more towards the latter’s intellectual representatives, who, in the “old” West German republic, had been presumptuous enough to put themselves forward as political spokesmen for a general redistribution. They enthusiastically read every article demonising the politics of 1968, they noted with deep satisfaction that the leading disciplines of the declining post ’68 era, sociology and psychoanalysis, were finally getting their comeuppance. The word of redemption was to be different from the jeremiads that the ideologues of old had delivered in the name of the weak and socially disenfranchised. It had to have something of the courage of intellectual grandeur and keep well away from the jargon of social impoverishment.

The representatives of this new class didn’t have too long to wait – soon a writer came out to meet them who had the right prescription for all their anxieties and hopes in his hand. At the very outset of his intellectual development, Peter Sloterdijk may still have been undecided whether he should set off down the path of philosophically inspired social criticism, or that of a mystical or speculative interpretation of history and the world. It may only have been the rapid success of his first books in the milieu just mentioned that finally led him to serve its disciples as a seer in impoverished times. He didn’t lack the power to create concepts and metaphors that seemed to throw open the world; he was also gifted with a certain capacity for diagnostic condensation; now all the intellectual preconditions had been fulfilled for Sloterdijk to take on that much-eyed prophetic mantle. Since then a string of essays, books and speeches have issued form his fertile mind year by year; if they aren’t all read by that stratum of his devotees, nonetheless they’re surely leafed through.

Proof of the Existence of God: No. 94

Proof of the existence of a deus absconditus from the existence of the modern labour market. “Please send your c.v. by paper aeroplane or arrive at the interview, which we are granting you for your sake, with a succinct statement of purpose tattooed on any exposed part of your body, except your foot, which, in answer to our questions, you will shoot yourself in using a firearm provided. . . The company accepts no liability, etc. It is answerable (in a sense, undetermined) to the government, which is answerable to the people (in a sense, un-derided), which is answerable to its Id (collective, individual), which derives grim satisfaction from your pain, turns cartwheels when you get your rocks off and has none of the other attributes of God either. The latter has definitely left the building. How could things have got this badly out of control otherwise?!” Q.E.D.

February 9, 2010

Journalism, or: Philosophy Dives Screeching from the Page

The definition of journalism - a verbal = X that opinionates in the absence of world-views; that proliferates in a world and time in which philosophies have become so much meal in the mouths of salesmen, lobbyists, hobbyists and hagiographers. In the world of journalism the editor is the gladiator. The writer, except in the case that he became a journalist, is his quarry. Writing itself is replaceable, for the sole necessity is that something be said and what I have written – can be written again – by someone else. The editor is a man with opinions. He is the taskmaster of the opinions, the man who ensures that they are truly opinions about what they ought to be about: opinions. By his agency opinions are made to interlock. He spreads them out before us like a fan with an untold number of facets. With their help a cool breeze wafts over our sultry lives - it's another question whether it’s just editorial ugliness, or truth as well, that screens itself from us here. In the process our dull yoke of factuality is not thrown off, but our labour under it is made easier by the refreshing mix of bad puns and righteous indignation. If true opinions, philosophies, existed here, they would dive screeching in terror from the page. But rest assured this cannot happen. That incendiary form of existence known as human action - which real opinions further and genuine philosophies supply the living atmosphere for - is here amended and annulled.

February 7, 2010

Don Juan in Australia

Don Juan in Australia is an altogether sad and fatigued character. A man of consummate taste, he nonetheless has to rely for what successes he has on the tastelessness of his quarry. When he imperiously draws them unto himself, he regularly gets charged with assault. When he chats them up or intimates in any way that his other name is Giovanni, they tell him he’s a bit of a faggot. When he makes eyes at the young ones, they keep mouthing “F*ck the pain away” and adjust their Ipods. When he does the same to the old ones, they try talking him into coming home with them to have tea with their gay sons. . . In Melbourne he finds that even when they don’t lack depth they lack superficiality and can’t separate flirtation from pre-marital horse-trading. Sydney-siders are of a sunny disposition that borders on the clichéd repetition of obscenities. Brisbane is like a homey porno-mag and forces him to realize that it’s experience he’s after, not just sex, and by this stage he’s in an existential crisis, packs his bags and flies back to Europe, or retires to Tasmania, collects sculpture and makes pathetic attempts to read German philosophy.

5 February, 2010

Poetry Translations 3: Heine

Heine - romantic, ironist, leftist, visionary - the bard of heaving breasts and bemused diagnosis - died in Paris in 1856, having spent the better part of the previous decade bed-ridden. The Nineteenth Century asssumed that syphillis was the cause of Heine's debilitating condition, as it was to do in the case of several of its other black sheep. Recent clinical tests seem to indicate that progressive lead poisoning was the cause of the agony which, at the time of the composition of today's poem, "Lord Have Mercy", still had several years to run.

The poem displays the typical symptoms of Heine's later attitude to Christianity: wisecracks at the expense of catholic dolts and Christian chokers by no means exclude a genuine religious sense of the poet's more-than-bodily wretchedness and need of more-than-worldly deliverance. Late Heine's cast of mind is basically deeply heterodox - a personal amalgam of Jewish, Christian and pantheist belief that would have been deeply unacceptable to the religious mainstream of Heine's day and to the orthodox Judaism and Christianity of our own day. His alleged last words were "God will forgive me. It's his job" - a line in which you might hear an undertone of anguish for sins committed or heresies proclaimed - a line in which for the rest of it what you hear is a man whose beliefs are something which, however deep, he always puts an ironist's inverted commas around.

