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St Matthews Christmas Billboard Vandalised: Catholic Fundamentalist Portrays Animals Emerging Two-by-Two from the Virgin Mary

18 Sunday Dec 2011

Posted by Deane in Language, Living, Politics, Reference, Religion, Rhetoric, Texts

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Advertising, Arthur Skinner, Catholic Action, Christmas billboard, Church, Humour, St Matthew in the City, Virgin Mary

In what was an almost inevitable development, fundamentalist Catholic Arthur Skinner, of the reactionary Catholic Action group, has vandalised the Christmas billboard erected earlier this week by St Matthew in the City, Auckland, New Zealand. Taking a pair of scissors to the billboard to reveal another picture below, Skinner has made it appear as if the Virgin Mary is expressing shock at various animals proceeding forth from her eternally intact vagina:

Original St Matthews Christmas Billboard

Original St Matthews Christmas Billboard

Vandalised St Matthews Christmas Billboard: Arthur Skinner makes it appear as if the Virgin Mary is shocked at animals proceeding two-by-two out of her eternally intact vagina

Vandalised St Matthews Christmas Billboard: Arthur Skinner (Catholic Action) makes it appear as if the Virgin Mary is shocked at animals proceeding two-by-two out of her eternally intact vagina

 

Arthur Skinner’s unusual alteration to the Christmas billboard appears to be unintentional, rather than a work of artistic creativity. TV3 reports Skinner ranting, “Everyone knows instinctively, you don’t muck around with God’s mother. This is devil’s work. This is luciferian. The attack on the blessed virgin.” Stuff reports that Skinner called church vicar Glynn Cardy the day he cut the poster to tell him he would “roast slowly in hell” for the billboard.

As Eric commented in respect of a similar rant by Family First’s Bob McCoskrie against St Matthew’s 2009 Christmas billboard,

There is a long-standing tradition in Christianity to immediately condemn any connection between Jesus and sexual activity of any kind. Whether this is due to a perceived need to defend the ludicrous doctrine of the virgin birth from critique (is the NT wrong?) or simply another aspect of the long historical tradition that claims the elevated, the divine, or the righteous are not subject to the same bodily weaknesses and urges that the rest of us are endlessly plagued with (for Deane’s thoughts on this, see here and here), remains an open question.

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Two Thousand Words about American Christianity

11 Friday Nov 2011

Posted by Eric Repphun in Capital, Christianity, Language, Photography, Reference, Religion, Texts, Theory

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Photo taken in Frisco, Colorado, USA, by William Repphun, 2010.

Photo taken in Frisco, Colorado, USA, by Eric Repphun, 2009.

The Nimble Apes: Unofficial Christchurch

04 Sunday Apr 2010

Posted by Eric Repphun in Language, Metaphor, Photography, Reference, Rhetoric, Symbol, Texts

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Christchurch, Friedrich Nietzsche, Monkeys, Unofficial Record

Continuing an ongoing series of images (see here, here, and here) of the haunted, unofficial language of the modern, rationalised city, inspired to some extent by the work French philosopher Michel de Certeau, we have here a Polaroid image (taken with an early 1960s Poloroid Land Camera) from Christchurch, New Zealand’s second-largest city, snapped some time in 2008:

Original Polaroid photograph copyright Eric Repphun, 2008.

On the lyrical genius of The Mountain Goats

31 Wednesday Mar 2010

Posted by Eric Repphun in Language, Metaphor, Music, Reference, Slang, Symbol, Texts

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Indie Rock, John Darnielle, Metaphor, Music, The Mountain Goats

Recent conversations over coffee with Deane and the beginnings of a new research project (on science fiction genre convention across cultures and Christian imagery in the Japanese anime film Neon Genesis Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone) has me thinking a good deal about metaphor and other figures of speech.

This has coincided with a mild (and growing) obsession with the great indie rock band The Mountain Goats, the pen name of the singer and songwriter John Darnielle and whoever he happens to be working with.  Darnielle’s massive output has included such masterpieces as Tallahassee (a 2003 concept album about divorce), The Sunset Tree (2005), and the recent The Life Of The World To Come (2009), a fascinating slice of reception history that features 12 songs inspired by individual verses from the canonical Bible (The Mountain Goats website can be found here).

One of the things that makes The Mountain Goats such a pleasure to listen to  is the fact that, not unlike writers like the philosopher/cultural critic Jean Baudrillard, the novelist Chuck Palahniuk, and the great theologian/existentialist/madman Søren Kierkegaard, Darnielle relies almost exclusively on indirect forms of communication, approaching and constructing his worlds of meaning from every conceivable angle, no matter how oblique.  For your pleasure, pondering, and perhaps confusion, a few of The Mountain Goats’ greatest (or most evocative) leaps in both language and logic.

From ‘Old College Try’ (Tallahassee), Darnielle manages to weave an oddly romantic metaphor out of a series of random images that would not be out of place in a Murakami Haruki novel:

… From the entrance to the exit/ Is longer than it looks from where we stand

I want to say I’m sorry for stuff I haven’t done yet/ Things will shortly get completely out of hand

I can feel it in the rotten air tonight/ In the tips of my fingers

In the skin on my face/ In the weak last gasp of the evening’s dying light

In the way those eyes I’ve always loved illuminate this place

Like a trashcan fire in a prison cell

Like the searchlights in the parking lots of hell

I will walk down to the end with you/ If you will come all the way down with me

Again, in ‘Broom People’ (The Sunset Tree), Darnielle builds a love song out what T. S. Eliot so memorably called (in The Waste Land) ‘a heap of broken images’, though Eliot would never have used such charmingly domestic visuals:

’36 Hudson in the garage/ All sorts of junk in the unattached spare room,

Dishes in the kitchen sink/ New straw for the old broom,

Friends who don’t have a clue/ Well-meaning teachers,

But down in your arms,

In your arms, I am a wild creature.

Floor two foot high with newspapers/ White carpet thick with pet hair,

Half-eaten gallons of ice cream in the freezer/ Fresh fuel for the sodium flares,

I write down good reasons to freeze to death/ In my spiral ring notebook,

But in the long tresses of your hair

I am a babbling brook.

From Heretic Pride (2008), we have ‘Sax Rohmer #1’, which is about something lovely, though I have no idea what that might be. (any suggestions from our readers would be welcome here).  The final figure/image is a keeper, something J. G. Ballard does half as well with ten times as many words in his novel Crash:

Fog lifts from the harbour/ Dawn goes down today

An agent crests the shadows/ Of a nearby alleyway

Piles of broken bricks/ Signposts on the path

Every moment points toward/ The aftermath

Sailors straggle back/ From their nights out on the town

Hopeless urchins from the city/ Gather around

Spies from imperial China/ Wash in with the tide

Every battle heads toward/ Surrender on both sides

And I am coming home to you/ With my own blood in my mouth

And I am coming home to you/ If it’s the last thing that I do

Bells ring in the tower/ Wolves howl in the hills

Chalk marks show up/ On a few high windowsills

And a rabbit gives up somewhere/ And a dozen hawks descend

Every moment leads toward/ Its own sad end

Ships loosed from their moorings/ Capsize and then they’re gone

Sailors with no captains watch a while/ And then move on

And an agent crests the shadows/ And I head in her direction

All roads lead toward/ The same blocked intersection …

‘Up the Wolves’ (The Sunset Tree) features one of the strangest, and most oddly stirring, calls to arms I’ve ever heard:

… Were going to commandeer the local airwaves/ To tell the neighbours what’s been going on.

And they will shake their heads and wag their bony fingers/ In all the wrong directions,

And by daybreak we’ll be gone/ I’m going to get myself in fighting trim,

Scope out every angle of unfair advantage.

I’m going to bribe the officials.

I’m going to kill all the judges.

It’s going to take you people years to recover from all of the damage.

Our mother has been absent ever since we founded Rome/ But there’s going to be a party when the wolf comes home.

Go!

And finally, from the immortal ‘No Children’ (Tallahassee), simply one of the finest and most frankly brutal break-up songs in recent memory, one which uses a descriptive language that is so oddly naked that it seems to hide its meaning in plain sight:

I hope that our few remaining friends/ Give up on trying to save us

I hope we come up with a failsafe plot/ To piss off the dumb few who forgave us

I hope the fences we mended/ Fall down beneath their own weight

And I hope we hang on past the last exit/ I hope it’s already too late

And I hope the junkyard a few blocks from here/ Someday burns down

And I hope the rising black smoke carries me far away

And I never come back to this town …

I hope I cut myself shaving tomorrow/ I hope it bleeds all day long

Our friends say it’s darkest before the sun rises/ We’re pretty sure they’re all wrong

I hope it stays dark forever/ I hope the worst isn’t over

And I hope you blink before I do/ I hope I never get sober

And I hope when you think of me years down the line/ You can’t find one good thing to say

And I’d hope that if I found the strength to walk out/ You’d stay the hell out of my way

I am drowning

There is no sign of land

You are coming down with me

Hand in unlovable hand

And I hope you die/ I hope we both die …

(Thanks to the exhaustive fansite/archive themountaingoats.net for help on some of the more obscure passages).

