Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis: Challenging Our Infatuation with Numbers 9781623560461, 9781623566494, 9781628927030, 9781623569792

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Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis

Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis Challenging Our Infatuation with Numbers Michael Mack

N E W YOR K • LON DON • N E W DE L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC First published 2014 © Michael Mack, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mack, Michael, 1969Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis : Challenging Our Infatuation With Numbers / Michael Mack. pages cm Summary: “Analyses the heuristic value of fiction by highlighting literature and philosophy’s potential impact on economics, health care, bioethics, public policy and theology”–Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62356-046-1 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-62356-649-4 (paperback) 1. Literature and society. 2. Numbers in literature. 3. Literature–Philosophy. I. Title. PN51.M17 2014 809’.93358 – dc23 2013044892 ISBN: HB: 978-1-6235-6046-1 PB: 978-1-6235-6649-4 ePDF: 978-1-6235-6979-2 ePub: 978-1-6235-6845-0 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

I want to dedicate this book to the Leverhulme Trust.

Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Objects and Numbers – Our Current Infatuation 1 What Is It about Numbers? 2 Playing the Numbers: Ethics and Economics 3 Certainty and the Predictability of Numbers: The Question of Literary Ethics 4 A Disenchantment with Numbers: Philosophy and Literature 5 Medicine and the Limits of Numbers 6 Towards a Numerical Ambiguity 7 Conclusion: From Numbers to the Individual – A New Ethics of Subjectivity Index

viii 1 19 47 75 107 141 175 201 229

Acknowledgements This book has been supported by various institutions. It grew out of a most generous research fellowship at the University of Sydney more than 10 years ago. The early conception of the book has also been supported by an ensuing Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in 2007. The award of a 2012–2013 Leverhulme Research fellowship entitled ‘Science and the Ethics of Literature’ made possible the completion of Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis: Challenging Our Infatuation with Numbers. The Leverhulme Trust has been most supportive not only in terms of research funding but also in terms of moral and intellectual encouragement. I am most grateful to the Leverhulme Trust. I would like to thank in particular Jean Cater and Anna Grundy of the Trust for their moral and intellectual support. I want to dedicate this book to the Leverhulme Trust. Haaris Naqvi of Bloomsbury has been as usual a most discerning editor and invaluable intellectual interlocutor. I am most grateful to him for all his great help, support and advice over the years. From the publication of Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity onwards he has been most generous and I cannot thank him enough. I also wish to thank Haaris’s team at Bloomsbury, Laura Murray in particular. Work on this book has been benefitted from discussions at various venues and universities here in the United Kingdom and abroad. I would like to thank Gillian Beer, Jackie Stacey, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Avital Ronell, Jeffrey Malpas, Richard Velkley, Michael O’Neil, Jonathan Long, Andrew Benjamin, Dimitris Vardoulakis, Howard Morphy, Reineir Munk, Jakob Johannes Köllhofer, Jakob Engholm Feldt, Berel Lang, Bernard Harcourt, Simon James and Mark Sandy for all their help, advice and support. Tim Clark of the English Department here in Durham has kindly authorized Avishek Parui to assist me with the index of Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis: Challenging Our Infatuation with Numbers. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and we apologize in advance for any unintentional omission. We would be pleased to insert the appropriate acknowledgement in any subsequent edition. “Daddy” (13), “Ariel” (6), “Tale of Tub” (10), “Three Women” (8), “Kindness” (3), “Burning the Letters” (8) from The Collected Letters of Sylvia Plath, Edited by Ted Hughes, Copyright 1960, 65, 71, 81 by the estate of Sylvia Plath Editorial mat’l Copyright (c) 1981 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of HarperColllins Publishers.

Introduction: Objects and Numbers – Our Current Infatuation

It is a strange world

Life is a stranger in this world

David Lynch, Blue Velvet

Franz Baermann Steiner

All theories are fictions Gary Becker at the open seminar ‘American Neoliberalism and Michel Foucault’s Biopolititcs’, University of Chicago, 9 May 2012

Human rights and numbers: The contemporary fusion of the humanitarian with the techno-science of military calculation This work is a study in ethics, literature, economics and medicine. It investigates how we can better understand literature as a critique of what appears to be certain, predictable and non-ambiguous. Our infatuation with the supposed certainty of numbers has deleterious effects on various economic and medical practices. This is a broad-ranging study: its historical scope extends from the pre-modern to the modern and contemporary – from Augustine to Spinoza to Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath, P. Roth, E. L. Doctorow, E. Perlman, W. G. Sebald and J. Littell. Although it takes its points of reference from medieval (Augustine) and early modern thinkers (Spinoza and Shakespeare), its focus is on contemporary issues and concerns. Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis further develops the methodological innovation first outlined in the introduction to Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity: it practices a highly interdisciplinary version of intellectual history, which is productive of contemporary thought. Within

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this methodological context, the book sheds new light on how bio-politics introduces forms of pseudo-scientific certainty into ethics, economics and medicine. In this context, it offers the first analytical account of the so far ignored pseudo-theological underpinnings of some dubious contemporary economic and medical practices. What are corrupt versions of theological paradigms? One way to describe the corruption in question would be to call it a pseudo-theology as I have proposed in German Idealism and the Jew. In this study, I have shown how anti-Semitism and other forms of racism employ not only pseudo-scientific but also pseudo-theological stereotypes. In a different context, Eyal Weizman has recently analysed how Augustine’s theological concept of the ‘lesser evil’ has been put to socio-political uses, which are distortions of the theology Augustine and other early Christian theologians actually had in mind: For example, unlike the tradition of liberal ethics that would invoke him centuries later, Augustine was never content with lesser evils. Indeed, a significant aspect of the idea of the lesser evil has been lost in this process of secularization from early Christian theology into the utilitarian foundations of liberal ethics. For the original Christian toleration of the lesser evil was understood in relation to the telos of redemption that is ultimately in excess of all calculations. For Augustine, the name for this state beyond calculations was ‘the kingdom of heaven’. In contrast to the teachings of the Christian theologians that they invoked, and locked within a perpetual economy of immanence, liberal ethics can be interpreted as drive for the ‘optimization’ of a system of government. But what is the sense of optimizing those regimes when they perpetuate intolerable injustice? Even those of us without much use for a ‘kingdom of heaven’ and without much patience for the systems of pastoral government that should guide us to it, can still see in Augustine’s argument an important challenge: how to engage in political practice within the complex force-fields of the present in a way that also aims to break away from them?1

In Augustine the concept of the lesser evil does not partake of a larger set of calculations but is part of a theology that would put an end to all calculations: be they military, medical or economic. In contemporary discourse and sociopolitical practice, in contrast, the perpetuation of the violence implicit in the concept of the lesser evil constitutes an end in itself. 1

Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Hannah Arendt to Gaza (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 21–22.

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Weizman calls this distortive societal mind-set our ‘humanitarian present’. He employs this rather confusing term to describe the complete fusion of military strategy and human rights law. According to this fusion, it is legal to kill or starve civilians as long as the violence in question is ‘proportional’. Weizman shows how the Iraq war was conducted along the human rights doctrine of ‘proportionality’. There is a new economy of violence: ‘violence that both kills and saves, a violence that calculates and determines the threshold between life and death’.2 During the Iraq war every dwelling space was a legitimate target except for houses with over 30 inhabitants. In this case, the US president G.W. Bush had to be consulted and he had to decide whether the deaths of 30 civilians were ‘proportional’ to military strategy. Weizman analyses the present-day fusion of scientific questions with military or bio-political aims and objectives. One disturbing consequence of the new techno-scientific human rights outlook is the erasure of the witness and of testimony: ‘An emergent object oriented juridical culture is part of a general transformation that has directed attention away from a preoccupation with the subjective and linguistic aspects of trauma and memory, and towards the information saturated in the material world.’3 This radical divide between the scientific and the subjective seems to be in keeping with what Bruno Latour has analysed as the modern constitution, at the heart of which is a purification project that separates nature and human society into two separate spheres. The modern constitution ‘makes a total distinction between humans and nonhumans’.4 As Latour shows, this constitution does not work in practice because these supposedly separate spheres give rise to creation hybrids and other works of mediation. Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis shows how what we take to be practices backed up by scientific objectivity are actually saturated with subjectivity, affect and various distortions of traditional theological paradigms (like those of immortality). Is our contemporary society really taken in by deception of various scientific claims of objectivity? Let me briefly show that Weizman’s analysis of the present-day fusion of the humanitarian with the techno-scientific is one symptom of this ever-increasing devaluation of what is merely ‘subjective’. Other examples abound  – ranging from the pseudo-scientific appeal of risk-free mortgage packages to the medical prioritization of longevity over the alleviation of pain – and they are extensively discussed in this study. Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils, p. 134. Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils, p. 114. 4 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 91. 2 3

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Weizman argues that as consequence of our infatuation with technoscience, human rights law has turned from the human witness to the forensic piece of evidence. He shows how this development constitutes a shift not only ‘from the human witness to the material object, but from a focus on the victims of war to an analysis of the mechanisms of the violation of law’.5 Most importantly, Weizman makes clear that the scientific appearance of forensic objectivity is illusory too. According to him, scientific or forensic evidence is: not one in which the misanthropic object emerges as stable and fixed alternative to humane uncertainties, ambiguities and anxieties. Rather, in contemporary forensics, and through the thick field of interpretation and cross-investigation, the problem of human testimony – those of the subject – seem to be somewhat reproduced as the problems of the object.6

Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis analyses such illusions of scientific objectivity that give rise to the contemporary presentation of human rights as deprived of human subjectivity. It does so by discovering the ways in which pseudo-scientific and pseudo-theological structures of thought intrude upon contemporary medical and economic performances. Literature provides us with the heuristic tools with which we can uncover the points of impact left behind by such intrusion. How is literature capable of providing the tools for such heuristic endeavours? The notion of literature presented in this study diverges from the mimetic or representational framework in which it has traditionally been located. Developing and deepening the discussion of How Literature Changes the Way We Think, this study proffers innovative readings of the arts and the humanities. My usage of the term ‘literature’ is broad: it includes cinema, philosophy, cultural theory, drama and advances of knowledge in the natural as well as social sciences. In short, the term ‘literature’ here denotes various aspects of creativity in the sciences, humanities and arts. This is not to deny the distinctiveness of the medium ‘literature’. The medium of literature is no doubt unique in its particular focus on the internal operations of the reader. Cinema, in contrast, operates in a more exterior arena. A film does not allow access to interiority to the same extent that reading a novel or poem may open up. In a fascinating comparison between Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar and P T Anderson’s 2007 film There will be Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils, pp. 124–125. Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils, p. 115.

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Blood Michael W. Clune describes the less interior exteriority of the medium film as follows: ‘Thus where The Bell Jar can be understood as an attempt to exemplify a subjectivity free of recognition, the film cannot present its protagonist except as subject to recognition.’7 Why, then, use the term ‘literature’ for an all-inclusive description of creativity? Precisely because the notion ‘literature’ denotes what has been marginalized in discussions of creativity: the interior or contemplative field of perception. Literature indeed unsettles standard oppositions between perception and action, between singularity and generality, between subjective and objective. In this way Derek Attridge has described literature’s pioneering form of creativity ‘by the new possibilities for thought and feeling it opens up in its creative transformation of familiar norms and habits: singularity is thus inseparable from inventiveness’.8 As will be discussed in Chapter 4, literature’s singular or subjective inventiveness helps us see anew the universality and objectivity of our lives beyond the homogenous standards of quantifiable measurements. This book analyses how literature may stage-innovate acts of creation, which counter our infatuation with numbers or, as Sylvia Plath puts it, the homogeneity of ‘faceless faces’. Literature constitutes a space in which we can create new forms of life – or new beginnings – rather than merely representing what we already know. This nascent approach puts literature into close proximity to cinema and this despite the obvious difference in medium (reading literature as a primarily interior act whereas watching a film being primarily exterior). Our contemporary digital culture accentuates the blurring of the differences between audience and production, perception and action. Films as well as literature are crucial in this context, because, while first working on the perceptions of the audience, the two art forms have the capacity not only to inform our ways of seeing the world but also to transform our actions within it. This blurring of the traditional distinctions between contemplative as well as individual perceptions and interactive activities is also backed by recent neuroscientific findings, which, through new analysis of so-called mirror neurons, have shown how we experience as action what we perceive and conceptualize. Antonio Damasio explains as follows: So-called mirror neurons are, in effect, the ultimate as-if body device. The network in which those neurons are embedded achieves conceptually Clune, American Literature and the Free Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 40. 8 Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 11. 7

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Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis what I hypothesized as the as-if body loop system: the simulation, in the brain’s body maps, of a body state that is not actually taking place in the organism.9

The recent neuroscientific discovery of mirror neurons and a Deleuzean understanding of cinema is also pertinent for a new approach to literature, because literature works in terms of perception too – albeit more interior than the exterior medium of film. What cinema offers in terms of immediacy, literature may complement in terms of the depths of inner experience. Both film and literature operate via different but related screens – exterior (film) and interior (literature), but here again distinctions are not absolute because exteriority may turn interior and interiority may transform into exteriority. According to Deleuze, ‘the brain itself functions like a screen’.10 The discovery of the brain in terms of a screen makes porous the divide between the actual and the virtual, the objective and the subjective, the present and the past, the mental and the corporeal, the intellectual and the emotive. Oppositions between the cerebral and physical, in contrast, precondition and inform the traditional mimetic approach towards literature and the arts. The controlling, directing and representative position of the mind over the ‘mere’ matter of the body helps install the work of representation as sovereign artistic practice. In this way, the mind takes charge of the corporeal by representing the body and the same holds true of the representative work of the intellect as opposed to the emotions, the present as opposed to the past (and so forth). Spinoza radically breaks with this mimetic model of culture.11 He does so by establishing a parallelism of mind and body. As Pisters points out, Deleuze’s work on cinema follows Spinoza’s approach: Going back to Spinoza and Bergson, Deleuze does not believe in the all-encompassing force of the concept of representation and the concept of identification as a means of modelling subjectivity. According to Deleuze, the brain, which is both an intellectual and emotional entity and functions parallel (not hierarchical) to the body, can give more insights about how we perceive ourselves as subjects.12 Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (London: Vintage, 2012), p. 103. Patricia Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 7. 11 See Mack’s Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity: The Hidden Enlightenment of Diversity from Spinoza to Freud (New York: Continuum, 2010). 12 Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture, p. 17.  9 10

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Being premised on the concept of repetition – which replaces that of representation – Deleuze’s philosophical system may itself – even though in different forms – repeat the conceptual impasse of the traditional mimetic approach. Along these lines, Chapter 2 offers a critique of Deleuze’s philosophy of repetition. Here, however, it is worth emphasizing Deleuze’s highly innovative deconstruction of mimesis in his writings on cinema and visual culture. Both cinema and literature ask us to establish connections rather than oppositions between the subjective and the objective, between the social and the scientific: The spectator is no longer invited to identify but to make connections between the different images. It is now the model of the brain, the rhizomatic mental connections that it can make and the way it conceives time, that are important. The sense of self is still important, but it is confused, loosened, and made more flexible.13

By affiliating a new understanding of literature with Deleuze’s neuroscientific view of cinema, this study discovers in a blurring of the divide between objectivity and subjectivity heuristic tools with which to dismantle the preoccupation with objects as opposed to subjects. Weizman’s critique of our ‘humanitarian present’ does precisely this: it disenchants the contemporary fetishist adoration of the object. Literature’s ethic entrusts us with a timely analysis of the ‘forensic fetishism as the return to the object, to the non-human in human rights work’.14 The ethical analysis that literature performs helps us discover objectivity not in opposition to subjectivity, but as itself saturated with a plurality of subjective positions. Mediating between the objective and the subjective, between science and the socio-political, between the emotive and the intellectual, literature performs the work of ethics.

Our infatuation with numbers and objects: Where ethics and economics have become indistinguishable Both ethics and literature are forms of mediation. Philosophy, however, has traditionally been the proper and professional home of ethics. Questioning the traditional prerogative of philosophy for ethical inquiry Bernard Williams argues for ‘scepticism about philosophical ethics, but a scepticism that is Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture, p. 39. Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils, p. 128.

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more about philosophy than it is about ethics’.15 Williams’s scepticism about philosophy arises from what he sees as the philosophical ‘desire to reduce’16 a diversity of ethical perspectives. The most extreme version of subjectivity – i.e. egoism – occupies the target of philosophy’s reductive approach to ethics; at least according to Williams, philosophy has tended, first of all, to see all nonethical considerations as reducible to egoism, the narrowest form of self-interest. Indeed some philosophers have wanted to reduce that to one special kind of egoistic concern, the pursuit of pleasure. Kant, in particular, believed that every action not done from moral principle was done for the agent’s pleasure.17

Subjectivity has played a rather marginal role in philosophical ethics, because it belongs to the demoted sphere of mere pleasure and associated with it, the emotions and the body. Williams published his critique of philosophy’s reductive approach towards ethics in the mid-eighties of the last century, at a time when economics had already started to supersede philosophy as a driving force of ethical considerations. Today economic questions and issues dominate our societal map. As Michael J. Sandel has recently pointed out, economics has become the determining discipline for almost all aspects of human behaviour – ethics excluded: Recently, however, many economists have set themselves a more ambitious project. What economics offers, they argue, is not merely a set of insights about the production and consumption of material goods but also a science of human behaviour. At the heart of this science is a simple but sweeping idea: In all domains of life, human behaviour can be explained by assuming that people decide what to do by weighing the costs and benefits of the options before them, and choosing the one they believe will give them the greatest welfare, or utility. If this idea is right, then everything has a price.18

Sandel clearly shows how through so-called ‘incentives’ the whole of our life has been turned into economics – from medicine (health) to education  – our success or failure immediately morphs into a quantitative, ‘objective’ Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, with a Commentary on the Text by A. W. Moore and a foreword by Jonathan Lear (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 83. 16 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 17. 17 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 17. 18 Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of the Market (New York: Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), pp. 48–49. 15

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or ‘scientific’ number/price – visible for all to discern. As we will soon see, Sandel singles out ethical judgements as the only sphere that has not yet been homogenized by economic consideration. This study begs to differ. Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis shows that what Williams critiqued as philosophy’s reductionism in the mid-eighties of the last century has today become far more comprehensive in economic terms: ethics and other fields of human behaviour have by now been reduced to prices, to a set of numbers, to statistics. One reason for the preponderance of economics over all aspects of contemporary life is that it promises freedom, predictability and order. As Bernard Harcourt has recently shown, in the public imagination the free markets have become synonymous with justice and the natural order. His book The Illusion of Free Markets ‘reveals how the notion of natural order from the eighteenth century evolved into one of market efficiency at its most sophisticated, erudite, scientific theorization – the version that achieved multiple Nobel prizes, prizes that have validated and confirmed in the public imagination the superiority of unfettered free markets’.19 Harcourt’s analysis of the link between the moral philosophies of natural order and free market theories implies that neoliberal economics propound an ethical system that divides humanity into those who act in accordance with economic rules and those who violate such rules. The latter are deviant or criminal and in need of punishment (this explains why, under the auspices of the free market, contemporary America has the largest incarceration rates worldwide). Clearly, theories of the free market outline public conceptions of the good life. Sandel, in contrast, argues that by excluding ethical questions – questions of the good life – from public discourse, ethics has almost invisibly turned into a question of economics: ‘But despite its good intention, the reluctance to admit arguments about the good life into politics prepared the way for market triumphalism and for the continuing hold of market reasoning.’20 At first glance he seems to reject the argument according to which this economization of the whole of our lives is itself a neutral or non-ethical force. To the assertion ‘Markets don’t wag fingers’,21 Sandel responds, ‘We don’t allow parents to sell their children or citizens to sell their votes. And one of the reasons we don’t is, frankly, judgmental: we believe that selling these things values them in the wrong way and cultivates bad attitudes.’22 Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis contributes to Sandel’s analysis of a new allencompassing economistic paradigm. For one thing, it shows how what Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 232. 20 Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy, p. 14. 21 Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy, p. 14. 22 Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy, p. 15. 19

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Sandel calls ‘bad attitudes’ amount to homogeneity: every form of life has to fit the managerial rubrics of economic value (price, economic cost per hour and so forth), which completely disregards the social, cultural and subjective value of different activities (education is a striking example) or states of being (illness or pain cannot be measured or cured via statistical assessments). In the end, however, Sandel seems to agree with the assertion that markets are non-judgemental. This study, in contrast, shows how the apparent nonjudgement of economics is in actual fact judgemental, as has been implied by Harcourt’s analysis of the link between the increase in the penitentiary system and the public espousal of free market economics: The logic of neoliberal penality has made possible our contemporary punishment practices by fueling the belief that legitimate and competent space for government intervention is the penal sphere. The logic of neoliberal penality has facilitated our punishment practices by weakening any resistance to governmental initiatives in the penal sphere because that is where the state may legitimately, competently, and effectively govern.23

Sandel argues that the apparent lack of ethics makes economics all the more appealing, objective and scientific: This nonjudgmental stance toward values lies at the heart of market reasoning and explains much of its appeal. But our reluctance to engage in moral and spiritual argument, together with our embrace of markets, has exacted a heavy price: it has trained public discourse of moral and civic energy, and it contributed to the technocratic, managerial politics that afflicts many societies today.24

Technocratic, managerial politics is what Weizman takes issue with too in our contemporary approach towards the ‘humanitarian’ that is so preoccupied with objects and the ‘objective’ that it goes so far as to exclude human subjects from its domain. Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis contributes to both Sandel’s and Weizman’s critique of our present infatuation with the numerical, with the visible, with the quasi-scientific object by bringing to light the so far invisible judgemental and pseudo-theological foundations of an economistic paradigm that endows ‘objective’ numbers with fetishist values. Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets, p. 52. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy, p. 14.

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In doing so, this study analyses the pseudo-scientific blind spots within contemporary economic and medical forms of practice. One striking example is contemporary medicine’s preoccupation with longevity; the term ‘longevity’ bears what Giorgio Agamben has recently called the theological ‘signature’ of eternal life (see Chapter 5). As Norelle Lickiss has recently shown, contemporary medicine is so concerned with the attempt to extend the life span that it avoids issues to do with pain ‘lest the slightest possibility for temporary prolongation of life be lost’.25 Lickiss goes on to urge the implementation of ‘possible approaches to an examination of why contemporary medical practitioners in affluent Western contexts, in the eyes of many’, are ‘frequently failing in the core business of relieving human suffering’.26 Chapter 5 will offer one possible analysis of why contemporary medicine prioritizes longevity over and above ‘the core business of relieving human suffering’. The explanation to this complex question can be found in the invisible presence or secret return of a theological idea that has been emptied out of its transcendent dimension: the promise of eternal life has turned immanent in the medical ideal of the long life. This is not to demote theology. On the contrary, this book bears witness to theology’s persistence in a non-theological age. Theology’s immanent figures of return (spectres or revenants) do not of course do justice to the spiritual and intellectual outlook of genuine theological thought. The contemporary medical as well as economic infatuation with substantive issues such as facts, statistical figure and number of years in which a life could be extended (and so forth) obfuscates – if it does not deny – the affective aspect of human life. Pain and suffering are subjective and affective. Due to its subjective nature, contemporary medicine only reluctantly engages with pain and other affects. This is why Eric J. Cassel has held his own discipline (medicine) responsible for the ‘continuing failure to accord subjective knowledge and subjectivity the same status as objective knowledge and objectivity’.27 A similar disregard of subjective and affective factors haunts the contemporary practice of economics. Crucially the economist’s – or what Weizman calls ‘humanitarian’ – exclusion of the subjective radicalizes the demotion or marginalization of the particular and affective, which – as we have seen above – Williams criticizes in philosophical ethics. This study shows how the contemporary infatuation with the object and the ‘objective’ constitutes the economistic intensification Lickiss, ‘On Facing Human Suffering’ in J. Malpas and N. Lickiss, Perspectives on Human Suffering (London: Springer, 2012), pp. 245–260 (p. 250). 26 Lickiss, ‘On Facing Human Suffering’. 27 Cassell, The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. xii. 25

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of philosophy’s ethical reductionism (see Chapters 2 and 3). Whereas the traditional philosophical approach has demoted the value of the particular for the greater good of the universal, the contemporary economist paradigm excludes the former as part of its overall process, which is predicated on calculation. What Weizman calls the ‘humanitarian’ is indeed economic: it calculates the proportionality of the lesser evil. Indeed in the secularized theology of ‘the least of all possible evils’, we encounter the point where economics and ethics meet – it is the place of seemingly affect-less or subjectless, ‘indifferent’ calculation. Shedding light on the spectres of theology in this apparent impersonal process illuminates the hidden chemistry of affect in the purported indifference of both philosophical ethics and economics. In the wake of the recent financial crises, it has become clear that economics cannot be understood in quasi-scientific models of certainty, predictability and rationality. Adam Smith’s invisible hand has recently become more and more suspect: markets are no longer seen to be orderly and rational instruments that could guarantee stability and equilibrium. By uncovering the pseudotheological foundations of the belief in financial stability and harmony, Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis brings to the fore the affective chemistry of what has previously been assumed to be a purely rational and objective social science of market mechanisms. John Cassidy has called ‘utopian economics’ what the current book analyses as the pseudo-theological foundations of economic theories, which are founded on axioms of stability and equilibrium. Cassidy’s term ‘utopian’ evokes rational planning but leaves out the theological or providential aspect of markets, which are seen to be self-regulating and ever progressing in creating wealth for the society at large. Adam Smith’s key term ‘invisible hand’ highlights the ghostly, non-empirical presence of a secularized form of providence and governance, which Giorgio Agamben has recently traced back to the management of Trinitarian Christian theology (see Chapter 5). Cassidy does not refer to theology but to mathematics when he discusses the Chicago School’s fervent belief in market rationality. However, Cassidy concedes that mathematics is not the issue as such: The issue is not the mathematics per se, but how it is used (and abused). During the past ten years, many economists working at central banks and finance ministries have embraced so-called New Keynesian models. Despite the name attached to them, these models owe at least as much to Lucas as they do to Keynes: they are self-correcting equilibrium models, built on the foundation of efficient financial markets and rational expectations.28 Cassidy, How Markets Fall: The Logic of Economic Calamities (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 105.

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The Chicago economist Robert Lucas – a disciple of Milton Friedman – tried to prove the rationality and beneficence of the free market mathematically (as proclaimed by Friedman). In doing so Lucas and mainstream neoliberal economists ignore to factor in issues of unpredictability and uncertainty as well as the human chemistry of affect (herd behaviour, panic behaviour and so forth): As in the original Lucas models, there is no role in them [i.e. third generation rational expectations models] for stock market bubbles, credit crunches, or a drying up of liquidity. Indeed, recognizable financial markets don’t really exist. The illusion of harmony, stability, and predictability are maintained, and Hayek’s information processing machine does its job perfectly: at all times, prices reflect economic fundamentals and send the right signal to economic decision-makers.29

Cassidy here describes Lucas, Friedman and F. A. v. Hayek’s belief in the perfect congruence between monetary prices and the indication of value they represent. Alan Greenspan and other decision makers believed in the perfect representation of value yielded by the sign system of pricing. The housing and credit bubble thus went undetected for years until it burst in the autumn of 2008. It is, however, not only economists and political decision makers who have been blind to the subjective ingredient of ‘purely’ objective or scientific market calculations (the subject matter of J. C. Chandor’s 2012 film Margin Call). How can we trace the ascendency of the pseudo-theological rule of economics over all aspects of socio-political, ethical, technological and scientific life? Pseudotheological is the ever-increasing promise of a quasi-transcendent (or magical) cure for immanent limitations. As Wendy Brown has shown, the hegemonic rise of an economistic paradigm is, to some extent, due to the historical fact that in contrast to Hannah Arendt’s earlier attempts ‘to reformulate the problematic of political freedom on fully non-economic ground’, the majority of late-twentieth century progressives abandoned ideas of equality ‘to embrace a vision involving state-administrated “economic justice” combined with a panoply of private liberties’.30 The economist paradigm has by now become homogenous to the point that even human rights organizations perform their work along the lines of the economic principle of calculation. Cassidy, How Markets Fall: The Logic of Economic Calamities (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 105. 30 Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 10–11. 29

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As Brown has pointed out, the spurious indifference or neutrality of an economistic performance of the law – human rights law included – ignores the affect-ridden machinations of legal and other socio-political operations: ‘This effort also casts the law in particular and the state more generally as neutral arbiters of injury rather than as themselves invested with the power to injure.’31 The combination of ethical and economical procedures serves the interests of social homogeneity while brandishing those who do not conform as social, sexual, moral and pecuniary outcasts: Thus, the effort to ‘outlaw’ social injury powerfully legitimates law and the state as appropriate protectors of injury and casts injured individuals as needing such protection by such protectors. Finally, in its economy of perpetrator and victim, the project seeks not power or emancipation for the injured or the subordinated, but the revenge of punishment, making the perpetrator hurt as the sufferer does.32

In this way, the contemporary exclusion of subjectivity amounts to the increasing abrogation of democracy and politics. In a society wherein we can appeal to nothing else but the calculating processes of law and economics, individuality as well as diversity lose their political foundations: ‘When social “hurt” is conveyed to the law for resolution, political ground is ceded to moral and juridical ground.’33 By now the moral and the juridical have become indistinguishable in the economic meeting place of calculation (what Weizman calls the ‘humanitarian present’ illustrates this point). This study locates in literature (or what Deleuze calls cinema) a space wherein we can recover a lost political dimension. Politics mediates between the particular and the universal, between the subjective and the objective. Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis discovers how we may find in literature precisely such mediation between the subjective and the objective, between the factual and the affective, between the embodied and the cerebral. The mode of inquiry is that of literary criticism. The literary is here understood in a novel way: as the mediation between the subjective and the substantive, the philosophical and the historical, the psychic and the physical. Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis asks how the study of literature and philosophy helps us find ways of changing our lives, as well as ways in which we could come to terms with the often-disturbing changes that we are Brown, States of Injury, p. 27. Brown, States of Injury, p. 27. Brown, States of Injury, p. 27.

31 32

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15

facing now. Here literature performs an ethics of resilience by dint of which we can overcome the repetition and thus consolidation of harmful practices. Literature and cultural inquiry as a whole has the potential to intervene in the violence and denigration of the past and the present. Broadly understood, literature intervenes in and interferes with the status quo. Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis engages with what I call a nascent approach to the study of literature. Here literature does not so much represent and consolidate past and current harmful practices but instead scoops out the mental space in which we can rethink what it means to be human and to live in our world. The discussion of How literature changes the way we think has focused on current demographic issues: it attempts to change the way we perceive ageing and how we interact with substantive questions of youth and age. Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis focuses on how a nascent approach to literature helps us conceptualize a new perspective on economics and medicine.

The recovery of politics (overview of the book) Opening on a promissory note, Chapter 1 discusses how the move from postmodern detachment to affect theory might signal a change that departs from the economist approach to the sciences, arts and humanities. The change in question is an intellectual one, moving away from what Brown diagnosed as the reduction of socialism to ‘the status of a (nonpolitical) economic practice’34 at the end of the last century. The contemporary socioeconomic realities that affect theory analyses are bleak, to say the least. Analytical work, however, pivots around issues to do with change. The starting point of Lauren Berlant’s recent book Cruel Optimism focuses on the question of what keeps ordinary or everyday life enthralled to fantasies and aspirations that have repeatedly proven to be harmful if not lethal: ‘Why do people stay attached to conventional good-life fantasies – say, of enduring reciprocity in couples, families, political institutions, markets, and at work – when the evidence of their instability, fragility, and dear cost abounds.’35 Chapter 1 discusses the fraying of the economist fantasy of the good life. After the recent financial crises the evidence of such fraying abounds and yet the calculating mechanism of financial value – as we will be analysed throughout the book – still reigns supreme as fantasy, which proclaims the end of all forms of limitations – from being caught in subjectivity to being confined to Brown, States of Injury, p. 14. Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 2.

