antagonist

I see the theology of he Historians, which I said was wretched, as indirect, vicious subordination of the ephermal to the permanent. Octave’s relation to Roberte, in Klossowski’s work, would belong to this subordination (LE, 36)

In ‘The Theologians’, Borgès imagines two heresies by non-repitition: one is the act of certain sects called Histrions … (LE 35).

My examples are of suffering; they could have been of elation. There are labyrinths of joy, the latter no less mad than suffering, very close to it. Around the armchaim from the Marriage of Figaro, Beaumarchais traces some dazzling mazes, where pieces of bodies expelled from their shelters flee and get lost, by by laughing. Joy is constructive, concentratory; it is an elevation around a supremee addressee, but incredulous and insolent joy is the laughter of metamorphoses that awaits no-one’s recognition and enjoys only its ductility. It is a horizontal laught, without assent (LE 39).

(LE = Libidinal Economy)

… or The Work of Art in the Age of Genetic Replication

In both Michael Bay’s The Island and Curarón’s Children of Men, a painting by Pablo Picasso is shown. In The Island we see Femme Assise (Jacqueline) in the office of Dr. Merrick while in Children of Men we see Picasso’s heartfelt depiction of Franco’s fascist crimes against Guernica reduced to mere dining room wallpaper. The use of Picasso’s paintings act as cultural tags, markers, that confirm the viewer’s suspicion that he is dealing with some sort of Brave New World-ish utopia that will turn out to be quite its contrary. In other words, Guernica and Femme Assise, implicitly describe a political context for us.

To Dr. Merrick clones are product. They are to be harvested for their organs and prodigy. According to him they lack feelings or emotions, in short: humanity. The Picasso in his office is what makes this belief work for him. He knows very well the clones are human, in fact all too human. Through the painting he can keep a save distance from their humanity, but more importantly, from his own inhumanity.

What separates the clones from the likes of Merrick i.e the humans, is not simply their love of art. It is their capacity as human beings to appreciate art in the first place. A capacity clones must necessarily lack and which as Merrick clearly shows in a short dialogue with Mr. Laurent – the mercenary hired to retrieve the escaped clones but instead helps them ‘liberate’ themselves – is suspect to be absent in other ‘lesser’ people i.e Mr. Laurent. What art marks here, what is tagged, is that art points to the affirmation/negation of humanity.

An interesting contrast to this line of thought can be found in Kazuo Ishigiro’s most Kafkaian novel so far Never Let Me Go. The story is told by Kathy, a clone, and unfolds in a late nineties Britain of the previous century. Cloning has become common and as in The Island clones are mined for body parts or offspring. They have been reduced to what Heidegger said man’s primary condition in the Gestell is: Rohstoff. Man is literally a human resource and the clones in Ishiguro’s novel know it. The book tells the stories of the clones, euphemistically called students or donors, growing up at Hailsham, a boarding school. Of particular interest is that they are stimulated, even required, to create art. Every now and then the best artworks are picked out by the mysterious Madame and taken away. At the start of the book nobody knows why. Only much later is it revealed that the art and Hailsham in general was an experiment setup to show the humanity of the clones. Their art was taken away ‘because we [teachers at Hailsham] thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.’

Why was it necessary to show the humanity of the clones? Because as is explained to the students: ‘How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away the cure, to go back to the dark days? […] So for a long time you [the students] were kept in the shadows, and people did their best not to think about you. In other words: “How can you ask a world that has come to regard capitalism as the cure for everything, to leave capitalism behind. As long as we keep deluding ourselves through defensive disavowal we can avoid this aporia.” (It is no accident that this ‘logic’ is quite similar to Mark’s observation about Theo’s friend in Battersea (Children of Men) who when asked ‘how all of this [the art] can matter if there’s no one to see it?’ answers ‘I try not think about it’.)

So, the point here is that the clones need to be kept in dark, meaning they need to be kept oblivious about their humanity in order to perpetuate their status as replicated gene pools. Their humanity is kept from them which is why the mysterious Madame had to sneak away their art. It was too revealing in a sense. By keeping the clones unaware, by keeping them from properly assessing their own art, this seemingly allowed the non-clones, i.e. the cloned ones to maintain their fantasy that they were not doing something inhuman. ‘Art is a mirror’, Kafka wrote and thus a reflective medium and hence brings about reflection. By keeping the clones from the means to reflection it was hoped they did not attain, if you like, their proper class consciousness.