Cinema as Exorcism (five): Perfume: The Story of a Murderer as the Enlightenment’s Dark Magic

25 Thursday Mar 2010

Posted by Eric Repphun in Angels, Death, Exorcism, Film, Language, Literature, Metaphor, Reference, Religion, Texts

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Enlightenment, exorcism, Patrick Suskind, Perfume, Tom Tykwer

And that is precisely what the metropolitan denizen teaches himself to do: he lives, not in the real world, but in a shadow world projected around him at every moment by means of paper and celluloid and adroitly manipulated lights: a world in which he is insulated by glass, cellophane, pliofilm from the mortifications of living.  In short, a world of professional illusionists and their credulous victims.

Lewis Mumford [1]

Continuing on with the ongoing Cinema as Exorcism series (more here, here, here, and here), with a look at the dynamics of modernity and magic in a (very slightly) older film, Tom Tykwer’s 2006 Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.  The film does not so much as exorcise as bring to the surface the dark, magical underbelly of the Enlightenment, the inadmissable but undeniable presence of enchantments in the form of forms of logic that exist underneath, behind, and all around conventional calculations of value, exchange and utility.  These enchantments, these dark magics, are represented as a profound source of threat.  Such enchantments must be understood as a potent and potential source of danger, something the sociologist Max Weber, the father of the theory of rationalisation, or as he also called it, ‘the disenchantment of the world’, recognised in his own lifetime in the volatile atmosphere of German society at the end of the First World War.

International poster for Tom Tykwer's Perfume

Tykwer’s Perfume is based on the German-language novel of the same name by Patrick Süskind.  Süskind’s novel, his first, has been highly influential and wildly popular since its publication in 1985 and is widely considered as part of the always de facto canon of magical realism.  The film seems at first to be an absolute departure for Tykwer, who is perhaps best known for his two related fairly tales about the transcendent, even supernatural power of love, Lola rennt (Run, Lola, Run, 1998) and Der Krieger und die Kaiserin (The Princess and the Warrior, 2000).  The brilliance of these two collaborations with the actress Franka Potenta aside, Tykwer’s best film is likely Heaven (2002), a near mystical, quasi-Christian take on the redemptive power of love, written by Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz for a planned trilogy of Kieslowski-directed films, offered to Tykwer after Kieslowski’s death in 1996.  Against the studied Romanticism of his other works, Perfume is violent, confrontational, even disturbing.  It is a rich and finely textured allegory that seeks to examine from within the hidden, dark enchantments of modernity.  The narrative undermines any easy account of modern history as the triumphant march out of darkness and into the light of perennial truth.  The film is not strictly about modernity as such, it focuses its metaphoric gaze on Enlightenment rationalism, a crucial element in the development of the forms of modern self-understanding embodied in evolutionary narratives. Perfume represents nothing less than a fictional account of that which is unthought, forgotten or simply ignored by modern narratives of progress and by unilinear theories of rationalisation.

The narrative itself is deceptively simple: Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an orphan in eighteenth-century France, gifted, like Palahniuk’s Rant Casey, with a supernaturally keen sense of smell, discovers upon reaching maturity that he has no scent of his own, which renders him unlovable and even sub-human.  After years of toil as a near slave in a leather tannery, he trains as a perfumer and learns the technological mastery of the world of scent.  Yearning to be loved as others are loved, he comes rationally, even scientifically, to a way to enchant the world into loving him.  He creates, from the scents of virgin girls he has murdered, a perfume so sublimely beautiful that it holds the power to enchant the whole world into loving him.  Upon succeeding, he discovers that his triumph is hollow and commits a strangely beatific act of suicide.  Metaphorically, Grenouille, the titular murderer, is an abominable outgrowth of the rationalising tendencies of modern thought, a monster whose dark magic reaches its full potential only when it is augmented by his technical training and the growing body of scientific knowledge that characterised the age in which he lived.  In Enlightenment France, Grenouille is seen as an abomination; indeed, the people who encounter Grenouille and his crimes simply cannot grasp his motives or come to grips with his very existence.  However, the film presents Grenouille not so much as an anomaly but as a fully explicable and natural outgrowth of rationalisation.

The film features an extensive voice-over from an anonymous and wryly amused narrator (the great John Hurt), who sets the scene of Grenouille’s birth at the heart of Europe:

In eighteenth-century France, there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and notorious personages of his time.  His name was Jean-Baptiste Grenouille and, if his name has been forgotten today, it is for the sole reason that his entire ambition was restricted to a domain that leaves no trace in history: to the fleeting realm of scent … In the period of which we speak there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women.  Naturally, the stench was foulest in Paris, for Paris was the largest city in Europe.  And nowhere in Paris was that stench more profoundly repugnant than in the city’s fish market.  It was here, then, on the most putrid spot in the whole kingdom that Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was born on the 17th of July, 1738. [2]

From his earliest days, his knowledge of this hidden world sets him apart from the other children in the foetid, overcrowded orphanage where he is raised by the coldly rational Madame Gaillard, who treats Grenouille, and all the other children, as nothing more than sources of income.  Grenouille, with his supernatural sense of smell, has access to levels of the world that other people do not.  The film casts Grenouille’s extraordinary ability in terms of language:

By the age of five, Jean-Baptiste still could not talk, but he had been born with a talent that made him unique among mankind.  It was not that the other children hated him.  They felt unnerved by him.  Increasingly, he became aware that his phenomenal sense of smell was a gift that had been given to him and him alone.  When Jean-Baptiste did finally learn to speak, he soon found that everyday language proved inadequate for all the olfactory experiences accumulating within himself.

First edition cover of Suskind's Perfume

Grenouille lives, then, outside of the world of conventional language, though he does so because of his gifts, not because of his own will.  He survives the orphanage and years as an abused tannery apprentice and grows into a gaunt, silent and scarred young man.  Confronted for the first time with the wider world of Paris (outside of the orphanage and the tannery) and the staggering wealth of scents the city has to offer, Grenouille begins his own version of the task of world mastery that is taking place at the same time in salons, laboratories and lecture halls in other, more privileged parts of the city.  Tykwer only rarely shows this world.  Grenouille serves as the primary guide within the structure of the film itself, forcing the viewer to contemplate the world largely from his perspective.  Part of this identification comes through Tykwer’s attempts to emulate the world of scent in a visual medium.  He does this with jump cuts and vivid close-up shots of the things that Grenouille is able to smell, images which both focus attention on their particularity and isolate them from their context.  As Grenouille enters Paris, the camera dissects the city into discrete, disconnected images, breaking the world down to its constituent elements – powdered wigs, cracking oysters, fabric, bread, mud, sewage, high-born women in carriages, horses.  Confronting the confusion and majesty of Paris with a growing hunger, Grenouille seeks understanding and order by breaking things apart, by removing them from the totality of smells and reifying each of these elements in the desire of possession and mastery.

This is true of people as well as inanimate objects and animals.  On this first visit to the city, when the film implicitly connects Grenouille to the emerging project of modern science and its hunger for new knowledge, Grenouille also commits his first murder.  Visually, the film depicts Grenouille’s fragmentation of the world, and by implication that of emerging modern science, as an act of violence and dismemberment.  The camera and the editing break down Grenouille’s victims long before he does, reducing them to fleeting glimpses of a naked shoulder, a vein pulsing on a slender throat, red hair flowing in the wind.  Grenouille catches the intoxicating smell of a redheaded young woman carrying plums and follows her into a dark courtyard where he, perhaps unintentionally, kills her.  Intentional or not, Grenouille doesn’t appear to care that she is dead, only that her unique smell is dissipating rapidly as her body cools.  He drinks up her scent as it fades, stripping her naked and exploring her body with his nose.  He cups his hands to hold onto her scent, but he cannot posses it and it fades, igniting within him to fierce desire to permanently possess scent.

It is telling to note one of the narrative’s harshest criticisms of modernity comes across in the fact that Grenouille must enter mainstream society to fully exploit his perverse need for world mastery, not shy away from it; Grenouille must embrace the emerging bourgeois world to fully realise his aims.  Shortly after his first murder, Grenouille insinuates himself into the laboratory of faded perfumer Giuseppe Baldini by sheer persistence and demands that Baldini teach him: ‘I have to learn how to keep smell!’  Because of his gifted nose, Grenouille’s facility with perfume is nothing short of magical.  Testing a perfume that Grenouille improvises for him, Baldini is transported to an enchanted garden, where a buxom young woman whispers, ‘I love you’ into his enraptured ear.  In the novel, Süskind explicitly makes this connection: ‘It was not a scent that made things smell better, not some sachet, not some toiletry.  It was something completely new, capable of creating a new world, a magical, rich world’. [3]

Grenouille, who is often treated as little more than human capital, comes to work as an apprentice for Baldini.  Working late in the basement laboratory, Baldini imparts a piece of perfumer’s lore to his new apprentice:

Baldini: Now, pay careful attention to what I tell you.  Just like a musical chord, a perfume chord contains four essences, notes carefully selected for their harmonic affinity.  Each perfume contains three chords: the head, the heart and the base, necessitating twelve notes in all … Mind you, the ancient Egyptians believed that one can only create a truly original perfume by adding an extra note, one final essence that will bring out and dominate the others.  Legend has it that an amphora was once found in a pharaoh’s tomb and when it was opened a perfume was released after all those thousands of years, a perfume of such subtle beauty and yet such power that for one single moment every person on Earth believed they were in paradise.  Twelve essences could be identified, but the thirteenth, the vital one, could never be determined.

Grenouille: Why not?