34 35

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mortality, the affect-ridden monetary promise of practical or applied science, seems to transcend all these natural limitations. The study as a whole brings to light how science, technology and ethics have increasingly become synonyms for economics. Through a discussion of Amitav Ghosh’s postcolonial writings, the last part of Chapter 1 analyses how the secularized theology of economics propounds identity rather than difference as a key ingredient of the fantasy that revolves around social harmony. Ghosh’s novels uncover such identity as a mirage of mirrors. It is not difference but identity that produces strife, harm and violence. As this discussion shows, violence ensues from striving not for different goods but for identical ones. Indeed our infatuation with numbers propels our affective attachments to those identical objects that promise the biggest numerical value. Literature’s ethics of resilience, in contrast, confirms the value of what is different and idiosyncratic. As discussed above, Bernard Williams’s critique of the limits of philosophy brings to the fore the reductive and homogenizing trend of philosophical ethics. Countering such a trend towards identity rather than diversity, Chapter 2 asks how some strands of philosophical discourse have reduced ethics to a dualism of mind and body wherein economics assumes the role of providence. The providential role of economics is to ensure the compatibility between the ethical good and non-ethical state of a mere natural embodied being. The notion of providence throws light on the ways in which utopian economics have been haunted by spectres of theology. Providence turns the incompatible into the compatible: nature – while being opposed to reason and redemption – in the end coincides with rational and ethical actions. Via providence – Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ – economics affects the presumed utopian position of equilibrium, stability and harmony. The concluding part of Chapter 2 shows how the ethics of literature changes our understanding of reason. Reason here no longer excludes or berates the affective and embodied sphere of our life; instead, what unfolds here is a new science of literature wherein reason is the mind’s mindfulness of its embodiment and, consequently, its imaginative tendencies. Chapter 3 analyses the rationality of literature in the readings of Malamud’s The Fixer and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Chapter 4 further discusses how literature uncovers the partiality of the purported impartiality (or non-subjectivity) of publically acclaimed truths through an innovative reading of Sylvia Plath’s poetry. This chapter focuses on Plath’s discovery that such assumed impartiality obfuscates the violence implicit in conformism and homogeneity: the pressure to turn people into ‘faceless faces’ as Plath calls it. When it comes to the interruption of homogeneity, literature plays a crucial role, precisely because literature foregrounds the subjective against the background of its public representation where it appears under the disguise of substantiality. By

Introduction: Objects and Numbers

17

unmasking the deceptive display of substantiality (during the acclamation of a ruler or during the public marketing of a political or economic idea or procedure), literature performs a form of heuristic or detective work. It does so by delineating how the purported substantiality of an ideology or an economic system or of a medical assessment is in actual fact a fantasy that grows out of the longing for a world in which we all cohere and are identical tools for a greater teleological or providential good. The ethics of literature disrupts the governmental blurring of the subjective and the substantive. In other words, literature’s insistence on subjectivity is not a subjective but a public matter: it counters the one-size-fits-all approach in public policies by articulating the infinite variety of subjective voices that do not fit into the homogenous call of the ruling discourse. Chapter 4 offers a new reading of Plath’s poetry along these lines: whereas critics have so far emphasized the subjective quality of Plath’s work, this chapter brings to light the public relevance of such foregrounding of subjectivity. Another way in which literature (as shown in readings of Plath’s and Kafka’s writings) disrupts homogeneity is by turning representation against itself, thus highlighting the lack of congruency and identity. Part of literature’s heuristic work (as shown through a reading of historical novels by E. L. Doctorow and Philip Roth in Chapter 5) is the discovery of how scientific endeavours – such as the medical quest for longevity – are in actual fact mutations of economic and secularized theological paradigms. This study analyses how Doctorow’s and P. Roth’s historical novel’s critique medicine’s prioritization of longevity over the alleviation of pain. Medicine turns bio-political when it attempts to eliminate subjectivity. In dialogue with Lauren Berlant’s affect theory Chapter 5 examines how bio-political operations feed on crises because it is in times of crisis when bio-politics can best impose its conditionality upon life. Here health becomes an effect of normality within the working of bio-politics. Spectres of theology appear in the crisis-ridden and deceptive representation of the partial as the impartial, of the subjective as the substantive. This is the case in the positing of health as effect of normality as it is in the opposite move, which is the theme of P. Roth’s new novel Nemesis (last part of Chapter 5). Here evil and pain figure not in terms of affective conditions as in Plath’s poetry, but instead the main protagonist of Roth’s latest novel represents his suffering as if it were impartial, substantive, as if it were all there is. In Nemesis Roth disrupts the deceitful concept of nemesis as an outside force by unmasking it as the power of representation: of how the main protagonist creates his own nemesis by turning his life and that of this environment into a representation of static images and categories. The flux of life’s contingency thus morphs into a representation of God – a representation that inverts the traditional theological content but clings

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Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis

to the allure of immutability and immortality. The narrator analyses how such coincidence of pre-modern notions of immortality and Mr Cantor’s modern medico-theological approach to immutability shares a troubling – if ridiculous – loss of life and action. Roth’s Nemesis offers a critique of both pre-modern delusions of ethics and their inverted modern representations. Pseudo-theology’s dogmatism haunts contemporary economics when it silences doubt and critique through representing its point of view as the absence of perspective, as impartiality and inevitability. Inevitability – the posited impossibility of an otherwise – denotes a secular type of faith, one that silences doubt and critique. Market economic reason turns into a secular theology at the point at which it denies its position as a point of view; this will be discussed in a theoretical reading of E. Perlman’s novel Seven Types of Ambiguity. The concluding Chapter 7 returns to what our pseudo-scientific infatuation with numbers and objects marginalizes and ignores: pain and trauma. This study closes with a discussion that lets us view recent novels by J. Littell, W. G. Sebald and E. Perlman as both literary and ethical critiques of the homogenous move to forensic objects, which has been the starting point for the arguments developed at the opening of this introduction.

1

What Is It about Numbers?

INTO LIFE

closing words of Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption

At a time of rising inequality, the marketization of everything means that people of affluence and people of modest means lead increasingly separate lives. We live and work and shop and play in different places. Our children go to different schools. You might call it the skyboxification of American life. It’s not good for democracy, nor is it a satisfying way to live. Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy

Our infatuation with numbers: Snow’s Two Cultures meets Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition Speaking of ‘the turn to affect’ we may describe the structure of feeling that we inhabit in the first decades of the twenty-first century. The term ‘turn to affect’ does not necessarily proclaim the overcoming of modernism or postmodernism. It merely signals a certain time-lapse or change in society at large. Strikingly, the divide between two cultures, between nature and society, between science and politics is constitutive of modernity’s consciousness. According to Bruno Latour, we have never been modern for the reason that the modern purification project – premised as it is on the radical separation between nature and society – has actually never been put to practice nor could it have ever been realized and because these nominally separated spheres are actually similarly constituted and in need of mediation. The project of modernity obfuscates or even denies the existence of subjectivity and the invisible. Deepening and developing Latour’s thesis, modernity could be defined as the unconscious of the invisible, as the unconscious of affect. Postmodernism recognizes that there is something wrong with the modern insistence on objectivity and visibility, but it abstains from further commitments that would investigate modernity’s unconsciousness – which is the unconsciousness of affect and other forms of the non-measurable. As Latour put it, ‘Postmodernism is a symptom, not a fresh solution. It lives

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Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis

under the modern Constitution, but it no longer believes in the guarantees the Constitution offers.’1 Postmodernity’s non-commitment has also been called aloofness. In this way Peter V. Zima has recently argued that indifference, or, in other words, a withdrawal of affect, characterizes postmodernism.2 Where postmodern art and culture remain aloof or cool, contemporary society seems to have fallen prey to various anxieties that grow out of an increasing sense of crisis, of instability and uncertainty. The recent financial crises and their implications for growing levels of anxiety in everyday life have led to a change in the structure of feeling. Based on his reading of Spinoza’s Ethics, Lionel Trilling has distinguished between feeling and passion. The emotions form a substantial part of our mental life: ‘To us today, mind must inevitably seem to be a poor gray thing, for it always sought to detach itself from the passions (not from the emotions, Spinoza said and explained the difference) and from the conditions of time and place.’3 As will be discussed in the closing section of this chapter, literature engages with a realm beyond numbers. It is the sphere of feeling that cannot be measured. This immeasurable aspect of our life nevertheless constitutes a substantial part of the human mind and we cannot wish it away as C. P. Snow has famously done in his Rede lecture on the Two Cultures. This lecture and its postmodern variation will be the subject of critical engagement in the first section of this chapter. In the wake of the collapse of the supposedly ordered and predictable economic measurements, Trilling’s concern with our emotive and immeasurable sense of humanity has returned with new force in the form of affect studies. As part of a contemporary change in the structure of feeling, we are becoming gradually more aware of the precarious foundations of life. Judith Butler has turned her attention to what it means to live precariously. Part of this recent preoccupation with the precarious is a re-discovery of care rather than postmodern indifference and aloofness. Lauren Berlant – a leading thinker of contemporary affect theory – has thus argued for a new aesthetics that does justice to what she calls crisis ordinariness, which characterizes life in the early twenty-first century. Against this background, this chapter establishes the economic and cultural break of contemporary society with various optimistic beliefs in 1 2 3

Latour, We Have Never Been Moderns, translated by Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 46. See Zima’s Modern/Postmodern: Society, Philosophy, Literature (London: Continuum, 2012). Trilling, The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent: Selected Essays, edited and introduced by Leon Wieseltier (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000), p. 425.

What Is It about Numbers?

21

economic and scientific improvements, which has characterized not only modern but also postmodern theory. Previously, critics have argued that Lyotard’s famous The Postmodern Condition critiques a modern scientific and economic paradigm (this critique was seen to be part of Lyotard’s postmodernism). This chapter shows that the opposite is in fact the case: Lyotard radicalizes C. P. Snow’s plea for the public implementation of an economic paradigm while abandoning Snow’s modernist trust in the egalitarian benefit derived from science and economics. Lyotard embraces the computerization of society, which promises economic growth in developed societies. As Fredric Jameson has put it this pre-occupation with computers and economic processes led to ‘the eclipse of all of the affect (depth, anxiety, terror, the emotions of the monumental) that marked high modernism and its replacement by what Coleridge would have called fancy or Schiller aesthetic play, a commitment to surface and to the superficial in all the senses of the word’.4 Contemporary aesthetics departs from the superficial aloofness with which Lyotard celebrates the death of narratives. The public resurgence of anxiety in the face of current financial crises has shifted attention away from the superficial to the affective. There are multiple causes for anxiety: economic crises, the growing divide between rich and poor, looming ecological catastrophes, rapid changes in techno-scientific products as well as paradigms, a shrinking of public funds for basic public requirements in education, research, medicine and security. These causes of anxiety have an economic ingredient in common. Consider the ecological crisis: it is at once a scientific issue (climate change) and an economic one (how to manage growth with limited natural resources?). Within this scientific-economic context, the humanities and arts have increasingly been pushed to the margins. They have almost disappeared from socio-political discussions and decisions that concern the public state of well being. Politicians seem to have downgraded the social role of creativity. Political discourse has relegated creativity to the status of a luxury we have to do without in a new world order where survival is premised on the economic application of already-created scientific goods and technological services – this is certainly true of the current UK government who has recently refused to fund the teaching of humanities and arts subjects at UK universities. As has been discussed in the introduction, my notion of literature is broad, denoting creativity in a wide range of fields, which encompass the 4

Jameson, ‘Foreword’ in Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, translation from the French by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. xviii.

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arts, humanities and sciences. Scientific inquiry certainly depends on creativity too. The arts and humanities have been charged as the main culprits of uselessness and being useless has almost become a synonym for being creative. The so-called ‘useless’ or creative aspect of both the sciences and the arts resides in their unpredictable, unquantifiable, unfixable and limitless openness to ever new questions, ever new insights, ever new forms of knowledge and discovery. Stefan Collini has recently distinguished university education from professional training along the lines of the potentiality of the new, which cannot be measured or immediately be used: ‘Intellectual enquiry is in itself ungovernable: there is no predicting where thought and analyses may lead when allowed freely over almost any topic, as the history of science abundantly illustrates.’5 The first part of this chapter will discuss how from C. P. Snow’s 1959 Rede lecture onwards, the term ‘science’ has increasingly been confused with applied science, professional training and economic benefits. Collini draws attention to how intellectual inquiry and its creativity are central to both the sciences and the arts. The political conflation of science with its economically useful applications undermines research and innovation. Due to the confusion of science with commercialized goods and services, the sole target of attack has so far been the arts and humanities (because they are, so the charge, useless or without economic impact or benefit). The political demotion of the humanities and arts to a socially irrelevant or private activity brings to culmination the polemics of the two culture debates that have haunted public discussion from the industrial revolution onwards. The famous C. P. Snow and F. R. Leavis controversy in the middle of the last century has a heritage dating back to the end of the eighteenth century.6 As Trilling has argued, C. P. Snow’s equation of what he calls ‘literary intellectuals’ with Luddite hostility to everything that is scientific and technological is quite unfair, simplistic and reductive. F. R. Leavis’s attack on Snow, however, is equally wrong because it fails to offer a valid account of literature’s social benefit: The early discussions of The Two Cultures [i.e. referring back to the Victorian controversy between Matthew Arnold and T. H. Huxley] were of a substantive kind, but the concerns which now agitate the English in response to Dr. Leavis’s attack have scarcely anything to do with literature and science, or with social hope.7 5 6 7

Collini, What are Universities For (London: Penguin, 2012), p. 55. For a detailed discussion of this history see Stefan Collini, ‘Introduction’ in C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. vii–lxxi. Trilling, The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent, p. 405.

What Is It about Numbers?

23

The quality of the debate seems to have deteriorated and that too in a changed socio-technological context. The scientific concern with numbers and other forms of measurability has, by the mid-twentieth century, been elevated as the sole criterion with which to judge all aspects of intellectual value. Trilling speaks of a ‘revolution’ that ‘would seem to be one of the instances in which a change of quantity becomes a change in kind – science can now do so much more in the last century, that it has been transmuted from what the world has hitherto known’.8 According to Snow, science indeed holds out the promise to render human society measurable and predictable (along the lines of the eighteenth-century concept of natural order as discussed in Harcourt’s The Illusion of Free Markets): ‘One of the consequences of this change – to Sir Charles [i.e. C. P. Snow] it is the most salient of all possible consequences – is the new social hope that is now held out to us, of life made better in material respects.’9 Following Trilling, Snow’s aversion to what he perceives to be the snobbishness of literati can be better understood within its historical context. When Snow delivered his Rede lecture in 1959, his approach was not so much shaped by a contemporary setting but by that of his early days in the Cambridge of the 1930s. During that time Snow failed to embark on an outstanding scientific career – as Stefan Collini has put it, Snow’s ‘achievement as a scientist had been patchy at best’.10 Snow’s scientific ambitions, however, were not exactly encouraged by the general culture of his alma mater at the time. Back in the 1930s, the sciences were marginalized at Cambridge: ‘In the 1930s, half of the students at British universities were in the arts faculties; more strikingly still, at Oxford and Cambridge the proportion studying in the arts faculties were 80% and 70% respectively.’11 Snow and his fellow science students constituted a minority. As shown by Collini, we need to take into account Snow’s rather bitter and embattled position as an aspiring but not brilliant research student in physics within the rather snobbish humanist setting of the 1930s when we read the 1959 Rede lecture. Given that the arts and humanities were the foundation of the ruling elites of his student days, he blamed ‘literary intellectuals’ for mismanagement, war and poverty. Today the situation is reversed: the humanities and arts are marginalized and clearly in the minority and at the bottom of educational or research priorities: ‘In 2009, those studying pure “humanities” subjects (classification problem again) accounted only for some 11% of undergraduates and 9% of postgraduates.’12 Funding priorities worldwide are to be gleaned from the Trilling, The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent, p. 404. Trilling, The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent, p. 404. 10 Collini, ‘Introduction,’ p. xx. 11 Collini, What are Universities For?, p. 32. 12 Collini, What are Universities For?, p. 32.  8  9

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following example: ‘the combined budgets of the seven research councils in the UK amount to some £ 3 billion, but only around 3% of this goes to the Arts and Humanities Research Council’.13 Politicians justify this disparity in funding by arguing that the arts and humanities are of little socioeconomic value. It is this repeated argument with ‘with which successive governments, of whichever party, have attempted to impose an increasingly economistic agenda on universities over the past two decades’,14 which we find for the first time, though with different emphases, articulated in Snow’s 1959 Rede lecture. In contrast to contemporary neoliberal politics, Snow was an egalitarian. His concern was with the elimination of hunger and poverty: ‘Before I wrote the lecture I thought of calling it “The Rich and the Poor”, and I rather wish that I hadn’t changed my mind. The scientific revolution is the only method by which most people can gain the primal things (years of life, freedom from hunger, survival for children).’15 He goes on to call on those who have the political power to administrate the funding of research and teaching. They should listen to the ‘practical truth of science’: It has been hard for politicians and administrators to grasp the practical truth of what scientists were telling them. But now it is beginning to be accepted. It is often accepted most easily by men of affairs, whatever their political sympathies, engineers, or priests, or doctors, all those who have a comradely physical sympathy for other humans. If others can get the primal things – yes that is beyond argument; that is good.16

Here, Snow establishes the equation of science with the moral foundations of practical life. This rather simplistic equation shapes contemporary political and media discourse albeit without the social optimism of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Despite the huge public support for practical sciences (medicine and so forth), there keeps arising an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor, a gap that Snow attempted to redress with the quasi-magical panacea he called ‘science’. The current elevation of science as a moral and materialistic cure for all sorts of social ill can be properly understood in its historical-ideological context when we consider the two cultures argument of Snow. Snow introduced this highly moralistic component into an otherwise crudely materialistic way of thinking. Science ‘comradely’ creates wealth (‘freedom from hunger’, longevity Collini, What are Universities For?, p. 32. Collini, What are Universities For?, p. xii. 15 Snow, The Two Cultures, p. 80. 16 Snow, The Two Cultures, p. 80. 13 14

What Is It about Numbers?

25

and so forth) and thus redresses social justice. The ‘and thus’ component has proved to be rather misleading. Nevertheless, the word ‘science’ keeps triggering associations with wealth (and conversely the humanities increasingly with poverty and lack of funding). What Collini has written of the radically changed economistic rationale for universities holds true for the whole of society in the first decade of the twenty-first century: ‘universities need to justify getting more money and the way to do this is by showing that they help make more money’.17 Science holds out the promise of more money, and money opens the door to everything we would otherwise do without. The numerical value of money – as we will be analysing throughout this book – has become the yardstick by which we are publically and officially seen to be able to overcome all forms of limitations – from being caught in subjectivity to being confined to mortality, the monetary usefulness of ‘practical science’ overcomes all these natural limitations. Snow’s Rede lecture of 1959 lays the foundation for such current equation of applied or practical science with the supposedly miracle working cure of wealth creation. In his Rede lecture, Snow opposes literary culture’s ephemeral status with the solidity of nature, which, he maintains, constitutes the subject matter of science: ‘They [representatives of literary culture, of the arts and humanities] still like to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of “culture”, as though the natural order didn’t exist.’18 This statement does not take into account the fact that philosophers and writers have shown a keen interest in nature19 (at least from Spinoza onwards) and that science shares many interests and pursuits with Snow’s despised literary intellectuals of the arts and humanities. Collini has described the current understanding of what is scientific as follows: the activities conventionally referred to as ‘the sciences’ do not, it is argued, all proceed by experiential methods, do not all cast their findings in quantifiable form, do not all pursue falsification, do not all work on ‘nature’ rather than on human beings; nor are they alone in seeking to produce general laws, replicable results, and cumulative knowledge.20

Even though there is (as Collini in this quote points out) a disconnection between Snow’s and more advanced as well as more complex interpretations Collini, What are Universities For?, p. x. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, p. 14; Collini, ‘Introduction’. 19 For a detailed discussion of George Eliot’s and other writers’ interest in the natural sciences see Gillian Beer’s ‘Translation or Transformation? The Relations of Literature and Science,’ in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 44 (1990), pp. 81–99. 20 Collini, ‘Introduction,’ xlv. 17 18

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Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis

of what constitutes science, Snow’s denigration of literary intellectuals has certainly influenced political decision makers. Anticipating the contemporary demotion and marginalization of the arts and humanities, Snow accuses literary intellectuals of being the polar opposites of scientists. The latter are bearers of those useful traits, which, as Collini rightly points out, are not scientific in a unique sense: quantifiable forms that are immediately useful, the employment of natural resources via ‘scientific’ methods and replicable as well as general laws that can be applied by industry. Industrial use and general utility are what Snow understands by science. Usefulness here is another word for wealth creation. Anyone familiar with the current political discourse about education in terms of wealth creation (from Tony Blair to Barack Obama; from George W. Bush to Mitt Romney) will recognize in Snow not only as Collini has put it, ‘the prophet of the consumer society’,21 but also the early spokesperson for an educational system that is premised on profit maximization and other quantifiable and visible measures. Science holds out the promise of profits: ‘Once the trick of getting rich is known, as it is now, the world can’t survive half rich, half poor. It’s just not on.’22 Thus spoke Snow in his 1959 Rede lecture. We have come to know that the divide between rich and poor is ever increasing despite amazing scientific advances. In Snow’s Rede lecture, science plays the quasi-magical role of enriching everyone – rather than only a few – while deepening the gap between wealth and poverty. The generation of money goes hand in hand with moral appraisal, because wealth seems to be spreading throughout society. Whatever is useful – i.e. scientific according to Snow – generates money and whatever generates money is moral, because wealth creation here is identical with social wellbeing. Snow reinforces the purist modern opposition between nature (inclusive of science and technology) and human society – here the scientist and there the literary intellectuals – in order to foreground not only the practical and the monetary but also the moral superiority of science: ‘The non-scientists have a rooted impression that the scientists are shallowly optimistic, unaware of man’s condition. On the other hand, the scientists believe that the literary intellectuals are totally lacking in foresight, peculiarly unconcerned with their brother men.’23 This supposed lack of concern for social usefulness and economic impact evidences for Snow the immorality of the latter and the high moral or socio-economic worth of the former: ‘In the moral, they are by and large the soundest group of intellectuals we have; there is a moral Collini, ‘Introduction,’ p. xxxiv. Snow, The Two Cultures, p. 42. Snow, The Two Cultures, p. 5

21 22

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What Is It about Numbers?

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component right in the grain of science itself, and almost all scientists form their own judgements of the moral life.’24 Morality and ethics turn into a form of economistic usefulness, which can be quantified and measured like the performance of a share on the stock market. As we shall see throughout this book science, technology and ethics have increasingly become synonyms for economics. How can we trace the ascendency of the pseudo-theological rule of economics over all aspects of socio-political, ethical, technological and scientific life? Pseudo-theological is the ever-increasing promise of a quasitranscendent (or magical) cure for immanent limitations. As Wendy Brown has shown, part of the hegemonic rise of an economistic paradigm is due to the historical fact that in contrast to Hannah Arendt’s earlier attempts ‘to reformulate the problematic of political freedom on fully non-economic ground’, the majority of late-twentieth century progressives abandoned ideas of equality ‘to embrace a vision involving state-administrated “economic justice” combined with a panoply of private liberties’.25

Postmodernism after Snow: The confusion of neoliberal economics with science How can we explain this growing confusion of ethics as well as the sciences with economics? It would be unfair to blame Snow for this development but, as we have seen above, his Rede lecture lays the ground for the moralization of science, wealth and health. As will be discussed in this section, Lyotard’s take on the postmodern condition further radicalizes the disparity between what Snow has called traditional or literary culture and the commercial paradigm change of science and technology. Postmodern culture has embraced this commercialization, as David Harvey and Fredric Jameson have shown in some detail. Hand in hand with the celebration of the surface of brands, logos and other standard symbols of commercial goods went a carefree, cool and distanced attitude (far removed from Snow’s concern for the social good), which touted dispassionate disinterest in anything that went deeper than the flat TV or video screen. Social reality seemed to have become outmoded. The term ‘reality’ could only be used in quotation marks. Jameson describes this postmodern loss of reality in linguistic terms as follows: ‘reification penetrates the sign itself and disjoins the signifier from the signified. Now reference and reality disappear altogether, and even meaning – the signified – is problematized. We are left with the pure and random play of signifiers that we Snow, The Two Cultures, p. 13. Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 10.

24 25

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call postmodernism’.26 According to Jameson, Lacan is the only postmodern thinker who ‘has shamelessly continued to talk about “the Real” (defined, however, as an absence)’.27 An absence of affect accompanied this extreme detachment from, or more radical still, bracketing off reality. Jameson calls the postmodern relinquishment of both subjectivity and reality ‘the waning of affect’.28 At the dawn of the twenty-first century, however, subjectivity, reality and the life of emotions came home to roost. This public distance and remove from ‘real’ or profound concerns was slightly jolted in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in 2001. The events were shown on the flat surface of TV screens. The audience knew, however, that these were real people who were jumping out of the burning World Trade Center in New York. New York itself was a city engulfed by disbelief, panic and anxiety. This sense of panic and anxiety was more than surface and it spread as affect. Some seven years later – after the Iraq War, which, taking place at some distance, was justified as a just war for the spread of wealth creation, democracy and the moral good – the reality of our precarious material condition was brought home in the aftermath of the collapse of the financial system in 2008 and 2009. After the going under of the investment house Lehman brothers on 15 September 2008, the economic and commercial system went into shock and paralysis: ‘A world that had earlier appeared to be “awash with surplus liquidity” (as the IMF frequently reported) suddenly found itself short on cash and awash with surplus houses, surplus offices and shopping malls, surplus productive capacity and even more surplus labour than before.’29 Reality returned emptied out of inhabitants. The sense of deficit and loss reinforced the return of concern and affect, shaking the public’s nervous system from a state of cool detachment to the panicked dysfunction of anxiety. The dreadful collapse first of the World Trade Center and then of the financial system caused a change of feeling and perception over the last few years (2001 to the present). This public transformation supported and increased the impetus to critique postmodernism’s cool and commercial surface culture and that as early as in Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism wherein he establishes a strong connection between postmodernist intellectuals à la Lyotard and the absence of critical engagement with real-life events. Opposition to the status quo seems to have become ineffective if it has not evaporated during postmodernism: Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 96. Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Capitalism, p. 94. 28 Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Capitalism, p. 15. 29 Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. 5. 26

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Unfortunately, as it is currently constituted this opposition is fragmented, rudderless, and lacking coherent organization. To some degree this is the consequence of self-inflicted wounds within the labour movement, within the movements that have broadly embraced identity politics, and within all those postmodern intellectual currents that accord, without knowing it, with the white house line that truth is both socially constructed and a mere effect of discourse. Terry Eagleton’s critique of Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition, in which ‘there can be no difference between truth, authority and rhetorical seductiveness; he who has the smoothest tongue or the raciest story has the power’, bears repeating.30

Critiquing the postmodern coolness towards reality, Harvey goes on to warn: ‘There is a reality out there and it is catching up with us fast.’31 The catchingup in question was the economic reality of homelessness, dispossession, unemployment, bankruptcy and, paradoxically, an increase in the one-sided and all-encompassing economic paradigm of wealth creation in the midst of unprecedented wealth destruction. This single-minded emphasis on money and economics is clearly postmodernism’s inheritance. Andy Warhol’s pictures proudly displayed the superficial culture of commercialized art products in the latter part of the twentieth century. Jameson’s analysis fruitlessly looks for social critique in Warhol’s art: Andy Warhol’s work in fact turns centrally around commodification, and the great billboard images of the Coca Cola bottle or the Campbell’s soup can, which explicitly foreground the commodity fetishism of a transition to late capital, ought to be powerful critical political statements. If they are not that, then one would surely want to know why, and one would want to begin to wonder a little more seriously about the possibilities of political or critical art in the postmodern period of late capital.32

Contrasting van Gogh with Warhol, Jameson detects in postmodern culture a ‘new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense’.33 In the postmodern era, art turned into a detached commodity highlighting the surface beauty of mass and celebrity culture (Warhol’s pictures figure both mass market products like Campbell soup cans and Hollywood stars like Marilyn Monroe). Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 198. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 198. 32 Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Capitalism, p. 9. 33 Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Capitalism, p. 9. 30 31

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This indifferent or cool aloofness of culture has recently disappeared – hence my term ‘the turn to affect’. The postmodern still forms our societal context but our attitude to it has become more alert, more anxiety-ridden (not aloof or ‘cool’ any longer). Postmodernism was aloof to the point that it proclaimed the death of individual concerns and interests: everything was seen from a detached or impersonal perspective that had done away with subjectivity. This is not to dismiss Foucault’s intriguing critique of subject formations. Foucault rightly takes issue with the disciplinarian, homogenizing, in short, subjecting tendencies in various constructions of identity and authorship. The concept of the author may be employed to support authoritarian strategy by which we cover up, reconcile or eliminate contradictions and other forms of multivalence: ‘The author is also the principle of a certain unity of writing – all differences having been resolved, at least in part, by the principles of evolution, maturation, or influence.’34 Following Foucault’s critique, the terms ‘individual’ or ‘subject’ – as used in this book – counter what Cary Wolfe has recently called ‘normative subjectivity’.35 The notion of subjectivity propounded in this study is not that of identity but plurality. It is an understanding of subjectivity that has passed through Foucault’s critique of the author as an authoritarian or ideological device that serves to preclude ‘the proliferation of meaning’.36 The figure of plural subjectivity may soon, however, return to society at large. It certainly has a presence in this book that cannot be ignored (see Chapter 4). Together with the subject, we witness the return of emotions. Frederic Jameson’s demotion of affects in the name of postmodern aloofness has recently been the butt of critique in Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism – a book that is a fine analytical as well as literary work within the newly evolving field of affect-theory. Berlant describes Jameson’s analysis of postmodernism as follows: Finally, Jameson, famously, marked the shift into postmodernism via the waning of affect in postmodern culture. To Jameson, affect equates with ‘feeling or emotion, all subjectivity’; here ‘affect’ is not a technical term but a coarse measure of a shift from a norm of modernist care for the historical resonance in the represented object to a postmodern investment in flatness and surface.37 Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ In Michel Foucault: Aesthetics; Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, edited by James D. Faubion, translated by Robert Hurley and others (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 205–227 (p. 215). 35 Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. xvii. 36 Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ In Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, pp. 205–227 (p. 222). 37 Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 65. 34

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Berlant goes on to charge Jameson with mistaking ‘the aspirationally flat affects of a small elite sector of the aesthetic public for the experience of a general population’.38 Might it be the case that the structure of feeling has slightly changed within society at large? Berlant’s book testifies to this change in the structure of feeling at a time when trauma seems to lose its extraordinariness and when crisis has become an everyday occurrence. Let us first return to postmodernism and its peculiar celebration of commerce, economics, science and technology with which we are already familiar from the discussion of Snow’s The Two Cultures at the opening of this chapter. From Snow’s Rede lecture onwards, the term ‘science’ has increasingly been misused to proclaim the societal uselessness of literature (and the humanities and arts in general). We live in a time that is obsessed with the redemptive potential of new technologies. This obsession with how various technologies change the way we live and think has been going on for some time. Its most noticeable theoretical manifestation can be found in Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979). The subtitle of Lyotard’s book highlights its heuristic and cognitive concerns: A Report on Knowledge. According to Lyotard, postmodernism’s divergence from modernism results from revolutions in technology – computer technology to be more precise. The computer connects different time zones and geographies that have so far been considered to be long distance. Within an instant the computer allows for the flow of news from one part of the world to another. Time compresses into space and spatial distances are to be bridged – via communication/ computer links – within seconds. This acceleration of knowledge exchanges conditions Lyotard’s famous formulation that pronounces ‘the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation’.39 Strikingly Lyotard locates the obsolescence of meta-narratives in a time horizon that coincides with the year in which Snow delivered his famous Rede lecture (1959). Connections between Snow’s 1959 lecture and Lyotard’s 1979 treatise have generally been ignored. This may be due to the fact that Lyotard does not quote Snow. Patricia Waugh has nevertheless found a connecting link between the two texts via Kuhn’s book on The Scientific Revolution: ‘Lyotard’s book has a crucial, though generally unacknowledged, place in the two cultures debate in that it took Kuhn’s critique of scientific knowledge overtly in the direction of Wittgenstein’s concept of language games and towards a fully fledged aestheticism.’40 Lyotard indeed aestheticizes science Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 65. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. xxiv. 40 Waugh, ‘Revising the Two Cultures Debate: Science, Literature, and Value,’ in Waugh and Fuller (eds.), The Arts & Sciences of Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 33–59 (p. 43). 38

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but this is part of his celebration of the new computer age where narratives have supposedly become obsolete. Lyotard’s aesthetics of science is precisely that of cool aloofness. His interest in aesthetics should not blind us to Lyotard’s attack on narratives, which he deems to be anachronistic and useless. Here we meet the congruence of Lyotard’s economistic position and that of C. P. Snow 20 years earlier. Indeed Lyotard does not diverge from Snow’s economist argument, which favours the sciences and condemns narratives and literature as well as meta-narratives and metaphysics to uselessness. While not mentioning Snow’s name, Lyotard opens The Postmodern Condition with a focus on the end of the 1950s: ‘Our working hyposthesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the post-industrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age. This transition has been under way since at least the end of the 1950s.’41 The transition to Lyotard’s postmodern age of the computer leaves behind all forms of narrative as an outmoded heritage of traditional or literary culture. Narrative is the form of the inherited or ‘customary state of knowledge’ which according to Lyotard sharply diverges ‘from its state in the scientific age’:42 ‘All that is important here is the fact that its form is narrative. Narration is the quintessential form of customary knowledge, in more ways than one.’43 Scientific advances preclude the validity of any form of narrative and if that eventuates in a loss of meaning then so be it: ‘Lamenting the “loss of meaning” in postmodernity boils down to mourning the fact that knowledge is no longer principally narrative.’44 The efficiency of science and technology from the latter half of the 1950s onwards seems to have rendered redundant any metaphysical quest for meaning. Once everything works smoothly why ask for the reason why it is working so well? Lyotard acknowledges that once there was a time when science needed the arts and humanities. But this time has vanished with the astounding technological perfections that characterize our posmodernity after World War II. The time for not only narratives but also meta-narratives was that of the Enlightenment. The meta-narratives of the Enlightenment helped legitimate scientific inquiry. Lyotard concedes the historical importance of these meta-narratives in the French revolution and in German Idealism. In Hegel’s philosophy, for example, science and society depend on the work of idealistic reason (knowledge) to discover its true identity: ‘In this perspective, knowledge first finds legitimacy within itself, and it is this knowledge that Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 3. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 19. 43 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 19. 44 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 26. 41 42

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is entitled to say what the State and what Society are.’45 All of this radically changed at the time when Snow delivered his Rede lecture. Then science and technology had become so efficient and socially encompassing that the need for any legitimacy simply evaporated. Now the humanities and arts had begun to lose their function of legitimating scientific advances and emancipatory promises: The grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative [i.e. that of German Idealism] or a narrative of emancipation [i.e. that of the French revolution]. The decline of narrative can be seen as an effect of the blossoming of techniques and technologies since the Second World War, which has shifted emphasis from the ends of action to its means; it can also be seen as the effect of the redeployment of advanced liberal capitalism under the protection of Keynesianism during the period 1930–60, a renewal that has eliminated the communist alternative and valorized the individual enjoyment of goods and services.46

As in Snow’s Rede lecture, here we encounter the confluence of the scientific with the economic. The triumph of both technology and capitalism no longer needs any legitimating narrative or discussion. It is self-evident. What makes it self-evident? – the efficient performance of economy and technology. Economic and technological power legitimates itself through its perfection, its perfect or efficient workings: This is how legitimation by power takes shape. Power is not only good performativity, but also effective verification and good verdicts. It legitimates science and the law on the basis of their efficiency, and legitimates this efficiency on the basis of science and law. It is selflegitimating, in the same way a system organized around performance maximation seems to be. Now it is precisely this kind of context control that a generalized computerization of society may bring.47

Education ceases to be concerned with ideas but with skills. The focus on skills is both scientific and at the same time economic. Lyotard knells the death bell over all forms of narratives and ideas whether they are small or grand. Postmodernism is post-industrial as well as post-metaphysical. 45 46 47

Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 34. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, pp. 37–38. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 47.