In late Heine, the impulse to mock and kick at those whose religious belief takes on the form of doctrinal insistence is always a little stronger than his sense that the world has a stable religious meaning. In short, if the poet who "lay seven years on the floor of a garrett in Paris unable to die" can be called religious, then any belief you attribute to him has to be one that acknowledges the primacy of the anti-religious backhander. . . [CS] 

1. Lord Have Mercy

I do not envy Fortune’s sons

Their lives, instead I’m smarting

At the way they meet their deaths

Their quick and painless parting

In festive garb, heads wreathed in laurel,

Smiles upon their lips

At life’s banquet’s grand array

Death’s scythe down on them slips.

In golden cloaks, bedecked with roses

Their blossoms still to savour

They reach the realm of shadows, those

Whom fortune deigns to favour.

Untroubled by infirmity,

Their brows without a line,

They’re welcomed graciously to court

By Empress Proserpine.

Their fate fills me with envy for

It’s seven years I lie

Writhing sourly on this floor

Unable still to die.

O Lord God shorten this my torment

Bring me death’s recess

The gifts one needs for martyrdom

You know I don’t possess.

I’m gob-smacked by your contrary ways, Lord,

Please don’t get the irits

The cheeriest poet you ever created

- You rob of his high spirits.

Pain dulls live minds and adds to life

A melancholic salt

If this grim fun does not stop soon

I’ll end a catholic dolt.

Then I’ll howl your ears full Lord

Like other Christian chokers

O Lord have mercy, thus departs

The best of literary jokers.

2. Body and Soul

Said soul to body in soulful pain

I cannot leave you, I’ll remain

With you – in death’s night I’ll with you sink,

Of death’s dispersion with you drink.

You were my ever-faithful second,

Flung me round, or so I reckoned,

In a festive cloak of satin

Warmly lined, of flawless pattern.

Woe is me, now naked, wracked,

Bodiless and quite abstract

I’m to lounge in blissful blight

Above in realms of heavenly light

In heavenly halls ‘midst heavenly norms

Where Time’s great surge in silence forms

Itself into a Yawn – where saintly trogs

Clack round bored in leaden clogs.

This is one second-rate result

Dear body, stay, and I exult!

So body said to downcast soul:

Take comfort and show self-control

Bear in peace with patient frown

What fate for each of us set down.

Burn out I must as our lamp’s wick,

But you, the spirit ever-quick

Will in heaven no doubt go far,

Will twinkle like a little star

Of beamiest purity – me, I’m junk,

Lumpen matter, a dead tree’s trunk

Slumping to the ground I become

That which I was – an earthly crumb.

Now fare you well and end your sighs,

Think, maybe there are funnier guys

Than you now believe up there.

And if you pass by heaven’s great bear

(NOT MEYER-BEAR) Some place in heaven’s starry sea

Say ten-times hi to him from me.

Auf Deutsch

1. Miserere

Die Söhne des Glückes beneid ich nicht

Ob ihrem Leben, beneiden

Will ich sie nur ob ihrem Tod,

Dem scmerzlos raschen Verscheiden.

Poetry Translations 2: More Heine

The Wandering Rats

There are two kinds of rat:

The hungry and the fat.

The fat ones stay content at home,

The hungry ones though, they hungrily roam.

They roam for many a mile,

Relentlessly lacking in style,

Straight on along their miserable track,

No wind nor weather can hold them back.

They climb over mountain peaks,

They swim the murkiest lakes;

Many have broken their necks or drowned,

The living pass on without looking around.

Take a look at these louts

With their fearsome ugly snouts;

Heads shaven bare they're at physical peak -

Radical chic - ratty and sleek.

The radical rodent squad

Know nothing of Heaven or God.

Their whelps run unbaptised and free,

Their wives are common property.

The sensuous rats of the fleet

Want no more than to drink and to eat,

No thought while they gulp, slurp and chortle

That our souls were created immortal.

Such wild and savage rats

Have no fear of Hell or of cats;

They think though they haven't a cent to their name

To divide up the world so we all have the same.

The rats are a'roaming here too,

Coming to a suburb near you!

I hear their squeaks, straight on they press,

Their multitude is numberless.

Alas! By now its too late,

They're already at the gate!

The local council and the mayor

Are shaking their heads in brainless despair.

Good citizens ready to arm,

The church bells ring out in alarm.

In peril is something by which we set store,

Our property values, our whole rule of law

No tolling of bells, no pious old pleas,

No majestic parliamentary decrees,

No squadron of cannon, no hundred pounders

Will save your children, your statues of founders,

No help from the verbal poptarts

Of weary rhetorical arts.

You don't catch a rat with a logical trap

So spare me your fine-spun sophistical crap.

To the hungry inside of a rat in a group

Appeals only the logic of dumplings and soup,

Arguments smelling of pig on a spit

With a side-dish of porky political wit.

A taciturn cod stewed in butter for hours

Is what pleases the radical powers

Far better than any Mirabeau

Or all the orations since Cicero.

Auf Deutsch - Die Wanderratten

Es gibt zwei Sorten Ratten:
Die hungrigen und satten.
Die satten bleiben vergn ügt zu Haus,
Die hungrigen aber wandern aus.

Sie wandern viel tausend Meilen,
Ganz ohne Rasten und Weilen,
Gradaus in ihrem grimmigen Lauf,
Nicht Wind noch Wetter hält sie auf.