Baldini: Why not?  What do you mean, why not?  Because it’s a legend, numbskull.

Grenouille: What’s a legend?

Baldini: Never mind.

It says a great deal about the film’s take on modernity and positivistic science that Grenouille confuses this legend with historical fact and later turns to this story for a model when he begins his murderous final act of creation.  It likewise says a good deal that it is this mistake that allows him to be so successful when creating his masterpiece, a perfume containing the scents of thirteen virgins.  Grenouille is either not aware of or simply ignores the implicit distinction in Baldini’s story between the technical accuracy of the perfumer’s art and the Egyptian story, which is clearly not to be taken as the same level of truth.  Grenouille has no need for modern epistemological distinction.  Nonetheless, with this syncretism of scientific and mythological ways of knowing, Grenouille is able to replicate the story of the legend, even though it was probably never true in the first place.  If we are to pause here briefly to consider Grenouille’s metaphoric role in European modernity, it is worth suggesting that he is not unlike the alchemist in his application of rational methods for supernatural aims.  Alchemy perhaps played a greater role in the history of modern science than the subtraction stories are willing to admit, as Louis Dupré notes:

Too often the cosmology of the early modern age continues to be viewed as a prehistory of the scientific revolution, as if there had been nothing between the Aristotelian picture and the mechanistic one.  Such a view overlooks a prolonged attempt to understand the universe through chemistry rather than through the laws of mechanics.  Until the end of the seventeenth century alchemy developed side by side with mechanical physics as an alternative science. [4]

To continue the metaphor, in much the same way that Grenouille is a forgotten product of rationalisation, alchemy is part of the unthought and often ignored inheritances in positivist science.  For Baldini, Grenouille’s abilities are uncanny, even worrisome, something he is willing to overlook with the floods of money coming into his shop as customers arrive in droves to buy Grenouille’s creations.  For Baldini, his new apprentice’s strangeness is defused somewhat when Grenouille learns the techniques and the operational language of perfuming, bringing his knowledge and his skill under the comforting umbrella of known registers of utilitarian language.  Süskind notes this connection explicitly in the novel: ‘The more Grenouille mastered the tricks and tools of the trade, the better he was able to express himself in conventional language of perfumery – and the less his master feared and suspected him’. [5] If Baldini feels more at ease the more that Grenouille learns, he is being greatly deceived.  Grenouille, under the respectable language of the perfumer, is growing ever more powerful, ever closer to the realisation of his dream to capture scent.  In an intriguing parallel with the novels of Chuck Palahniuk  operational language becomes a shield for Grenouille’s uncanny abilities and his unsettling aims.

Trading the formulas for one hundred new perfumes for his freedom, Grenouille departs for a journeyman’s post in the Provençal town of Grasse, which Baldini calls ‘the Rome of scents, the promised land of perfume’.  On the way, he is distracted for no less than seven years, living a base, animalistic existence hidden away in a cave in the mountains, revelling in the cold, clean, scentless air but equally horrified to discover that he has no scent of his own, that he is, as others have long suspected, something less than fully human.  The narrator tells of the new desire this opens up within Grenouille’s heart:

For the first time in his life, Grenouille realized that he had no smell of his own.  He realized that all his life, he’d been a nobody to everyone.  What he now felt was the fear of his own oblivion.  It was as though he did not exist.  By the first light of next morning, Grenouille had a new plan; he must continue his journey to Grasse.  There he would teach the world not only that he existed, that he was someone, but that he was exceptional.

Arriving finally in Grasse, Grenouille takes a post as a journeyman perfumer and expands his repertoire beyond what Baldini was able to teach him.  He also continues his experiments in his free time, first trying to capture the scent of a reluctant living prostitute then resorting to simply killing women so he will have bodies to experiment with.  Grenouille’s experimentation is relentless, passionless and rigorously scientific.  After several failed attempts, he finally strikes upon a complex method involving cold enfleurage, digestion, lavage, and distillation that renders the scent of the woman into a single tiny flask.  Having robbed these women forcibly of their essence, Grenouille leaves a series of corpses, stripped naked and shorn, for the people and authorities of Grasse to find.  In Grenouille’s reign of terror, undertaken in the interests of world mastery and in the selfish needs of Grenouille to perfect himself, the narrative finds its metaphorical centre.

Grenouille’s application of the scientific method in the interests of possessing ‘all the smells in the world’ is what allows his magic, and his perversion, to fully flower.  Without the equipment and techniques of the perfumer, Grenouille would be condemned to the fleeting sensations of the scent of the living, accessible to him only via his gifts.  Wendy Faris underlines Grenouille’s conjunction of magic and science, which, as we have seen, also manifests itself in the discourses of reenchantment: ‘Grenouille’s perfuming abilities resemble those of an experimental chemist of genius, so that in addition to the magical powers of its narrative mode, the novel also takes on a quasi-scientific aura, intimately connected to the concrete worlds of natural and constructed chemical compounds’. [6] Grenouille’s perfuming skills bring the reification of the individual inherent in disenchantment and the rise of modern capitalism sharply into focus; the women Grenouille harvests are human capital, literally liquid assets in his quest to manufacture an identity for himself and in his relentless pursuit of the sublime beauty of his thirteen-note masterpiece.  In an extended sequence, Tykwer underlines this connection visually.  Tykwer intercuts sensuous images of Grenouille’s flasks, bottles, and experimentation with blackly comical images of the discovery of the bodies of the murdered women, drawing an explicit visual parallel between the act of manufacture and the act of destruction.

In Grasse, Grenouille meets his only formidable opponent, the wealthy merchant Antoine Richis, whose sublimely beautiful daughter, Laura, Grenouille needs as the thirteenth and crowning note of his perfume.  Richis is a deeply rational and practical man, like Grenouille a child of the Enlightenment.  The two are opposites and antagonists; however, they also represent the two sides of the dialectic of enchantment and Enlightenment.  When the town council meets to try to decide what to do about the murders, Richis calls for a rational approach to the seemingly irrational horror in their midst:

We have to put ourselves inside the mind of this man.  Each of his victims had an especial beauty.  We know he doesn’t want their virginity so it seems to me it’s their beauty itself that he wants, almost as if he’s trying to gather something.  His ambitions are those of a collector … Whatever it is, I fear he won’t stop killing until his collection is complete.

For Richis, who suspects early on that Laura is a necessary part of Grenouille’s collection, Grenouille’s threat is greater than mere murder; the killings are inexplicable, unreasonable even in the deranged logic of murder.  Grenouille attacks conventional structures of knowledge and value by not sexually violating his victims and by following an inexplicable but undeniable logic of his very own.  His violation of his victims is symbolic at the same time it is literal, an act of extreme violence, especially considering Baldini’s assertion, which Grenouille takes to heart, that ‘the soul of beings is their scent’.  Richis is blinded by his understanding of modernity, which only allows him to understand Grenouille by one standard of truth and logic.  The town council refuses to listen to Richis’ sobering and rational call, opting instead to fall back on the divine language of the Catholic Church, which Richis, as an Enlightened man, is visibly sceptical of.  Tykwer stages here a very brief debate between science and religion:

Judge: This man is a demon, a phantom who cannot be fought by human means.  Now, I insist that we call upon our bishop to excommunicate him.

Richis:  What good would that do?

Judge: Have you no faith at all in the power our Holy Mother Church?

Richis: This is not a matter of faith.  There’s a murderer out there and we must catch him by using our God-given wits.

Judge: I say until we submit to Mother Church, these killings will not cease.

Tykwer plays the following scenes as a perverse comedy and a mockery of both the council and the Church to even slow Grenouille down.  The bishop stands up in his cathedral in front of the town and declares Grenouille’s excommunication with all the vigour the corpulent churchman can muster.  The scene is intercut with Grenouille, not in the least bothered by his communication, if he is even aware of it, deliberately mixing his perfume from his twelve tiny flasks of oil, awaiting its crowning thirteenth note in the scent of Laura Richis, which he soon has, despite Richis’ best efforts to thwart him using clever ruses that are no match for Grenouille’s supernatural abilities.  Grenouille is caught the next morning as he finishes his perfume over an open flame and is taken back to Grasse for interrogation and execution.  As Grenouille is tortured, Richis strives in vain to understand his reasoning.  Their meeting is a clash of different epistemologies in which there is no exchange or dialogue between sides.  The Janus face of Enlightenment rationalism is here brought into sharp focus as is becomes clear that both men are equally rational, equally methodical.  The divide between the two remains nonetheless absolute, their positions utterly irreconcilable by any common discourse, what Jean-François Lyotard calls a differend:

Richis: Why did you kill my daughter?  Why?

Grenouille: I needed her.

Richis: Why did you kill my daughter?

Grenouille: I just needed her.