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Narratives still had a social function in the relatively long time spectrum of the industrial age. Efficiency has done away with social antagonism and signification. Lyotard posits the end of social antagonisms and meanings of the industrial age. With the end of social antagonism, we also reach the end of social meaning. As Slavoj Žižek has recently pointed out, inefficiency is the prerequisite for the existence of meaning. Meaning depends on obstacles; on cracks in the well-run machinery of society: ‘Meaning – allegorical or symbolic – arises only through destruction, through an out-of-joint experience, or a cut which interrupts the object’s direct functioning in our environment.’48 As we have seen above, Lyotard addresses the loss of meaning that accompanies the hoped-for perfection of technological efficiency (writing ‘Lamenting the “loss of meaning” in postmodernity boils down to mourning the fact that knowledge is no longer narrative’).49 Literature and narratives had a social function before Lyotard’s postmodern age of efficiency. According to Lyotard, the post-industrial age of postmodernism does away with social meanings and social antagonisms that had sustained the functionality of narratives. To be fair to Lyotard, he articulates a critique of the single-minded concern with skills and efficiency when he cautions that such systems of selflegitimating power might end up in regimes of terror. The computerization of society ‘could become the “dream” instrument for controlling and regulating the market system, extended to include terror itself and governed exclusively by the performativity principle’.50 Lyotard holds out the promise that such regime of computerized terror will fail if we have the choice of its more attractive democratic alternative. He admonishes his audience: ‘The line to follow for computerization […] is, in principle, quite simple: give the public free access to the memory and data banks.’51 This presupposes, however, that the free flow of information will be efficient in itself. According to Lyotard, efficiency legitimates itself: efficiency automatically democratizes rather than terrorizes. Furthermore, Lyotard’s postmodern world changes with the news flow from minute to minute. Against the background of such smooth circulation of information, narratives seem to have lost their social validity. The technique of speedy communication has taken the place of what had once been the location of narrative. According to Lyotard, only those aspects of human culture are valid that can be adopted into the short-lived format of computerized communication: ‘We can predict Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), p. 492. 49 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 26. 50 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 67. 51 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 67. 48

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that anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable in this way [i.e. into the format of computer communication] will be abandoned and that the direction of new research will be dictated by the possibility of its eventual results being translatable into computer language.’52 Lyotard veils his value judgement under the guise of a prediction. The computer dictates the future shape of our lives. Lyotard therefore appraises the new hegemony of the computer, which condemns everything that is different to a quick death: ‘Along with the hegemony of the computers comes a certain logic, and therefore a certain set of prescriptions determining which statements are accepted as “knowledge” statements.’53 From now on all forms of knowledge are based on the technology of the computer rather than on the arts of narrative. As Harvey has maintained, the hegemony of this scientific knowledge condones capitalism’s high finance: The rhetoric of postmodernism is dangerous for it avoids confronting the realities of political economy and their circumstances of global power. The silliness of Lyotard’s ‘radical proposal’ that opening up the data banks to everyone as a prologue to radical reform (as if we would all have equal power to use that opportunity) is instructive.54

According to Harvey it is instructive because it is nothing else but a universal gesture without any political validity. Lyotard, however, has made his neoliberal-democratic affiliations quite clear. He has made clear that scientific knowledge is framed by and serves the interests of capitalist profit maximization when he emphasizes that the standard of scientific truth is not a long-term perspective but the quick flow of production and consumption: The relationship of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will increasingly tend, to assume the form already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the commodities they produce and consume – i.e., the form of value. Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold; it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange. Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its ‘use-value’.55 52 53 54 55

Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 4. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 4. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 117. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, pp. 4–5.

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The new scientific knowledge of ‘postindustrial’ postmodernism turns out to be not so much driven by science as such but by neoliberal economics: by the command to keep increasing the margins of profit and ‘create wealth’. Money is the value that transcends all use-values. It turns these usevalues into indifferent entities that can be exchanged with the financial power money provides. This raises the question about what is new in postindustrial postmodernism. It is a question that has been repeatedly raised by Jameson and Harvey. Harvey has often argued that Lyotard’s and other postmodernists’ attempts to deny the continuation of class divides and everincreasing disparities between extreme wealth and extreme poverty serve to make consolidations of power go without critical opposition. As Harvey has put it recently apropos the emergence of neoliberal economics in the late 1970s: My view is that it [i.e. neoliberalism] refers to a class project that coalesced in the crisis of the 1970s. Masked by a lot of rhetoric about individual freedom, liberty, personal responsibility and the virtues of privatization, the free market and free trade, it legitimized draconian policies designed to restore and consolidate capitalist class power.56

Lyotard describes these economic changes while extolling the virtues of computer technology. The computer enables the uninterrupted flow of value or, in other words, capital within seconds from one part of the world to another. It is this process that constitutes both scientific knowledge and financial value. Computer technologies have indeed helped bridge temporal and spatial gaps between different geographies. More importantly, the new information technologies have radically accelerated the flow of news and financial value. This increase in the speed of financial and informational processes is, however, what capitalism has been about from roughly 1750 onwards. As Harvey has put it, ‘Throughout the history of capitalism much effort has therefore been put into reducing the friction of distance and barriers to movement. Innovations in transport and communications have been central.’57 According to Lyotard computer technology has accelerated this process to such an extent that we no longer have time to engage with any form of narratives. The telling of stories takes time as well as patience. The time has run out for such patience. Lyotard calls this shrinkage of time ‘scientific’ but, as the above discussion has shown, in actual fact it is economic. In an unacknowledged 56 57

Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism, p. 10. Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism, p. 42.

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way, Lyotard refers to the economics of what he proclaims to be science when he predicts that the divide between the developed and developing world will grow wider with every new ‘scientific’ advance: In the postindustrial, postmodern age, science will maintain and no doubt strengthen its pre-eminence in the arsenal of productive capacities of the nation states. Indeed, this situation is one of the reasons leading to the conclusion that the gap between developed and developing countries will grow ever wider in the future.58

Here Lyotard’s ‘science’ shows its prejudicial point of view. He associates the developing world with poverty, narrative and the lack of science. His prejudiced predictions could not be further from the truth: indeed today it is developing nations – like China and India – that are not only closing the gap with developed ones but overtaking them in economic growth. Lyotard’s claims about the efficiency of post-industrial economics have, however, collapsed into the debris of our contemporary anxiety. This sense of anxiety arises out of fears about the meltdown of the financial system and the change in climate to which our carbon-heavy industrialized economies keep contributing. Unlike Snow’s 1959 and Lyotard’s 1970s we are no longer assured of the self-legitimating efficiencies of science in terms of economics. Economic growth and science have become almost indistinguishable in both Snow’s hope for a postmodern future and in Lyotard’s account of postmodernism. According to Lyotard and his followers, the accelerated speed of such purported scientific growth has rendered the slow pace of literature obsolete. Has it? This question is all the more pertinent in the wake of the financial crises that have shaken the purported scientific foundations of the developed world.

How can literature change accustomed forms of action and perception? Chakrabarty, Said, Amitav Ghosh Against the background of the financial crisis, the following chapters challenge Lyotard’s influential dismissal of narratives as obsolete and unscientific. Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis shows how literature is more than a narrative device by which we represent our world. Rather than merely representing what exists, literature’s narratives create open spaces where we can experience new forms of life. Forms of life that run counter to 58

Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 5.

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what Lyotard has called (in the quote above) the hegemony of the computer. Science provides infrastructures for life and so do economic practices. Lyotard confuses the infrastructure with the pulse of life. While science and economics lay the foundations for the channels by which information and financial value travel, the scientific and economic perspective remains indifferent if not disengaged from the forms of life that make use of its services. While engaging with literature we discover how science and economics are themselves part of a larger cultural context. By thus shifting the perspective from questions of efficiency to those of social meaning, literature also makes possible thought of different or new forms of socio-cultural interaction in which already-established scientific-economic infrastructures may be still of use but in slightly altered forms. The sciences are in need of literature as both complementary interlocutor and critic. Let me exemplify my argument by showing its relevance apropos postcolonial literary studies in South East Asia. Social scientist Dipesh Chakrabarty focuses in his work on how we can fruitfully connect cultural inquiry, representation and imagination with the empiricist core of the social sciences. Chakrabarty takes the socio-political force of figures of imagination seriously. In this context, Chakrabarty critiques Benedict Anderson (social anthropologist and author of the influential study Imagined Communities) for having paid too little attention to the category imagination: ‘Yet, compared to the idea of community, imagination remains a curiously undiscussed category in social science writings on nationalism. Anderson warns that the word should not be taken to mean “false.” Beyond that, however, its meaning is taken to be self-evident.’59 Building on Chakrabarty’s Provincialising Europe, Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis analyses how literary and cultural inquiry are not marginal appendices to social science research – such as finance and economics – but rather one of its prime preconditions. In Chakrabarty’s account, the imagination’s primary role is that of representation. Here Chakrabarty follows Edward Said’s famous analysis of how European novels represent colonialism. Said has spelt out the relationship between the seemingly autonomous or elevated sphere of culture, and the applied, worldly and brutal practices of imperialism. In doing so, Said revises Matthew Arnold’s definition of culture from the 1860s, according to which culture is an Eden-like island where we live amongst ‘the best that is thought and known’. Countering such definition of culture as the purity of various cerebral perfections, Said maintains that culture is a mixed entity that cannot be separated from often unsavoury worldly practices such as colonialism and 59

Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 149.

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imperialism. He argues that ‘Cultural experience or indeed every cultural form is radically, quintessentially hybrid, and if it has been the practice in the West since Immanuel Kant to isolate cultural and aesthetic realms from the worldly domain, it is now time to rejoin them.’60 He goes on to say: This is by no means a simple matter, since – I believe – it has been the essence of experience in the West at least since the late eighteenth century not only to acquire distant domination and reinforce hegemony, but also to divide the realms of culture and experience into apparently separate spheres.61

Unintentionally Said provides a rather homogenous view of various writers who, he argues, were not only representing colonialism but also supporting it through their work of representation. Criticising Said’s view of literature/ culture as a consolidator of empire, the following chapters bring to the fore a different aspect of literature and cultural inquiry: one that helps us change rather than consolidate harmful practises within economics, politics, religion, medicine and society at large. Countering a long-standing tradition that views literature in terms of representation or mimesis, Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis shifts the emphasis from a focus on resemblance to the creation of alternative and novel forms of life. It delineates how arts and humanities help us change accustomed forms of action and perception. How can literature change accustomed forms of action and perception? Literature’s sphere of action may appear modest and circumscribed. Whereas the sciences pursue large societal questions, literature seems to be introvert in its focus on individuals and particulars. How can literature’s engagement with the subjective and the local bring about change in society at large? In order to address this question it is helpful to discuss Amitav Ghosh’s essay ‘The March of the Novel Through History’. Ghosh asks how a genre like the novel, which is concerned with particular places, could give rise to a notion of universal literature. Ghosh describes ‘the emergence of a notion of universal “literature,” a form of artistic expression that embodies differences in place and culture, emotion and aspiration, but in such a way as to render them communicable’.62 This idea of universal literature may have its origins in Europe – in Goethe’s famous term Weltliteratur (world literature) – but was most enthusiastically embraced as practice elsewhere: ‘This idea may well have had its birth in 60 61 62

Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 68. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 68. Ghosh, Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times (New York: Mariner Books, 2005), p. 108.

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Europe, but I suspect it met with much more enthusiastic reception elsewhere.’63 As we will see below, Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy consciously partakes of this idea of a universal literature, which connects the local with the global. How can we account for the paradox of literature: that we experience the universal through an in-depth engagement with the local and the internal? Intriguingly Ghosh attempts to make sense of this paradox by examining how literary representation occurs. What makes possible a sense of place is the loss of place in the first place: ‘Those of us who love novels often read them because of the eloquence with which they communicate a “sense of place.” Yet the truth is that it is the very loss of a lived sense of place that makes their fictional representation possible.’64 Literary representation depends on a shift away from that which is represented. This gap between sign and signified has been bewailed in philosophical and theoretical works on literature, from Plato to Heidegger, to Paul de Man. Slavoj Žižek has recently attempted to do justice to the loss that is a gain. What we lose in literature’s shift away from what it represents, we gain in our understanding of the universal and its particular or concrete meanings. Creatively rereading Hegel’s notion of the concrete universal Žižek writes of ‘the movement of negativity which splits universality from within, reducing it to one of the particular elements, one of its species’.65 Literature’s site is local and particular. The particular, however, partakes of the universal. Put more precisely, the particular is the internal rift of the universal. We cannot think of the universal without its stumbling block: the particular. The particular participates in social antagonism, which is a synonym for the diversity without which the universal would be flat, monolithic or homogenous. Lyotard’s end of narratives could only come to fruition in a completely efficient world of what Sylvia Plath calls ‘faceless faces’ (see Chapter 4) where homogeneity reigns supreme and where we have lost the meaning of both particularity and universality. In order to arrive at meanings old or new, we need to touch the zero level of nothingness, where representations evaporate and new configurations arise out of the gap, the null point that separates the sign from the signified: ‘There are many worlds because Being cannot be One, because a gap persists between the two.’66 Literature thrives in this gap opening up between the particular and the universal. Ghosh describes this interruption as the birth of the universal out of the loss of the particular. Ghosh, Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times (New York: Mariner Books, 2005), p. 108. 64 Ghosh, Incendiary Circumstances, p. 119. 65 Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2003), p. 87. 66 Žižek, Less than Nothing, p. 52. 63

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The zero point of the particular is, however, the recuperation of a new particularity within the universal, within world literature. Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis discovers in precisely this gap between particular and universal, between sign and signified the space for forms of new life that diverge from what we are already familiar within our circumscribed daily routines hemmed in as they are by the parochial. Ghosh calls this ‘dislocation’ – this process of the literary opening from the local to the universal: ‘In other words, to locate oneself through prose, one must begin with an act of dislocation.’67 Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies narrates precisely this sense of dislocation without which we would not have an understanding of the universal and of human interconnection. In the first part of his Ibis trilogy Ghosh moves from land, to river, to sea. The novel’s structure performs an opening up from solid forms of empire and colonialism to the wide seascape where trade may hit its limits being subject to the vagaries of storms and other forms of disruptive weather. The landbound section of the novel frequently gives rise to the pseudo-scientific talk of the capitalist economics of 1838 (which mirrors our contemporary neoliberal setting). Representatives of empire emphasize the scientific advancement colonialism and the lucrative opium trades bring to less-developed, ‘unscientific’ China. Referring to opium trade as the foundation of Victorian wealth, the merchant trader Mr Burnham turns the trade in this drug into the foundation of all scientific progress: ‘Why one might even say that it is opium that has made progress and industry possible.’68 Progress means not only addiction but also the mass starvation of Indian peasants who are bound by British colonial rule to solely plant opium poppies rather than wheat. Against this bleak background of the status quo Ghosh’s novel turns the infamous Kala-Pani, or Black Water of the ocean, into a metaphor for literature’s scope for border-crossing liberations. The violence inflicted by the drawing of border has already been the subject matter of his earlier (1988) novel Shadow Lines. This novel does not have much of a plot. Instead of telling a linear storyline, it focuses on the shadow lines announced in its title. These lines come home to roost at the end of the novel when the narrator loses his childhood friend Tridib in the Communal Riots of 1963 in Dhaka. Borderlines divide Dhaka from the narrator’s and Tridib’s native Calcutta. The novel tells the story of how these borderlines are shadow lines: it unmasks the fictitiousness of these lines in the life of its protagonists. The actual shadowy or fictitious character of these lines comes to the fore at an utterly contingent moment: that of street riots in both Dhaka and Calcutta. Ghosh, Incendiary Circumstances, p. 119. Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (London: John Murray, 2008), p. 121.

67

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The narrator and his companions have crossed the border separating his India’s Calcutta from Bangladesh’s Dhaka. It turns out that borders do not separate opposing parties. On the contrary, they intensify violence by turning the two geographies (separated by the border) into mirror images of each other. Ghosh describes violence across borders in terms of Lacan’s mirror stage. Whereas Lacan analyses the fictitious foundation of the strife for autonomous selfhood, Ghosh discovers how supposedly separate entities come together in the deadly and mirror-like embrace of violence. It is worthwhile quoting the whole passage: When I turned back to my first circle I was struck with wonder that there had really been a time, not so long ago when people, sensible people, of good intention, had thought that all maps where the same, that there was a special enchantment in lines; I had to remind myself that they were not to be blamed for believing that there was something admirable in moving violence to the borders and dealing with it through science and factories, for that was the pattern of the world. They had drawn their borders, believing in that pattern, in the enchantment of lines, hoping perhaps that once they had etched their borders upon the map, the two bits of land would sail away from each other like the shifting tectonic plates of the prehistoric Gondwanaland. What had they felt, I wondered, when they discovered that they had created not a separation, but a yetundiscovered irony – the irony that killed Tridib; the simple fact that there had never been a moment in the 4000-year-old history of that map when the places we had known as Dhaka and Calcutta were more closely bound to each other than after they had drawn their lines – so closely that I, in Calcutta, had only to look in the mirror to be in Dhaka; a moment when each city was the inverted image of the other, locked into an irreversible symmetry by the line that was to set us free – our looking-glass border.69

Here we encounter the opposite of an ostensible gap where entities separate and create new forms of being. The narrator describes the violence of a meeting between sign and signifier, representation and that which it represents. The mirror-like coincidence between representation and the represented creates a double. Traditionally the double denotes doubt. In this way the Latin word for to doubt, dubitare, derives from duo (two or double). Glenn W. Most has argued that the widespread association of crisis (doubt) with the figure of the double 69

Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (London: Bloomsbury, 1988), p. 287.

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refers to ‘doubt about identity in particular’.70 Following Freud and Lacan, Catherine Malabou has recently argued that the double denotes the psychic collapse of the distinction between internal and external danger.71 The self that sees its mirror-image in the assumed other turns violent at the collapse of his confirmed identity. The drawing of borderlines establishes clearly delineated identities. The collective mirror phase marks the discovery that these identities are spurious. This recognition does not lead to greater insight but to anger and violence. The collectives in question here turn furious at the spurious foundation of what divides them (borderlines or the grounds of their political, religious and ethnic identities). Ghosh describes postcolonial violence in terms of both mirages and mirrors. Violence’s mirror scene renders the normalcy of non-violent civil society a mirage of contingency: It is fear that comes of the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent, that the spaces that surround one, the streets one inhabits, can become, suddenly and without warning, as hostile as a desert in a flash flood. It is this that sets apart the thousand million people who inhabit the subcontinent from the rest of the world – not language, not food, not music – it is the special quality that grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one’s image in the mirror.72

Like borders, mirrors produce two semi-identical copies of one’s body. These two copies behave identically: here clearly being is one. The one splits into identical bodies; the two images or bodies represent each other and desire the same thing. It is not difference but identity that produces strife, harm and violence. This sense of rivalry ensues from striving not for different goods but for mutually identical ones: We’re going to get you, nothing personal, we have to kill you for our freedom. It would be like reading my own speech transcribed on a mirror. And then I think to myself, why don’t they draw thousands of lines through the whole subcontinent and give every place a new name? What would it change? It’s a mirage; the whole thing is a mirage.73

The novel shows how this quest for freedom reduces difference to spurious – mirage-like – sameness. Colonial India aspires to freedom from colonial rule. Most, Doubting Thomas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 80. See Malabou’s The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage, trans. Steven Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), pp. 121–141. 72 Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, p. 250. 73 Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, p. 302. 70 71

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In the postcolonial era, India’s Calcutta fights for freedom from Bangladesh’s Dhaka and vice versa. Each entity mirrors each other’s quest for freedom. Lines are drawn to ensure ‘freedom’ but these lines are shadow lines because the countries and nations they supposedly separate are identical representations of each other. Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines narrates the violence implicit in mirrors and full or identical representations. What is missing is the gap out of which difference arises. Difference creates both inefficiency and meaning – two entities missing in Snow’s and Lyotard’s pseudo-scientific understanding of science. The two cultures’ debate itself was an attack on the difference that the arts and humanities seem to constitute to the idealized hegemony of the free market. Mutatis mutandis, in Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy death and difference loom within the feared nonentity of the ocean’s black water. However, the death in question here is that of a new beginning. The ship that traverses the blackness of water is the vehicle of true transformation. It crosses the vastness of the ocean where we encounter the zero point of borders and lines: ‘Ibis was not a ship like any other; in her inward reality she was a vehicle for transformation, travelling through the mists of illusion towards the elusive, ever-receding landfall that was Truth.’74 The passengers of Ghosh’s symbolic ship are all outcasts – whether they are prisoners or indentured peasants or collies who replace the victims of the now-illegal slave trade. Through their exposure to the borderless Black Water, they experience the new beginning of literature, which is precisely the interruption of institutionally (i.e. borders and other institutional nomenclatures) produced harm. As has been discussed above, Ghosh calls this form of salutary disruption ‘dislocation’. The Ibis indeed dislocates its passengers from the harm they were subjected to at home: ‘Now that they were cut off from home, there was nothing to prevent men and women from pairing off in secret, as beasts, demons and pishaches were said to do: there was no pressing reason for them to seek the sanction of anything other than their own desires.’75 By relying on the sanction of their own individual forms of desire, the outcasts of the Ibis undermine the colonialist trade with opium. How so? Sea of Poppies describes the effects of opium consumption as precisely the death of desire. The opium-addicted captain of the ship explains the work of the drug as follows: ‘I will tell you then: it kills a man’s desires.’76 By answering to the authority of their individual desires, the outcast crew of the Ibis invert the foundation of modern ethics, which is precisely the indifference to or the overcoming of idiosyncratic, nonconforming, non-homogenous affects or emotions. Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, p. 440. Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, p. 449. Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, p. 453.

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As we will see in the following chapter modern Western ethics has been shaped by a secularized Christian divide between fallen nature (i.e. desire) and rational or spiritual redemption from this ‘corrupt’ natural state (ruled by desire). The colonial judge who condemns one of the outcasts of the Ibis to punitive work in Mauritius justifies the harshness of his sentencing with precisely the ethical command to forgo natural inclinations and emotions in order to reach rational forms of justice as follows: ‘The temptation that afflicts those who bear the burden of governance,’ said the judge, ‘is ever that of indulgence, the power of paternal feeling being such as to make every parent partake of the suffering of his ward and offspring. Yet, painful as it is, duty requires us sometimes to set aside our natural affections in the proper dispensation of justice … ’77

Mr Justice Kendalbushe here clearly articulates ethics based on a modern compatibalist perspective, which will be discussed in the following chapter. His reasoning also partakes of a providential view of progress, which, as we have seen at the opening of this chapter, keeps shaping the thinking of twentieth-century intellectuals in different but related ways. The colonial subject appears as a child who is in need of parental punishment and providential guidance. The colonial child must not follow his/her desire but obey the command of his/her colonial parent. Ghosh’s Ibis novels disrupt this harmonious and providential construction of economics, ethics and politics. As we shall see in the following chapter and throughout this book, literature’s ethics of resilience confirms the value of desire. Resilience here denotes the refusal to abandon nonconforming affects. The turn to affect in contemporary society at large may constitute a resilient re-discovery of nonhegemonic versions of the arts and sciences that have refused to submit to the one-size-fits-all approach of global capitalism.

77

Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, p. 248.

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The aim is to reach an outlook different from that of any of these theories. It is an outlook that embodies scepticism about philosophical ethics, but a scepticism that is more about philosophy than it is about ethics. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

Introduction: The tradition of modern ethics and its divide between nature and reason As we have seen in the last section of the previous chapter, literature critiques reductive approaches towards ethics. At the same time literature helps discover a diversity of ways of conducting a good life. As Bernard Williams has pointed out, ‘philosophy has traditionally shown a desire to reduce this diversity’.1 In the pre-modern context philosophers reduced ethics to eudaimonia, to a question of the well-being of the soul: ‘Well-being was the desirable state of one’s soul – and that meant of oneself as a soul, since an indestructible and immaterial soul was what one really was.’2 This dualistic account of the good life has shaped Greek and Christian ethics from Socrates to Augustine (see Chapter 5). A further reduction haunts this approach. It reduces the question of well-being (to which it has already reduced ethics) to being disembodied: ‘If bodily hurt is no real harm, why does virtue require us so strongly not to hurt other people’s body?’3 Pre-modern philosophical ethics reduces the question of the good to the dualistic, immaterial issue of the soul’s well-being. Though still clinging to a dualistic paradigm, modern philosophical ethics attempts to separate ethical value from any form of well-being. Within Kantian philosophy, the term ‘ethics’ denotes the divide between the merely natural state of well-being and the rational state of the moral good. This accustomed Kantian or modern understanding of ethics grows out of the purported incommensurability of being and reason. The natural Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2011), with a commentary on the text by A. W. Moore and a foreword by Jonathan Lear, p. 17. 2 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, pp. 38–39. 3 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 39. 1

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state of being gives rise to the sheer pleasure of being alive. As Williams has clearly put it, ‘Kant, in particular, believed that every action not done from moral principle was done for the agent’s pleasure.’4 Pre-modern philosophy reduces ethics to the well-being of the soul. Modern Kantian philosophy is equally reductive in excluding spiritual or embodied feelings of pleasure from its conception of the moral good. Kant’s purportedly secular approach towards ethics nonetheless adds the religious element of dying away from the world (an overcoming of worldly concerns). Kant constructed an understanding of what it means to be rational along the lines of Christ’s death to the world. In traditional Christian scripture, the fruits of this death are to be reaped in heaven. In Kant’s secular version of this redemptive narrative these fruits are to be harvested immanently.5 As Girogio Agamben has recently pointed out, ‘ethics in a modern sense, with its court of insoluble aporias, is born, in this sense, from the fracture between being and praxis that is produced at the end of the ancient world and has its eminent place in Christian theology’.6 The divergence between being and praxis necessitates a system of rules and regulations by means of which what is incompatible becomes compatible. The word ‘ethics’ has come to signify such a system. Ethics in this secularized Christian or modern sense imposes its degrees upon a fallen or imperfect world. From now on, we have to work hard at turning fallen nature into a product of our (ethical) actions: ‘what is new is the division between being and the will, nature and action, introduced by Christian theology’.7 Christian theology from Augustine onwards creates the concept of providence in order to bridge the gap between being and praxis. Providence turns the incompatible compatible: nature – while being opposed to reason and redemption – in the end coincides with rational and ethical actions: ‘Providence (the government) is that through which theology and philosophy try to come to terms with the splitting of classical ontology into two separate realities: being and praxis, transcendent and immanent good, theology and oiknoomia.’8 Providence transforms potentially unruly nature into the wished-for stability signalled by the concept ‘natural order’. Via providence – Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ – economics affects the presumed Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 17. For a detailed discussion of this topic see Mack’s German Idealism and the Jew: The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 23–41. 6 Agamben, The Kingdom and Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, translated by Lorenzo Chiesa with Matteo Mandarini (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 54. 7 Agamben, The Kingdom and Glory, p. 55. 8 Agamben, The Kingdom and Glory, p. 140. 4 5

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utopian position of equilibrium, stability and harmony. As John Cassidy has recently shown, the supposed mathematical certainties of modern market equilibrium theory are not objective facts but rather participate in a hermeneutic and secularized theological tradition of intellectual history: ‘Behind all the posturing and fancy mathematics, it [i.e. market equilibrium theory] relied on the ancient notion of the free market economy as a stable, self-equilibrating mechanism, and ignored many of the problems and pathologies that the history of capitalism has thrown up.’9 Pseudo-theological is the ‘myth of natural orderliness in the economic realm’.10 The market here assumes the mantle of theological providence, invisibly turning instability into stability, corruption into beneficence and self-interest into social welfare. Owing to the financial crisis we have realized that markets are far from stable. This is, however, reality-derived knowledge by hindsight. A decade ago various mortgage-backed securities were mathematically credited to be risk-free. It is not mathematics but rather contingent history and affectridden social reality that prove the validity of an economic theory. Market equilibrium theory was valid as long as markets were reasonably stable: Following the steep recession of 1981–82, the US economy went twentyfive years without entering another prolonged downturn. When things are going well, it is much easier to sell people on the latest exposition of the invisible hand, and to ignore inconvenient issues, such as rising inequality, chronic budget deficits, gaps in the health care system, the potential for financial instability.11

Agamben does not mention reality-based economics on which Cassidy focuses his discussion. Cassidy, however, does not refer to the secularized theological affect of providence in economic theories of the invisible hand. Economic theories such as those of both market efficiency and market equilibrium assume to be rational and non-affect-ridden. This appearance of objectivity makes them all the more attractive. The realization of their subjective and affect-driven foundations renders those delusive theories amenable to rational critique. This is precisely one of the tasks of this book. Theology and economics affect the perfection of an imperfect world with reference to a providential and teleological scheme. Agamben seems to be aware that it is not only theology and economics Cassidy, How Markets Fall: The Logic of Economic Calamities (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 106. 10 Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Market: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 151. 11 Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Market.  9

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whose functioning is premised on the concept of a predetermined order, of providence. It is also modern science: Modern science’s image of the world, writes Agamben, ‘has often been opposed to the theological concept of a providential government of the world. However, in their conceptual structure they are more similar than we customarily think. First of all, the model of general providence is based on eternal laws that are entirely analogous to those of modern science’.12

Agamben’s notion of modern science may be too much reliant on the work of Adam Smith to be congruent with current scientific methodologies. As we shall see in Chapter 5, the science of medicine does, however, displace the denotation of the theological term mortality into the sphere of secular immanence. Within this seemingly secular sphere notions of ill health and mortality separate the ethically good and healthy from sin-invested diseases of modern life (obesity, smoking and so forth). Illness here becomes not a theological but an economic topic of modern ethics (rendering parts of the workforce uneconomic or useless). Agamben’s concern with the management of disorder is pertinent not only to economics and theology but also to medicine and other modern sciences, because ‘what is essential’ to these disciplines is not really the idea of predetermined order, so much as the possibility of managing the disorder; not the binding necessity of fate, but the constancy and computability of a disorder; not the uninterrupted chain of causal connections, but the conditions of the maintenance and orientation of effects that are in themselves purely contingent.13

In order to manage contingency and control disorder, modern ethics relies on providential schemes and this in different fields – not only in theology but also where we would least expect it: in medicine, economics and other social and natural sciences. What, however, has this hidden concern with the management of disorder and contingency to do with evidence-based empirical research? Evidencebased empirical research does not take place in a sphere independent of context and concept. It is itself shaped by questions of order, efficiency, disorder and breakdown. Agamben’s recent work analyses points where Agamben, The Kingdom and Glory, p. 123 Agamben, The Kingdom and Glory, p. 124.

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the theological has become indistinct from the economical. The concept of a well-ordered and predictable future (providence) is such a point. (More generally speaking, a similar attention to the management of life characterizes the broad modern understanding of the term ethics, as has recently been argued.)14 Agamben critically reflects on how such management of life declares our contingent affect-ridden and embodied world unworthy of reflection. Bio-politics is an extreme form of such management of life, where life becomes synonymous with political ideologies and rules. Agamben sees in the Christian theory of government a precursor of both bio-politics and utopian economics: ‘The Christian government of the world consequently assumes the paradoxical figure of the immanent government of a world that is and needs remain extraneous.’15 By ‘extraneous’ Agamben understands something that is irrelevant, non-essential or impertinent. Both theological providence and economic predictability declare affect-ridden and contingent forms of embodiment non-essential and unworthy of critical reflection. The ethics of literature counters this Christian and post-Christian (i.e. modern) approach to the management of life and other forms of disorder. Rather than rendering the contingency of our world peripheral, it reconnects the word with the world, literature with life.

Judith Butler, literature and the bridge between nature and reason Literature changes the way we conceive of ethics: no longer in the postChristian context of a divide between being and praxis, but rather in terms of an interdependence and interaction between the two. This back and forth between substance and subjectivity, between body and mind engages with – rather than, in panic-ridden moves, banishes – contingency and disorder. This book argues for a new conception as well as implementation of the ethical. This new approach towards ethics emerges from nascent readings of literature, science and philosophy. The ethics that emerges out of literature’s engagement with philosophy, science and socio-political pseudo-science does not repeat or somewhat reinstate in the slightly altered form of the ethical as we know it from theological and philosophical discourse. Rather than presenting philosophical ethics in a different, more accessible form and format, the ethics of literature compliments and sometimes counters See Simon Blackburn’s Ethics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Agamben, The Kingdom and Glory, p. 140.