So what does art signal in Never Let Me Go? I venture to propose it marks the loss of humanity. By defensively disavowing and blocking the path to reflexivity, and thus emancipation, humanity is lost. The more pressing question is: whose humanity? Ironically, it is not the social class that is seemingly kept unreflexive that has lost their humanity, in fact they find it. The clone class, thought in this way, can be seen as a literal ‘living negation of capitalism’.

If we look only at the (re)production of humans or human tissue in the three mentioned examples (The Island, Never Let Me Go, Children of Men) we can start to discern a schema: in Children of Men man cannot procreate, in The Island procreation is delegated as is in Never Let Me Go (also Atwood’s Handman’s Tale comes to mind). A third element can be added to this schema by taking out or rather suspending the need for procreation completely as is done by Michel Houellebecq in The Possibility of an Island.

Houellebecq’s grand project is to eradicate the source of all human suffering i.e. desire which in his Dickian-Lovecraftian world can be wholly reduced to senseless sex, lethal lethargy and buffonic boredom. Sex as commodity is the materialisation of all suffering, a ’system of differentiation completely independent of money’ which is closely linked to man’s obsession to overcome his own finite existence and thus the instinctive drive for reproduction. In order to escape the everexpanding domain of constant struggle as the title of one of Houellebecq books suggests (Extension de domaine de la lutte) man must break the evolutionary chain of being i.e man must abandon sexual reproduction for the sake of reaching nirvana through a kind of innerwordly asceticism sans protestant ethic. This is the story of The Possibility of an Island where the practice of cloning is reformatted in an eternal-return-of-the-same messianic cosmo-ontology: we travel with protagonist Daniel through his various self-cloned reincarnations while he awaits the return of the Supreme Sister and The Future Ones.

While awaiting the future Daniels read the life account of the original Daniel, a radical comedian who spent a lifetime venting his islamophobia and eventually commits suicide after a life haunted by the search for the possibility of love.

Daniel’s self-imposed solipsicism is occasionally lifted by communicating with other clones via ‘email’ (the digital or virtual world in The Possibility of an Island is not pixelperfectly photorealistic but rather coarsely pixelated and text based.) Daniel writes poems which he leaves at an ip address; his only means of communicating with other clones. This is how art appears in TPI: as poetry. The ‘original’ Daniel (Daniel1), the comedian who in the end will take his own life, only starts to write poetry after he’s met Esther, one of the two women in his life narrative. When the other woman, Isabelle commits suicide, this does not provoke the need for poetic catharsis. Instead after the death of Fox, his dog, about whom Iggy Pop aptly sings that he is ‘a machine for loving’, does Daniel write poetry again and strangely, perhaps absurdly, it is dedicated to Esther. The last poem Daniel writes, just before he takes his own life is not a Daniel1 chapter but rather is relayed to us by Daniel25, the last clone of Daniel:

Et l’amour où tout est facile,
Où tout est donné dans l’instant;
Il existe au milieu du temps
La possibilité d’une île

The official English translation of the last stanza is a bit different from the Dutch one. First the English:

And love, where all is easy,
Where all is given in the instant;
There exists in the midst of time
The possibility of an island.

This is a quite literal translation. Here’s the Dutch translation retranslated into English:

And love, happiness without strife,
Where all is given instantly;
There exists a possibility
Of an island within time.

Why did the Dutch translator opt for translating using the word ‘happiness’. It does not appear in the French. But I think its import is correct. What makes love easy? Love that does not require struggle, which thus does not require strife or battle to obtain and maintain. In other words, this is love which cannot possibly exist, not in Houellebecq’s universe at least. The possibility pointed to then does not refer to as one reviewer put it ‘the impossibility of being an island’ but rather to the impossibility of the possibility an-sich. (Perhaps Houellebecq’s utopia is best described as an antitopia: a place which resists being a place in the first place?).