Grenouille is sentenced to a horrific death in the public square.  Dressed in blue velvet finery, Grenouille is led to his punishment in front of the entire town.  He, through his dark magic, retains the position of power.  During the scenes on the platform, Tykwer accentuates the strange and monstrous aspect of Grenouille by placing him dead centre in the frame.  A rare composition in contemporary cinema, such an image has an intensely alienating effect (see Figure 1).  With a light application of his perfume, Grenouille faces the crowds with equanimity and a wry smile.  The executioner is the first to fall under the spell of Grenouille’s perfume, shouting, ‘This man is innocent!’ Spreading the scent with a wave of his handkerchief, the crowd takes up this call.  The bishop falls to his knees, declaring, enraptured, ‘This is no man, this is an angel’.  Even Richis, the last to fall under the spell, lays down his sword and asks for Grenouille’s forgiveness as the crowd degenerates into a massive and undifferentiated orgy.  Soon everyone is naked, or near to it.  The coupling is indiscriminate, men with women, women with women, old with young, bishops with prostitutes.  Grenouille has brought about with his technique and his magic a perverse flowering of communitas.  In his final appearances he possesses a power and an authority, however artificially generated, to control the desires and actions of all those around him.  The ambivalent relationship of modernity to enchantment is embodied in these simple narrative and visual moments; unable to stop Grenouille’s killing spree nor understand his motives, the secular and ecclesiastic authorities of the day end their relationship with Grenouille by falling under his spell, by embracing against their will everything they claim to be against.

Figure 1:

Figure 1: Grenouille on the platform in Grasse.

As Grenouille stands on the scaffolding, all of the forces of early modern French society are unable to do anything but fall under the enchantment of his mastery, born half from his inexplicable sense of smell and half from rational techniques.  What Grenouille represents is the forgotten magic that underlies modernity, the hidden agency of ancient, animalistic elements buried within the structure of European modernity, forgotten but always present.  Grenouille, however, feels no satisfaction as he stands above the crowd, a master of the world.  Grenouille is, if anything, both disgusted and regretful.  In one of the few moments in which Tykwer allows Grenouille some remorse, some ordinary humanity (something Süskind never does in the novel), watching the sea of naked townspeople, Grenouille has flashbacks to his first killing, the girl with the basket of plums.  As the whole of the city writhes naked at his feet, caught up in his manufactured reenchantment, the film re-enacts the scene of the murder but shows the plum girl reacting to Grenouille very differently as he approaches her openly.  She welcomes him, embraces him, kisses him, returns his singular affection.  Grenouille imagines the scene as it could have gone if he were fully human.  Grenouille weeps at the thought of her dead, at the thought of the lost opportunity for a living exchange with a living woman rather than his one-sided violation.

Instead of facing up to Grenouille and what he represents, the people of Grasse look away and arrest another man, Grenouille’s former employer, who is hanged for Grenouille’s crimes, thus balancing the scales of justice and the demand for an exchange for the murdered girls in terms that they are able to understand.  The march of order and history has been restored and Grenouille, forgotten in the emerging triumphalist narratives of modernity, is left out of the history books:

The people of Grasse awoke to a terrible hangover.  For many of them, the experience was so ghastly, so completely inexplicable and incompatible with their morals that they literally erased it from their memories.  The town council was in session by the afternoon and an order was passed to the police lieutenant to immediately begin fresh investigations into the murders.  The following day, Dominique Druer was arrested, since it was in his backyard that the clothes and hair of all the victims had been found.  After fourteen hours of torture, Druer confessed to everything.  With that, the case was closed.

That Grenouille is forgotten only further underlines his historical power, in that he works in a threatening symbolic register and cannot be captured in language. His regret, and the ever-present narrator, follow him back to Paris:

By then, Grenouille was already halfway back to Paris.  He still had enough perfume left to enslave the whole world if he so chose.  He could walk to Versailles and have the king kiss his feet.  He could write the Pope a perfumed letter and reveal himself as the new messiah.  He could do all this and more if he wanted to.  He possessed a power stronger than the power of money, or terror, or death; the invincible power to command the love of mankind.  There was only one thing the perfume could not do.  It could not turn him into a person who could love and be loved like everyone else.  So, to hell with it, he thought.  To hell with the world, with the perfume, with himself.  On the twenty-fifth of June, 1766, around eleven o’clock at night, Grenouille entered the city through the Porte d’Orléans and like a sleepwalker, his olfactory memories drew him back to the place where he was born.

Grenouille, still dressed in his finery, sees a group of ragged, dirty people huddled around a fire.  He upends the bottle of perfume on his head, drawing the attention of the gathered crowd as he is suffused with a warm glowing light.  Two women approach him and cry, ‘An angel’ and, ‘I love you’.  The crowd falls upon him and literally devours him.  There is nothing but a pile of clothes left, and these are stolen by a group of poor children.  Jean-Baptiste Grenouille fades into the mists of history, the dark side of Enlightenment and modern science forgotten save for the fragments of finery he briefly wore as the master of the world.  Reenchantment is necessarily, as we have argued in conceptual terms, a fleeting, ephemeral, if forever renewed phenomenon not unlike Grenouille and the scraps of his enchantment he leaves behind after his death.

These final images are deeply ambiguous, if not deeply perverse.  The narrator finishes his tale in a matter of fact manner: ‘Within no time, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille had disappeared from the face of the Earth.  When they had finished, they felt a virginal glow of happiness.  For the first time in their lives, they believed they done something purely out of love’.  It is possible to read this final scene in a number of ways.  That Grenouille is identified on at least two occasions as an angel, as a figure from traditional Christian cosmology, is highly significant if we return our attention to the concept of religious modernity.  In this context, it is possible to interpret the deeply ambivalent ending of Perfume in a different way.  What Grenouille, as an angel, represents is the destructive, monstrous aspects of the religious productions of modernity, a murderous hybrid of the religious, the magical and the scientific.  This fusion of differing epistemologies can take violent forms, exemplified today in various forms of religious fundamentalism.  Similarly, as Faris notes:

In magical realist texts irruptions of magic sometimes constitute the surfacing of buried religious traditions, which speak independently of particular themes and styles.  In Perfume, for example, the magical quality of Grenouille’s perfuming abilities transmits a trace of pre-Enlightenment belief in magical powers of enchantment, which operates within the satiric narrative that condemns the beginnings of the scientific age and its culmination in Nazi experimental atrocities, and yet it is not entirely defined by it. [7]

It is more than this, however.  Grenouille is not a trace or a survival, he is a production of modernity and the processes of rationalisation.  Jean-Baptiste’s Christian name implicates him both as a significant religious figure and also the one who comes before something greater, in this case both the French Revolution and modernity as a whole.  In Perfume, it is a magically endowed, coldly rational and utterly vicious killer of virgins who prepares the way for the modern era, which, the story suggests, is forever haunted by the dark enchantments that lie forgotten in its history by those things it produces and then seeks to forget.


[1] Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961), 546.

[2] Perfume, DVD. All quotations and screen captures are the work of the author.

[3] Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, trans. by J. E. Woods (New York: Penguin, 1987), 90.

[4] Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 52.

[5] Süskind, Perfume, 96.

[6] Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (Nashville, AB: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), 74.

[7] Faris, Ordinary, 70.

Make Your Own Snapshot of Mainstream Culture!

22 Monday Mar 2010

Posted by Alan Smithee in History, Internet, Language, Pornography, Reference, Religion, Texts, Theory

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Google, Internet, Job, Pornography

An experiment for all our fair readers, though not one to be conducted at work: turn off all the ‘Safe Search’ options on your browser and do an image search for ‘Job’.  At least on Google, this yields a fascinating slice of the mainstream culture – at least that part of it that is online – in the English-speaking world.  I’ve done this a few times after stumbling upon it looking for a painting by Marc Chagall last year and the results, though always shifting, are always about the same.

Well over half the images involve employment or ‘jobs’ in some way:

The other half are split more or less equally between illustrations from the Hebrew Bible book of Job and various pornographic categories – ‘hand job’, ‘foot job’, ‘boob job’, ‘blow job’, and the like (in the interests of propriety – I am an American citizen, and America owes a good deal to Puritan morality even today when so many other element of Puritan culture has passed into the mists of memory – I will leave the illustration of this final category to your imagination, which is filthier than anything I could find anyway, I reckon):

An illustration from Job by WIlliam Blake

There is something about this juxtaposition of the religious, the economic, and the pornographic that seems to perfectly capture our present cultural moment and its inherent contradictions.

It will be fascinating to do this on occasions over the coming months and even years to see if shifts in the larger culture alter the mix I found this morning (these two were taken from the first two pages of a Google image search results), or alter the proportions in which these three things appear.

Logorama: An Amusingly Bleak View of a World of Commodities

16 Tuesday Mar 2010

Posted by Alan Smithee in Cartoons, Cults, Ethics, Film, Language, Reference, Religion, Rhetoric, Symbol, Texts

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Academy Awards, commodification, Francois Alaux, Herve de Crece, Logorama, Slavoj Žižek

There is something deeply disturbing – if wildly entertaining – about the 2010 Academy Award winner for Best Animated Short Film, Logorama, by Francois Alaux and Herve de Crece (the whole thing is available in a number of places [legally, I hope], including over at TwitchFilm, an excellent source for news of film projects from outside of the United States mainstream).  The official site for the film can be found here.

An image from Logorama

The film is a short, sweet little action adventure that takes place in a fictional(?) Los Angeles where everything, the people included, are corporate logos.  There are a number of ways to look at this slice of visual genius; we can view this as nothing more than a laugh, but there is more to the film’s central conceit than this; there is something chillingly plausible about this world, which looks more than a little like some parts of the United States today. In a world where so many people are willing to shell out extra money to buy a T-shirt with a corporate logo on it, and a world where kids on the other side of the world dress and act as if they were in an American hip-hop video (all the time talking about how they are ‘keeping it real,’ of course), this degree of commodification seems just around the corner, even as the financial edifice that such a commodification has helped to build crumbles around us.  This leads to a question that may seem to be defeatist, but which is worth taking seriously: is this  ever more dominant aspect of the world entirely immune to criticism?