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that of philosophy. It compliments some strands within contemporary political thought about social exclusion, social performance, particularly that of Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek. Butler is of particular interest for the project of developing a new approach to ethics, because she combines Hegel and Spinoza’s ethical thought, while still clinging to a Hegelian philosophy of recognition. Her work shows that a politics of recognition and a politics of creativity (self-determination or, in other words, what Hasana Sharp has recently called ‘renaturalization’) are not mutually exclusive. As she has shown in her reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit recognition is premised on one of the prime motors of creativity: desire. ‘But what is it that the other recognizes us as’, she asks and answers ‘as a desiring being: Self-consciousness is Desire in general’.16 From Butler’s perspective, social recognition does not arise from social conformity but from our creative, self-determined and highly diverse desires. Social recognition thus understood complements Spinoza’s conatus, which is a distinctive life force that informs and shapes us in different and differentiated ways. Indeed Butler interprets Hegel’s notion of force (which preconditions his understanding of desire) as ‘Hegel’s reformulation of Spinoza’s conatus’.17 The self receives social recognition for its creative force through which it transforms not only the external world but through which it also re-creates itself: ‘Desire as a transformation of the natural world is simultaneously the transformation of its own natural self into an embodied freedom.’18 The encounter between self and other is mutually transformative. Butler’s Hegelianism is one that is inclusive of otherness because it is revisable. Butler reconstructs Hegel’s philosophy along Spinozist lines. This makes her reading of both Hegel and Spinoza highly creative. Butler opens up Hegel’s humanism to Spinoza’s critique of humanism. By undermining the methodologies of representation, Spinoza has led the groundwork for a new conception of literature. This new understanding of literature and creativity, in general, preconditions Butler’s liberating reading of social recognition not as the result or reward for social conformity, but, on the contrary, as the realization and appreciation of social difference and diversity. This new understanding of literature revises our approach towards politics. It is no longer a politics of homogeneity but of creativity, self-determination and diversity. Butler, ‘Desire, Rhetoric, and Recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1987)’ in Sara Salih with Judith Butler (ed.), Judith Butler Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 39–85 (83). 17 Butler, ‘Desire, Rhetoric, and Recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1987)’, p. 55. 18 Butler, ‘Desire, Rhetoric, and Recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1987)’, p. 83. 16

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Can it be one of nature or renaturalization? Butler has analysed how ‘nature’ is culturally constructed. And yet we live in a substantive, embodied world of nature. The point is not to conflate the natural with the cultural. The study of representation is of huge socio-political value, because it reveals how in different contexts, the cultural becomes represented as the natural. A politics based on representation, which defines social recognition in terms of social conformity, does, not, however, do justice to our diversity. Instead of representation, Spinoza’s conatus evokes the diverse and idiosyncratic forces of creativity and self-determination. Preparing for a new understanding of ethics, this chapter will first discuss Spinoza’s Ethics and will then proceed to raise the question whether literature rather than the more de-contextualized field of philosophy enables us to see the ethical beyond the mind–body, being–reason divide. The concluding section analyses literature’s differentia specifica from the Spinozist philosopher Deleuze’s ideational approach.

Spinoza’s ethics of literature: His conatus and the new approach to literature, humanities and the arts Further developing Spinoza’s rationalist perspective on the imagination I have recently delineated a new approach towards the ethical significance and the social impact of literature and the arts.19 This chapter shows how Spinoza’s thought has been helpful in formulating what I call a nascent approach to the study of literature and the arts/humanities in general. How Literature Changes the Way We Think attempts to place the emphasis on the active rather than merely on the receptive aspect of humanities and arts. Here, it creatively re-reads Spinoza’s term conatus as the striving or, in other words, the unending attempt to act within and perceive the world in radically new life-enhancing ways. The humanities and arts have traditionally been associated with the imagination. The imagination, in turn, has often been separated from the work of reason. Spinoza was the first philosopher to break down the separation between reason and imagination as well as between mind and body. To better understand Spinoza’s philosophy of the conatus, we must therefore attend to his novel approach to the mind–body problem. This will be the task of what follows in this section. It will emerge from this discussion that bringing together literature, humanities and the arts with medicine, social sciences and science depends on Spinoza’s post-humanist humanism. See Mack, How Literature Changes the Way We Think (New York: Continuum, 2012).

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Spinoza does not deny humanity and human rationality. His reason is, however, that of the conatus: the striving to create and preserve ever-new forms of life. Rationality here consists in recognizing the subjectivity and creativity of each form of life. This section will also discuss what I call the ethics of literature: literature uncovers the affective and fictive ways of living, which govern our day-to-day activities. This rationalist work of making us conscious of real fictions also provides the impetus to change our mode of action and interaction within society at large. The second section analyses one powerful fiction that has shaped various attempts to find an abstract measure of what is human. This is the fiction of bio-politics, the extreme variation of which determined the Nazi genocide. The following section analyses the ways in which the Spinozist thinker Gilles Deleuze comes to terms with the philosophical repercussions of bio-politics and the Nazi genocide. This discussion will show that a literary mode of inquiry may prove to be closer to the ethics of living than Deleuze’s ideational discourse. The radical wager proposed in this chapter is that literature rather than philosophical discourse à la Deleuze bridges the gap between the mental and the corporeal, between the humanities and the sciences. The bridging of these divides was a major concern of Spinoza’s reconception of the mind as the idea of the body. There is a certain parallelism between imagination and reason, between mind and body. What has been taken to be the receptive region of both the body and the imagination turns out to be connected to the more active or constructive workings of the mind. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Spinoza’s radical revision of Descartes’s mind–body dualism was scientifically substantiated by neurological experiments and research findings. By now it has become common neurological knowledge ‘that the human mind and spirituality originates in a physical organ, the brain’.20 Contemporary neurology has thus proved right Spinoza’s materialism of the mind.21 The mind is not separated from the body but partakes of it. The mind is itself corporeal matter (the brain). These neurological findings overturn the traditional divide between body and mind, which places the latter above the former. Commenting on Simone de Beauvoirs’s analysis of the body, Judith Butler has maintained that this traditional divide between the mental and the corporeal ‘takes its bearings within a cultural situation in which men have traditionally been associated with the disembodied or transcendent feature of human existence Eric R. Kandel, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of the Mind (London: Norton, 2007), p. 7 21 For a discussion of this see Antonio Damasio’s Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (London: Harcourt, 2003). 20

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and women with bodily and immanent features of human existence’.22 The predominance of Descartes’s res cogitans has begun to disintegrate. Descartes res cogitans ‘gives rise to rational thought and consciousness, and it reflects in its nonphysical character the spiritual nature of the soul’.23 Kandel rightly claims that contemporary neurology’s critique of Descartes’s paradigm of a mind that interacts with the body by controlling it dates back to Freud. Freud’s starting point was the physicality of the mind (the brain): in 1887, when Freud began his own career, he has thought to solve the hidden riddles of mental life by studying the brain one nerve cell at a time. Freud started out as an anatomist, studying single nerve cells, and had anticipated a key point of what later came to be called the neuro doctrine, the view that nerve cells are the building blocks of the brain.24

When Freud abandoned his neurological research and concentrated on literary issues such as language, the unconscious and representation, he always connected these seemingly immaterial linguistic concerns with the material spheres of sexuality, mortality and the physical. Following Spinoza, to whose work he was deeply indebted, Freud’s psychoanalysis established the indissolubility of body and mind.25 Our contemporary Freudian or post-Freudian culture is to a large extent shaped by the bio-medical assumptions of a materialism that has first been advanced by Spinoza in his critique of Descartes’s mind–body divide.26 Spinoza is, however, not a straightforward materialist, because he combines a biomedical (avant lá lettre) understanding of our humanity with an ethical perspective. Deleuze has analysed the ways in which ethics is different from morality. An ethical approach attempts to delineate ways of living, whereas a moral approach is concerned with conceptual issues or with representative models where questions of right and wrong are fixed and mutually opposed to each other.27 Deleuze pinpoints the intellectual location of ethics within Spinoza’s parallelism of mind and body: ‘According to the Ethics, on the contrary, what is an action in the mind is necessarily an action in the body as well, and what is a passion in the body is necessarily a passion in the Butler, ‘Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, Foucault (1987)’ in Sara Salih with Judith Butler (ed.), Judith Butler Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 21–37 (27). 23 Kandel, In Search of Memory, p. 117 24 Kandel, In Search of Memory, pp. 55–56. 25 For a detailed discussion of Freud’s intellectual engagement with Spinoza see the last chapter of Mack’s Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity (London: Continuum, 2010). 26 On this see Mack, Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity, pp. 11–29. 27 On this see Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza and Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988). 22

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mind. There is no primacy of one over the other.’28 The ideational name for such understanding of ethics is what Deleuze calls ‘a philosophy of “life” in Spinoza; it consists precisely in denouncing all that separates us from life, all these transcendent values that are turned against life, these values that are tied to the conditions and illusions of consciousness’.29 In How Literature Changes the Way We Think I have shown how Spinoza’s ethics solves the problem of a divide between art and life, which has characterized traditional approaches to aesthetics. (As we will see, Spinoza’s, Deleuze’s and Derrida’s ethical turn has recently come under attack in the work of Jacques Rancière.) Spinoza tried to delineate ways of living from the perspective of an active and preservative principle, which he called conatus. This principle equally informs the body and the mind as it does the imagination and reason. The imagination is not passive or simply receptive (of images and other sense data); it also acts upon reason in either beneficial or detrimental ways. Spinoza appreciates both affect and reason as being compelled by the conatus. In this way ‘desire is the very essence of man, that is, a striving by which a man strives to persevere in his being’ and in parallel reason demands ‘that everyone should strive to preserve his own being as far as he can’.30 Spinoza relates the imagination to desire, to the affects and to the body but also to morality – morality being determined by the concepts of good and evil. Spinoza submerges these concepts in a material or biological/corporeal realm. What we take to be morally good or evil varies according to what we desire, to what affects our body as either good or evil: And so knowledge of good and evil is nothing but an idea of joy or sadness which follows necessarily from the affect of joy or sadness itself. But this idea is united to the affect in the same way as the mind is united to the body, that is, this idea is not really distinguished from the affect itself, or from the idea of the body’s affection; it is only conceptually distinguished from it. There, this knowledge of good and evil is nothing but the affect itself, insofar as we are conscious of it.31

The concepts of good and evil denote cognition of what affects our bodies in either a beneficial or detrimental manner. Up to this point Spinoza anticipates our biomedical age of materialism. Spinoza is, however, concerned with the Deleuze, Spinoza and Practical Philosophy, p. 18. Deleuze, Spinoza and Practical Philosophy, p. 26. 30 Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, edited and translated by Edwin Curley with an introduction by Stuart Hampshire (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 124. 31 Spinoza, Ethics, pp. 120–121. 28 29

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discovery of a way of life where we are collectively able to reduce the politicosocial exposure of individuals and minorities to harm. At this point Spinoza counters the partial or ideological-moral-aesthetic discussions of good and evil or beautiful and ugly. The problem with bodily affects and perceptions or desires is that they can mislead us: they can make us confuse our subjective disposition with objective or universal states of affairs. In this way we take our predilections to be universal facts rather than subjective entities. Here we reach the point where Spinoza’s thought critiques aspects of humanism. Out of our subjective notion of what is human, we are prone to postulate an abstract and fixed notion of humanity in general. This form of humanism is quite moralistic: it defines its notion of humanity in accordance with the concepts of good and evil. As we have seen above, Spinoza removes these terms from the exclusively mental realm of morality – the domain of traditional humanism – and submerges them into a more fluid and lesselevated element: that of biology, medicine and the corporeal. This is not say that he abandons reason, intellect and the spiritual. His rationalist approach is, however, quite idiosyncratic and marks a difference in the history of rationalism. It is a rationalism that is aware of its dependence on as well as exposure to the illusions and misapprehensions of bodily sensations and impressions. Our corporeality connects us to the outside world via the senses of sight, touch and smell. The way we interpret various sense information is, however, culturally conditioned. The corporeal work performed by the senses, its neurons and the transmission of this information to the neurotransmitters located in the brain does not exist in a neutral location. The work of how we interpret this information has to do with our culture and how we relate to it: whether we simply repeat or copy its interpretative framework or whether we differentiate ourselves from it. Medicine and biology cannot be separated from culture and culture cannot be separated from the corporeal realm of medicine. Spinoza’s thought has solved the problem of a purported split between medicine and the humanities (the realm of culture): he argues that the mind is the idea of the body and that we therefore live within a parallelism of the mental and the corporeal. We inhabit the osmosis of mind and body. This collapse of the boundary between mind and body has serious implications for the validity of traditional humanism and associated with it rationalism and moral thought. Significantly, Spinoza insists on both ethics and the rationalism of his thought. His is rationalism with a difference, however. Reason here does not work out abstract categories that are imposed on our life. Rather than ruling nature and the corporeal in a one-way manner, reason here listens to the medical realm of the body. It is an interconnection that reflects upon

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delusions of generality – such as the fixed notion of the human and, associated with it, the terms of good and evil – generated by the parallelism of mind and body that we inhabit. Spinoza employs the term reason for the opening-up of our perspective from our subjective lives to the larger, communal or universal map of our world: ‘Insofar as the mind reasons, it wants nothing other than to understand.’32 The body, its affects and desires, is what the mind seeks to understand: ‘the object of our mind is the existing body and nothing else’.33 In How Literature Changes the Way We Think I have shown that literature does the work of Spinoza’s reason: in different and related ways it seeks to understand the increasingly changing body of our world. Reason’s work of understanding operates on different levels, which are interrelated and depend on imagination as one of its substantive parts.

Spinoza’s critique of humanistic anthropocentricism, the Nazi genocide and the collapse of ethics This section analyses the ways in which Spinoza’s critique of purportedly objective views, which are intrinsically subjective, contributes to solving the problem of humanity’s centrality in our ecological structure, where – via industrial pollution and waste – the human has become a geological force (changing the ecosystem of the seas and the climate of our planet). In the following, we will first establish the larger cultural context for an examination of the relevance of Spinoza’s thought to eco-political and medical problems through a discussion of the imagination and literature, in particular. The central argument focuses on an exploration of the problematic nature that characterizes endeavours to define or ‘measure’ what it means to be human. This is all the more important in an age where the human has become an overweening and all-dominating force in the non-human life of our planet. The bio-political definition of humanity in terms of species existence relies on certain conceptions of normativity and human essence. Recent debates about the ‘posthuman’ call these normative – or, in other words, moral – conceptions into question. Is there a human essence and why should there be one? Definitions of human essence have been established with the understanding of humanity’s centrality in the cosmos. Spinoza was the thinker who most explicitly and stringently analysed various humanistic and theological attempts to define the human in terms of anthropomorphic Spinoza, Ethics, p. 129. Spinoza, Ethics, p. 40.

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conceptions of God. This and the following section (focusing on Deleuze and Nietzsche) discuss how Spinoza’s thought is of continuing relevance in an age that the Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen has described as anthropocene, as a new age ‘defined by one creature – man – who had become so dominant that he was capable of altering the planet on a geological scale’.34 Through scientific-technological dominance, humanity is in the process of altering the conditions of life on planet earth. In our anthropocene age, humanity has thus become a geological force. Spinoza is helpful in a critique of the theological and scientific-historical ideas that prepared for such a predominance of humanity within the ecological system of our planet. As I have shown elsewhere he attempted to remove man from the centre of the philosophical,35 theological and scientific universe. He unmasked all grand human teleologies as theology that equates humanity with God/nature. In this way, Spinoza is a non-humanist thinker. This does not mean that he is not concerned with the welfare of humanity. The following discussion explores how his critique of theology and normative strands of humanism may help us in a revision of current medical, theological and political attempts at reinforcing the anthropocene nature of what our planet has become. This analysis will shed light on how a normative conception of the human creates inhumane fictions of monolithic dominance and single-minded commercialism. One outcome of such developments is the anthropocene destruction of non-human life-worlds within the ecosystem of our planet. This shows that a normative conception of the human, which establishes reductive accounts of what is normal, beautiful and good, does violence to the diversity of life (both within humanity and beyond). Normative conceptions of the human create fictions of truth, beauty and goodness, which can have rather inhumane consequences in the embodied world of both human society and the non-human life of our planet. A radically reductive and intransigently normative humanism can thus result in the collapse of the humanity that characterizes traditional humanist ethics. The following will explore the ways in which Spinoza’s thought assists us in solving problems associated with the collapse of humanism: the absence of morality that can be remedied via a Spinozan re-appreciation of ethics and literature. Important thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Martha Nussbaum have struggled with the collapse of traditional humanist ethics. What is missing in Arendt’s and Nussbaum’s respective analyses is a Spinozist perspective on how the collapse of humanism is already part of a humanist intransigence regarding Elizabeth Kolbert, ‘The Climate of Man’ New Yorker (2005, April), p. 54. Mack, Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity.

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reductive norms, which Spinoza has famously (or infamously) unmasked as fictions of power. Avital Ronell has recently taken issue with Arendt’s humanist take on authority, which includes an endorsement of slavery: One must take a closer look at the bind that tightens around the slave and ask how this tautological event (‘the slave came under the command of the master when he became a slave’) erases the question of violence. So intent is she on clearing the way for an authority without violence that Arendt refuses to recognize that there is no slavery without violent possession.36

The attempt to find a middle ground between persuasion and violence eventuates in Arendt’s humanist justification of inequalities and authoritystructures, which, as Ronell has shown, are violent (i.e. slavery). Arendt is of course aware of some of the problems involved here. She has recognized how in the latter part of the twentieth century humanism has lost some of its ethical validity. Partly as a response to disturbing bio-political practices within the twentieth century (Nazism, Stalinism and other forms of totalitarianism) traditional conceptions of humanity have been questioned.37 This has been the case because, as Hannah Arendt has argued, various forms of totalitarian rule made use of certain humanistic traditions of ethics while perverting these traditions. In her Eichmann in Jerusalem, she attempts to describe ‘the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society’.38 The Nazis corrupted Biblical, Socratic and Kantian ethics while proclaiming to be their true heir. Here the infliction of harm, violence and mass death has become a duty. Acting unlawfully has become a law. Harmful acts have lost their traditional association with temptation. Instead, harm, murder and robbery have transmogrified into the new content of an otherwise seemingly intact morality of duty and obedience. Arendt’s famous ‘banality of evil’ consists in the way cruelty has come to govern the normal way of social life. Eichmann and his fellow perpetrators were not abnormal or pathological. On the contrary, they represented normal and respectable German society. Evil has become normalized here: it has turned moral. Evil thus no longer denotes a temptation to break laws or a Ronell, Loser Sons: Politics and Authority (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012), p. 31. See Hannah Arendt’s Essays in Understanding 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, edited with an introduction by Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 1994) and her The Origins of Totalitarianism, with a new introduction by Samantha Power (New York: Schocken, 2004). 38 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 125. 36

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transgression of norms but the fulfilment of the law and an accommodation to the social norm: Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it – the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom (for that the Jews were transported to their doom they knew, of course, even though many of them may not have known the gruesome details), and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.39

While breaking with the content of traditional ethics (Socratic, Biblical or Kantian), Nazism continued and even reinforced notions of respectability and of what is acceptable or normal. In this way Nazism’s corruption and distortion of traditional morality both reinforced and magnified the normative dimension of traditional humanism. Indeed the Nazis made it a duty to rob, deport and kill minorities (Jews, gypsies, people with a disability and homosexuals) by classifying them as abnormal, as carriers of infectious disease and, worse still, as non-humans and therefore not morally worthy to be alive. Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and people with a physical or mental disability were first deprived of rights. This loss of rights prepared for the legality of their being put to death. Rather than condoning such deprivation of rights as the establishment of ‘pure politics’ (as Rancière claims), Arendt analyses this political process that declared certain groups of people to be outside the realm of the political and the publicly useful. The exclusion from politics and the public good grows out of a normative or moralistic system, which contrasts bare life, the mere fact of existence, with that of politics as the sphere of historical signification and public achievement. Rather than condoning such division of humanity or, worse still, the total annihilation of certain groups of people as practised in the Nazi-genocide, Arendt critiques the politics of normative exclusion. Rancière conflates the substance of Arendt’s critique with her actual argument when he suggests ‘that the radical suspension of politics in the exception of bare life is actually the ultimate consequence of Arendt’s archi-political position, that is, of the attempt to preserve the political from the contamination of the private, the social or a-political life’.40 Arendt examines the perversion and Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 150. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, edited and translated by Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 66.

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collapse of traditional politics and morality (here conflated with ethics). She attempts to understand this process of disintegration with a view to drawing consequences from her investigation that could promote new beginnings for a non-exclusive approach towards politics and ethics in the post-war era. Arendt is especially concerned with the ways in which the re-enforcement of traditional practices of exclusion became the publicly valid form of ethical and political life under the Nazi regime. In order to win public approval for its murderous norms, the Nazi propaganda machinery worked on the emotions of its audience. It provoked one emotion in particular: that of disgust. As Winfried Menninghaus has pointed out, ‘the fundamental schema of disgust is the experience of a nearness that is not wanted’.41 Disgust seems to work in an immediate manner: what is perceived as disgusting has a direct way of permeating our skin and entering into the information-gathering mind: the brain. The experience of a nearness that is not wanted is, however, culturally conditioned. It is not something that comes naturally but depends on memory and learning. Emotions such as disgust are part of our psychological constitution and ‘aspects of many psychological problems are learned’.42 Hence, indentifying a group or groups of people with the immediate feeling of disgust requires some training. Martha Nussbaum has shown how disgust ‘expresses a universal discomfort with bodily reality, but then uses this discomfort to target and subordinate vulnerable minorities’.43 The identification of the abject body with a word denoting a group of people is clearly a form of cultural training or conditioning. This is what Nazi propaganda provided: it depicted Jews (and other minorities) in a way that made the word ‘Jew’ immediately identifiable with the feeling of disgust. How is all of this relevant for today? Martha Nussbaum has recently shown how ‘the politics of disgust continues to exercise influence, often in more subtle and unstated ways’.44 Whereas totalitarian societies are governed by a ‘politics of disgust’, in liberal democratic societies disgust has ‘gone underground’.45 Being hidden does not necessarily prevent disgust from exerting its harmful and often lethal political consequences. To counter the open or hidden influence of a politics of disgust, Nussbaum makes a strong case for a politics of humanity. Whereas a politics of disgust denies the humanity of the other, the politics of Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Emotion, translated by Howard Eiland and Joel Golb (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003), p. 1. Kandel, In Search of Memory, p. 116. 43 Martha C. Nussbaum, From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010), p. xv. 44 Nussbaum, From Disgust to Humanity, p. xiv. 45 Nussbaum, From Disgust to Humanity, p. xv. 41

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humanity acknowledges our shared human condition. The former is exclusive and the latter is inclusive. How, however, can we cultivate inclusion? Nussbaum argues that we can become more inclusive via the imagination: ‘Disgust imputes to the other a subhuman nature. How, by contrast, do we ever become able to see one another as human? Only via the imagination.’46 Here Nussbaum’s contemporary critique meets with Arendt’s analysis of totalitarian terror. Both see the imagination as vital for ways of diminishing social exclusion, violence and genocide. Arendt makes a lack of imagination responsible for both Eichmann’s lack of feeling of guilt and his inability to repent: It was precisely this lack of imagination which enabled him [i.e. Eichmann] to sit for months on end facing a German Jew who was conducting the police interrogation, pouring out his heart to the man and explaining again and again how it was that he reached only the rank of lieutenant colonel in the S.S. and that it had not been his fault that he was not promoted. […] He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is ‘banal’ and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace.47

As I have shown elsewhere, Arendt does not understand by the word ‘thoughtless’ what it commonly means.48 Her usage of the term is uncommon in order to emphasize the non-communality of what the term describes. ‘Thoughtless’ in Arendt’s usage here does not mean absent-minded or stupid or dysfunctional. It rather denotes what its linguistic isolation performs: the loss of communality and the denial of humanity’s interconnection. According to Arendt, Eichmann and his fellow perpetrators enacted such loss of our communality by declaring certain groups of people to reside outside of what they fixed in their racist nomenclature to be human (i.e. Aryan, non-disabled and non-homosexual). Arendt assumes that such loss of communality goes hand in hand with the collapse of humanism. Spinoza, however, has already shown how such a collapse of humanism is potentially part of its normative intransigence that can do violence to the embodied world where we encounter a diversity of life forms that all strive to create and preserve their life (conatus). Arendt Nussbaum, From Disgust to Humanity, p. xvii. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 287–88. 48 Mack, ‘The Holocaust and Hannah Arendt’s Philosophical Critique of Philosophy: Eichmann in Jerusalem’, New German Critique (Winter 2009): 35–60. 46 47

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relates the imagination to understanding. Spinoza, as we have seen in the preceding section, defines reason as the work of understanding corporeal reality. The reality reason seeks to grasp is in constant flux and hence cannot be accurately depicted via static concepts of duty and obedience. Eichmann and his fellow perpetrators refer to such static concepts – even to Kant’s categorical imperative (in Eichmann’s case) – in order to move acts of mass murder into a detached or intellectual realm. The imposition of subjective, culturally determined standards of evil – the Jews according to anti-Semitism are ‘evil’ and thus evoke the bodily sensation of disgust – onto the universe of matter is what happened during the state-sponsored reign of Nazi terror on the European continent. Spinoza critiqued the fictions that come to shape socio-political reality. The most brutal fiction is the genocidal anti-Semitism which the Nazis enacted. Nazism thus brings to the fore the cultural or, in other words, subjective/fictive, construction of the body: it fabricated the Jewish body as the non-human body. This harnessing of the term ‘humanity’ in order to exclude groups of people from the human highlights the importance of our cultural engagement with deleterious fictions that determine the empirical core of the social sciences and the sciences. In this way Spinoza’s analysis of humanist or moralistic thought about good and evil highlights the ways in which cultural inquiry – of which literature and the humanities partake – helps us tackle issues of violence, racism and other forms of stigmatization in debates about and formulations of public policy. The Jews were certainly placeholders for evil in both Nazism and the quasi-scientific and quasitheological racism that prepared its way.49 The following section analyses the predominance of a philosophical discourse that prioritizes an abstract sphere of norms and ideas over and above the more fluid realm that characterizes the ethics of literature. This will be accomplished in an exploration of how the works of twentieth-century Spinozist Gilles Deleuze and those of the contemporary philosopher Jacque Rancière come to terms with the collapse of humanist morality after the Holocaust.

Deleuze, Nietzsche and the turn from ethics to aesthetics On an ideational level Deleuze takes seriously Spinoza’s critique of humanism and its concept-based morality of good and evil. He takes it so seriously that he decomposes the human body, which in his thought morphs into a body without organs. His work pivots around a reflection about For a detailed discussion of this topic see Mack, German Idealsim and the Jew.

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in-distinction that does away with hierarchy, with various hierarchies that have informed the moral system of humanism and traditional theological thought. It is important to emphasize that Deleuze’s approach towards Spinoza’s parallelism of mind and body is technically philosophical: it concerns Spinoza’s philosophical term ‘attributes’. This is Deleuze’s posthumanist/idealist take on Spinoza: Any hierarchy or pre-eminence is denied in so far as the substance is equally designated by all attributes in accordance with their essence, and equally expressed by all the modes in accordance with their degree of power. With Spinoza, univocal being ceases to be neutralized and becomes expressive; it becomes a truly expressive and affirmative position.50

According to Deleuze, Spinoza has philosophically/ideationally done away with the differentiations and hierarchies that characterize traditional humanism and theology. Instead of hierarchical differentiations, we find ourselves on an equal ideational playing field where every philosophical attribute has a right to engage in other forms of expression. My concern is with human equality. Deleuze’s philosophy does not bridge the divide that still separates the ideational or mentalist world from the embodied sphere of human equality and public policy. My argument is that literature rather than philosophical discourse à la Deleuze bridges the gap between the mental and the corporeal, between the humanities and the sciences. The bridging of these divides was a major concern of Spinoza’s re-conception of the mind as the idea of the body. Deleuze’s post-humanism has a decidedly idealist edge. His expressionism does not relate to the distinct individual of traditional humanism. It rather refers to a series of expressions that are impersonal and ontological. This emphasis on the non-distinct results in Deleuze’s rejection of personalized representation in favour of impersonal repetition: The world of representation presupposes a certain type of sedentary distribution, which divides or shares out that which is distributed in order to give ‘each’ their fixed share (as in the bad game or the way to play, the pre-existing rules define distributive hypotheses according to which the results of the throws are partitioned). Representation essentially implies an analogy of being. However, the only realized Ontology – in other words, the univocity of being – is repetition. From Duns Scotus Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 50.

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Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis to Spinoza, the univocal position has always rested on two fundamental theses. According to one, there are indeed forms of being, but contrary to what is suggested by the categories, these forms involve no division within being or plurality of ontological senses. According to the other, that of which being is said is repartitioned according to essentially mobile individuating differences which necessarily endow ‘each one’ with a plurality of modal significations. This programme is expounded from the beginning of the Ethics: we are told that the attributes are irreducible to genera or categories because while they are formally distinct they all remain equal and ontologically one, and introduce no division into the substance which is said or expressed through them in a single and same sense (in other words, the real distinction between attributes is formal, not a numerical distinction).51

Based on Spinoza’s one-substance ontology, everything is more than interconnected or interrelated: it is univocally at one and all distinctions are simply formal rather than numerical. Deleuze’s philosophy takes issue with representation because representation presupposes distinct entities: representation constructs concepts that do not do justice to the world they claim to depict. Distinct entities cannot exist (in an absolute sense) in a univocal world or if they do ‘the real distinction between attributes’, as Deleuze has put in the quote cited above, ‘is formal, not a numerical distinction’. One of the most striking distinctions is the one between good and evil, as has been discussed above. Whereas representation divides the world into spurious oppositions such as good and evil, the idea that according to Deleuze most accurately accounts for the univocal constitution of life is that of repetition. The concept of representation is premised on a humanist understanding of our lives being fixed in their proper place – proper according to the hierarchical coordinates of morality and theology. Deleuze’s repetition, in contrast, is mobile: repetitions are on the move. Deleuze’s repetitions enact infinite series of repeating movements, which are not identical but differ as they move. His approach to difference is thus via repetition and contrasted with representation. Representation works through categories and concepts and repetition operates through the movement of ideas. Representations are fictions whereas repetitions instantiate the truth of ideas. In contrast to Spinoza some aspects of Deleuze’s thought attempt to do away with the imagination, which he equates with representation (fictions, non-truth) and which he contrasts with the truth of his ontological Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 377.

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idea (repetition). Representation is the untruth of the imagination, which violates the truth of the idea: repetition. Deleuze endeavours to propound a philosophy of difference. In order to do so he distinguishes between identical repetition (which is representation) and non-identical repetition. For non-identical repetition to work in a philosophy that attempts to combine Kantianism and Spinozism, the idea has to play a decisive role in this philosophical system.52 Deleuze differentiates his understanding of the idea from the norms of traditional humanism, which does its work through representation rather than through non-identical repetition. Identical repetition depends on a standard or a norm of which it would be representative. Deleuze denies that this origin of the normative exists in reality. In truth, reality consists not of originals but of simulacra: ‘However, difference does not lie between things and simulacra, models and copies. Things are simulacra themselves, simulacra are the superior forms, and the difficulty facing everything is to become its own simulacrum, to attain the status of a sign in the coherence of the eternal return.’53 Deleuze here combines Nietzsche with Spinoza and Kant. He affirms the primacy of the idea (idealism) by equating the idea with the reality of the senses (Spinoza’s univocity) and then reads the product of this equation in terms of Nietzsche’s eternal return. As we see below Nietzsche, as Alexander Nehemas’s Life as Literature has shown, is concerned with turning life into literature. Deleuze’s Nietzschean background is crucial for both his approach to Spinoza and his ideational reading of literature. Nietzsche’s eternal return may well be a response to Spinoza but one that diverges from and warps Spinoza’s questioning of anthropomorphism. Spinoza argues that we should not conflate our idea of God or nature with God or nature. This conflation results from the mind’s uncritical acceptance of information the brain receives from bodily sensations. This confused knowledge is what characterizes the imagination. In this sense we imagine the sun to be in close proximity to us, because our senses are strongly affected by the rays of the sun. The mind, by representing bodily affects, sees the sun to be in the vicinity of the earth. This representation does not yield knowledge of the truth but, as Galileo showed, turns out to be a fiction: ‘For we imagine the sun so near not because we do not know its true distance, but because an affection of body involves the essence of the sun insofar as our body is affected by the sun.’54 Spinoza does not berate On this see Beth Lord, Kant and Spinozism: Transcendental Idealism and Immanence from Jacobi to Deleuze (Basongstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 134–150. 53 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 81. 54 Spinoza, Ethics, p. 54. 52

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us for our inadequacy; inadequacy here describes our proneness to believe representations or fictions to be true. On the contrary, he understands our representational dilemmas, writing that we ‘can hardly avoid this, because’ we ‘are continually affected by external bodies’.55 The moot point here is that we need to be aware that our knowledge derives from bodily inputs and represents our sense of being affected by external bodies. This awareness characterizes reason: it is the mind’s mindfulness. Reason is the mind’s mindfulness of its embodiment and, consequently, its imaginative tendencies. It puts our place in the universe in perspective. The cosmos is no longer anthropocentric and we are no longer its centre. Spinoza set out to make us love God or nature intellectually: to make us see how we are a small but significant part of the vast and, to us, in its totality, incomprehensible universe. Nietzsche is not so much concerned with Spinoza’s ethical and social thought as with the epistemological implication of a Spinozist critique of Goal and God. What are the repercussions for our understanding of our cognitive powers, if we are only a small part of what is to us forever in its totality an infinite and impersonal universe, which Spinoza calls deus sive natura? Modern science operates on the basis of the ceaselessly renewed testability and thus reversibility and re-visibility of its findings. Its methods are those of the unceasingly falsifiable. In this sense, it has incorporated Galileo’s and Spinoza’s demotion of the earth and humanity as the centre of the universe and all this implies for human omniscience. On the other hand, our age is an anthropocene age and it is one that has been shaped by scientific discoveries for which Galileo and Spinoza have prepared the intellectual ground. How can we explain this discrepancy? The welding together of our planet with the industrial waste of humanity (plastic in the sea and so forth) has to do not so much with the practice of science as with the ecological consequences of an ever-growing market economy based on consumption. Slavoj Žižek has famously called Deleuze ‘the ideologist of late capitalism’.56 Deleuze’s Nietzschean idea of the eternal return finds a striking equivalent in the material sphere of infinite serialized production. Branding depends on the repetition not of the same but the slightly different (in this way the advertising industry reinvents Coca Cola and other branded products within a repetitive or serialized framework where the same forms become repeated in infinite variations). The basis of brand attachment is an affirmation of our worth and value we attach to the brand and which we hope to see eternally returned to us with each Spinoza, Ethics, p. 61. Žižek, Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and the Consequences (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 84.

