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.