‘At the level of consumption, this new spirit is that of so-called “cultural capitalism”: we primarily buy commodities neither on account of their utility nor as status symbols; we buy them to get the experience provided by them, we consume them in order to render our lives pleasurable and meaningful … This is how capitalism, at the level of consumption, integrated the legacy of ’68, the critique of alienated consumption: authentic experience matters’.[1]

That the companies whose logos are put to use here have not blocked the release of the film is surprising, or perhaps  merely an indication of how comfortable they all are with the current state of things, and how frustratingly little such small acts of protest really are.  I am reminded here of Starbucks’ cooperation in allowing their products to feature in the early scenes of David Fincher’s visionary Fight Club, as scathing a critique of contemporary consumer culture as Hollywood has produced in the decade since its first release.

‘The pressure “to do something” here is like the superstitious compulsion to make some gesture when we are observing a process over which we have no real influence.  Are not our acts often such gestures?  The old saying “Don’t just talk, do something!” is one of the most stupid things one can say, even measured by the low standards of common sense’.[2]

Logorama is strong, subversive stuff, or at least it should be.  That it may be prevented by the structure and the ubiquity of that which it critiques from being received as anything other than its glossy surface and its pitch-perfect homage to Pulp Fiction is  a deeply troubling thought.


[1] Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009): 52-54.

[2] Žižek, Tragedy, 11.


Sigmund Freud and the Animal Farm School of Intellectual Inquiry

04 Thursday Mar 2010

Posted by Alan Smithee in Academics, Ethics, History, Living, Reference, Relativism

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Animal Farm, Animal Farm Tendency, George Orwell, Sigmund Freud

Deane, having been back from a trip to Australia for about three hours, has already at least doubled the number of words posted to this record that I managed to post in the entire two weeks he was gone.  I am well and truly shamed and must endeavour to do better …

In the very appropriate spirit of shame, a few thoughts on reading Sigmund Freud, which I am doing in preparation for teaching a class on religion and modernity in which the poor students will have to take Freud seriously.  In his 1927 book on religion, The Future of an Illusion, as translated by James Strachey in The Complete Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961), Freud writes,

Sigmund Freud in The Hague in 1920

If all the evidence put forward for the authenticity of religious teachings originates in the past, it is natural to look round and see whether the present, about which it is easier to form judgments, may not also be able to furnish evidence of the sort,  If by this means we could succeed in clearing even a single portion of the religious system from doubt, the whole of it would gain enormously in credibility.  The proceedings of the spiritualists meet us at this point; they are convinced of the survival of the individual soul to demonstrate to us beyond doubt the truth of this one religious doctrine.  Unfortunately they cannot succeed in refuting the fact that the appearance and utterances of their spirits are merely the products of their own mental activity. They have called up the spirits of the greatest men and of the most eminent thinkers, but all the pronouncements and information which they have received from them have been so foolish and so wretchedly meaningless that one can find nothing credible in them but the capacity of the spirits to adapt themselves to the circle of people who have conjured them up.

I must now mention two attempts that have been made – both of which convey the impressions of being desperate efforts – to evade the problem.  One, of a violent nature, is ancient; the other is subtle and modern.  The first is the ‘Credo quia absurdum‘ of the early Father of the Church [Tertullian].  It maintains that religious doctrines are outside the jurisdiction of reason – are above reason.  Their truth must be felt inwardly, and they need not be comprehended.  But this Credo is only of interest as a self-confession.  As an authoritative statement it has no binding force.  Am I obliged to believe every absurdity?  And if not, why this one in particular?  There is no appeal to a court above that of reason.  If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience which bears witness to that truth, what one to do about the many people who do not this rare experience?  One may require every man to use the gift of reason which he possesses, but one cannot erect, on the basis of a motive that exists only for a very few, an obligation that shall apply to everyone.  If one man has gained an unshakable conviction of the true reality of religious deoctrones from a state of exstasy which has deeply moved him, of what significance is that to others? (pp. 27-28).

That I find myself in more or less absolute agreement with most of Freud writes here is disturbing on a personal level, as I find Freud to be a load of destructive nonsense and antinomian conjecture; however, on closer inspection, there is something glaringly off about this passage in light of Freud’s larger project.  This is an instance of what I want to call the ‘Animal Farm Tendency’ within intellectual inquiry.  Recalling the bitter climax of George Orwell’s masterpiece Animal Farm, first published in the UK in 1945 as Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, the modification of the original credo of ‘all animal are equal’ to ‘all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others‘, this tendency, endemic within many fields of academic inquiry, is the tendency to be blind to the lapses in reason in every system of thought but one’s own.

The cover of the first British edition

For example, Freud’s entire system of thought, impressively involved as it is, is instantly undermined by the simple fact that Freud is as indebted as any Christian to the acceptance of certain assertions based less on reason than on other factors.  If one rejects as rank assertion Freud’s sacred trinity of Mother, Father, and Child (and all of the implicit sexual tension within this trinity) and the whole apparatus of his symbolic interpretation of dreams, the whole of the Freudian structure of though becomes largely untenable.  This is especially glaring given his arrogance and his pretensions towards science.  After all, he did write that many of the things plaguing humanity, religion among them, would eventually be ‘destroyed by psychoanalysis’ (31).

Freud is not alone in this sort of thinking.  We need think only of any of the predestinarian theologies, which assert a standard of evidence that neccessarily excludes those who are disinclined to believe in such theology.  This is even more true among the many theologians who have adopted a putatively – but poorly understood and lazily formulated – postmodernism.  Here we need only think of someone like Jean-Luc Marion, who uses the language of open inquiry to mask what is in reality a simple assertion of the truth of Christian Revelation.  John W. Cooper gives us another example:

In response to modernist claims of rational autonomy, some Reformed apologists have so strongly emphasized the relativity of reason to true faith and uniquely Christian presuppositions that the universal availability of any truth whatsoever has in effect been denied. What results is a kind of religious relativism. Truth is admitted to be completely system-relative, but only (Reformed?) Christians are acknowledged to have the right system.

The logic, undoubtedly given a boost by the language of the postmodern movement, goes something like this: ‘in a relativistic world, there is no such thing as thought free from presuppositions; therefore, everyone must be obliged to respect the presuppositions of others’.  Fair enough.  As far as this goes, we are still within the relatively respectable territory of ‘all animals are equal’.  However, the next step within the Animal Farm Tendency is to add a further phrase: ‘there is no such thing as thought without presuppositions; therefore, everyone must be obliged to respect the presuppositions of others; therefore, we are justified in claiming that our presuppositions are superior (or more equal)’ to those of others.

Animal Farm illustration by Jim Conte

Other scholars in many disciplines, biblical studies and broader religious studies among them, have used a similarly uncritical relativism to support absolutist claims or to simply and without reflection claim the truth of a given set of presuppositions. Much as it may pain me to say this, there are many examples of the Animal Farm Tendency within contemporary Marxist thought; in fact, anyone relying uncritically on Marx’s materialist meta-narrative of history is guilty of walking on two legs after denouncing walking on two legs.

Such thinking, whether it aimed at religious, historical, ethnic, or scientific ends, reminds at least this reader unavoidably of the immortal Leninist slogan delivered the pig Napoleon at the end of  Animal Farm.

Let’s have some more examples, this time from the audience …

The ‘World Wide Web’ and the Utopian Imaginary

26 Friday Feb 2010

Posted by Alan Smithee in Internet, Language, Living, Postcolonialism, Reference, Universalism

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Internet, Punk, Utopian imagination, World Wide Web

‘The Internet has empowered the marginal, the talentless, and the librarian in all of us.  If punk gave everyone carte blanche to pick up a guitar and scream at the world, so the World Wide Web has allowed everyone the opportunity to share their small world-view with anyone with time to kill’.

The writer, the journalist Dylan Jones (From ‘Icon: Frank Sinatra’, GQ July 2007, p. 68), here gets at a valuable aspect of Internet content and its seemingly inevitable trivialising nature, something I have had to grapple with while working on this site.  But he is, on a more serious note, missing something equally valuable.

It is telling to take a good look at these two sentences and the way that they ignore the often ignored fact the Internet is not really a voice for everyone, but a potential and potentially limiting voice for everyone with access to a computer and a certain degree of technical know-how.  The same is perhaps true of punk rock, his earlier referent, but at least punk, which may have been accessible to more people as creators than, say, classical piano, but which was still limited by economic and other factors, made no real claims to being a world-wide or universal phenomenon.

The idea of the ‘World Wide Web’, and the ubiquity of the term itself, is by contrast a utopian promise, a dream not only of universal access but of universal participation in a major cultural forum.  That it has failed singularly in creating this utopia is so blindingly obvious that it perhaps should pass by without mention.  The fact that it makes this promise – and the fact that this promise is so often believed – is in itself very interesting, especially if we want to draw connections between the persistence of technological utopianism and the Christian tradition of eschatology that it grew out of.