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purchase of the product. The point of Nietzsche’s eternal return is indeed the immanent affirmation of humanity’s fate – amor fati – in the face of a deserted transcendent realm, which traditionally provided such affirmation from above. Nietzsche doubts whether we can be satisfied with Spinoza’s, Galileo’s and Darwin’s demotion of our cognitive status from images of God to embodied part of the natural world. This may explain why he coined the notion of the eternal return – in order to confirm rather than to question humanity’s grandeur. As Nehemas has shown, Nietzsche equates life with literature. Such conception of life as repetition of literature – and vice versa, of literature as representation of life – is quite problematic. In Nietzsche’s case difficulties are compounded by the fact that a rather traditional understanding of literature as harmonious, coherent and whole underlies his concept of the eternal return. Nehemas has critiqued the internal coherence of Nietzsche’s equation of literature and life as follows: And once we admit contents, we admit conflicts. What we think, want, and do is seldom if ever a coherent collection. Our thoughts contradict one another and contrast with our desires, which are themselves inconsistent and are in turn belied by our actions. The unity of the self, which Nietzsche identifies with this collection, is thus seriously undermined.57

Nietzsche’s reading of life as literature is itself a fiction. Whereas Spinoza critiques the fictitiousness that shapes aspects of our lives, Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’ encourages us to celebrate our lives as fictions: as stylized harmonizations or even deifications of our humanity. The point of Spinoza’s critique of revelation is precisely to question this equation of life with an idealized concept of nature or of God. Hence, we can now come to see how Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche’s eternal return fits into his attempt to submerge Spinoza’s mind–body parallelism in Kantian and post-Kantian idealism. This combination eventuates in Nietzsche’s eternal return, where we affirm what is and what has been and eagerly await its repetition with ever so slightly different internal constitutions. The primacy of Deleuze’s idea of repetition sacrifices Spinoza’s embodiment as a ground of mental information to the Heideggerian thrownness (Geworfenheit) of the groundless as it separates memory from ideas. Alexander Nehemas, Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 180.

57

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Deleuze’s repetition does its work within a philosophical system ‘where the ground was abolished in groundlessness, the Ideas were separated from the forms of memory, and the displacement and disguise of repetition engaged divergence and decentring, the powers of difference’.58 The separation of memory from the idea, which is repetition, brings to the fore a certain lack of remembrance, which enables the serialized differences of Deleuze’s philosophical system. His is a repetition out of amnesia: ‘one repeats because one does not know, because one does not remember, etc: or because one is not capable of performing the action (whether this action remains to be performed or is already performed). “One” therefore signifies here the unconscious of the Id as the first power of repetition’.59 The driving force behind difference is the Freudian dialectic of disavowal or repression – which is the repression of a memory – and repetition. Deleuze discusses Freud with specific reference to the role of repetition and difference in the death drive: ‘The turning point of Freudianism appears in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: the death instinct is discovered, not in connection with the destructive tendencies, not in connection with aggresivity, but as a result of a direct consideration of repetition phenomena.’60 By ‘death drive’ Freud does not understand the state of being dead but the wish to be so. This wish for the restfulness associated with death is part of Freud’s pleasure principle. The pleasure principle drives us to repeat actions in different contexts and times that bring about states of rest and certainty. According to Žižek’s recent interpretation, Freud’s term denotes the uncanny persistence not of death but of life: ‘The paradox of the Freudian death drive is therefore that it is Freud’s name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis, for an uncanny excess of life, for an “undead” urge that persists beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption.’61 Emotions are highly ambivalent and the desire to be dead is no exception for what drives such desire is the fearful wish not ever to reach the object of desire: death. On both ontogenetic and polygenetic levels we keep repeating certain forms of action through which we attempt to increase our sense of certainty, rest, respect and security, which makes us feel at home in the world. Deleuze’s notion of the simulacrum derives from Freud’s understanding of fantasy, which determines our psychology (not only the death drive but also the Oedipus complex): Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 364. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 368. 60 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 18. 61 Žižek, ‘A Plea for a Return to Différance (with a minor Pro Domo Sua),’ Critical Inquiry 32 (Winter 2003): 226–249 (245). 58 59

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A decisive moment in psychoanalysis occurred when Freud gave up, in certain respects, the hypothesis of real childhood events, which would have played the part of ultimate disguised terms, in order to substitute the power of fantasy which is immersed in the death instinct, where everything is already masked and disguised. In short, repetition is in its essence symbolic; symbols or simulacra are the letter of repetition itself.62

Here we reach the point where Nietzsche’s notion of life as literature comes to fully inform Deleuze’s idea of repetition. What is repeated in ever different shapes and forms is not the memory of something that actually took place but a certain kind of fiction: in short an imagined storyline or literature (the Oedipus complex or the primeval scene where the sons kill the alpha-male father figure). This is why literature (Kafka, Proust, de Sade, Pasolini, to name a few writers who loom large in Deleuze’s oeuvre), theatre and cinema play such an important role in Deleuze’s work. Through Nietzsche’s fascination with tragedy, Aristotle’s Poetics shapes Deleuze’s notion of the non-identical action of repetition that informs the world of theatre: ‘play it and repeat it until the acute moment that Aristotle called “recognition”.’63 By repeating the actions in a different context, we come to realize their signification and recognize their psychic meaning. This is Freud’s approach to repetition and Deleuze describes it as follows: ‘If repetition makes us ill, it also heals us; if it enchains and destroys us, it also frees us, testifying in both cases to its “demonic” power. All cure is a voyage to the bottom of repetition.’64 Deleuze does not, however, describe the ways in which such repetition of fantasy may free us. According to Freud, the awareness of what we are repeating frees us from future repetitions. In this way the re-enactment of the primal scene in Moses and Monotheism – where the Jews repeat the fantasy of the primal scene by killing their father figure, Moses (which is of course itself a fantasy) – frees the Jews from future repetition of such violence in different social, historical and political contexts. This moment of the breakaway from repetition is missing in Deleuze’s philosophical system, because it is founded on the idea of repetition and thus cannot free itself from it. Instead his philosophy relies on an infinite series of non-identical repetitions of simulacra, which, as we have seen, are fantasies, storylines, in short literature. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 19. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p 17. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 21.

62 63 64

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Deleuze has banished one of form of imagination – i.e. the concept of representation – from the truth of his idea of repetition. Yet as we have seen, the substance of repetition is itself imaginative: simulacra, fantasy, art and literature. In Nietzsche’s fashion, life turns out to be literature. This is where Deleuze diverges from Spinoza’s account of the imagination. Spinoza does not attempt to exclude the imagination from our lives, because this would be an impossible undertaking (given that we do not live an affectless, disembodied sphere). He does, however, admonish us to be mindful of our mind’s exposure to the misleading input of bodily sensations, which gives rise to fictions of grandeur or fantasies of destruction. This mindfulness constitutes Spinoza’s ethics. Rather than abstract and superimposed concepts of good and evil, Spinoza’s ethics of mindfulness is context-specific and requires ever-renewed awareness as well as alertness in particular situations, which vary according to a given time and space. Spinoza’s ethics admonishes us to see our self-interest as bound up with that of others. Fantasies of one’s superiority over others are harmful to the self, because the self relies on the communal in the same way in which the communal depends on the self. This mutual dependence is part of our embodied constitution, which is one of disease, neediness and mortality. In order to avoid harm and to alleviate the prospect of illness and death, we have to be mindful of re-enacting certain fantasies of immortality, predominance and autoimmunity. Whereas Deleuze’s philosophy celebrates the repetition of various simulacra, Spinoza’s (as well as Freud’s) ethics attempts to break the circle of this and similar repetitions. Whereas Deleuze engages with Spinoza’s critique of concepts (representation) as fiction, Deleuze himself clings to a fiction (repetition of simulacra), which he, in Nietzschean fashion, attempts to equate with everyday life: ‘For there is no other aesthetic problem than that of the insertion of art into everyday life.’65 Developing and radicalizing Deleuze, Rancière has recently described this insertion of art into everyday life, as the aesthetic turn, which he distinguishes from the ethical turn that characterized the work of Derrida.66 Rancière evokes Deleuze’s Heideggerian notion of ‘groundlessness’,67 when he attempts to do away with the ground of ethics in the works of Spinoza and Derrida. As I have shown elsewhere,68 in different ways, the ground of ethics in Spinoza’s and Derrida’s thought is that of self and other. In contrast to Derrida, Spinoza focuses on the preservation of selfhoods (conatus) and it is this preservation that depends on that of Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 365. Rancière, Dissensus, pp. 45–61. 67 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 364. 68 See Mack’s Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity. 65 66

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others. Derrida’s ethics criticises the political prioritization of the self over and above the other. In Rancière’s aesthetic turn, we have lost all forms of differentiation between self and other, because otherness is the principle of democratic politics: Derrida argues that […] democracy still holds fast to the same unexamined power of the autos or self. In a word, democracy lacks its Other, which can only come to it from the outside. Derrida thus set out to break with the circle of the self by weaving a thread from the pure receptivity of the khora to the other, or the newcomer, whose inclusion defines the horizon of a ‘democracy to come’. My objection to this is very simple: otherness does not come to politics from the outside, for the reason that it already has its own otherness, its own principle of heterogeneity.69

That democracy has its own principle of heterogeneity is true within an ideational context (a là Deleuze) but the actual politics of it may be quite different from its idea. Literature focuses on the ethical negotiation between ideas and the messiness of their performance in the embodied and thus affectridden context that shapes our actual lives. Rather than repeating various ideas (that of Rancière’s groundless form of democratic equality or Deleuze’s repetition of simulacra), literature and art change the way we think about the potentiality of ideas and the particular context in which various ideas or scientific discoveries are applied and played out. The following chapter will outline an alternative account of the imagination out of Spinoza’s critique of representation. By focusing on the idea and by conflating the work of the imagination with that of representation, Deleuze perpetuates a mimetic account of literature from his perspective of philosophy (from Plato’s ideas via Aristotle’s Poetics to Kant’s transcendental idealism to Heidegger’s understanding of poetry as a mimetic ground of historical identities). What I call the ethics of literature establishes the radical difference of creativity, which is not so much ideational but perfomative – in short, yet another shift of Spinoza’s conatus.

Rancière, Dissensus, p. 53.

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3

Certainty and the Predictability of Numbers: The Question of Literary Ethics

He thought about life. You never really got what you wanted. No matter how hard you tried you made mistakes and couldn’t get passed them. You could never see the sky outside or the ocean because you were in a prison, except nobody called it a prison, and if you did they didn’t know what you were talking about, or they said they didn’t. Malamud, The Magic Barrel How bleak experience when only one experienced.

Malamud, God’s Grace

Malamud’s ethics: The drama of life and death As we have seen in the preceding chapter, contemporary political and social thought remains beholden to the implied divide between nature and human freedom – a divide that is foundational for Kant’s philosophy of humanism. The term ‘humanism’ describes the attempt to elevate human life over and above that of the merely natural. On this view nature names a lack (hence the expression ‘merely natural’): it lacks the certainty of rationality, which distinguishes humanity. Given its characteristic divide between the natural and the human, humanism concurs with the philosophical school of combatibilism, which assumes that the contingent and merely natural aspect of our existence is compatible with being ruled by its opposite: the adjudicating and governmental human mind. This chapter discusses how the ethics of literature differs from the contextindependent way of thinking which characterizes the compatibilist strand of philosophical discourse. As we have seen in the preceding discussion, Spinoza’s thought diverges from philosophies (that of Kant and Descartes) that posit a compatibility of our naturalist tendencies with a rationalist ideal of subduing and controlling natural urges, feelings and inconsistencies. By departing from compatibilism Spinoza is at odds with most philosophers who

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have come after Descartes and Kant. As Hasana Sharp has recently pointed out, ‘most philosophers today maintain a “compatibilist” idea of the person, a view of moral agency in which freedom of the will is seen to be compatible with natural determination’.1 The view that we can exert our rational free will despite natural determinations holds sway in social thought and thus exerts a strong influence on politics. For compatibility to exist between two disconnected entities there needs to be some form of a divide between them in the first place. As we have seen in the preceding chapter, Spinoza radically outdoes the duality between nature and reason (or free will). There is continuity rather than a duality between affect and concept, between desire and thought, between reason and nature. Building on Spinoza’s thought, Hasana Sharp attempts to counter our current form of politics with a new one of ‘renaturalization’. What does this mean for our understanding of humanity and its social habitat, politics? Sharp argues that Spinoza at once humbles the status of and refocuses our attention on the value of human life. Spinoza ‘redefines human agency as entirely natural, locating it within a system that reserves no special status whatsoever for humans’.2 This devaluation of the eminence of humanity within the larger context of nature of which we are only a tiny part does, however, help alleviate human suffering. From Spinoza’s perspective violence, hierarchy, humiliation and warfare are the result of the human presumption to triumph over the lowly sphere of the merely natural, of ‘mere life’. The ‘denial of human exceptionalism serves, first and foremost, to attenuate a particular destructive passion: hatred, directed at oneself and others’.3 Malamud’s The Fixer combines a focus on two seemingly contradictory tendencies: hatred of and support of the other. The fate of humanism is central to both Spinoza’s thought and Malamud’s writing. Spinoza at once undermines traditional humanism and revaluates it in philanthropic terms. Spinoza takes issue with what he takes to be the supernaturalism of humanism. This may sound incongruous. Does not humanism reject the supernatural? Spinoza argues, however, that the very attempt to distinguish itself from nature risks turning humanity into a supernatural entity. Traditional humanism posits compatibility between two distinct spheres: human freedom within the determined but not determining context of nature from which humanity separates itself. This rise above nature endows humanity with supernatural powers: ‘Even if humanism typically rejects a supernatural Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 2. 2 Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization, p. 4. 3 Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization, p. 4. 1

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order in favour of human community on earth, from the perspective of Spinozism it relocates supernaturalism within the human mind.’4 The human mind thinks itself above the sphere of the merely natural. Other members of the human community can become placeholders of the merely natural too. If this happens, we witness the ideational formulation and the political perpetuation of religious, racist, economic and other forms of hatred. Malamud’s The Fixer focuses on one type of such hatred: anti-Semitism. How, however, does Spinoza’s critique of supernaturalism square with Malamud’s ‘magic’ of literature. Malamud’s work has often been associated with magic –undoubtedly, this association springs from the title of his National Book Award-winning short story collection entitled The Magic Barrel.5 Critics have so far overlooked Malamud’s rather ironic treatment of the supernatural. In Malamud’s writing and thought, magic has little to do with the supernatural or with other forms of divine intervention. ‘Magic’ is Malamud’s term for the uncertain, the mysterious and the undecided. One could historicize his usage of the term as belonging to a modern and postmodern way of writing and thinking: as J. Hillis Miller has recently argued ‘undecidability’ is a ‘fundamental formal feature of so-called modern and postmodern fiction’.6 In the Magic Barrel magic is not so much supernatural but quite natural; the short stories gathered together within it focus on sudden insights into life’s pleasure beyond the consumerist and careerist commandment to enjoy status and brand symbols. In this way, Malamud employs quasi-supernatural devices to highlight humanity’s capacity to break with harmful practices and to transform life in intellectually and emotionally beneficial ways. Why, however, does Malamud employ the word ‘magic’? The term is quite strong and potentially misleading (it can give rise to confusing associations with the supernatural). It is so rich in association that it certainly goes beyond modern and postmodern notions of the undecided and ‘undecidable’. While containing elements of uncertainty, magic in Malumud’s usage evokes a startling and sometimes shocking break and disruption of homogeneity. Malamud’s is a very human form of magic: it is what the arts and the humanities may perform if their social and political value would truly come to light.7 The change towards a new life is the subject matter and the form of Malamud’s very human and natural – differentiated from supernatural – practice of literature. Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization, p. 5. See Evelyn Avery (ed.), The Magic Worlds of Bernard Malamud (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). 6 Miller, The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 251. 7 I have discussed this in How Literature Changes the Way We Think (New York: Continuum, 2011). 4 5

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The writer Malamud shares with the philosopher Spinoza a concern for the human in an increasingly brutal world for which humanity is largely responsible.8 Against the background of the state-sponsored atrocities of the twentieth century, Malamud focuses on what he calls the degradation of the human. Who, however, degrades the human if not the human? It seems as if humanism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has to study Spinoza’s philanthropist critique of traditional humanism. In a Spinozist manner, Malamud reads selfishness as self-deception. Spinoza has argued that it is in our interest to help others, because we depend on others for our survival. We therefore deceive ourselves when we think we could degrade others for our benefit: How much selfishness and self-deception, for instance, does a man have to flush down the drain to become an effective defender of the rights of Negroes? What is the source of morality, and how is it discovered, of those few Germans who hid a handful of Jews away from the ovens and concentration camps? How much regret for Hiroshima must a man induce in himself to commit a single good deed in this world?9

Malamud here implicitly breaks with the compatibility of two distinct and, more importantly, mutually opposed spheres: those of morality and affect, those of reason and nature. He premises morality on both rationality and feelings such as regret. Malamud’s famous phrase the ‘human sentence’10 points to the continuity – rather than duality – between the rational and the affective. The phrase adumbrates language or literature as well as life: it bridges the posited gap between life and literature, while avoiding Nietzsche’s conflation of one with the other. Throughout his essays, Malamud returns to the continuity between the rational and affective. His notion of human wholeness does not describe unity but the isomorphism of entities, which pre-Spinozan thought tends to dualistically oppose: reason and the emotions, life and ideas, philosophy and literature and so forth. Malamud’s notion of the whole can be best understood along the lines of Žižek’s take on Hegel the ‘whole is the truth’: See Eileen H. Watts, ‘Not True Although Truth: The Holocaust’s Legacy in three Malamud Stories ‘“The German Refugee,” “Man in the Drawer,” and “The Lady of the Lake,”’ in Evelyn Avery (ed.), The Magic Worlds of Bernard Malamud (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), pp. 139–152.  9 Malamud, ‘The Contemporary Novel,’ in Alan Cheuse and Nicholas Delbanco (eds.), Talking Horse: Bernhard Malamud on Life and Work (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 191–199 (p. 193). 10 Malamud, ‘Introduction to The Stories of Bernard Malamud, 1983,’ in Talking Horse, pp. 5–9 (p. 9).  8

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‘The underlying premise is that the Whole is never truly whole: every notion of the Whole leaves something out, and the dialectical effort is precisely the effort to include this excess, to account for it.’11 Malamud does not contrast literature with philosophy. He argues that literary writings are about ideas. The philosophy to be found in literature differs, however, from a notion of the universal understood as being independent of particular contexts and specific constitutions that the compatibilist strand – which, as we have seen above, characterizes the majority view – of philosophical discourse advances. The ideas we encounter in art and literature offer an alternative to the ideational timelessness of philosophy: ‘In art, ideas were made anew, as if for the first time again, since in art “knowledge has drama – a concrete quality that abstract knowledge does not as a rule have” (LCII 13.10).’12 Here Malamud critiques a lack of concrete quality, which constitutes some aspects of philosophical and scientific writing. The refusal to engage with timebound narratives and concrete contexts bespeaks an unwillingness to reflect upon the ways in which philosophy and science grasp knowledge. Neither philosophy nor science takes place in an abstract, timeless and context-less setting. The scientist conducts his evidence-based research within a particular framework in which he or she addresses a particular set of questions (which excludes of course other sets of questions). The philosopher does philosophy within an historical and specific social context, which informs the sort of inquiry he or she undertakes. Let me mention an example that shows how we cannot understand philosophy’s production of abstract knowledge without paying attention to its time-bound historical environment. My 2003 study German Idealism and the Jew analyses the subterranean tremors and aftershocks of certain ideational paradigms that not only incorporate prejudices widespread in the general public of a given time, but also shape and sharpen these prejudices into a seemingly rational, systematic, self-consistent whole. Malamud’s notion of drama disrupts such self-consistency by confronting abstract knowledge with the concrete quality that characterizes the different contexts of human life. To embark on such analytic dramatization of abstract knowledge, the critic has to historicize philosophy, an approach that has often been interpreted as a violation of philosophy as such. Philosophy qua philosophy seems to reside in a realm removed from the contingency of historical events. It is important to understand, however, that this enforced separation from the unpredictability of various historical realities sets the stage for the violent Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), p. 523. 12 Philip Davies, Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 231. 11

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imposition of predictable, therefore ‘rational’, schemata onto the infinite diversity of both individual actors and anthropological communities. Philosophy often seems unwilling, if not unable, to bear the thought of that which could potentially unhinge the pure, stable and unchangeable order established by reason. The diverse changes brought about by the drama of life and by history seem to shake philosophical cohesion at its foundations. As Berel Lang has pointed out, ‘the image of philosophical thought as atemporal and undramatic, as itself non-representational, has been taken for granted in the historiography of philosophy since the nineteenth century; it has in certain respects been part of the profession of philosophy since its origins’.13 In his essays Malamud develops a philosophy of literature that not only illuminates the philosophical content of his novels and short stories, but also establishes a dialogue with philosophers such as Berel Lang who are engaged in the pursuit of a different kind of philosophy – in the words of Lang a ‘literary philosophy’ that has opened up to the concrete quality of the dramatic structure of history and life. Malamud’s philosophy of literature as well as his literary philosophy introduces the life of the affects into the realm of idea. Malamud’s concern is not, however, completely absorbed by philosophy. He attempts to let us see literature as an open field that extends into and expands different ways of seeing the world, be they economic, philosophic, scientific or legal. His essayistic and literary work broadens the scope of these disciplines in order to achieve new realms of creativity and possibility for humanity as a whole. In accordance with his critique of timeless knowledge, he does not perceive the human as static. Like Spinoza, he clearly departs from traditional humanism, which, in a compatibilist manner, insists on humanity’s autonomy from contextual or natural conditions. Rather than being traditional, Malamud’s approach towards reason and human nature ‘is strategic and revisable’.14 From both Spinoza’s and Malamud’s perspective, the philosophical terms ‘morality’, ‘freedom’ and ‘rationality’ have changed their traditional meaning due to one significant change: morality, freedom and rationality are no longer opposed to natural affects but are rather working in continuity with them. Both Spinoza and Malamud envisage freedom in terms of the rational love of self and other. According to Malamud love enacts freedom: ‘In freeing ourselves to love we broaden the freedom of others, and create the conditions of living together that we call morality, which is a further means of making us free and releasing in ourselves, instead of anxiety and fear, the creative Berel Lang, The Anatomy of Philosophical Style: Literary Philosophy and the Philosophy of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 22. Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization, p. 112.

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power to live meaningfully.’15 The term ‘meaningful’ in this context has only a tenuous connection to making sense of what already exists via literary representation. More importantly, in Malamud’s idiosyncratic usage the term ‘meaningful’ describes the power of creating new forms of meaning. The freedom of the imagination is literature’s and art’s way of discovering new forms of knowledge that are not so much atemporal and undramatic, but open up new perspectives on how to cope with change as well as on how to transform current harmful social practices. The quest for literature’s and art’s new forms of knowledge does not exclude emotions: emotions lead man to man, the writer to a subject worthy of his art, and therefore to the creation of the conditions of his own acceptance in our culture. It will be his task to scout the area of hope, explore possibility, and in so doing, create a vision of life, so dignified, so whole, and lovely that it will lead humanity to a changed conception of itself. This I conceive to be the true function of the writer and his art.16

In this manifesto-like statement, Malamud elaborates on his understanding of a strategic and thus revisable approach to what it means to be human. He sees it as the writer’s task to revise our view of humanity: to change our apprehension of what it means to be human in order to transform traditional humanism in a philanthropic manner. Literature’s ethics articulates new conceptions of what we are. The term ‘whole’ in this quote may mislead some readers. It may invoke notions of totality and unity. As is clear from the context of this quote Malamud employs the word ‘whole’ to describe the vastness and complexity of our condition, which cannot be narrowed down to the deceptive focus on one set of issues. Malamud’s term ‘whole’ denotes a holistic approach that conceives of the human as part of a larger universe. It also adumbrates Spinoza’s notion of nature, which is not a norm or standard according to which we should conduct ourselves (in this way heterosexuality has been taken to be a natural norm or gender roles have been justified with reference to ‘nature’), but ‘names the necessity of ongoing mutation and the inescapability of dependence among finite beings’.17 Malamud’s wholeness describes relational dependence and, more importantly, the infinite vastness of such relations. In order to do justice to the wholeness of our lives we need to engage with the arts and literature. Here we engage in an activity that is neither exclusively abstract nor exclusively concrete but combines various shades of both. Malamud, ‘The Writer in the Modern World,’ in Talking Horse, pp. 200–214 (p. 214). Malamud, ‘The Writer in the Modern World’. Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization, p. 8.

15 16 17

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From a literary vantage point, Malamud’s wholeness of humanity grows out of Keats’s negative capability. Malamud describes this topic as follows: Negative Capability: the ability to deal with, handle, operate what is not yet there; to function as an artist without knowing final answers, therefore temporarily remaining content with partial knowledge and still being able to work in the dark until something is thought out, flashes on, or thinks itself out and communicates itself to the artist.18

According to Malamud, Keats’s term ‘negative capability’ describes the creative act. It is another term for magic. As has been discussed above, magic within this context does not have a supernatural connotation. Rather than referring to a realm above nature, the uncertainty that accompanies artistic creation partakes of nature’s and life’s lack of certainty. Malamud puts it as follows: One, therefore, must learn to function in uncertainty. In one of his wonderful letter John Keats uses the term ‘negative capability,’ which he defines as the state of ‘being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without an irritable reaching after fact and reason,’ or ‘of remaining content with half knowledge’. I would add ‘remaining content’ as one seeks beyond ‘half knowledge’ for that knowing which is needed. Keats may be saying life is uncertain because we can’t see the next minute of the future; but one must have faith in his talent to foresee. Although his hand and the ground are shaking the artist goes on working. A certain courage is called for.19

This is the courage to live and the courage to create. The two go hand in hand. The ambiguities of life reflect the uncertainties that characterize creative work. Neither life nor literature nor art is predictable. And neither is science or philosophy. Malamud’s addition to Keats’s definition of negative capability – the ability to remain content with the uncertain and the non-predictable – harks back to Spinoza’s famous notion acquiescentia (contentment) at the end of Ethics (Book V, Proposition 36). We should remain content with the contemplation of our limited capacities: Malamud warns against the temptation to choose simple, totalizing and seemingly predictable ways of engaging with life, literature, art, philosophy and science. This is all the more relevant today when science Malamud, ‘Bennington College Commencement Address, June 12, 1981,’ in Talking Horse, pp. 172–178 (p. 177). Malamud, ‘Bennington College Commencement Address’.

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(genetics is a striking example) has become associated with clear, certain and predictable solutions, which are valuable because they can be applied and are thus economically useful. Scientists of course know that science is too complex and complicated to be predictable, risk-free and certain in its applications and outcomes. Politicians (at least in the United Kingdom and in the United States),20 however, fabricate the myth of science’s certainty and disparagingly contrast scientific facts with the uncertainty of the arts and humanities. Against the contemporary background of the obsession with certainty and the predictable in politics and contemporary culture, it is incumbent upon us to keep in mind that ‘life is uncertain’. Spinoza explains this uncertainty by the vastness of nature of which humanity only forms a tiny part. As a tiny part of an infinitely vast sphere that goes under the name nature (or God) our capacity of understanding is too limited to grasp the laws that govern our environment. We are of course able to grasp some laws of nature, but we will never be able to grasp them in their totality. We could predict life and live certain lives only once we had found the key to understanding the huge cosmos of which we are an infinitesimal component. By making us aware of our uncertain and rather precarious position within the world at large, Spinoza’s thought and Malamud’s literature help counteract illusory ideas of having attained immutable positions of certainty and predictability. Consider delusions of certainty and predictability in financial markets: In finance, the representativeness heuristic leads people to predict shortterm trends in the markets will continue and to underrate the prospect of a major reversal. This can lead to very bad outcomes, especially when it is combined with one of the mental traits that Adam Smith identified and which Kahnemann and Tversky confirmed: overconfidence. Once people are convinced that a small sample is representative of reality, they place unwarranted faith in their ability to forecast the future, ‘with little or no regard for the factors that limit predictive accuracy,’ Kahnemann and Tversky noted.21

The very strength for which mathematics is prized within economics – pseudo-scientific certainty and absence of risk – may turn into a springboard for social calamities. Social life – of which economics partakes – cannot For a discussion of the UK and US contexts, see Martha C. Nussbaum’s Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 21 Cassidy, How Markets Fall: The Logic of Economic Calamities (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 198. 20

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be certain or predictable, precisely because society cannot be conceived independently from its affective foundations. The ideal of certainty and predictability is itself an affect. Spinoza’s philosophy has an ethical and political focus. Instead of attempting to find the key to the totality of the laws of nature, Spinoza admonishes us to conduct our socioeconomic and political life in a mutually supportive manner: ‘men who are governed by reason – that is, men who, from the guidance of reason, seek their own advantage – want nothing for themselves which they do not desire for other men’.22 In order to preserve ourselves we have to preserve others because the success of our undertaking depends on the support of others. Were life certain and predictable we could go our own way without caring for others. The very uncertainty and unpredictability of our condition demand of us sensitivity towards Keats’s literary uncertainty and inconsistency while conducting our lives. Malamud’s term ‘magic’ denotes precisely the uncertainty, the sudden reversals and inconsistency, which are the subject of both life and literature. To do justice to the complexity of life, Malamud allows for the magic not of illusion but of disruption and non-predictability. The wholeness of humanity and nature includes its uncertainty and openness towards disruption as well as transformation. In terms of a literary philosophy, Malamud’s wholeness of humanity adumbrates the idea and practice of the symbol. Malamud first explicates what he means by symbol in his discussion of the The Magic Barrel. He does so in an attempt to distinguish his way of writing from one that is flatly mimetic: ‘Sometimes this material, of present time, can become journalistically thin if it is not handled with some reference to symbol and archetype in history, personal or cultural; that is to say if it is handled without imaginative plumbing for depth, or with little awareness of the complexity of human existence.’23 He goes on to distinguish literature from the quasicertain or quasi-documentary work of a certain form of memory: If memory is practically all, the writer becomes a sort of recording device, in much the way Thomas Wolfe was, and Proust was not. Memory, when too strongly relied on, destroys a necessary invention; and it slows objectification and symbolism. As a matter of fact, it is the purpose of the symbol to fight memory: to reduce experience to its essentials at the same time as it derives all the meanings (and contains them) that it can. It is, let me call it, the quickest route out of the self into the past, the lives of others, and into universal experience generally.24 Spinoza, Ethics, translated by Edwin Curley with an introduction by Stuart Hampshire (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 126. 23 Malamud, ‘The Magic Barrel,’ in Talking Horse, pp. 62–85 (pp. 62–63). 24 Malamud, ‘The Magic Barrel,’ in Talking Horse, pp. 62–85 (p. 63). 22

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In this dense quote, Malamud seems to contrast the universalism of the symbol with the particularity of memory. On a closer reading, however, it emerges that Malamud does not intend to denigrate particularity: literature brings to light the particular otherness of the past as well as the lives of others. His main concern is with a critique of what I have elsewhere called ‘flat mimesis’:25 he distinguishes literary creation from the replicating process of representation. The imagination has traditionally executed the task of memory. As Paul Ricoeur has shown, from antiquity onwards, representation has been closely bound up with the memory of the past. The work of memory is that of the imagination. The imagination attempts to make present what is past. Memory engages in a quasi-magical undertaking: it tries to produce a faithful copy of bygone people and things.26 Malamud’s magic of literature also attempts to redeem the loss of past life. He explains this undertaking, however, by differentiating his methodology from that of mimetic replication. The expression ‘to reduce experience to its essentials’ may give rise to the suspicion of reduction and essentialism. This interpretation is not borne out by the context of the quote. Malamud does not argue that literature does away with the diverse and particular through the employment of all-encompassing symbols. On the contrary, the symbolic method aims not to achieve the illusion of a clearly reduced, certain and thus definable or representative character, but to create a vast force field of diverse meanings. By evoking a diversity of meanings about the concrete quality of past and present lives, the ethics of literature unsettles a pseudo-scientific sense of certainty and predictability. According to Malamud, the literary method of symbolism is most capable of achieving such disruption of the illusory certainties that sometimes keep our real lives enthralled. He establishes three literary methodologies, which he illustrates via three different historical styles of writing. The first is the Victorian quasi-realistic novel, which aligns straightforward meaning to a character or event: ‘this is my meaning – that villainy, for instance, never succeeds and good triumphs in the end’.27 The second is the modernist-experimental way of writing, where the reader has to discover the meaning: ‘the second is to present a story or narrative, without comment of any kind – as a matter of fact with great restraint – and expect the reader to dig under all that is said and done in order to discover See my How Literature Changes the Way We Think, pp. 16–28. For discussion of this point see Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting, translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 27 Malamud, ‘Psychoanalysis and Literary Criticism,’ in Talking Horse, pp. 130–135 (pp. 130–131). 25 26

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meaning’.28 The third is the method of what could be called the symbolist novel of modernism, where the meaning of a character, object and event is so diverse that it disrupts our sense of certainty and predictability. Malamud refers to Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers to illustrate this method: For instance, in Thomas Mann’s Joseph story, the well into which Joseph is thrown by his brothers is of course a well, but it must also be read as a womb; and the point of the incident is that Joseph will be reborn – he will be a different kind of person – when he emerges from the well. In the first way of presenting a meaning the writer says ‘this is it’; in the second he says ‘come and get it’; in the third he says ‘look into the well, if it is a well’.29

The point of symbolism is therefore not to find one meaning but to deliver a superabundance of meanings, which cast into doubt homogenous ways of seeing us and our environment. Malamud’s example here is Thomas Mann. A more striking case of a diversity of conflicting meanings are the novels and short stories of Franz Kafka: ‘There is more than one way to interpret Mann’s Joseph story, his Magic Mountain, Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle, and to include a poet, T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and “Four Quartets”.’30 Malamud’s version of symbolism complicates homogeneity. The more diverse meanings a seemingly simple object has, the more symbolic is it: ‘Mr Eliot doesn’t care how many meanings you come up with. He expects you, within his universe, and subject to his architecture, his language, to find whatever meanings you can.’31 Malamud’s symbolic reduction is not one to homogeneous essentialism but to the essentials of a vast diversity of meanings, which it is our task to do justice to in both life and literature. Rather than reducing a variety of meanings to one symbolic content, literature disrupts the homogeneity to which we are subjected through some economic, social and health policies. This disruption of homogeneity enacts literature’s ethics. The ethics of literature outdoes the conceptual work of a dualistic divide between reason and the affects, which takes place in compatibilist philosophy (see opening of this chapter). Instead of subduing or controlling the affective and embodied aspects of our lives, literature negotiates between ideas and their transformation within the unpredictable and inconsistent context of our internal and external ambience. The ethics of literature does its work not so much through representation – as has been argued from Aristotle to 30 31 28 29

Malamud, ‘Psychoanalysis and Literary Criticism,’ in Talking Horse, pp. 130–135 (p. 131). Malamud, ‘Psychoanalysis and Literary Criticism.’ Malamud, ‘Psychoanalysis and Literary Criticism,’ p. 133. Malamud, ‘Psychoanalysis and Literary Criticism’.