There can be no mistake about the return of the Future Ones and the Supreme Sister: it will not be. It cannot really be expected. It is abundantly obvious that the myth of their return is a fabrication, something which Daniel is all too aware of. In this way, it is a ‘messianique sans messianisme’: a qualitative experience of the non-present in which the present is both always already past and always arriving at the same time, which is to say that it is haunted. The Shakespearian out-of-jointness of time means that time is never present with or to itself. However much Houellebecq relegates Derrida to the domain of nonsense (as well as Foucault, Deleuze and Lacan), the messianism in the form of a messianicity structured in the return of the Future Ones and the Supreme Sister (i.e a messiah that has not existed and will not exist) can be thought of exactly as the kind of messianism Derrida had in mind. Daniel25’s wait for the Supreme Sister is in a way quite similar to Derrida’s messianic wait. Drifting in the ocean, towards what Caputo calls an ‘the futural possiblity of impossibility’ he is, as Derrida writes: ‘[A]waiting without horizon of the wait, awaiting what one does not expect yet or any longer’.

Some concluding remarks (or rather a conclusion without conclusion). Derrida “shun[s] the word ‘utopia’”. Instead messianicity is a ‘universal structure of experience which … is anything but utopian’. However he also claims that “one could not so much as account for the possibility of utopia in general without reference to what I call messianicity”. In The Possibility of an Island art shows this reference. It brings out messianicity and with it a pure hope (Ernst Bloch), which for lack of better word can be named utopia. I’m hoping to develop this a bit better in a later post. For now you can have a look at a very promising paper on Derrida’s Spectres and Bloch’s Principles and the idea of utopia here.

Dear Bernard-Henri Lévy,

Between the two us, there is, as one says, a world of difference. Except for one thing, and it’s not the least of things: we are both rather despicable individuals.

As a specialist in failed actions and hypocritical media appearances, you’ve disgraced even the white shirts you wear. As an intimate of the powerful, since childhood wallowing in wealth, you are the embodiment of what in, somewhat trivial magazines like Marianne, is still called ‘armchair socialism’ and what the German publicists more subtly call Toskana-Fraktion. As a thinker without thought, but certainly not without relations, you are moreover the creator of the most laughable movie in the history of film.

Nihilist, reactionary, cynic, racist and a womenhater in disguise: it would be too much honour to count me as a member of the hardly  appetising family of rightwing anarchists; essentially I am nothing else but a plebian. As a vulgar author without style I have, thanks to an improbable mistake of a handful of confused literary critics. been able to gain fame, a couple of years ago. Fortunately, my weak provocations have become boring since then.

Together we symbolise perfectly the terrifying feebleness of French culture and intelligence which Time Magazine reported, sternly but fairly, not so long ago.

We have in no way contributed to the resurrection of the French electroscene. Our names are not on the roll of Ratatouille.

All preconditions for a debate are present.

Michelle Houellebecq

Brussels, 26 January, 2008

(From Ennemis publics Flammarion/Grasset 2008.)

One day a colleague, Marcello Marchesi, came from Milan with a book, The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka … The unconscious, which Dostoevsky had used to probe and analyze emotions, became, in this book, material for the plot itself … Here was the individual unconscious, a shadow zone, a private cellar suddenly clarified …

Kafka moved me profoundly. I was struck by the way he confronted the mystery of things, their unknown quality, the sense of being in a labyrinth, and daily life turned magical.

-Federico Fellini

From: Federico Fellini: Contemporary Perspectives by Burke/Waller

This light, this light, has been transformed into noise for him.

From Blindness by José Saramago (stills from Blindness by Fernando Meirelles)