The World Wide Web, in its very name, promises the democratisation of knowledge, despite the fact that similar claims were made about the telegraph, the telephone, the printing press, the railroad, the radio, and the personal computer, and despite the fact that these claims have never been validated, at least not without studiously ignoring the facts.  Indeed, such promises were made as far back in time as the emergence of the written word, which was itself reliant upon a series of potent technologies.  All of these things, especially the printing press, have had a democratising effect on the production and distribution of knowledge, but at the same time all of these things have also played an important role in the creation of new elites as well as new forms of cultural and technological poverty.  As James Carey writes,

There is, however, a more stringent sense of the meaning of a monopoly of knowledge.  When one speaks, let us say, of the monopoly of religious knowledge, of the institutional church, one is not referring to the control of particles of information.  Instead, one is referring to control of the entire system of thought, or paradigm, that determines what it is that can be religiously factual, that determines what the standards are for assessing the truth of any elucidation of these facts, and that defines what it is that can be accounted for as knowledge.  Modern computer enthusiasts may be willing to share their data with anybody.  What they are not willing to relinquish as readily is the entire technocratic worldview that determines what qualifies as an acceptable or valuable fact.  What they monopolize is not the body of data itself but the approved, certified, sanctioned, official mode of thought-indeed, the definition of what it means to be reasonable … Instead of creating a ‘new future,’ modern technology invites the public to participate in a ritual of control in which fascination and technology masks the underlying factors of politics and power.  But this only brings up-to-date what has always been true of the literature of the future.  This literature, with its body of predictions, prescriptions, and prophecies, is a cultural strategy for moving or mobilizing or arousing people toward predefined ends by prescribed means.[1]

Incidentally, we also must keep in mind that data, the Internet’s forte, is not the same as information, which is not the same as knowledge, which is not the same as wisdom.  There are more steps in the democratisiation of knowledge than simple access, as anyone who has read an undergraduate essay which cites only online sources will readily attest.  It is indeed one of the curious paradoxes of the Information Age that there is perhaps a greater degree of access to data than at any point in history at the same time that fewer and fewer people have access to the sorts of knowledge and critical skills that are necessary to navigate the morass of rhetoric, misinformation, and simple ignorance that is characteristic of the Internet.  However, this utopian rhetoric raises a serious question that is not granted enough serious consideration: given that significant numbers of people on this planet have never even used a telephone, just how world wide can the ‘World Wide Web’ possibly be?

In fact, it is possible to argue that the label  ‘World Wide Web’ is in reality another way of distinguishing the part of the world that matters – the world of the wealthy, the (largely) white, and the self-consciously modern – from the rest of the world in all of its poverty and backwardness.  This is nicely illustrated by a popular image from 2007 showing Internet access density (thanks to the artist, Chris Harrison, for making this accessible on his website):

This image puts the lie to the idea of a truly World Wide Web, as much of the world is simply missing, or sunk in darkness.  The areas that are portrayed as blank spaces on this image are sadly predictable and follow more or less exactly the patterns laid out by economic oppression and exploitation in global capitalism.  The same is true of the following visualisation, from the same source, this time documenting Internet traffic:

Here even more of the world simply fades into the blackness of technological backwardness, raising another very real question: is the Internet a part of the solution to the staggering problems that these maps speak of, or is it simply another part of the problem, another way of delineating the haves from the have nots?

In the end, the truly marginal are not the solitary toilers sitting in front of computer screens sending out their worldview for general consideration (and, we assume, validation), but are instead those who lack access to even the basic tools that advertising and other interested cultural forces have told us are necessary for authentic communication, not to mention the billions who lack access to clean water, basic health care, or simply enough to eat.

Though this may seem to be taking all of this in the direction of conspiracy and needs a good deal more investigation to be anything more than conjecture, I want to suggest that the label ‘World Wide Web’ is both a utopian promise and a shield from precisely this sort of criticism.  This, of course, is the result of a range of factors and not simply a choice made with the deliberate goal of creating and maintaining socio-economic inequalities, but that doesn’t make it any less damaging.  There is no reason to be a Luddite about all of this, and no need to retreat to a facile, outdated technological determinism; there is, however, a real need to pay attention to the cultural and economic aspects of information technology, from the quill to the computer on which I write these words.  As Erik Davis writes, resorting to what is a not unjustified hyperbole, ‘Without turning to face our own terminal screens, without sharpening critical wisdom and cultivating compassion, the Internet may only become a new brand of bondage’.[2]

McLuhan, and those, like Baudrillard, who were influenced by him, have made this point over and over again, and made it well: technology is never ideologically neutral, and to think otherwise is indeed dangerous.


[1] James Carey, Communication as CultureEssays on Media and Society(New York: Routledge, 1989): 194-195.


[2] Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2004): 380.  He elaborates: ‘In the long run, I suspect that some of the most valuable and productive aspect of postmodern thought may lie in its confrontation with digital technology, whose alien cunning it helped to articulate and whose posthuman possibilities it helped to unfold … cyber-culture also embodies the channel-surfing decadence, depthless fragmentation, and smug obsession with self-referential codes and jargon that characterize postmodern culture at its worst.’  Davis, Tech, 388.

Cinema as Exorcism (One): The Case of (White) Australia [Repost]

18 Thursday Feb 2010

Posted by Eric Repphun in Film, History, Language, Politics, Reference, Religion, Texts, Violence

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Australia, Balibo, Film, Spectrality, Van Diemen's Land

Frame capture from The Proposition (2006)
Frame capture from The Proposition (2006)

In honour of the wide New Zealand release of the excellent Australian film Balibo this week, I am going to re-publish the following piece, which originally ran in August of last year, at the end of Dunedin’s International Film Festival.  This is also the first episode in the ongoing (and marginally popular) series ‘Cinema as Exorcism’, more of which can be found here, here, and here).  Balibo tells the story of a number of Australian (and one kiwi) journalists who get caught up in Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in 1979 and tells that story with a keen eye for both detailed realism and for the ways in which the most important lessons about national identity are often learned far away from home.  If you want to support the existence of tightly-crafted,  t0ugh-minded, politically and socially relevant cinema, go and see Balibo, even if its portrait of journalism as relevant social action, sadly, appears badly dated.

Inspired by two very good Australian films that screened down here at the International Film Festival, this is the first of what will (hopefully) be a series of posts dealing with film and various aspects of spectrality (and thanks to Deane for this last word).

These two very different films hammer home something that has been increasingly clear in the past few years: Australia, as a nation, is attempting through the cinema to shed the shackles of its national ghosts, or at least bring these spectres into the full, harsh light of day.  This is more than simple katharsis, it seems, bridging over into some more elemental; expiation maybe, even exorcism.  Australia – or at least Australian art, as the Australian government seems to be committed to continuing its long history of criminal behaviour – is engaged in a collective exorcism.  This is true, I suppose, of only those people who make these films or the people who choose to see them instead of Transformers. Perhaps this needs a further clarification, as this exorcism is largely confined to the ghosts of Australia’s European past.  The long plight of the Aboriginal peoples is still largely consigned to the darkness, or is subject to well-meaning but ultimately hollow official attempts at apology.  Something like Philip Noyce’s film Rabbit-Proof Fence, for all its striving nobility, simply doesn’t pack the emotional punch and the raw sense of wrongness that characterises the film-as-exorcism.

Jonathan auf der Heide’s remarkable debut Van Diemen’s Land recounts the story – such as it is – of eight convicts who escaped from the brutal penal colony at Macquarie Harbour in Tasmania in 1822.  Of these eight men, only one, an Irish thief named Alexander Pearce, would be found a number of weeks later, claiming to have killed and eaten a number of his fellow prisoners to survive.  The authorities were loath to believe Pearce, choosing to believe instead that Pearce was covering for his friends still at large.  It muddied the water considerably when Pearce escaped again a few years later and was found with human flesh in his pockets, despite the fact that he still had other things to eat.  He was hanged.  Almost two hundred years later, the filmmakers take Pearce at his word, taking us with the group as they are slowly whittled down by hunger, by malice, and by the sheer fact that they were all city-dwellers in the wilds of an unforgiving, uncaring island.  Eschewing the temptation to hammer the scant source material into a standard narrative form, the film instead evokes something of the experience of the men involved: the days bleed into another endlessly; the men themselves remain largely indistinguishable; the world is reduced eventually to an endless tract of damp forest; the bursts of violence are sudden, messy, and uncomfortably brutal.  It is an unsettling vision of the world, made all the more alien by Pearce’s Gaelic voiceover.  This is harsh, essential humanity at its very worst, the long, sad plight of imperfect men placed into an inhuman situation by circumstance and by the ambitions of others.  This is, the film makes very explicit, what made Australia, and by extension the whole of the British Empire; it was built on the suffering of untold hundreds of men like Pearce, sent to the ends of the Earth for the heinous crime of stealing six pairs of shoes.  Pearce is neither villain nor hero.  In the film, he simply is, and the film confronts the audience with his image, his voice, and his ghost, perhaps hoping that it will simply fade away now that its eternal bloodlust has been dramatised and made clear for all to see.