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Heidegger and Deleuze – but by various movements that traverse the subjective (the affective) and the substantive spheres that constitute our political, economic, social, cultural and medical activities. Literature’s ethics performs acts of both transformation and preservation: it preserves life by transforming it. Paraphrasing Albert Camus’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Malamud argues that it is the task of the writer and of society at large ‘in keeping the world from destroying itself ’.32 Malamud’s philanthropic transformation of traditional humanism is not human-centred: it adumbrates and includes the non-human world too. Indeed his late novel God’s Grace tells the story of a future world that has been devastated by human destructiveness. Malamud’s God pronounces the immanent state of catastrophe as follows: ‘The present Devastation, ending in smoke and dust, comes as consequence of man’s selfbetrayal.’33 To prevent humanity’s self-degradation, we are in need of literature, the humanities and the arts, given that the preservation of life depends on its transformation. In How Literature Changes the Way We Think I have called ‘philosophy of birth’ this dialectic between invention and preservation. Birth literally describes the creation of new life. The invention of the new preserves what lived in the past. Aspects of the old resurface in new life forms. Literature’s philosophy of birth thus unravels the duality between preservation and creation. Malamud’s concern with the human is an unceasing questioning that gives rise to forms of creation: ‘Literature is concerned with man, with what is human, and why, and how to create humanity.’34 The human is not something given. If we do not invent it, we degrade it and its possibilities. According to Malamud this degradation is the tragedy of our time: ‘The true tragedy of our time is the degradation of the human being.’35 Why does the absence of the invention of the human eventuate in its degradation? The terms creation and invention of humanity describe a movement between the subjective (the idea or affect of the human) and the substantive (the embodied human). There is a plurality of subjectivities as there are many forms of creation and many types of substance. The degradation of humanity is premised on the imposition of certainty and predictability on the diversity of our ideas, affects and embodied lives. Literature disrupts the certainty of death. Literature’s ethics insists on the irrevocable uncertainty and inconsistency of what it means to be human. This is what Malamud understands by mystery. The writer reveals in literature the inconsistent Malamud, ‘Beginning the Novel,’ in Talking Horse, pp. 95–106 (p. 100). Malamud, God’s Grace (London: Penguin, 1983), p. 12. 34 Malamud, ‘The Contemporary Novel,’ in Talking Horse, pp. 191–199 (p. 193). 35 Malamud, ‘The Contemporary Novel’. 32 33

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uncertainty not of our illusions but of our substantive life: ‘In recreating the humanity of man, in reality his greatness, he [i.e. the writer] will, among other things, hold up the mirror to the mystery of him, in which poetry and possibility live, though he [i.e. man or humanity] has endlessly betrayed them.’36 Malamud here refers to a famous quote about literature’s mimetic qualities.

Hamlet’s signature Hamlet (in Shakespeare’s play of the eponymous title) gives the actors the following instructions: Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as t’were the mirror up to nature.37

Hamlet first insists on the isomorphism between life and literature, between word and action. He then goes on to ground such connection between world and word in a theory of representation: the word represents the world, literature holds up the mirror to nature. Hamlet emphasizes the traditional quality of literature’s mimetic conception: ‘whose end both at first and now, was and is, to hold as t’were the mirror up to nature’. Malamud treats this quote ironically when he says that the writer holds the mirror not to humanity’s nature but to its mystery. From Malamud’s vantage point, mystery denotes the uncertain, not-to-bepinned-down nature of our humanity. Does this ironic treatment of Hamlet’s famous account of the traditional and contemporary validity of mimesis depart from Shakespeare’s take on literature? The play within the play does not imitate the deception practised by Hamlet’s uncle (Claudius). Rather than offering a mimesis of the fiction that is the subject of the play – i.e. Claudius’s show of his legitimate hold on power after having killed his brother and Hamlet’s father, the legitimate king – the play within the play unmasks the ‘seeming’ – ‘in censure of his (i.e. Claudius’s) seeming’38 – performed by the stage character. Claudius admits to Polonius the ‘heavy burden’ of ‘my Malamud, ‘An Idea that Animates My Writing,’ in Talking Horse, pp. 215–216 (p. 216). Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, edited by Philip Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 153. 38 Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, p. 156. 36 37

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most painted word’.39 So Hamlet’s metaphor of holding the mirror to nature is rather misleading. The mirror would reproduce the image of seeming, of a painted word, of a lie. What then is ‘nature’? Shakespeare casts into doubt the certainty of what we take to be natural. Hamlet Prince of Denmark confuses our sense of what are sovereignty, reality, fiction, nature and legitimacy. Who is the legitimate king? The audience comes to know that it is not the ruling king, Claudius, given that Claudius is quite outspoken, when left alone, about his feelings of guilt vis-à-vis fratricide and patricide. Claudius describes the guilt of his ruling hand, calling his own legitimacy in question: What if the cursèd hand Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood, Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens, To wash it white as snow?40

Here Claudius links his individual misdeed to the endless betrayal of humanity’s potential or mystery which is one Malamud’s main literary concerns: Oh my offence is rank, smells to heaven; It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t, A brother’s murder.41

This refers to Cain’s killing of Abel in the book of Genesis. Shakespeare’s play is about the endless perpetuation of this crime from humanity’s beginnings – b’reshit or in the beginning is the Hebrew title of the book of genesis – to the present. A mere mimetic representation, which holds the mirror up to nature, does not do justice to this unmasking of the abyss and confusion that unfolds during the play Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The abysmal confusion about human nature turns out to be perpetual in its mythical repetition from biblical times to Hamlet’s Denmark. Malamud’s notion of the symbol tries to do justice to the mystery of our human potential and its repeated betrayal from Cain onwards. A mirror that reproduces the visible hand in its natural form distorts rather than reveals the truth about Claudius’s not to be mirrored invisible hand of blood, which natural rain proves incapable of washing away. Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, p. 146. Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, p. 171. Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, p. 171.

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Malamud’s ironic reference to Hamlet’s quote about holding the mirror to nature points to the way in which Shakespeare contextualizes this and other quotations about ‘nature’ within the most ‘unnatural’ or brutal context of ghostly visitations and their unhinged causations. The most striking term for such unhinging is the highly ambiguous or superabundant meaning of the word ‘thing’. ‘Thing’ in Hamlet Prince of Denmark denotes the uncertainty as well as inconsistency of conflicting significations and their referents. First the ghost is a thing (‘What, has this thing appeared again tonight’?).42 Casting his straightforward assessment of theatre as holding the mirror up to nature into doubt, Hamlet calls the play an indefinable ‘thing’ with ‘which to catch the conscience of the king’ (i.e. Claudius).43 After having been exposed to the mysterious thing-likeness of the play within the play, the king himself turns into a thing: HAMLET:The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing – GUILDENSTERN:A thing my lord? HAMLET:Of nothing.44

As Philip Edwards points out in his commentary, this passage alludes to the two bodies of the king: the natural and the body politic, of which the king is a representative.45 In his exchange with Guildenstern Hamlet denies the two bodies of the reigning sovereign: not only does Claudius’s body fail to represent the body politic, it has turned into a ghostly, ephemeral thing of nothing. Without validating or de-validating the real presence of Hamlet’s father as non-substantial ghost, the play discloses how our substantive lives are sometimes driven and shaped by ghostly, subjective, ephemeral and dream-like occurrences. These ephemeral things are the play within the play whose effect on Claudius’s conscience convinces Hamlet of the substantive validity of the non-substantive thing, which is the ghost of his father with its command to remember (‘remember me’) past lives and past crimes. The airy and eerie connotations of ghostliness become substantiated with yet another abstracted form of life – money – once the impact of the play within the play on Claudius’s substantive behaviour convinces Hamlet of the ghost’s validity: ‘O good Horatio, I’ll take the ghost’s word for a thousand pound.’46 Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, p. 76. Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, p. 143. Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, p. 187. 45 For discussion of this topic as a leading trope with medieval political theory see Ernst Kantorowicz’s famous book The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). 46 Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, p. 165. 42 43 44

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While supposedly acting mad, Hamlet manages to describe the complex interchange between the subjective and the substantive, between the fictional and the real in illuminating ways. First, he states a famous maxim of cognitive relativism: ‘there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.’47 Then, however, he invokes not embodied reality but dreams as the measure of real feelings about life: ‘O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.’48 These two quotes have made a huge contribution to what Joel Fineman has called the ‘subjective effect’ in Western writing and thought.49 Yet Hamlet allows for something else than subjectivity. He clearly encounters some substantive force that reigns in the free range of thinking’s sovereignty. This is not, however, real substance but the substance simulated by dreams. We cannot think as we please, because the neurotic life of dreams limits our capacity to be detached from our experience of substantial issues in an unaffected way. The lines between substance and subject here become blurred to the extent that the non-substantive (the ghost, the fiction of the play within the play, Hamlet’s bad dreams) has a greater impact on real life than any material manifestations could ever have. As Stephen Greenblatt has brilliantly shown, part of this blurring between substance and subject is due to the theological unmasking of Catholic ways of life as being based on fraudulence or, in English Renaissance terms, poetry: ‘In early-sixteenthcentury England, there was nothing gossamer-like about Purgatory. The great imaginary construction had produced highly tangible results. Hence at other moments, what is most startling is not the fraudulence of the imaginary place but its power.’50 In Hamlet and throughout his oeuvre Shakespeare depicts the ways in which the imaginary produces or sometimes brings to light the existence of so-far-ignored substantive realities. In doing so Shakespeare illuminates not literature’s escapism or illusion but aspects of its work of discovery and creation. It is not the fraudulence of our dreams, aspirations, ideas, actions and fears – what Spinoza has called the affects – but their power over our lives. The ghost is the invisible and perhaps inexistent driver of the actions of Shakespeare’s play. Citing Prosperous’s famous lines from The Tempest – ‘We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on, and our life/ is rounded with a sleep’ – Greenblatt comments on the Shakespearean parallelism between life and play (i.e. literature): ‘Here the dreamlike emptiness long associated with the transitory illusions Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, p. 129. Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, p. 129. 49 See Fineman’s The Subjective Effect in Western Literary Tradtion (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1991). 50 Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 38. 47 48

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of the theatre is carried over into all that lies beyond the boundaries of the stage.’51 Building on Greenblatt’s analysis, one could argue that Shakespeare breaks with an Aristotelian tradition of mimesis according to which literature imitates human actions and thereby expresses the universal truths of nature and humanity (whereas history, according to Aristotle, in a non-philosophical sense remains stuck with the particular). As we have seen, on Shakespeare’s stage nature has been called into question. In Malamud’s words, it turns out be a mystery. The parallelism between dreams, literature and life does not mean that literature represents or imitates life. On the contrary, literature’s dream-like aspects help discover the ways in which our lives are often formed and shaped by fantasies and ghostlike visitations. There is of course no equation between life and literature and one is not representative of the other. This tension between the two does, however, increase rather than attenuate their vital relationship. Literature’s non-mimetic qualities interrupt rather than consolidate or perpetuate the harmful effect of deleterious fictions that have shaped and are shaping our life. Malamud’s ironic reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet quotation elucidates a Shakespearean break with the Aristotelian dictum according to which literature has to imitate an asserted truth of human nature via the representation of purportedly universal actions. Rather than positing the unity of human nature, Shakespeare and Malamud’s literary work shows us how homogenous conceptions of humanity are fictions that rule societal reality with deleterious effect. Here literature – similar to the play within the play in Hamlet – exposes rather than imitates or represents the myths or fictions that we have turned into a substantial part of our socio-economic and socio-political existence. Shakespeare’s Hamlet reveals the ways in which non-substantive or perhaps even non-existent entities like the ghost can drive the actions and our lives into abyssal confusion. Hamlet’s problem is that – even though he comes to question universal and sacred truths – he does not question the ways in which his own selfhood is constituted by both substance and subjectivity. He takes his subjectivity to be all there is to the substance of life in his time. First he assumes the role of a redeemer: ‘The time is out of joint: O cursèd spite,/ That ever I was born to set it right.’52 Then, in the later part of the play, he turns the subjective perception of an assumed providence or universal harmony into the substance of all there is, whereas the actual events – the substance of what is happening on stage – proves the contrary. During the last scene Hamlet imposes his changed subjective outlook onto a reality that clearly contradicts Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, p. 260. Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, p. 114.

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his meaning-making strategies. First he proclaims an Aristotelian teleology in the form of theological providence: ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will.’53 Where he saw arbitrariness before, he now sees a purpose, an end ordained by a higher, divine authority: ‘There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.’54 His trust in such special providence makes Hamlet willingly undergo the mayhem with which the play ends. He thereby wilfully accepts his own death and those around him. Once again the subjective disposition cannot be separated from what it promotes or accepts to occur in the substantive space of socio-political life. Literature alerts us to this exchange between subjectivity and substance that characterizes our real life. Hamlet is a tragic figure not merely because he does not perform the right actions at the right time.55 More importantly, Hamlet’s failure to interact beneficially with his environments is premised on his inability to separate his subjective perception from the substantive otherness, which is the outside world. The back and forth between subjective and substantive brings about changes that renew our personal and social lives. Literature’s ethics activates inter-subjectivity, given that the term ‘inter-subjective’ denotes the interaction not only between subjects but also between forms of substance that are continuous with forms of subjectivity. Spinoza’s philosophy establishes the continuity between affect and idea, which literature performs. The performance of this continuity results in new forms of knowledge wherein we discover ways of avoiding deleterious deceptions to which we are exposed in real life. Shakespeare’s Hamlet depicts the mayhem that results from claims to power and a dithering revenge plot. The ghost may be a fantasy but it exerts an overwhelming impact on the action and inaction on stage.

Lucretius, Shakespeare, Spinoza and Malamud’s Fixer In the following, we will see how Malamud refers to Spinoza’s Ethics in order to highlight a Shakespearean analysis of fictions that shape the raw realities of socio-political life. How can we explain the historical curiosity of a meeting point halfway between Spinoza’s philosophy and Shakespeare’s literature? For one thing, Shakespeare and Spinoza were near contemporaries. This Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, pp. 225–226. Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, p. 234. 55 For a detailed discussion of this point, see Jacques Lacan’s ‘Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet’ in Shoshana Felman (ed.) Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 11–52. 53 54

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historical fact does not, however, explain similarities between their respective intellectual outlooks. More important is their mutual exposure to a form of ancient philosophy that was suppressed, repressed and nearly eliminated during the Middle Ages but fortunately rediscovered and preserved at the dawn of the Renaissance: the Epicureanism of Lucretius’s masterpiece De Rerum Natura combines poetry with both science and philosophy. In 1417, the humanist Poggio Bracciolini rediscovered one remaining copy of the book in a German monastery (located in the town Fulda). The book hunter had every reason to be enthusiastic about his catch: ‘He had encountered a poem that conjoined “brilliant genius” in philosophy and science with unusual poetic power. The conjunction was as rare then as it is now.’56 The significance of Poggio’s discovery is remarkable. It helped bring about a certain form of non-teleological modernity. Lucretius’s philosophicalscientific poem unmasks providence and other forms of teleology as fantasy, as fiction: The universe has no creator or designer. The particles themselves have not been made and cannot be destroyed. The patterns of order and disorder in the world are not the product of any divine scheme. Providence is fantasy. What exists is not the manifestation of any overarching plan or any intelligent design inherent in matter itself. […] There is no end or purpose to existence, only ceaseless creation and destruction, governed entirely by chance.57

Rather than being structured or driven by a single goal or homogenous plan, the universe keeps giving birth to an infinite diversity of different new beginnings – swerves – which occur not in a providential but random fashion: ‘The swerve – which Lucretius called variously declinatio, inclinatio, or clinamen – is only the most minimal of notions, nec plus quam minimum. But it is enough to set off a ceaseless chain of collisions. Whatever exists in the universe exists because of these random collisions of minute particles.’58 The randomness of the world does not, however, give rise to cynicism or nihilism. Instead, the absence of a grand goal or purpose entices contended contemplation. Unpredictability and purposelessness enhance rather than diminish life’s marvellous complexity. The complexity of random arrangements encourages the contemplative desire for understanding rather than wilful domination or rule: Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World became Modern (New York: Norton, 2011), p. 51. Greenblatt, The Swerve, pp. 187–188. Greenblatt, The Swerve, p. 188.

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Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder. The realization that the universe consists of atoms and voids and nothing else, that the world was not made for us by a providential creator, that we are not the center of the universe, that our emotional lives are no more distinct than our physical lives from those of all other creatures, that our souls are as material and as mortal as our bodies – all these things are not the cause for despair. On the contrary, grasping the way things really are is the crucial step toward the possibility of happiness. Human insignificance – the fact that it is not all about us and our fate – is, Lucretius insisted, the good news.59

Spinoza takes up Lucretius’s argument about human insignificance. He does so while adding an important element. Our insignificance in the face of a vast cosmos of which we are only a tiny part strengthens rather than weakens the case for our collective self-preservation. He cautions against buying into ideologies, because ideologies give rise to violent conflict. Against this socio-political background, Spinoza’s Ethics deepens and develops Lucretius’s critique of teleology, theology and anthropocentricism. The absence of either natural or supernatural mechanisms that would guarantee the victory of different ideologies – whose glorious endpoints are the point of various religious, economic, philosophical, moralistic and military ideologies – contributes to peace and blissful contemplative understanding: what Spinoza famously calls acquiescentia or the intellectual love of God in Book V of his Ethics. In a true Epicurean manner, Spinoza associates truth not with epistemology – complete and total insight into what is – but ethically as well creatively – as the preservation of what is through change – in other words, through the transformative desire to persevere in an ever-changing contingent universe. Building on Lucretius Spinoza rediscovers truth as avoidance of violence. To circumvent harmful political actions he exposes various socio-political fictions that give rise to violent actions. Further developing Spinoza’s and Shakespeare’s Lucretean conception of truth, the ethics of literature helps us circumvent the infliction of pain. It does so by pinpointing where socio-political life falls prey to the lure, illusions and delusions of violence and stereotyping. This is the subject matter of Malamud’s The Fixer. Racism is a fantasy that has shaped socio-historical reality with horrendous consequences in the preceding century. Malamud’s novel The Fixer describes one form of racism – i.e. anti-Semitism – with Spinoza as a philosophical point of reference. The name ‘Spinoza’ permeates Malamud’s The Fixer like a leitmotiv. One reason for this prominence has Greenblatt, The Swerve, pp. 198–199.

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to do with Spinoza being the first modern Jewish philosopher. Even though he was not the first Jew to break tradition, he was certainly the first to do so without repenting for his actions.60 Moreover, after he was banned (herem) from contact with the Amsterdam Jewish community, Spinoza proceeded to put down his non-traditional ideas in a philosophical and philological critique of the socio-political uses of the Bible (the Theological-Political Treatise). The publication of this book caused a scandal and made the name Spinoza synonymous with Epicureanism: atheism and a complete lack of morality. Yakov Bok, the main protagonist of Malamud’s The Fixer, is a poor jack of all trades in the Jewish settlement of Russia (the Pale). He attempts to leave the misery of the Pale behind. One way to do so is through education.61 He is an autodidact whose learning is very selective. He singles out Spinoza’s writings as his sole textual source: ‘What little I know I learned on my own – some history and geography, a little science, arithmetic, and a book or two of Spinoza’s. Not much but better than nothing.’62 There is an almost exclusive focus on one thinker, which may strike us as odd. Reading Spinoza turns Yakov Bok into a freethinker, one of the later-day Russian haskilim. He leaves the Pale for the idea of a better life in modern-day Russia. He attempts to make his fortune in the Kiev of 1911. What he encounters there is not what the idea of modernity promises: it is not equal opportunities he meets but the modern revival of the fantasies that determine medieval anti-Semitism. Here we witness how ideas demand a substantive context in which they can come to life. Yakov Bok, however, encounters a socio-political setting that smothers the philosophical ideas of universal human rights. Similar to Hamlet’s Denmark, the Kiev of 1911 is not shaped by a politics of humanity but by a politics of disgust.63 The object of disgust is ‘the Jew’. One way of reading the novel is to see it revolve around the promise of as well as the disappointment with what the name Spinoza may signify to Yakov Bok: modernity and its notions of equal human rights. This may be true to a certain point but such reading ignores that the main protagonist of The Fixer never voices misgivings about Spinoza and his social thought. On the contrary, as Yakov Bok undergoes torture and torment in his jail cell, into For a detailed discussion of this point see Jonathan I Israel’s Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and Shmuel Feiner’s The Jewish Enlightenment, translated by Chaya Naor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 61 Feiner’s The Jewish Enlightenment emphasizes the quasi-erotic attraction of secular knowledge for the haskilim. 62 Malamud, The Fixer (London: Penguin, 1967), p. 10. 63 See Matha C. Nussbaum’s From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 60

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which he has been forced under the fantasized accusation that he had ritually slaughtered a Christian child, he steadfastly clings to Spinoza’s thought. At the end of the book he invokes Spinoza in order to destroy the fantasy not of literature but of political actuality. The fantasy is anti-Semitism, which fabricates real evidence in order to turn its politics of disgust into the force that corrupts society: ‘What is it that Spinoza says? If the state acts in ways that are abhorrent to human nature it’s the lesser evil to destroy it.’64 Malamud’s The Fixer invokes Spinoza in order to question the ways in which harmful fantasies (in this case anti-Semitism) turn actual in history and politics. The fantasy of anti-Semitism is medical, moralistic and religious: it turns the Jew into a representative of disease, evil and the demonic. Reflecting upon Spinoza’s thought, we may come to see literature not as repetition of fantasy but as a form of mindfulness that changes the way we think about the various deceptions that have shaped our socio-economic, cultural and political lives. Rather than evoking Spinoza’s philosophy as the culprit for the attempt of an impoverished Russian Jew to change his dismal circumstance by becoming part of a modern cosmopolitan world, Malamud’s novel weaves the name of the seventeenth philosopher into its texture as a counterpoint to a world in which one subjective view (that of anti-Semitism) via deception and brute force turns into an all-determining socio-political reality. The name Spinoza opens up a world of diversity and adventure. Yakov wants to leave the Pale ‘to get acquainted with a bit of the world’.65 Spinoza functions as the ghost of modernity’s open, diverse and worldly promise. To his father-in-law’s admonishment to be faithful to God’s transcendence, Yakov responds with: ‘Today I want a piece of bread, not in Paradise.’66 Spinoza’s Epicurean philosophy of immanence promises worldly fulfilments that are not only material but also intellectual as well as socio-economic: the end of a discriminatory society and the beginning of a democratic, modern state that offers equal rights and the transformation of warfare into mutual support, rivalry into solidarity. Yet the historical substance of the Ukraine continues to be haunted not by the promises of the future but by the ghosts of traditional harmful practices: ‘The steppe was a black sea full of strange voices. Here nobody spoke Yiddish. […] Ghosts rose like smoke in the Ukraine.’67 Yakov’s crossing of the river Dnieper reads like a descent back into infernal time of bigotry. The crossing of the Dnieper is his entry to the shore of Kiev. The city Kiev represents modernity to the exile from the shtetl. Representations are sometimes deceptive. The reality of Kiev does not live Malamud, The Fixer, p. 299. Malamud, The Fixer, p. 14. 66 Malamud, The Fixer, p. 19. 67 Malamud, The Fixer, p. 26. 64 65

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up to Yakov Bok’s representation of it. Instead of an inclusive modernity, the ferryman proclaims the misanthropy of anti-Semitism: ‘God save us all from the bloody Jews,’ the boatman said as he rowed, ‘those long nosed, pock-marked, cheating, bloodsucking parasites. They’d rob us of daylight if they could. They foul up earth and air with their body stink and garlic breaths, and Russia will be done to death by the diseases they spread unless we make an end to it. A Jew’s a devil – it’s a known fact – and if you ever watch one peel of his stinking boot you’ll see a split hoof, it’s true. I know, for as the Lord is my witness, I saw one with my own eyes. He thought nobody was looking, but I saw his hoof as plain as day.’68

The boatman’s hate-filled speech anticipates the peculiar combination of the modern and the medieval, the pseudo-theological and the pseudo-scientific, which constitutes the anti-Semitism to which Yakov will be subjected to in the heart of Kiev. The boatman insists on the empirical evidence of his pseudo-theological equation of the Jew with the devil (‘it’s a known fact; I saw one with my own eyes’). He marshals medical authority in order to represent Jews in terms of a health risk (the diseases they spread). This lethal combination of the pseudo-medical or pseudo-scientific with medieval pseudo-theological stereotypes has informed the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Nazis in which Jews were represented as satanic forms of bacteria and other causes of disease. The boatman goes on to spell out the genocidal anti-Semitism, which the Nazis enacted: ‘and the only way to save ourselves is to wipe them out. I do not mean kill a Zhid now and then with a blow of the fist or kick in the head, but wipe them all out, which we’ve sometimes tried but never done as it should be done’.69 As has been intimated above, the boatman evokes the mythical ferryman who transports his clients into the dark regions of inferno. He is associated with a mythical figure and yet his hate-filled speech has the concrete quality of historical referents. Malamud’s conjunction of history and myth brings to light the ways in which the historical enacts the mythical. Literature’s ethics makes us see the ways in which history and life have frequently been imprisoned by the forces of myth. What is myth? According to Walter Benjamin as well as Malamud, myth denotes the quasi-ritualistic repetition of harmful practices in evernew forms and new combinations. As Malamud has made clear The Fixer Malamud, The Fixer, p. 28. Malamud, The Fixer, p. 28.

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shows us how socio-historic reality has sometimes been fixed into a mythical structure of harm, bigotry and state-sanctioned murder or genocide: I was now looking for a story that had happened in the past and perhaps would happen again. I wanted the historical tie-up so I could invent it into myth. In other words, I wanted to show how recurrent, almost without thought, almost ritualistic, some of our unfortunate historical experiences are. I considered basing a fiction on the life of Caryl Chessman, and then on the Dreyfus case, but for different reasons neither idea suited me.70

Once in Kiev, Yakov Bok’s trial will re-enact not only that of his direct historical precedent – that of Mendel Beilis – but also that of the fin-de-siècle high-ranking French general Dreyfus who, on account of being Jewish, was accused of espionage. Like Beilis and Dreyfus, the proof of Yakov’s crime is the accusation.71 The legal, scientific and theological as well as historical evidence of Yakov’s crime is already borne out by having been accused of the crime. As Malamud has put it: ‘I settled for a combination of a blood ritual incident in pre-Soviet Russia, plus something like the Dreyfus incident. A man is put in prison, and there he must suffer out his existence with what he has and, in a sense, conceive himself again.’72 The rebirth, at least, in Dreyfus’s case is pathological. As Sander L. Gilman has shown, ‘In the course of his [i.e. Dreyfus’s] autobiographical account, Dreyfus’s body metamorphoses from the body of the French soldier to that of the imaginary diseased Jew.’73 Dreyfus’s trial and imprisonment on Devil’s Island makes his mental and physical health conform to the anti-Semites’ imagined representation of the Jew: a sick and infectious body that spreads its contagion. The Dreyfus case horrendously shows how historical reality is capable of enacting practices that turn real embodied human beings (Dreyfus and, later under Nazi rule, European Jews) into the living embodiments of deleterious representations borne out of hatred and pseudo-science. The power of fraudulent forms of mimesis holds sway not only in Hamlet’s Denmark but also in early twentieth-century France and Russia. We have lost but we may rediscover from Shakespeare’s Renaissance ethics and aesthetics an awareness of literature’s vital social role in making us aware of how what we take to be substantive or objective Malamud, ‘Sources of The Fixer,’ in Talking Horse, pp. 88–89 (p. 88). For a discussion of the Mendel Beilis context see Davis, Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 240–243. 72 Quoted from Davis, Bernard Malamud, p. 240. 73 Gilman, Franz Kafka, the Jewish Patient (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 80. 70 71

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socio-political and socio-economic reality is frequently driven by fantasized representations created by pseudo-science, pseudo-medicine and pseudotheology. Literature’s ethics makes us alert as to how historical experiences are re-enacting a mythic structure of exclusion, violence and murder. Foucault has advocated the employment of an archaeological method in order to unearth the different forms such repetition of harm, discipline, homogeneity and exclusion may take over the course of modernity. Radicalizing Foucault’s approach, Agamben has recently proposed what he calls the methodology of signatures. Agamben recommends ‘an ontological anchoring’ where repetition pervades history in its entirety (and not only modernity as in Foucault’s account).74 Agamben’s notion of signature is remarkably close to Malamud’s understanding of the symbol: it is a pervasive force where past violence already foreshadows the modern, more advanced horror to come. The past of Foucault’s archaeological method partakes of the present and future. Yakov’s pain in Kiev at the beginning of the twentieth century symbolically reaches backward to the preceding suffering of Dreyfus at the fin de siècle as well as anticipates the future horrors of the Nazi genocide. Malamud’s symbol and Agamben’s signature resemble a time machine where we come to see the past in terms of being a signature of the future: ‘It is the past that will have been when the archaeologist’s gesture (or the power of the imaginary) has cleared away the ghosts of the unconscious and the tight-knit fabric of tradition which blocks access to history.’75 Strikingly Agamben associates archaeology with the imagination and the imagination is arguably a prime feature of literature. The way to find truth is via literature’s imagination. The imaginary is a heuristic device that enables us to see through the deceptions that characterize what we have come to accept as accurate according to the standards of received, conventional teaching (the tradition). The ethical component of literature insists on there not being a necessity by which past and current states of affairs have to be like this – flatly mimetic copies of figures of a deleterious imagination. This is why Malamud holds out the promise of freedom even in the torturous and tormenting environment of a jail cell. The wrongly accused, falsely imprisoned and tortured Yakov Bok refuses to buy into the demands of yielding evidence – via a confession of his crime – which would yet again prove the bloodguilt of the Jewish community at large. Through this refusal, Yakov does his part to interrupt Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method, translated by Luca D’lsanto with Kevin Attell (New York: Zone Books, 2009), p. 111. Agamben, The Signature of All Things, pp. 106–107.

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the repetitive working of history, which has become mythic in its ritualistic repetition of a bigoted plot. ‘Mythos’ is the Greek term Aristotle employs to delineate the plot of Greek tragedy. According to Aristotle’s mimetic paradigm, the plot of Greek tragedy imitates actions that are universal (rather than particular as in historical writings). The universality of tragic plots describes their repeatability. The mythic truths of Greek tragedy are repetitive: they reinforce in different ways and contexts the hierarchical divide between mortals and immortals. Malamud’s aesthetics and ethics break the mimetic paradigm that has shaped the approach to literature from Aristotle onwards. This is not to say that Malamud abandons representation. His novel evokes quite a realistic sense of what it means to be imprisoned in Tsarist Russia. As has been discussed above, the realism of The Fixer involves universal references too: ‘To his [i.e. the historical figure Mendel Beilis on which the literary Yakov Bok is based] trials I added some something of Dreyfus’s and Vanzetti’s, shaping the whole to suggest the quality of the affliction of the Jews under Hitler.’76 The historical references of the plot, however, hardly evoke the affirmation of what they represent. In Malamud’s The Fixer representation does not celebrate or endorse what it represents. Rather than affirming the validity of history’s quasi-universal and mythic repetition of harmful socio-political and socio-economic policies, the mimetic content of the novel turns against itself. Here representation aims at interrupting itself: the unfortunate and saddening as well as repetitive reality the novel presents. One reason why Yakov Bok turns to Spinoza is his dissatisfaction with the socio-political state of affairs. His dissatisfaction with history is a rejection of the socio-political realty of violence, bigotry and superstition: ‘From birth a black horse had followed him, a Jewish nightmare. What was being a Jew but an everlasting curse? He was sick of their history, destiny, blood guilt.’77 What does the word ‘Jew’ signify here? Not the Jew as an individual human being but the representation of the Jew in terms of bloodguilt throughout the history of Christian Europe. Yakov’s jailors are able to make his outward image conform to the anti-Semitic fantasy of what a Jew looks like. When his former wife visits him in prison, she notices how Yakov’s changed body conforms to the representative image of ‘the Jew’: ‘How strange you look in earlocks and long beard.’ ‘That’s their evidence against me.’ ‘How thin you are, how withered,’78 Malamud, ‘Sources of The Fixer,’ in Talking Horse, pp. 88–89 (p. 89). Malamud, The Fixer, p. 206. Malamud, The Fixer, p. 255.