The growing list of movies dealing with utopian/dystopian issues can not be simply dismissed as a Hollywood capitalization of our consumer need for or addiction to widescreen rehearsals of a humanity in crisis, facing apocalypse or enduring to the point of near extinction: catastrophe. Or rather the need is there but for not obvious reasons. This is what I consider an important point Frederic Jameson makes: ‘Utopia emerges at the moment of the suspension of the political’. Jameson means that while the political, the fabric of which is time i.e history itself, is a continuously changing presence, at the same time its material manifestation congealed and concealed into political institutions creates that strange ‘realist’ sense of their unchangeability and inescapability. Hence the late capitalist or postmodern condition comes across as something inevitable, as a political and economical status quo, locking us into a Weberian cage of calculative rationality. When this point, this status quo is reached, on a cognitive level, it is utopian thinking that generates what Jameson calls ‘mental play’ which consist of thinking through the possibilities under which the political institutions can be genetically recombined into new, possibly even revolutionary, institutional constellations. Jameson therefore agrees with other thinkers in that Thomas More’s Utopia or Roussau’s work appeared as they did at particular conjunctures in time – i.e. the rise of capitalism and the dawn of the preconditions for French Revolution resp. – for a reason, namely that the social configuration of space and time at those conjunctures created exactly the cognitive and affective preconditions of the mental play meant: the sense of a total lock-in in the then current system (political, economical etc).

The question we might be tempted to ask in the current conjuncture of capitalist realism is: which utopia has emerged that will allows us to play freely this mental game yet again only to realize immediately no such utopian mindset did arise. Here, I’d like to suggest an intuition or suspicion: the suspension of the political might be permanent and that our capacity to envision utopia anew has been foreclosed. After 1968, the exceptioned or suspended state of the political has become one of endurance and persistence into the belief that ‘there is no alternative’. Hence new ‘classical’ utopias, will not do, they will not be able to ‘free our minds’ (slight pun intended). Our constant infatuation with doomsday entertainment can be looked upon as sympthomatic for this suspicion.

We can understand this failure for a new utopian mental play to arise by realizing that what sets apart capitalist realism from postmodernism or late capitalism is the idea that CR comes with utopianism built-in. CR works on the basis of structural disavowal as first and most succintly voiced by Octave Mannoni: je sais mais quand meme: I know capitalism is not really the only alternative but still I act as if it is. As German philosopher Robert Pfaller theorized, this kind of disavowal, which Zizek calls fetishistic disavowal is based on the objective existence of the ‘illusions of others’. Why do we act as if capitalism is the only alternative, even though we don’t really believe it? Because, we believe anonymous others believe so. Our illusions are never our own, that for them to be constructive and constituating fantasies they must necessarily belong to others, who we are not able to identify as such. Hence Pfaller concludes that these are illusions without owners, they are orphaned illusions, meaning there is no subject to be found anywhere that these illusions spring from or belong to. The illusions of others, while ownerless, are shared illusions and in this sense I believe they can be properly called utopian. The collective disavowal through these ‘illusions of others’ is what I mean when I say utopianism is built-in.

As a sidenote: contrary to the standard notion of dystopia, negative utopianism is not identical to dystopia. The negativity I’m referring to stems from the either explicit or implicit prevention of the possibility of utopia to arise at all. Or, to put this in apocalyptic terms: the end, the eschaton will never be reached. Fukuyama’s notorious ‘end of history’ thus understood, does not just claim that liberal democracy is an end stage of an evolutionary historical process. With it, what has come to an end is utopian thinking, in that we realize that the end of capitalism will never come and that in an evolutionary sense therefore history is as complete as it will ever be. Or so we are led to believe.

Thus, the question is not which utopia will allow us to think recombination but rather which reconfiguration of utopia, and possibly the built-in utopianism itself, must we realize in order to escape the state of political suspension. I think that in this way, a particular utopia, understood in the terms set out above, has been able to foreground itself in an increasingly plausible manner, namely: communism or rather the hypothesis of communism. However right Badiou is to state the communist hypothesis as a generic or Kantian regulative Idea, thereby dismissing the utopian as a negative qualification of communism – obstructing our cognitive and affective capabilities to even think communism as plausible yet again – a utopian mindset, albeit in a new configuration, remains an important precondition of envisioning a radically different future. I feel, that when he asks us to endure through time, to connect to a different durée with courage i.e ‘the virtue which manifests itself through endurance in the impossible’; this can only be done if we maintain a sense of utopianism. For what else could a durée, a perpetually changing, unquantifiable stream of reiterative and repetitive historical reconfiguration of the same, in which we reconstitute ourselves anew each time, mean but a utopia? Is not this what enables us to think a new future at all?