The other film that leads me in this direction is Robert Connolly’s Balibo, based again on historical incident and on the lives of real people.  The film tells of six Australian journalists (one of whom was a New Zealander) on the ground during the 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor.  The film is structured almost as a mystery, following the journey of Roger East, played as both a lion in winter and as a faded revolutionary by a superb Anthony LaPaglia, as he follows the trail of five younger colleagues, who witnessed the early days of the invasion.  In stunningly recreated period detail, we see these hapless young men struggle to capture evidence that would prove to the world that Indonesia was ramping up an illegal invasion of a sovereign nation that had only recently gained its freedom from Portugal.  They paid for this dream with their lives, and the film spares us very little of their terror and the ignominy of their final moments in a deserted cinder-block house.  The film is as much about Australia turning a blind eye to the invasion (in which as many as 183,000 people were killed) as it is about the invasion itself. At the end of Balibo, East is captured when the invasion begins in earnest.  He chants a desperate mantra – ‘I’m an Australian, I’m an Australian’ – trying to save himself from execution.  He fails and is gunned down unceremoniously.  He fails also to convince the audience that his nationality can (and should) save him, and Connolly leaves little doubt that some of the responsibility for the invasion should be laid at the feet of Australia and its opportunistic foreign policy.  The final images, triumphant archival footage from East Timor’s eventual independence from Indonesia in 1999, do little to erase the feeling that this film, like Van Diemen’s Land, is grappling with the ghosts of colonial guilt and with Australia’s uneasy relationship with its past.  The film opens with a title card that is rare in that it is so unequivocal: ‘This is a true story’.  Not ‘Based on true events’ or ‘Inspired by actual events’, but a blunt assertion of historical truth, making this even more of a punch to the gut, even purer an act of exorcism.

Tracing this trend a few years into the past, John Hillcoat’s painfully brilliant Aussie Western The Proposition, released in 2006, is perhaps the paradigmatic case of this kind of filmmaking.  Less an Unforgiven-like deconstruction of the tropes of the genre, Hillcoat’s film is more of an evisceration of every shred of dignity from the frontier.  With a script by Bad Seed singer Nick Cave (who provides the score along with Warren Ellis, the violinist from Dirty Three), the film mines an almost biblical vein of filth and violence on the borderlands of nineteenth century British civility.  The film closes on an image of two bearded, filthy Irish immigrants sitting in the sands just outside a displaced, genteel English house at the edge of the Outback, staring out into the future.  The psychotic Arthur Burns (played with a sociopathic refinement by Danny Huston) is dying slowly, facing the endless nothingness.  Arthur asks his younger brother Charlie (played by a gauntly intense Guy Pearce) the question that has plagued every modern person since Hamlet: ‘What are you going to do now?’  Charlie, having killed Arthur in a futile bid to save the life of their angelic younger brother, is left to face the future forever trapped between savagery and civilisation.  That the brothers end the film staring away from the English house and into the wilds speaks of a profound emptiness and a deep unease at the core of Australia’s sense of its own European history.   Incidentally, walking out of the theatre after seeing The Proposition, I overheard the best impromptu film review ever: a young woman behind me turned to her friend and said in a shaky voice, ‘I thought I was going to vomit the whole time that was playing’.  This is elemental, haunted, and resonant filmmaking.  This is expiation.

Australia’s spiritual and geographic neighbour New Zealand really hasn’t delved into its own past in quite this fashion – save for a few brilliant exceptions like Geoff Murphy’s Utu (1983) – and I suspect New Zealand’s puritan underbelly and its continued reverence for both the British Empire and for its own (small) part in that Empire will prevent this from happening.  While there are kiwi films that are willing to admit that New Zealand society is underpinned by an almost impenetrable darkness – see Brad McGann’s 2004 In My Father’s Den for an outstanding example of this – and even films that dramatise and make visible this dark core – see Robert Sarkies’ 2006 Out of the Blue, arguably the best film ever made in this country – there is little evidence that the wholesale historical exorcism that we see in Australian film is anywhere close to the surface.

This is a shame; we need to do this, and soon.

The only thing perhaps that we can change is the past and we do it all the time.

Ninian Smart

George Orwell Was (Mostly) Right: Newspeak Today

05 Friday Feb 2010

Posted by Alan Smithee in Ethics, Language, Literature, Living, Metaphor, Politics, Reference, Rhetoric, Texts, Violence

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Apple, Barack Obaom, George Orwell, IPad, Nineteen Eighty-Four

First British edition of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

In his visionary 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the science fiction pioneer George Orwell lays out a vision of a terrifying dystopian future where everything, even thought, ispoliced and monitored by Big Brother, an oppressive and virtually omniscient government.  The diegetic world of the novel is dominated by Newspeak, a new propaganda language in which everything has at least two meanings and which uses language to obscure rather that communicate meaning and truth.  Living in a world increasingly dominated by meaningless Managmentspeak – ‘going forward’, ‘learning outcomes’, ‘consultation’, etc., etc. – and by an equally meaningless and equally damaging antinomian Therapyspeak – ‘bipolar disorder’, ‘happiness’, ‘ Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder’, ‘life goals’, etc., etc. – it is very difficult to escape the impression that Orwell’s future is closer to the reality that we are facing than most people would like to believe.

A few examples of very real Newspeak from contemporary history: 1) An American president dedicated to continuing the aggressive, imperialistic campaigns against the Middle East launched by his much-hated predecessor is given the world’s highest honour for peace.

2) A new piece of technology that is simply a new way of doing the same old tasks is marketed and received as both a magical and a revolutionary device – the image below is from the official Apple website.  The special irony (and equating pure functionality with enchantment is indeed a fine irony) here is that Apple made a famed advertisement that aired in 1984 which claimed that arrival of the personal computer would be the reason that ‘1984 won’t be like Nineteen eighty-Four‘ (the ad is available here).  Anyone who says that the world is fully disenchanted world has obviously never really looked at contemporary advertising practices, which enchant the world for the mercenary aim of profit.

I’d be happy to have any other examples of Newspeak from out there if you know of any …

War is Peace

Functionality is Magic, or Consumption is Rebellion

Family First NZ: Jokes About Sexy Jesus Still Not Funny

17 Thursday Dec 2009

Posted by Eric Repphun in Language, Living, Politics, Reference, Religion, Rhetoric, Texts

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Advertising, Church, Humour, St Matthew in the City

And now for a fascinating example of the recent reception history of a religious figure …

St Matthew in the City, a progressive Anglican church in Auckland (the biggest city – not that this is saying a whole lot – in New Zealand), is planning to erect a controversial billboard to raise awareness of the ‘Christ’ part of Christmas and to provoke discussion about the holiday and its meaning.  The billboard shows Mary and Joseph in bed and makes a cheeky, glancing reference to the Virgin Birth:

Billboard for St Matthew in the City, Auckland, New Zealand

The billboard, before it has even made its first public appearance on the street, is being roundly decried by Family First New Zealand, a conservative Evangelical group in the mode of the American Focus on the Family.  Family First’s Bob McCoskrie had this to say about the advertisement:

The church can have its debate on the virgin birth and its spiritual significance inside the church building, but to confront children and families with the concept as a street billboard is completely irresponsible and unnecessary … The church has failed to recognise that public billboards are exposed to all of the public including children and families who may be offended by the material.

The assertion that children could possibly be offended by the material is simply nonsensical, especially in a heavily secularised (and often illiterate and anti-intellectual) place like New Zealand, where a fair percentage of the people who see the billboard will be rather likely not to even understand what it is referring to.  If this really is offensive, than all the better, as being offended is tantamount to having to think seriously about something.  On an incidental note, the consequences of this last sentiment – that advertising that offends should not be allowed – are vast when we consider that there are people out there, me for instance, who find mediocrity of any kind offensive.

There is a long-standing tradition in Christianity to immediately condemn any connection between Jesus and sexual activity of any kind.  Whether this is due to a perceived need to defend the ludicrous doctrine of the virgin birth from critique (is the NT wrong?) or simply another aspect of the long historical tradition that claims the elevated, the divine, or the righteous are not subject to the same bodily weaknesses and urges that the rest of us are endlessly plagued with (for Deane’s thoughts on this, see here and here), remains an open question.  We saw similar tendencies in reactions to the rubbish novel and film The Da Vinci Code and to the brilliant novel and film The Last Temptation of Christ.  Despite all of the ballyhoo to the contrary, I want to suggest that these negative reactions were related more to the idea of a sexual Jesus (which Martin Scorcese’s film showed in some detail) than to any of these texts’  other criticisms of the churches.

In a final note, the billboard, by a mainline Christian church, is in some ways far more subversive, and certainly far more intelligent, than the recent advertising campaign by the New Zealand Atheist Bus Campaign, which raised $20,000 from donations to place advertisements on  a number of public buses that read ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’.  That this is a cliched and seriously tired sentiment (though one that still applies most to a certain breed of Calvinist) need pass by without mention.  That they feel the need to add the word ‘probably’ reveals either that they are  deliberately trying to tone down their message or are simply unsure of themselves makes them both bad provocateurs and bad atheists.   This kind of waffling undermines the whole of the campaign.  True atheism needs to be both bold, unequivocal, and, as I’ve written elsewhere, historically aware.  The billboard, on the other hand, is thought-provoking, even to someone who has already in this post declared the idea of virgin birth as ‘ludicrous’.  It also has the distinct advantage of actually being funny – I love the wistful look in Mary’s eyes as she gazes heavenward and thinks what are most likely very impure thoughts about her God – and of using humour to a far more serious purpose than a knee-jerk appeal to a bland and poorly understood atheism – without God, are we completely free from any obligation as moral agents, free to simply enjoy our lives, or (to employ a much-used and ultimately meaningless word) are we finally free to be happy?