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Yakov’s changed appearance flatly coincides with the pseudo-theological as well as pseudo-scientific representation of ‘the Jew’ in anti-Semitic writing and visual culture. His earlocks and his long beard denote his presumed religious orthodoxy – as Spinozist, Yakov is, however, anything but orthodox. His thin and sick physique (withered) provides fake, or rather fabricated, evidence and yet the fabrication becomes represented as substantial proof of the pseudoscientific image of the diseased Jew. In this way, Yakov’s changed appearance turns him into a mimetic figure and at the same time the spurious nature of what is mimetic here highlights the falsity of the ‘embodied’ corroboration of anti-Semitic fantasies. Representations – whether in dreams or fantasies (see the above discussion of Hamlet) or in political, pseudo-scientific or pseudotheological treatises – do, however, exert a power that manifests itself in the socio-historical reality of pogroms, lynching, genocide and other forms of hate crimes. The current state of Russian society is a repetition within history of past forms of harm. History is repetitive to the extent that it has turned mythic – repeating the tragic plot of hate and its crimes. In the novel, Spinoza figures as break with the exhaustion of historical repetition: ‘Fatigued by history, he went back to Spinoza, rereading chapters on biblical criticism, superstition, and miracles which he knew almost by heart.’79 Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise analyses the fantasies that have shaped socio-political reality in theological ways. Spinoza unmasks the anthropomorphic construction of a God who serves to make one political group triumph over another. Malamud’s The Fixer not only evokes Spinoza’s rationalist critique of superstition and bigotry. It also summons the ideas of the seventeenthcentury philosopher in order to interrupt the mythic repetition of superstition and bigotry within both history and the plot of the novel. As we will see The Fixer closes with the evocation of such interruption of the flow of mimesis. Having been arrested and imprisoned on charges of having killed a Christian child (thus repeating the medieval accusation against the Jews as child as well as Christ killers), Yakov re-encounters Spinoza through the attorney Bibikov. Invoking Spinoza, Bibikov validates the possibility of a modernity that is diverse rather than homogenous. During their first meeting, Bibikov asks Yakov about the meaning of Spinoza’s philosophy. He makes clear that his intentions are not hostile when he raises this question, ‘because Spinoza is among my favourite philosophers and I am interested in his effect on others’.80 In his response to Bibikov’s enquiry, Yakov singles out Spinoza’s interruption of historical repetitions. Such interruption frees us to perceive the complex Malamud, The Fixer, p. 58. Malamud, The Fixer, p. 71.

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ways in which we are in truth interconnected rather than violently opposed to each other in socio-economic or socio-political hostility. The book to which Yakov refers to here is Spinoza’s Ethics: ‘In that case,’ said the fixer, partly relieved, ‘I tell you that the book means different things according to the subject of the chapters, though it is all united underneath. But what I think it means is that he was out to make a free man out of himself – as much as one can according to his philosophy, if you understand my meaning – by thinking through and connecting everything up, if you’ll go along with that, my honour.’81

Freedom goes hand in hand not with withdrawal or separation from – negative freedom as freedom from something – the socio-political but, on the contrary, with the insight into social commonality and interdependence. First Yakov refers to the supposed determinism of Spinoza’s philosophy and then he argues that it gives way to the freedom of interconnection. Living up to this Spinozan view of an interconnected universe, Bibikov later, before his tragic death in a jail cell next to Yakov’s, explains the conatus-like, self-preserving character of his legal assistance: ‘Keep in mind, Yakov Shepsovitch, that if your life is without value, so is mine. If the law does not protect you, it will not, in the end, protect me. Therefore I dare not fail you, and that is what causes me anxiety – that I must not fail you.’82 From Spinoza’s perspective we are determined to see our own self-interest realized by caring for others, because without the assistance of others we would not be able to survive and thrive. Spinoza’s holistic or trans-individual determinism of an interconnected universe furthers freedom, life and creativity. We are determined not by supernatural forces but by the actions through which we interact with our environment. Spinoza’s world is free from repetition and immutability. His philosophy analyses superstition and bigotry as fictions that have shaped unfortunate aspects of history. In his last legal defence of Yakov’s case, Bibikov turns the table on the charge of Jewish immutability: it is not the Jews who are immutable but the history of a civilization that has been determined by fictions of hate and stigmatization. Similar to Benjamin’s Angel of History Bibikov sees progress as the piling-up of endless ruins of destruction: The French have a saying, ‘The more it changes, the more it remains the same.’ You must admit there may be a certain truth to that especially with reference to what we call ‘society’. In effect it has not changed in its Malamud, The Fixer, p. 71. Malamud, The Fixer, p. 159.

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essentials from what it was in the dim past, even though we tend loosely to think of civilisation as progress. I frankly no longer believe in that concept.83

The term ‘progress’ loses its progressive connotation when it describes the accumulation or repetition of bigotry and murder. Spinoza’s idea of a trans-individual and interconnected society breaks with the social history of violence and stigmatization that has shaped traditional history. Spinoza, whose image served to represent Satan in the social imagination of the seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century, is of course an apt reference point for a suspension of the traditional form of humanism. At the end of the novel the sad reality of history gives rise to art’s interruption of mimesis, representation, repetition and stigmatization. It does so by providing space for Yakov’s striving for freedom. Here literature’s ethics enacts politics as cessation of the status quo. By killing the Tsar, Yakov renders a corrupt but real political, social and economic system inoperable. He proclaims the birth of a true form of politics, which has been obliterated by the actually existing history of stigmatization and exclusion. By interrupting the mimesis of historical events, Yakov reverses the mythical history of misanthropy: As for history, Yakov thought, there are ways to reverse it. What the Tsar deserves is a bullet in the gut. Better him than us. The left rear wheel of the carriage seemed to be wobbling. One thing I’ve learned, he thought, there’s no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew. You can’t be one without the other, that’s clear enough. You can’t sit still and see yourself destroyed. Afterwards he thought, Where there’s no fight for it there’s no freedom. What is it Spinoza says? If the state acts in ways that are abhorrent to human nature it’s the lesser evil to destroy it. Death to the anti-Semites! Long live revolution! Long live liberty!84

The ending of the novel rewrites history. Significantly, Yakov does not say ‘Long live the revolution’ but ‘Long live revolution!’ Art’s reversal of history is ‘revolution’, which cannot be tied down to the corrupt instance of a historical event, which would be ‘a revolution’ or ‘the revolution’. Writing opens up vistas of potentiality in Malamud’s oeuvre. It does so perhaps most strikingly in his late novel Dubin’s Life. There the ageing biographer Dubin contrasts Augustinian memory as a blissful return to God Malamud, The Fixer, p. 157. Malamud, The Fixer, p. 299.

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with his own experience of an ‘active remembrance of the sadness of the past’.85 Writing offers a way out of the monolithic track that binds the self to the past. Life without writing is a form of imprisonment. Dubin’s inability to continue with the writing of his new biography of D. H. Lawrence precludes a break from prison (as it were): ‘He could not escape the imprisoning consciousness, the fixed self nailed to the past.’86 Yakov escapes his imprisonment by rewriting history. The assassination of the Tsar symbolizes the end of stereotyping and anti-Semitism. How can we reconcile philanthropy with having the Tsar shot in the guts? The shooting at the Tsar symbolically destroys a societal setup that almost ritualistically perpetuates stigmatization and other forms of violence. The end of such a political system coincides with humanity’s self-preservation. The reference to politics emphasizes this point: it evokes Spinoza’s vision of communality and interdependence within a modern, diverse society.87 Crucially, literature opens up new horizons where we find ourselves unbound from the chains that otherwise tie us to the monolithic past of our present.

Malamud, Dubin’s Lives (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977), p. 311. Malamud, Dubin’s Lives, p. 317. 87 Without referring to Spinoza, Davis has described the meaning of politics at the end of The Fixer as follows: ‘This is the wider, ancient meaning of political: that there is nothing human that can be sure of being wholly separate, safely unaffected, or utterly unimportant.’ Davis, Bernard Malamud, p. 258. 85 86

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A Disenchantment with Numbers: Philosophy and Literature

To treat their [confessional poets] poems mainly as documents of personal experience is not just to diminish their achievement, but to ignore their unanimous disdain for the idea of confessional poetry. Adam Kirsch, The Wounded Surgeon So even as governmental tactics give rise to this sovereignty, sovereignty comes to operate on the very field of governmentality: the management of populations. Finally, it seems important to recognize that one way of ‘managing’ a population is to constitute them as less than human without entitlement to rights, as the humanly unrecognizable. Judith Butler, Precarious Life

Agamben’s and Foucault’s critique of political theology As we have seen in the previous chapter the ethics of literature uncovers the partiality of the purported impartiality (or non-subjectivity) of publically acclaimed truths. Public representations of justice and law, of what is human or non-human, and associated with these, of what is normal or abnormal, healthy or pathological, innocent or guilty, harmless or accused, may be false or fictitious. Yet these representations, once they have governmentally and socially been approved, come to precondition our understanding of what is ethically acceptable. The way we represent the world may be subjective. The subjective turns substantive, however, once it has received public or governmental approval as well as acclamation. Acclamation marks the point where politics and modern media meet theology. What kind of theology? A theology that appraises, that glorifies either transcendent (God or gods) or secular power (the sovereign, the ruling party and so forth, the ruling class of managerial power and so forth).1 It is The theology of approval and acclamation contrasts with Mark C. Taylor’s theological vision. See Taylor’s Nots (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

1

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a theology of glory that constitutes, as Giorgio Agamben has recently put it, ‘the secret point of contact through which theology and politics continuously communicate and exchange parts with one another’.2 Agamben argues that modernity does not constitute a rupture with the theology of pre-modernity, but that it merely displaces the theological imprint of power from a Trinitarian sacred location to a secular and immanent one of management, the economy and (secular) politics – issues with which the Butler quote is concerned at the opening of this chapter: ‘Modernity, removing God from the world, has not only failed to leave theology behind, but in some ways has done nothing other than to lead the project of the providential oikonomia to completion.’3 Here Agamben clearly positions himself within the famous debate about the secular between Hans Blumenberg and Carl Schmitt. Blumenberg defends the legitimacy of modernity against Schmitt’s political theology, which proclaims that all secular terms are but translations of theological ideas. Agamben is, however, not a follower of Schmitt. Here it is worth noting that Agamben speaks of modernity’s failure to leave theology behind. According to Schmitt this is not a failure but a triumph. Similar to Walter Benjamin’s approach in the 1920s, Agamben engages with the conservative political theology of Schmitt (and also that of Erik Peterson) not in order to affirm the repetition of theological patterns within modernity but to hold modernity to account for precisely such repetition. In what ways does Agamben’s critique of theology’s persistence within secular practices of politics and economics pertain to the development of a new ethics borne out of the sources of literature? Strikingly modern literature often alludes to as well as works through theological themes and images. Kafka has done so as has one of the most important twentieth-century poets: Sylvia Plath. A recent study has a chapter dedicated to ‘Plath’s Theology’.4 Does Plath have a theology? Or rather, does her work struggle with the theological structure – albeit emptied out of transcendent content – of the world we are facing within modernity? Agamben makes a strong case that our predilection for what achieves the greatest number of sales or the greatest number of clicks or views (the internet or television and media – internet channels like YouTube for instance – in general) or the greatest number of approval/acclamation ratings is not as secular or immanent as it seems but rather instantiates the displacement of theological hierarchies onto a different location: Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (with MatteoMandarini) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 194. 3 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, p. 287. 4 See Tim Kendall’s Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), pp. 111–127. 2

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As should be evident today, people-nation and people-communication, despite the differences in behaviour and figure, are the two faces of doxa that, as such, ceaselessly interweave and separate themselves in contemporary society. In this interlacing of elements, the ‘democratic’ and secular theorists of communicative action risk finding themselves side by side with conservative thinkers of acclamation such as Schmitt and Peterson: but this is precisely the price that must be paid each time by theoretical elaborations that think they can do without archaeological precautions. That ‘government by consent’ and the social communication on which, in the last instance, consensus rests, in reality harks back to acclamations is what can be shown even through a summary genealogical quest.5

Agamben here analyses the delusions of progressive thinkers such as Habermas, which consist in establishing consensus as a liberal rather than conservative strategy. The delusion in question derives from the ignorance of the ways in which history repeats itself in different disguises. Agamben refers to Foucault’s method of inquiry when he evokes terms like ‘genealogical quest’ and ‘archaeology’. The invocation of Foucault is significant, because it was he who has shown that concern for population growth and, associated with it, the marketability of huge quantities of goods become the measure of what matters and what not from the eighteenth-century onwards. According to Foucault, from the eighteenth century onwards those who achieve the greatest number of sales or popular approval measures (such as fame or electoral success) become arbiters of both power and truth (rather than philosophical or theological notions of metaphysical accuracy, as was the case during the scholasticism of the Middle Ages). In contrast to Foucault, Agamben argues that such modern strategies of public approval, marketability and public consensus are not something new but rather a displacement of Church theology that glorifies as God’s representatives those who govern through public displays of acclamation. According to Agamben, within medieval theology there is already a clear point of coincidence where politics, economics and theology have become indistinct. Ernst Kantorowicz’s famous The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology substantiates Agamben’s argument about the blurring of the distinction between the economic, the theological and the political within traditional Church thinking: the King represents at once the otherworldly and the worldly and this simultaneity makes mundane issues such as people, management and popular (quantitative, or, in other Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, p. 259.

5

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words, what is based on the greatest number of people) acclamation indistinct from theological doxa.6 Agamben’s concern is with the dark aspect of theology: a region where it has become indistinct from oppressive political and economic management. While employing Foucault’s archaeological methodology, Agamben nevertheless begs to differ when it comes to the question of modernity’s break with what preceded it. His genealogy of modernity diverges from that given by Foucault. For Agamben the origin of modern economics and politics is ironically non-modern, early Christian and Medieval, whereas for Foucault – here sharing the progressive thinking of Blumenberg and Habermas – it is the break with pre-modernity. I think both versions of modernity’s origin help explain how and why we live the way we live today. Genealogical inquiry is a method Foucault has inherited from Nietzsche. As Judith Butler has recently argued, it is a methodology that allows for a plurality of truths: Indeed, it may be that to have an origin means precisely to have several possible versions of the origin – I take it that this is part of what Nietzsche meant by the operation of genealogy. Any one of those is a possible narrative, but of no single one can I say with certainty that it alone is true.7

Once we are able to read Foucault’s and Agamben’s respective accounts as partial truths that complement each other, we grasp that modernity is paradoxically both a break with and a continuation of pre-modern thought, myth and social practice. What for Foucault is a non-theological modern fabrication of markets and other quantitative measures, Agamben sees as being part of a genealogy that connects the pre-modern with the modern. The doxa of purported pre-modernity already delineated as well as supported the activity of secular economics and politics. Qualifying Agamben’s argument by complementing it with Foucault’s, we could say that modernity intensifies within an imminent and immanent realm the operations of power and oppression, which in pre-modernity were shared and somewhat postponed (far off in another supernatural context) between this world and the world to come (a transcendent realm). The way power and oppression work remains, however, the same. Its operations are premised on acclamation, on the will of the majority, on the power of the sheer quantity of those who acclaim the ruler. For a discussion of this see Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). 7 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 37–38 6

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What characterizes the working of oppressive power? The simultaneity of the quantitative and the uniform (conforming to the rule laid out by the ruling party) reinforces the impression that the operations of oppressive power depend on homogeneity. According to the OED the first English usage of the term ‘homogeneity’ (N. Carpenter 1625) denotes both harmony and communion. The ruler who has the power to oppress certain groups of people has a harmonious relationship of acclamation with the majority of the people who uphold his rule. The sovereign’s subjectivity assumes the objectivity and substantiality of the population as a whole. The ruler thus has two bodies: representing both God and the people as a homogenous unity. Law, justice and the ethics associated with the legal system serve to enact and reinforce ‘the one size fits all’ motto that characterizes homogeneity. Public images of law and justice have the horrific function of facilitating not only acceptance but also acclamation of forms of activity that have been instituted by managerial authority. Through the public approval of homogenous rule, subjectivity becomes at one with substantiality. Let me unpack this dense argument. The ruling party that makes its rule uniform and homogenously applicable in actual fact represents its partiality or subjectivity as if it were universal and substantive. The representation of the partial as the universal, of the subjective as the substantive is precisely what takes place in displays of public approval, or, as Agamben puts it, acclamation. When it comes to the interruption of homogeneity literature plays a crucial role, precisely because literature foregrounds the subjective against the background of its public representation where it appears under the disguise of substantiality. By unmasking the deceptive display of substantiality (during the acclamation of a ruler or during the public marketing of a political or economic idea or procedure), literature performs a form of heuristic or detective work. It does so by delineating how the purported substantiality of an ideology or an economic system or of a medical assessment is in actual fact a fantasy that grows out of the longing for a world in which we all cohere and are identical tools for a greater teleological or providential good. The ethics of literature disrupts the governmental blurring of the subjective and the substantive. In other words, literature’s insistence on subjectivity is not a subjective but a public matter: it counters the one-size-fitsall approach in public policies by articulating the infinite variety of subjective voices that do not fit into the homogenous call of the ruling discourse.

Sylvia Plath and the disruption of ‘confessional poetry’ For a critique of homogeneity, Sylvia Plath’s work is highly relevant because it foregrounds subjectivity. This is why it is purported to be ‘confessional poetry’. Her poetry has frequently been accused of being excessively

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subjective – subjective to the point of being egotistic. In this way the poet (and one of Sylvia Plath’s numerous biographers) Anne Stevenson demotes the intensity of Plath’s poetry as ‘egoistic fantasizing’ and refers to ‘her gift for romantic self-aggrandizing’.8 The main title of Stevenson’s biography Bitter Fame is quite ambiguous and the ambiguity derives from a highly moralizing assessment of Plath’s work from the perspective of her life and personality shaped as it was by so-called ‘madness’ or ‘mental illness’: ‘She was indeed cursed. Desperately she struggled in the bonds of selfhood; through her writing she must find a way out!’9 Too bad, then, when her poetry does not seem to find a way out of subjectivity, of selfhood. Critics have recently discovered a more public aspect to Plath’s and confessional poetry in general. As Deborah Nelson has put it: At the time of their emergence, the confessional poets were taken to be an extreme instance of romantic self-absorption. However, their significance in literary history and to the changing culture in privacy lies in their exposure of limitations on lyric autonomy and constitutional sovereignty that we had not perceived the lyric subject or the constitutional citizen to suffer.10

As we shall see, in her poetry Plath strenuously and unceasingly strengthens her selfhood. This act of strengthening selfhood highlights the precarious existence of the individual or constitutional citizen. The poetic voice touts subjectivity precisely because lyric autonomy and the individual difference of constitutional citizen are threatened by the homogenous forces of society. As Michael W. Clune has recently argued apropos a reading of her only novel The Bell Jar, Plath withdraws from intersubjective recognition (and in doing so joins the antipsychiatry movement of P. D. Laing and Gregory Bateson)11 – from what constitutes our sociality in social thought from Hegel via Lacan to Martha Nussbaum, Gayatri Spivak and Charles Taylor: ‘Plath’s understanding of the separability of subjectivity from recognition underlies a dimension of her work that has remained invisible to the critics.’12 By separating cognition from social recognition Plath emphasizes her difference – her deviation from Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath. With a New Preface, 1998 (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 32.  9 Stevenson, Bitter Fame, pp. 32–33. 10 Nelson, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. xvii. 11 Clune, American Literature and the Free Market, 1945–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 34–38. 12 Clune, American Literature and the Free Market, 1945–2000, p. 31.  8

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societal rules, roles and regulations. According to Plath the social ‘dialectic of recognition is evil’,13 because it paves the way for the totalitarian equation of one particular subject or idea with substance, with the totality of all there is in an actually diverse world. Clune discusses the asocial aspect of Plath’s work. This is an important and potentially innovative approach but Clune may highlight Plath’s hostility to intersubjective recognition while not considering the reasons for her poetic withdrawal from society. Most importantly the reason d’être behind Plath vacating the sphere of the social is itself socio-political: it constitutes an affront to the politics of homogeneity. As has been intimated above, her insistence on the individual difference of her poetic voice has provoked outrage in the public sphere. Far from finding a way out of her selfhood, Plath’s poetry creates and also preserves the life of subjectivity that refuses to meet moralistic rules and standards that a biographer á la Stevenson imposes upon not only her life but also her literary work. Crucially, this refusal to budge and stifle the idiosyncrasy of selfhood constitutes a public act. It is indeed the scandal of Plath’s poetry. Some of Plath’s most notorious poems – most famously ‘Daddy’ – ostensibly do not achieve a transcendence of selfhood as demanded by Stevenson and others. While introducing her poem for a reading on the BBC, Plath highlights the idiosyncratic and subjective ground of the poetic voice: Here the poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was a Nazi and her mother possibly part Jewish. In the daughter or in her imagination, the two strains marry and paralyse each other – she has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it.14

As Tim Kendall has noted this description of the poem emphasizes a critical or almost clinical distance: ‘having been portrayed as the passive victim of a disordered psyche, Plath now becomes a manipulator, using her wide and detailed knowledge of psychoanalytical literature to mould her persona, rather too blatantly, according to pre-existing Freudian models’.15 Plath’s persona is certainly not autobiographical. Her mother was not Jewish and her father was not a Nazi. The poem is not confessional in the sense of autobiographical. Clune, American Literature and the Free Market, 1945–2000, p. 32. Quotation from Elisabeth Bronfen’s Sylvia Plath (Tavistock: Northcote House Publishers, 2004), p. 82. 15 Kendall, Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), p. 150. 13 14

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The poem vibrates in the tension between distance and closeness, between the histrionic and the sincere, between the factual and the imagined, between the deftly calculated and the rawness of experience. George Steiner has appraised the poetic acumen and emotive force of ‘Daddy’ in terms worth quoting: In ‘Daddy’ she wrote one of the very few poems I know of in any language to come near the last horror. It achieves the classic act of generalization, translating a private, obviously intolerable hurt into a code of plain statement, of instantaneously public images which concern us all. It is the ‘Guernica’ of modern poetry. And it is both histrionic and, in some ways ‘arty’, as is Picasso’s outcry.16

Steiner here describes how supposedly private or subjective experience comes to turn public, how via poetic rationale it ‘concerns us all’. The poem voices an imagined subjectivity, which becomes overwhelmed by substantive reality. Subjectivity here is passive, that of victimhood. The oppression of the outside reality, of substance, of all there is, goes under the name of father. The starting point is subjectivity that is being crushed by a force that is taken to be that of all there is: the universe, the world, in short, God. Plath’s use of the word ‘complicated’ evidences her detached position. For what does it mean that God here is a Nazi, a Panzermann? God as Nazi is a travesty of traditional notions of a benevolent deity. The way Plath reads the poem emphasizes this ridiculous aspect. The poem’s tone is infantile and absurd. Take its title, which is quite childish: ‘Daddy’. Kendall has astutely drawn attention to the interrelation between vowel repetition – the silly messiness that jumbles together shoe and Jew – and the Freudian context that Plath’s poem re-enacts as well as parodies: This repetitive pattern of disappearance and return represents Plath’s version of the fort-da game as famously described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where the child’s repeated and long drawn out ‘o-o-o-o’ is only a slight vowel modulation away from the ‘oo’ repetition of ‘Daddy’. The father-figure is a ‘contemporary experience’, not a memory; and, as Freud explains, the reason for his continuing presence lies in the speaker’s ‘infantile sexual life’. The father’s early death ensures that she cannot progress, and her sense of selfhood is stutteringly confined within a compulsion to repeat.17 Steiner, ‘Dying is an Art,’ in Steiner Language and Silence: Essays 1958–1966 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 183–190 (p. 189). Kendall, Sylvia Plath, p. 152.

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The persona of the poem had to kill her father or god figure before in order to avoid having her subjectivity crushed by him. At the opening of the second stanza the voice admits this compulsion for a liberating kill: Daddy, I have had to kill you. The penultimate stanza doubles this act of murder before closing in the hardto-believe closure of ‘I am through’: If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two – The vampire who said he was you And drunk my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There’s a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I am through.18

The two acts of murdering the father figure hark back to Freud’s primal scene where the angry and jealous sons kill their father who has had a monopoly on sexual intercourse and procreation. According to Freud, the Jews repeat the primal scene by killing their overbearing, monopolizing and rather strict as well as homogenous leader: Moses. Patricide gives not only rise to a feeling of guilt. More importantly, it makes possible a break from sovereign power, which prevents the flourishing of diverse forms of life. Plath’s poem in a tongue-in-cheek tone performs the liberation of a subjective voice from the oppressive subject of the father. The subject of the father, at least in the eyes of the daughter, denies his own limited subjectivity: he was God, the substance of all there is. The poem bores holes into such pretentions. Admittedly it does so in a scandalous and offensive way. It attaches the category of Nazi to overbearing and homogenizing authority figures and equates victims of such regime with victims of the Nazi genocide. There is, however, a so far undetected connection between Plath’s juxtaposition of the silly, the thoughtless, the banal and the extraordinary criminality of the Holocaust. As Berel Lang has shown this tension between banal or ordinary violence and the unprecedented systematic as well as industrialized planning of the Nazi genocide has in different but related ways informed Jewish thought in the post-Holocaust period: Plath, Collected Poems, edited by Ted Hughes (New York: Harper Collins, 1981), p. 224.

18

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The ‘YetzerHa’rah’ introduced in Genesis had the function of asserting the lure of evil (not necessarily its triumph, but its presence) even in the presence of understanding and thinking, which would always be options. The problem for this juxtaposition, we saw, concerned the imposed resolution of theodicy – that whatever happens in history, up to and including the Holocaust, was ultimately the best, with God and man in some sense collaborative agents. Arendt would certainly reject this verdict on history – on world history, on Jewish history, and on Eichmann’s history. But the terms that she herself sets for the problem of Holocaust-evil by insisting at once on its banality and its extraordinary criminality afford her no ready way of reconciling the two sides of that tension. She is, of course, not alone in facing this difficulty, and no doubt Jewish thought in the post Holocaust will continue to wrestle with it.19

The complexity of ‘Daddy’s’ poetic voice may do justice to complex, paradoxical and contradictory ways of thinking through the rationalized, industrialized and systematically ‘managed’ violence perpetrated in the Nazi genocide. Plath’s poetry has certainly a direct intellectual point of reference in Freud’s psychoanalysis. The point of Freud’s psychoanalysis is to validate the subjectivity of his patients and to prevent the repetition of harm, which results from desire or drive (Id) as well as authority (superego)-driven forms of homogeneity: where Id was, subjectivity shall be. I would argue that Plath’s poem performs such a break through its appalling and offensive offerings. There cannot be any doubt that ‘Daddy’ has offended if not outraged many readers from Joyce Carol Oates via Hugh Kenner and Marjorie Perl off to Helen Vendler and Seamus Heaney. In her defence of Plath’s poem Jacqueline Rose has argued that it ‘addresses the production of fantasy as such’.20 Although potentially insightful, this is a rather general point. Where does this production of fantasy take place? Of course, the whole poem is a fantasy or fiction, but how precisely is it concerned with the mechanism of the production of fantasy? The speaker endows the father figure with a substantive power to represent God or the whole universe. This fantasy of the almighty father collapses at the point of its enunciation in the poem: Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through.21 Berel Lang ‘Evil, Suffering, and the Holocaust,’ in Michael L. Morgan and Peter Eli Gordon (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 277–299 (p. 295). 20 Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (London: Virago Press, 1991), p. 230. 21 Plath, Collected Poems, p. 223. 19

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The God-like figure of the father collapses into the brute force of Nazism. The poem performs this deflation of the inflated. In doing so it not only breaks the myth of quasi-divine patriarchy but also deflates and interrupts its own inflations in infantile babble. The poem swerves away from the voice that articulates its lines. It puts an end to the fantasies from which it has derived its oppressive, stifled and infantile existence. No wonder that Plath read ‘Daddy’ aloud to a friend ‘in a mocking and comical voice that made both women fall about with laughter’.22 Its poetic voice is ridiculous. It cancels itself out to make room for something else. ‘Daddy’ is not the only poem that enacts as well as witnesses the death of a self who has been confined to the stifling stasis of conformity and homogeneity. ‘Ariel’ opens in the oppressive darkness of stasis and at its close turns into the shape and speed of an arrow: And I Am the arrow, The dew that flies Suicidal, at one with the drive Into the red Eye, the cauldron of morning.23

The image of the arrow denotes freedom from oppression. It validates subjectivity and frees it from being subservient to homogenizing forces. Does not the ending of ‘Ariel’ return to the homogenous darkness with which it opens (‘Stasis in darkness’)? It closes with ‘morning’. We associate morning with light. The spelling and the pronunciation of the word, however, also evokes ‘mourning’. Furthermore, the image of a cauldron may give rise to an association with witches and other prejudicial representation that mark women as dangerous. These possible dark images and evocations, which return the ending of the poem to its beginning, are nevertheless put to rest by the promise of endless transformations in which we move from suicide to a new beginning, a new morning. Ariel’s arrow-flight is suicidal, but this is a suicide of an angel that is capable of re-birth, of unceasing metamorphoses of subjectivity. As we will see, throughout her writing Plath takes issue with conformity and homogeneity. In Steiner’s words, her poems are ‘unique in their implacable, harsh brilliance’.24 She sets out to develop a tough style of poetry that does not Stevenson, Bitter Fame, p. 277. Plath, Collected Poems, pp. 239–240. Steiner, ‘Dying is an Art’.

22 23 24

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conform and please but one that appals (as is clearly the case with ‘Daddy’). Her struggle with homogeneity is feminist. The arrow into which the speaker of ‘Ariel’ transforms has an intertextual point of reference in Plath’s The Bell Jar. This reference illuminates the context of patriarchal homogeneity and societal stasis from which the persona of the poem breaks free. Apropos established gender relations Esther Greenwood rejects the lack of subjectivity that goes with the traditional role of women as selfless servants who sacrifice their subjectivity for the life of their male companions: ‘The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement to shoot of in all directions myself, like the coloured arrows from a Fourth of July Rocket.’25 Rather than being the place from where an arrow shoots of from, Plath’s persona wants to turn, in Ariel-like fashion, into the arrow itself. The place that is a launch pad for an arrow is passive and static, recalling the opening of ‘Ariel’: ‘Stasis in darkness’. In Plath’s poetry, stasis is a state of mind imposed upon individuality: it is a straight jacket, a form of imprisonment. Movement concerns the free space granted to subjectivity. This implies that the subjective cannot be separated from what may sometimes stifle and oppress it: the stasis or darkness into which it may find itself placed as in the opening and closing of ‘Ariel’. Those of Plath’s poems that are not about the self are often concerned with the social and economic pressures to hide or to be deceptive through misleading representations that veil aspects of our lives deemed unacceptable. As Steiner has put it, ‘Sylvia Plath had mastered her essential theme, the situation and emotive around which she was henceforth to build much of her verse: the infirm or rent body, and the imperfect, painful resurrection of the psyche, pulled back, unwilling, to the hypocrisies of health.’26 Plath’s poetry cries foul of the normative and acceptable. Her poems open up what society represses. They render glaringly visible what has been confined to darkness. Plath’s poetry creates a new public space where what has been drowned in darkness and stifled by stasis shoots off like an arrow. In one of her earlier poems, ‘Tale of a Tub’ (1956), Plath focuses on the ways in which we lie and deceive others as well as ourselves about ourselves in order to conform to the roles we have to display day in and day out. Instead of acknowledging the stark nakedness of what is our subjective substance, we acclaim the fabrications of representations that cover us like clothes in our social actions and interactions, which turn out to be role acting: Yet always the ridiculous nude flanks urge the fabrication of some cloth to cover Plath, The Bell Jar (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), p. 79. Steiner, ‘Dying is an Art’.

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such starkness; accuracy must not stalk at large: each day demands we create our whole world over, disguising the constant horror in a coat of many-colored fictions, we mask our past in the green of eden, pretend future’s shining fruit can sprout from the navel of this present waste.27

Our embodied self is demarcated by ‘nude flanks’ that we have to cover with fabrications, with clothes. Plath’s ‘Tale of a Tub’ does not reduce the truth of the self to the materiality of ‘nude flanks’ but its intensity derives from the pressure to hide aspects of one’s sheer existence. An enjambment emphasizes the verb ‘urge’ and the urging in question then falls on the verb ‘cover’, which closes the following line until we face the alliterating and rather grave statement: ‘such starkness; accuracy must not stalk at large’. The hiatus (marked by the colon) between starkness and accuracy establishes a parallelism between two different semantic fields: between the harsh rigidity of starkness and the truthfulness of accuracy. What is harsh, unpleasant is nevertheless true or accurate. And yet this harsh, ugly truth must not enter public consciousness: it must not stalk at large. We have to hide or to repress – Plath was an avid reader of Freud and thought about entering a Ph.D. program in psychology – aspects of our lives that are rigid or otherwise unpleasant. Strikingly, the point of and for offense here is not some inner subjective issue – or an embodied form of a mental issue such as a tic – but the sheer rigidity of the body’s demarcation (nude flanks). We all share such nude flanks in different but related ways. Hence, the nude flanks denote the point where subjectivity turns substantive in at least two ways: (1) as the material form of our subjectivity (i.e. our body) and (2) as the shared constitution of life that is the substantive or objective fact of our existence (the conditio humana). What Plath’s ‘Tale of a Tub’ uncovers is the cultural, social, economic or political conformity that is imposed on the appearance of the merely material so that the materiality of our embodied life is itself not something natural but a fabrication. While being ostensibly concerned with the subjective – the nude flanks that pertain to the poetic voice and on whose starkness the poetic voice reflects enjoying a bath – ‘Tale of a Tub’ has a public dimension. A two-staged covering takes place. First the poem masterly downplays the public dimension of this so private bath by calling itself not ‘Tale of the Tub’ but rather, more partially, more subjectively, ‘Tale of a Tub’. Then there is of course the uncovering of the public coverings and deceptions for which the Plath, Collected Poems, p. 25.