Thanks to Stuff.co.nz for the image and the quotations (without their permission, of course, this is the Internet).

The Minds Which Seduce Us: On First Reading E. M. Cioran’s The Temptation to Exist

11 Sunday Oct 2009

Posted by Eric Repphun in Biblical Studies, Continental Philosophy, Death, Ethics, Evil, God, Hebrew Bible, History, Language, Philosophy, Reference, Religion, Rhetoric, Texts, Theory

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

America, Confession, E. M. Cioran, Exile, Job, Judaism, The Temptation to Exist

One of the most palpable pleasures of the academic life is to find a new thinker, a new author who challenges, excites, infuriates, or simply makes one prick up one’s ears.  So much the better to stumble upon a thinker who has a long list of books just waiting to be explored, deconstructed, and enjoyed.  My recent encounter with Emil Cioran’s collection of essays, The Temptation to Exist[1], is the intellectual equivalent to my first listen to Tom Wait’s Closing Time as an undergraduate, where the joy of discovery is only deepened with the knowledge that there are – in the case of Waits – albums like Rain Dogs and Bone Machine waiting in the wings.  Unlike Waits, Cioran is no longer living and working among us, so his body of work is bounded in time, but there is still a lifetime of writing to anticipate reading.  I’ve got two more of his books waiting for me at home already.  I’ve come to Cioran by recommendation of Deane, who is, according to one commenter, The Dunedin School’s ‘archblogger’, who has yet to recommend to me a bad book, which is in itself rather remarkable.

E. M. Cioran

E. M. Cioran

Cioran, born in Romania in 1911 with a Romanian Orthodox priest for a father, took to philosophy early in life, travelling to Berlin in 1933, where he developed a certain sympathy for the Nazis and for the Romanian nationalistic organisation The Iron Guard, despite the fact that violence of any kind made him uncomfortable.  Cioran spent much of his adult life working and living largely as a hermit in France and he would eventually repudiate all of his ties to the political right, expressing his regret clearly in later interviews.  He died in 2005, leaving a mass of unpublished work that is still tied up in the French courts.   Reading Cioran is maddening, joyous, and difficult.  Understanding him is, if anything, even worse.  Writing in the aphoristic philosophical tradition that includes such diverse figures as Nietzsche, Baudrillard, and Wittgenstein, Cioran is one to read and to ponder in mad, great lumps or in discrete bites.  I can’t pretend to have mined any of this with any thoroughness, but I’ve included some highlights, some things that caught my attention, that pricked up my ears.

Cioran, in ‘Thinking Against Oneself’, betraying his history of sympathy to fascism (which, though this is a troubling thought, does not mean that he is wrong):

Almost all our discoveries are due to our violence, to the exacerbation of our instability.  Even God, insofar as He [sic] interests us – it is not in our innermost selves that we discern God, but at the extreme limits of our fever, at the very point where, our rage confronting His, a shock results, an encounter as ruinous for Him as for us (33).

In the same essay, on Christianity:

But the Christian virus torments us: heirs of the flagellants, it is by refining our excruciations that we become conscious of ourselves.  Is religion declining?  We perpetuate its extravagances, as we perpetuate the macerations and the cell-shrieks of old, our will to suffer equalling that of the monasteries in their heyday.  If the Church no longer enjoys a monopoly on hell, it has nonetheless riveted us to a chain of sighs, to the cult of the ordeal, of blasted joys and jubilant despair … No sage among our ancestors, but malcontents, triflers, fanatics whose disappointments or excesses we must continue (34-35).

Wherever there is suffering, it exhausts mystery or renders it luminous (39).

The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their lives a meaning (45).

From ‘On a Winded Civilisation’ on the intellectual life (and this hits very close to home):

The tired intellectual sums up the deformities and the vices or a world adrift.  He does not act, he suffers; if he favors the notion of tolerance, he does not find in it the stimulant he needs.  Tyranny furnished that, as do the doctrines of which it is the outcome.  If he is the first of its victims, he will not complain: only the strength that grinds him into the dust seduces him.  To want to be free is to want to be oneself; but he is tired of being himself, of blazing a trail into uncertainty, of stumbling through truths.  ‘Bind me with the chains of Illusion’, he sighs, even as he says farewell to the peregrinations of Knowledge.  Thus he will fling himself, eyes closed, into any mythology which will assure him the protection and the peace of the yoke (57-58).

The future belongs to the suburbs of the globe (64).

In ‘A Little Theory of Destiny’ and ‘Advantages of Exile’, Cioran explores the idea of exile and living as an expatriate, which is very much on my mind on as I am on a short trip back to my American hometown of Boulder, Colorado (the New Age capital of the universe), a place I love and hate in equal measure – and his writing captures some of the essence of my experience so well that is almost chilling:

The aspiration to ‘save’ the world is the morbid phenomenon of a people’s youth (66).

Hating my people, my country, its timeless peasants enamored of their own torpor and almost bursting with hebetude, I blushed to be descended from them, repudiated them, rejected their sub-eternity, their larval certainties, the geologic reverie.  No use scanning their features for their fidgets, the grimaces of revolt: the monkey, alas! was dying in them.  In truth, did they not sprout from the very rock?  Unable to rouse them, or to animate them, I came to the point of dreaming of an extermination.  One does not massacre stones.  The spectacle they offered me justified and baffled, nourished and disgusted my hysteria.  And I never stopped cursing the accident that caused me to be born among them (70).

It is a mistake to think of the expatriate as someone who abdicates, who withdraws and humbles himself, resigned to his miseries, his outcast state.  On a closer look, he turns out to be ambitious, aggressive in his disappointments, his very acrimony qualified by his belligerence.  The more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and our illusions become (74).

On poetry, an analysis that fits New Zealand, a decidedly minor nation that is very fond of poetry, like a glove:

Consider the production of any ‘minor’ nation which has not been so childish as to make up a past for itself: the abundance of poetry is its most striking characteristic.  Prose requires, for its development, a certain rigor, a differentiated social status, and a tradition: it is deliberate, constructed; poetry wells up: it is direct or else totally fabricated; the prerogative of cave men or aesthetes, it flourishes only on the near or far side of civilization, never at the center.  Whereas prose demands a premeditated genius and a crystallized language, poetry is perfectly compatible with a barbaric genius and a formless language (76).

In ‘A People of Solitaries’, which on occasion strays dangerously close to an unformed, casual anti-Semitism, Cioran offers as astute, troubling look at Judaism in European history:

To be a man is a drama; to be a Jew is another.  Hence, the Jew has the privilege of living our condition twice over.  He represents the alienated existence par excellence or, to utilize an expression by which the theologians describe God, the wholly other (80).

However grave its consequences may have been, the rejection of Christianity remains the Jews’ finest exploit, a no which does them honor.  If previously they had walked alone by necessity, they would henceforth do so by resolve, as outcasts armed with a great cynicism, the sole precaution they have taken against the future (85).

On Job, a frequent guest here at The Dunedin School (turn the pages and stop here and here):

The tragic hero rarely seeks an accounting from a blind, impersonal Fate: it is his pride to accept its decrees.  He will perish, then, he and his.  But a Job harasses his God, demands an accounting: a formal summons results, of a sublime bad taste, which would doubtless have repelled a Greek but which touches, which overwhelms us.  These outpourings, these vociferations of a plagued man who offers conditions to Heaven and submerges it with his imprecations – how can we remain insensitive to such a thing?  The closer we are to abdicating, the more these cries disturb us.  Job is indeed of his race: his sobs are a show of force, an assault.  ‘My bones are pierced in me in the night season’, he laments.  His lamentation culminates in a cry, and this cry rises through the vaults of Heaven and makes God tremble.  Insofar as, beyond our silences and our weaknesses, we dare lament our ordeals, we are all descendents of the great leper, heirs of his desolation and his moan.  But too often our voices fall silent; and though he shows us how to work ourselves to his accents, he does not manage to shake us out of our inertia.  Indeed, he has the best of it: he knew Whom to vilify or implore, Whom to attack or pray to.  But we – against whom are we to cry out?  Our own kind?  That seems to us absurd.  No sooner articulated than our rebellions expire on our lips … Job has transmitted his energy to his own people: thirsting like him for justice, they never yield before the evidence of an iniquitous world.  Revolutionaries by instinct, the notion of renunciation fails to occur to them: if Job, that Biblical Prometheus, struggled with God, they would struggle with men (99-100).

There is so much more that could be said about The Temptation to Exist, but it is late and I will leave you with a final note, from ‘Some Blind Alleys: A Letter’, in which Cioran, writing decades before the rise of the now dominant therapeutic ethos and the repellent spectacle of reality television, sees into the future with a striking clarity:

The confessional? a rape of conscience perpetrated in the name of heaven.  And that other rape, psychological analysis!  Secularized, prostituted, the confessional will soon be installed on our street corners: except for a couple of criminals, everyone aspires to have a public soul, a poster soul (109).

Never have I wanted more to be a criminal, and more ashamed to be working – with these very words – towards a public soul.


[1] E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist, translated by Richard Howard, with an Introduction by Susan Sontag (London: Quartet Encounters, 1987).  All page numbers cited in parenthesis refer to this version of the text.

(Incidentally, The Dunedin School has been ranked #35 on the Biblioblog Top 50 list this month, which is kind of funny, as some of us aren’t even Biblical scholars, though we are constantly running into that damned thing.)

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