27

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privacy of the bath becomes the privileged place of inquiry. The title ‘Tale of a Tub’ also establishes an intertextual reference to Swift’s 1704 satire on society and religion entitled A Tale of a Tub. Whereas the content of Plath’s poem includes the taking of a bath, Swift explicitly plays with the non-literal meaning of his title. He makes clear that the title of his satire describes not what it ostensibly denotes (a tub or bath) but the condition of the society it satirizes: And to render all complete I have, with much thought and application of mind, so ordered that the chief title prefixed to it (I mean under which I shall design it shall pass in the common conversations of court and town) is modelled exactly after the manner peculiar to our society. I confess to have been somewhat liberal in the business of titles, having observed the humour of multiplying them to bear great vogue among certain writers whom I exceedingly reverence.28

Plath does not choose and use the title of her poem in Swift’s liberal manner but her concern is social and public too. There is also a satirical component to ‘Tale of a Tub’: it ridicules the pretensions of various social performances and the deception of our public roles. The social focus of the subjective is a topic that the social sciences – at the time at which Plath was writing ‘Tale of a Tub – were in the process of discovering. Commenting on Mary Douglas’s groundbreaking analysis (in the late fifties and early sixties of the last century) of the convergence between seemingly subjective parts and practices and the normative dimension of the socio-political, Judith Butler analyses the public codification of the individual’s body: ‘Her (i.e. Mary Douglas’s) analysis suggests that what constitutes the limit of the body is never merely material, but that the surface, the skin, is systematically signified by taboos and anticipated transgressions; indeed the boundaries of the body become, within her analysis, the limits of the social per se.’29 She goes on to say that analysis shaped by the post-structuralism of Foucault and Derrida attempts to unseat the hegemony that shapes the societal structure Douglas investigates: ‘A poststructuralist appropriation of her (i.e. Douglas’s) view might well understand the boundaries of the body as the limits of the socially hegemonic.’30 As we have seen, Plath’s ‘Tale of a Tub’ goes further: it delineates how the body (the ‘nude flanks’ of the body) is itself Swift, A Tale of a Tub and other Works, edited with an introduction by Angus Ross and David Wooley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 33. 29 Butler ‘Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversion (1990)’ in Sara Salih with Judith Butler (ed.), Judith Butler Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 90–118 (p. 106). 30 Butler, ‘Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversion (1990)’. 28

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taboo. Hegemony cannot accept the harsh and stark differences between our bodies (as well as minds) and demands that they be hidden, masked and covered through fabrications. In contrast to Butler’s post-structuralist approach, Plath insists on the unbending, rigid kernel of subjectivity that will not budge. The nude flanks remain there and they cannot be wished away through the streamlining process of homogeneity; they can only be covered with homogeneous fabrications. Refining and revising her poetic voice, throughout her literary life, Plath keeps uncovering the raw starkness of the idiosyncrasy that marks each of our lives in different but related ways. Throughout her writings, Plath attempts to uncover the universal truth of the idiosyncratic, the subjective, the excluded, the clothed over and covered harshness of selfhood: ‘to wrestle through slick shellacked façades to the real shapes and smells and meanings behind the masks’.31 Poetry makes us see the public truth that the public hides. Plath’s word for the public is ‘façades’. The façades that constitute the architecture of the public are shellacked. In American slang the word ‘shellacked’ means intoxicated, ‘plastered’. Intoxication reigns in the public sphere. Poetry’s sobriety contrasts with the intoxicated deception of sociopolitical conformity. The romantic German poet Hölderlin employs the term ‘the holy sober’ to describe the elevated truth of poetry. This is not to say that Plath read Hölderlin or that her poetry bears similarity to his. It is to make you aware of the sombre and coldly calculated fabric of Plath’s sometimes seemingly emotive and subjective poetry. Plath’s poetry is sober also with respect to its reflective background. Plath was determined to find her individual voice in a tough and truthful harshness that goes beyond and sometimes offends conventional niceties. This is more than just the ambition to become America’s greatest female poet as she famously puts in her Journals: ‘I have the joyous feeling of leashed power – as I am not all now, though I sit on poems richer than Andrienne Cecil Rich.’32 This ambition has perhaps less to do with outward recognition than with the reflective desire to create a new style of writing, a new style that cannot be reduced to anything else past or present in its tough truthfulness. The frenzy of Plath’s writing goes hand in hand with her calculated aims and objectives as she makes clear in her Journals: I was taken by a frenzy a week ago Thursday, my first real day of vacation, and the frenzy continued ever since: writing and writing: I wrote eight Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath: 1950–1962, edited by Karen V. Kukil (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), p. 352. Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, p. 371.

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poems in the last eight days, long poems, lyrical poems, and thunderous poems: poems breaking open my real experience of life in the last five years: life which has been shut up, untouchable, in a rococo crystal cage, not to be touched (Friday afternoon: March 28, 1957).33

What is that which is not to be touched? It is what society has put under taboo. Taboo concerns that which is dangerous, which is untouchable for certain groups of people, especially women.34 Taboo denotes what society perceives to be dangerous and which it puts out of reach, hides and covers. In the quote above, Plath locates her poetry on the side of precisely that which is untouchable, outcast, dangerous, tabooed. Could it be that those entities that have become untouchable are not only certain facets of life but that they ground life in its entirety? What precisely puts life under taboo? In my reading of Plath’s poetry we encounter received forms of not only ethics but also aesthetics as instruments of oppression. Plath focuses on aesthetics: ‘on the rococo crystal cage’. The term ‘rococo’ designates the ornamental style of the late baroque, which emphasizes normative propriety and social niceties. (Goethe attempted to overcome such a style as part of his early poetic development in an attempt to capture a poetry that is true to lived experience rather than to social rules). Plath does not have the period (late baroque) in mind but the word ‘rococo’ denotes for her homogenous poetry, a poetry that is not subjectively sober and sombre but one that attempts to live up to the standardized pleasantries ‘good society’ expects of us. Plath’s usage of the term ‘neatness’ is another word for poetry, not of truth but of social conformity. She thus abrades herself for being ‘fixed, fixated on neatness’ (July 19, 1957).35 The fixity of social and stylistic conformity contrasts with breaking open into life’s true and idiosyncratic experience of the quote above. Fixed and fixated does not refer to being closed in on oneself but to being put into a preformed social cage of rococo aesthetics and ethics: as denoted by the word ‘neatness’. To break out of such a societal cage, Plath radicalizes her subjectivity. She goes on a quest to find her distinctive voice: ‘But to make my own voice, my own vision, that’s another matter: do I must.’36 From the early 1950s onwards, the quest for an inner self always comprises a public concern; one which includes different and Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, p. 356. For a detailed discussion of taboo, danger and power see Mack’s Anthropology as Memory: Franz Baermann Steiner and Elias Canetti’s Responses to the Shoah (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001). 35 Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, p. 409. 36 Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, p. 327. 33 34

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often marginalized identities. This inclusion of the socially excluded takes place while reading literature and poetry. The early Plath admonishes herself: ‘Read widely of others experiences in thought and action – stretch to others even though it hurts and strains and would be more comfortable to snuggle back in the comforting cotton-wool of blissful ignorance!’37 Whether the reading or the writing of poetry, literature combines one’s own subjectivity with the multiplicity of selfhood that forms the universal substantiality of what is humanity. From early on Plath’s self has been premised on literature’s inclusion of so many selfhoods. Plath’s appetite for different lives seems to be enormous: ‘I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want.’38 The self here emerges not as a single but as potentially a universal entity.39 The covering of selfhood implies the exclusion of so many selves. What demands such exclusion is the ‘one size fits all’ approach that reigns not only in the social conformity of rococo aesthetics, but also in various political, medical, economic and, for Plath most significantly, gender policies. There is in fact a parallelism between Plath’s search for a non-conventional style and her revulsion with established norms about womanhood. Gender norms were still unquestioned in the early 1950s. In her journal entry of 29 March 1950, Plath reports and vehemently rejects such norms: Perry said today that his mother said ‘Girls look for infinite security; boys look for a mate. Both look for different things.’ I am at odds. I dislike being a girl, because as such I must come to realize that I cannot be a man. In other words, I must pour my energies through the direction and force of my mate. My only free act is choosing or refusing that mate. And yet, it is as I feared: I am becoming adjusted and accustomed to that idea.40

This quote brings to the fore how deeply conceptions of selfhood contend with as well as succumb to preordained gender roles in Plath’s writing and thinking. As a girl, she has been relegated to a passive role through society’s ethical norm system. Were she not to play the role of the passive female who merely follows the male lead, she would become ethically suspect. The only Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, p. 47 Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, p. 43. 39 I think it is more accurate and insightful to read the multiplicities of Plath’s persona not in pathological terms but as an innovative opening-up of marginalized subjectivities to public sight and public esteem. For an almost clinical account of Plath’s divergent persona in terms of hysteria see Elisabeth Bronfen’s Sylvia Plath (Tavistock: Northgate House, 1998). 40 Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, p. 54. 37 38

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active role she is allowed to initiate is that of judging who the man is whose actions she will merely reiterate. There is a sense of inevitability. Whether she likes it or not, she cannot vacate the ethical sign system of society and step out of her prescribed passive role of girl and woman: ‘And yet it is as I feared: I am becoming adjusted and accustomed to’ the idea of what societal ethics expects of a girl or a woman. Against this background of inevitability within society at large, poetry emerges as free space that is not subject to societal rules and regulations delineating the conduct of gendered selfhood. It is a space you could figure either beyond or below the straight line of social homogeneity. Here selfhood can flourish in idiosyncratic ways, in ways that would be precluded within the homogenous fabric of the socio-political. The act of stepping out of the socio-political is, however, itself a public one. Its publicity may manifest itself in so-called scandals. Conduct that deviates from a given norm or gendered role occasions scandal. Plath’s poetry is more radical than being merely scandalous: it not only offends against the norms and roles of society but calls into question their very ground of existence. A turning of table takes place: poetry becomes the measure of truth and reality, and under this heuristic gaze society’s flat or homogenous operations come to light in their fabricated fictitiousness. The many coloured fictions are those where we try to cover or to hide our specific subjective experiences in order to fit into one of the prearranged pigmentations of governmental rationality. Plath takes issue with conformity and unmasks conformity as deception, as cover of a disturbing truth that may be ugly or beautiful or both at once. In the long poem Three Women (1962) the second voice articulates her revulsion with conformity in society, politics, economics and gender relations. Those who rule and govern impose the homogeneity of their flat faces on us: And then there were other faces. The faces of nations, Governments, parliaments, societies, The faceless faces of important men. It is these faces I mind: They are so jealous of anything that is not flat! They are jealous gods That would have the whole world flat because they are. I see the Father conversing with the Son. Such flatness cannot be holy ‘Let us make a heaven,’ they say. Let us flatten and launder the grossness from these souls.41 Plath, Collected Poems, p. 179.

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There is a certain continuity between ‘Tale of a Tub’ and Three Women. The latter belongs to Plath’s later poems. Here the focus has shifted from the outwards (the ‘nude flanks’) to the inner, to the psychology of power and subjection with which we are already familiar from the discussion of some of the entries in Plath’s Journals. The oxymoron ‘faceless faces’ describes homogeneity’s constitution: it cannot endure the presence of subjectivity, of a distinctiveness the term ‘face’ describes – hence its face is faceless. The lines establish a tension between the idea of the sacred or holy and the reality of political theology and economy that is oppressive. The oppression of this theological, political, societal and economic power is the flatness into which it forces everyone and everything. Homogeneity is flat. It is a flatness that pertains to the whole of society, including religion. The poetic voice articulates its consternation about the all-encompassing force of society’s homogeneity. How can even religion be flat? The word ‘holy’ marks something that stands out (in Hebrew quodesh), that is dangerous, not-to be-touched, that is tabooed. The holy cannot be flat: ‘Such flatness cannot be holy.’ The oxymoron of holy flatness pertains to the conformity of traditional Christian theology, centred as it is on the Trinity and the interaction between Father and Son. This interaction is flat and therefore cannot be holy. Plath takes issue with a religion and theology that does not endow the world with difference, with holiness. On the contrary the heaven created by the theology of Three Women is premised on plastering over difference. The violence of such theology that flattens everyone and everything into an image of its faceless face has ethical connotations. Ethics cleans society of conduct that is improper. Here ethics seems to justify the agreement between Father and Son to ‘Let us flatten and launder the grossness from their souls.’ Similar to the nude flanks of the ‘Tale of a Tub’ grossness embodies that which stands out, which cannot be flattened, assimilated or accustomed to prearranged norms and roles. Grossness will not conform. Plath’s poetry is gross in this sense, in the sense of nonconformity. As her Journals make clear Plath takes issue with the conformity of consumer society and sees it as threat to both poetry and life: What do they want? Concern with a steady job that earns money, cars, good schools, TV, iceboxes and dishwashers and security First. With us these things are nice enough, but they are second. Yet we are scared. We do need money to eat and have a place to live and children, and writing may never and doesn’t give us enough. Society sticks its tongue out at us.’42 Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, p. 437.

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The quote from Three Women focuses on the theology of flatness. In this Journal entry Plath discusses economic pressures that endanger writing and the survival of poets. Whereas homogeneity finds its endpoint in the repetition of the same or similar kind of products (dishwashers) and services (good schools), poetry is life, is the kernel of ever-different and ever-renewed life. Society with its established gender roles stifles, smothers, in short, flattens the life on which poetry feeds. The image of the mother, of a past where the child becomes trained to conduct herself properly, resembles that of the conforming pressures in society at large. Plath reflects upon the anger that such threats to the writing of poetry provoke. She starts with her selfhood and then realizes that the self has to be rediscovered, has to be differentiated from the mother: If you are angry at someone else, and repress it, you get depressed. Who am I angry at? Myself. No, not yourself. Who is it? It is my mother and all the mothers I have known who have wanted me to be what I have not felt like really being from my heart and at the society which seems to want us to be what we do not want to be from our hearts: I am angry at these people and images.43

The pressure to live a conforming life as economically measured by money earned has its symbolic equivalent in the figure of the mother. What is crucial here is that this is a literary figure but not necessarily the autobiographical mother. The terms ‘mother’ and ‘father’ have entered another realm – that of literature and its various constructions where we encounter a world that relates to but also utterly changes the way we think and interact with the social world. Literature counters the societal oppression of our distinctiveness, of what each of us in quite different and often contradictory ways could be. In Plath the word ‘mother’ evokes the smothering of societal demands, especially as they relate to gender. As has been intimated above, Plath attacks gender identities and roles as one of the most glaring and violent forms conformity has taken. She at once feels obligated to conform to the role as daughter, wife and mother and at the same time rebels against such conformity. Here poetry emerges as an alternative to the promises of social harmony and homogeneity. Her Journals frequently juxtapose the lively prospect of having babies and being a good mother and wife with the new life, the birth that occurs through the writing of poetry. Writing poetry is for Plath not only a life-enhancing but more importantly a life-generating activity that is more fecund than the fecundity Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, p. 437.

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of conception and motherhood, precisely because it resides outside the reglementary structure of roles. In this way writing is the precondition for life. The mother acts as the conforming force that not only stifles but also steals or expropriates the writing of Plath, who tries to commit suicide in her teens: How, by the way, does mother understand my committing suicide? As a result of my not writing, no doubt. I felt I couldn’t write because she would appropriate it. Is that all? I felt if I didn’t write nobody would accept me as human being. Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don’t love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.44

Writing preconditions life because it confers distinctiveness – if not distinction – which characterizes the interface between public and private. It is one way of connecting one’s subjectivity to the public arena shared by humanity at large. Distinctiveness and distinction does not necessarily involve hierarchy. We are all distinctive in our different ways and one way may not be superior to another. In the quote above, Plath writes from the position of weakness: writing compensates for a lack, for a lack of social recognition and appreciation. It not so much puts the self front and centre but substitutes for selfhood via literary constructions. These literary constructions change social reality by creating a new world that is not flat but one that is truly holy in a non-theological sense. It is holy in its dedication to the ordinary, the messy, the gross; in short, poetry sanctifies the profane and elevates what has been labelled gross and impure in proper theological, economic, ethical and political discourse. Far from being theological or based on a set of creeds (doxa), poetry is nevertheless sacred and its conception and composition deserves a dedication that is associated with the religious: Writing is a religious act: it is an ordering, a reforming, a relearning and reloving of people and the world as they are and as they might be. A shaping which does not pass away like a day of typing or a day of teaching. The writing lasts: it goes about its own in the world. People read it: react to it as to a person, a philosophy, a religion, a flower: they like it, or do not. It helps them, or it does not. It feels to intensify living: you give more, probe, ask look, learn and shape this: you get more: monsters, answers, color and form, knowledge.45 Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, p. 448. Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, p. 436.

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The roots of the word ‘religion’ have two mutually exclusive meanings, signifying the act of both binding and unbinding.46 Plath may be referring to the second connotation when she defines the religious act of poetry in terms of ‘a reforming, a relearning and reloving of people and the world as they are and as they might be’. The prefix ‘re-’ highlights the change poetry brings about. Plath underscores the significance of poetic change: it remains; it does not pass away as so much else that partakes of societal work (teaching, typing, etc.). Poetry is different, it is not a copy or a vision of what exists but redoes our life and world. Poetry unbinds us from the flatness of societal existence and this form of unbinding is binding: it lasts, it does not pass away. Its endurance manifests itself in the different actions and reactions it occasions. According to Plath not just the writing but the long life of poetry is an activity that marks our world, precisely because the flatness of this world is undone within it. Poetry unbinds us from societal or economic or theological or gender structures and the act of this unbinding binds us into a new public space of intensified, heightened life. Its religious dimension consists in the creation and also preservation of new forms of being. To be sure the life in question here is utterly unlike what we live when we conform to social roles and rules. Plath does not equate the act of physical conception with the composition of poetry. She juxtaposes the two in order to highlight the contrast between them. Babies are born into a world in which sooner or later they have to conform to gender roles and other structures through which the socio-cultural sign system conceptualizes their bodies and minds. The conception, in contrast, that takes place in the birth of poetry opens up a new space in which we are free to vacate the homogeneity that shapes much of our socio-economic and political existence. This is the unbinding performed by poetry: it works through a reshaping of our accustomed societal role. Plath argues that the life of poetry runs counter to the economic imperatives that reinforce the force of social conformity. Economics does so with the veiled but nevertheless clear threat of death: earn your money by conforming to social roles and rules or else you face hunger, homelessness and social death. Plath sees her life with Ted Hughes as an open scandal, as insult to such economic hegemony where making money is the only excuse for writing poetry: ‘Images of society: the Writer and Poet is excusable only if he is Successful. Makes Money.’47 The problem is of course that it is quite difficult to make enough money with poetry. Plath and Hughes offend not only economic For a detailed discussion of the etymology of religion see Mack’s Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity: The Hidden Enlightenment from Spinoza to Freud (New York: Continuum, 2010), pp. 152–167. 47 Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, p. 438. 46

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commands of conformity but they also disrupt the hegemony of gender roles: ‘he isn’t earning “enough bread and butter” in any reliable way, I am not “sewing on buttons and darning socks” by the hearthside. He hasn’t even got us a hearth; I haven’t even sewed a button.’48 While Hughes does not fulfil the gender role of the husband – earning money and providing for household necessities presided over by the wife – he nevertheless expects Plath to conduct herself in accordance with the rules of a homogenous female identity. Plath’s Journals record fights ‘about his deep-rooted conventional ideas of womanhood, like all the rest of men, wants them pregnant and in the kitchen’.49 The conventionality of Hughes’s ideas contrasts with the non-conventional, nonconforming life of poetry that reshapes the life of the couple – making it insecure and intense. The life reshaped by poetry contrasts with the figure of the mother, which literarily embodies the longing for a security: financial security, societal security, the security of firm and clear gender roles, the security of clear targets and goals, the security of ‘final answers’: ‘Her (i.e. the mother figure’s) information is based on a fear for security and all advice pushes toward the end and goal of security and final answers.’50 As we have seen, Plath’s poetry attempts to unbind us from such moral panic by revealing security and final answers as delusions and deceptions that nevertheless shape our societal existence in its wish to find a safe home in a common lot. By denuding the deceptions that go with our public representation of ourselves, poetry overcomes the representational structures through which it works by performing a new – radically subjective in the sense of nonconformist – form of life. In one her last poems, Plath celebrates the nascent life of poetry by closing her poem ‘Kindness’ with the following three lines: The blood jet is poetry, There is no stopping it You hand me two children, two roses.51

It is almost as though Plath were here conflating word and deed, world and poetic word, life and poetry’s letter. In the religious context of Biblical writing blood symbolizes life. The poem ‘Kindness’ closes with the connection between blood and life – rather than the destruction of life, which could also be evoked here – with the parallelism of ‘two children, two roses’. The roses point to the redness of blood. The two children appear within the context of poetry and not that of actually giving birth within the social setting of family or hospital. Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, p. 445. Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, p. 444. 50 Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, p. 450 51 Plath, Collected Poems, p. 270. 48 49

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The blood jet alludes to the gushing forth of blood, which also accompanies conception. It is an allusion, however, that diverges from what it alludes to, because the reference point is not that of an emergent new child but that of poetry. The blood jet does not go with actual birth but with the continual birth and rejuvenation of poetry: ‘The blood jet is poetry.’ ‘There is no stopping it’ harks back to the religious image of life without end, of a form of eternity that goes beyond mortality. The kindness of the title of the poem has, according to the OED, its etymology in the old English word for generation. In its early fifteenth-century usage, kindness referred to natural affection but also to natural right, a kind of birthright. Plath investigated the etymology of the words with which she worked in her poetry. The very opening of the poem evokes an allegorical medieval personification of kindness as ‘Dame Kindness’. The allegory of this dame invokes and evokes a sphere of nature that is beyond social forms of deception into which we are born when we enter an already-established system of signs, roles and regulations. This beyond is the non-theological religious dimension of poetry. It is religious in the sense of an unbinding that binds us to the new public of literature and poetry where we go without the various deceptions and homogenous roles that language and society otherwise impose on us. The subjective and idiosyncratic kernel of our respective lives is the blood jet that is poetry: it unbinds or liberates us from societal conformity. Poetry performs a redemption of sorts: it creates Paul’s messianic life, which, in Agamben’s intriguing interpretation, ‘is the impossibility that life might coincide with a predetermined form’.52 Literature disrupts the identity between life and the homogeneity of a predetermined form that supposedly fits all. Literature confounds this rationality in such a way that it makes it appear inadequate, Panzermann-like, subjective, desiretrenched, fantasy-driven, obscene.

Kafka’s and Plath’s struggle with Augustine’s eternity and the inadequacy of traditional ethics Plath’s work at a poetry that is forthright in its raw starkness of heterogeneity has a point of support in Kafka’s rough parody of the substantive realms of law, order, economics and government. The representative picture of a judge within Kafka’s The Trial depicts not fair disinterest but impassioned fury: The unusual thing about it was that this judge was not sitting in tranquil dignity but was pressing his left arm hard against the back and side of the Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, p. 248.

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chair and had his right arm completely free and just held the other arm of the chair with his hand as if his intention was to spring up at the next moment with a violent and perhaps outraged gesture to utter something decisive or even pronounce judgment.53

Ethics, justice and violence here become indistinct. We see the judge in action as a violent and highly biased man. The Law should, however, be unbiased. At the point where law and ethics attempt to punish nonconformity, the ethical and the juridical turn violent. With reference to Kafka’s writing, Judith Butler has recently critiqued the violence of ethics: ‘Condemnation becomes the way in which we establish the other as nonrecognizable or jettison some aspect of ourselves that we lodge in the other, whom we condemn.’54 The crucial point in Kafka and also in Plath’s literary critique of ethical violence is how in their writings societal norms, which we tend not to question otherwise, are represented in a way that turns representation against itself. Strikingly, The Trial represents the allegory of Justice as the contradiction of the just and the fair: as triumphalism, hunt and kill. K.’s incredible ‘Ah, now I recognize it’ follows upon the painter’s revelation that the figure represented in his painting is Justice. The recognition of what may be just in the representation of justice quickly reverses into its opposites. K. first seems to see symbols of impartiality and fair, non-violent judgement: ‘here’s the bandage over the eyes and these are the scales.’ Immediately this image of patience and measure turns into one of fear-inducing movement: ‘But aren’t these wings on the ankles and isn’t this figure running?’ The painter replies that he is not allowed to paint as he likes but that he has to follow societal norms as they are dictated by the court of law’s strict commission. He has been commissioned to paint Justice in terms of Violence, Hunting and Victory: ‘Yes,’ said the painter, ‘I was commissioned to paint it like that. Actually it is Justice and the goddess of Victory in one.’ ‘That’s hardly a good combination,’ said K. with a smile. ‘Justice has to be motionless or the scales will waver and there’s no possibility of correct judgement.’ ‘I’m only following the instruction of the person who commissioned me,’ said the painter. ‘Yes, of course,’ said K., who had not wished to cause offence with his remark.55

This indistinction between justice and victory points to the triumphalism prevalent in warfare. Indeed later on, we learn that the painting that purports Kafka, The Trial, translated by Idris Parry (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 85. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, p. 46. Kafka, The Trial, pp. 114–115.

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to represent Justice depicts the opposite, namely the violent act of hunting: ‘it was scarcely reminiscent of the goddess of Justice any more, nor of the goddess of Victory either; now it looked exactly like the goddess of the Hunt.’56 Hunting is an act of victimization that ethics and the law are supposed to preclude or, in case it has already occurred, rectify. In The Trial the law hunts and victimizes. One of the wardens who come to arrest K. says as much: ‘Our authorities, as far as I know them, and I know only the lowest grades, do not go in search of guilt in the population but are, as it says in the law, drawn to guilt and must send us wardens out. That is law.’57 In Kafka’s writing the law has abandoned any cultural or historical conditioning and has turned into a quasi-scientific force of nature. A pseudoscientific law of attraction governs the working of the law. This quasi-natural aspect of the legal system truly turns obscene. The obscenity of the law reinforces the already-established sense of its extreme inadequacy and dark ridiculousness: the court of law ‘is composed almost exclusively of lechers’.58 K. goes on to provide a striking example where yet again animalistic hunting constitutes legal procedure – ‘Just let the examining magistrate see a woman in the distance and he’ll dive over the table and the defendant to get there in time to catch her.’59 Different but similar to the self-parodying tone of Plath’s ‘Daddy’, representation turns against itself. The dive of the judge resembles that of a tiger rather than that of a professional lawyer. Or rather the professional lawyer appears as a rapacious tiger and the conflation of the two makes us feel ill at ease with societal systems such as the legal/ethical one. Here representation does not represent a copy of something but rather exposes the inadequacy of the thing it represents. The daddy of Plath’s poem deflates from being ‘God’ to the ‘brute force’ of a Panzermann. Representation turns against itself: it hollows out, exposes as obscene the represented. Plath was fascinated by Kafka’s writing, by how he commingles the familiar with the uncanny, the realistic with the symbolic. In a Journals entry of 15 July 1957 she puts it as follows: ‘like Kafka, simply told, symbolic, yet very realistic.’60 The yet is quite perceptive: there is indeed a clash between the symbolic and the realistic in Kafka’s writings. The reality that Kafka’s short stories and novels describe calls into question, even into ridicule, what they purport to represent or to symbolize. Plath enacts a similar split between a symbol or concept and the reality described. She does so most strikingly when Kafka, The Trial, p. 115. Kafka, The Trial, p. 5. 58 Kafka, The Trial, p. 165. 59 Kafka, The Trial, p. 165. 60 Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, p. 283. 56 57

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she exposes the inadequacy of traditional ethics at the end of her late poem ‘Burning the Letters’ (1962): The dogs are tearing a fox. This is what it is like – A red burst and a cry That splits from its ripped bag and does not stop With the dead eye And the stuffed expression, but goes on Dyeing the air Telling the particles of the clouds, the leaves, the water What immortality is. That it is immortal.61

In keeping with Plath’s reputation as a confessional poet, the poem has been read in terms of her marital breakup with Ted Hughes.62 Although it is beyond doubt that, at one level, the subject of the poem refers to the realistic and quite physical act of burning the letters of Hughes, there is quite clearly also another level that comes to the fore in the lines quoted above. The co-mingling of an animalistic image with a symbol or concept that has been foundational for the Western tradition of ethics: immortality. The closing lines of Plath’s ‘Burning the Letters’ provide a stark contrast to the traditional conceptions of ethics, metaphysics and, associated with it, immortality. Within a traditional system of ethics, theology sustains the continuity of the just and the good by guaranteeing – via belief in a benevolent and personal God – the absence of eternal death. According to Paul, and following him, Augustine, there exists a dialectical relationship between change, trauma, death and sin. As we will see in the following chapter, modern as well as pre-modern medical discourse in different but related ways establishes a reciprocal connection between sin or unhealthy living and mortality. In Augustine’s and Paul’s pre-modern context, death is a question of eternal death versus eternal life, and in modern medicine it concerns the secular extension of life in a quasi-eternal domain: the biomedical promise of Plath, Collected Poems, p. 205. Recently Adam Kirsch has in an intriguing book about confessional poetry taken issue with ‘Burning the Letters’ as a poem that is indeed all-too confessional and self-centred:

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That is the lesson of ‘Burning the Letter,’ in which an actual episode – Plath’s vengeful burning of Ted Hughes’s papers in the summer of 1962 – can be all too easily discerned. Plath herself seems to acknowledge her failure of art: ‘I am not subtle,/Love, love, and well, I was tired … ’ There is still a movement toward magical thinking in this poem – with the husband’s letters gone, Plath writes, ‘at least it will be a good place now, the attic,’ as though by burning them she had performed an exorcism. But the underlying motives of revenge and jealousy seem all too human, leaving the poem finally just a record of sordid domestic sabotage. Kirsch, The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets (New York: Norton, 2005), p. 264.

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longevity that denotes the absence, not of eternal death, but of its secularized version: the retreat of ageing and decay. Sander L. Gilman has recently used the term ‘moral panic’ to describe the secularized reaction to ways of living (obesity, smoking and so forth) that may cause premature death in our contemporary culture, which has been shaped by the biomedical prospect of an ever-more extended longevity. Moral panic visà-vis disease and mortality evidences the link between medicine and culture (whether it is theological or secular, pre-modern or modern): any given illness ‘is culturally, not scientifically, limited and its centrality in the mental universe of any given individual is heavily dependent on the role of anxiety associated with it’.63 The closing section of this chapter prepares for the following chapter by analysing how our secularized anxiety in the face of mortality refers back to a theological-ethical approach towards the absence of eternal death that characterizes the writings of Paul and Augustine. As Gilman has shown, in the pre-modern context ‘science is part of religion, as it is seen as means of understanding the complexity of human health and illness within a world view that does not separate the human from the divine’.64 In the wake of modernity science increasingly partakes of the immanent sphere of politics, economics and government. Whether it is theological and pre-modern, or whether it is secular and biomedical, our anxiety about disease and mortality gives rise to forms of moral panic through which we establish various delusions of ethics. The lines above from Plath’s poem attempt to unmask pre-modern as well as modern fantasies about the way out of eternal death: immortality or longevity. Paul proclaims the redemption from eternal death through the sacrifice of Jesus who absolves those who believe in him and follow his example (the Greek dogma derived from the Hebrew dugmah) from the sin incurred by the old Adam. So from Paul onwards, the finality of death results from the sin incurred at the origin of sinfulness: what Augustine calls original sin. In Augustine death is a symptom of the corruption or the illness that characterizes the earthly city of fallen humanity where we encounter ‘the death in which God forsook the soul’.65 Here death has an ethical significance. It is an inevitable punishment for original sin: the whole of humanity is subject to the fall and thereby to disease and death. In this way everyone undergoes death but the question is whether death is momentary or momentous – whether it is a brief interlude paving the way to eternal life in the city of God or whether it defines the eternity of life after death in terms of eternal death. Gilman, Obesity: The Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. xiii. Gilman, Obesity, p. 37. 65 Augustine, Confessions, translation by Henry Chadwick(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 524. 63 64

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The lines by Sylvia Plath make a strong case for the immortality not of life but of death. In Paul and Augustine – and as we will see in our biomedical society of the twenty-first century – there is an alternative to death. In a world where death is not inevitable but avoidable, the fact that we all face the prospect of dying functions as a moral warning. The warning may give rise to what Gilman has called the ‘moral panic’ of contemporary medico-political policy. According to Augustine death and disease are not something we need to panic or fret about. Augustine puts it as follows: We may therefore take it that this was the death God meant when he gave the warning ‘On the day that you eat from that tree you will die by the death,’ this being tantamount to saying, ‘On the day that you forsake me in disobedience, I shall forsake you with justice.’ But even so, he certainly gave a warning in this death, of the other deaths also, which without doubt were destined to follow.66

Death works as a warning in our contemporary biomedical society too. The warning may give rise to moral panic where we see death as the fruits of either theological or medico-political sins of our lifestyle. Pre-modern theology and modern biomedicine attempt to come to terms with the inevitability of our mortality in different but related ways: the former proclaims resurrection in the eternal life of the city of God for those who conduct their lives in the proper theological manner and the latter promises the ever-increasing deferral of the moment of death via the consumption of biomedical cures allied with what it considers a ‘healthy life-style’. Both demand forms of obedience. Within a pre-modern context, humanity’s refusal to follow divine instruction constitutes sin. The fruit of sin is eternal death. Here clearly death works as part of an ethical system where a theological hierarchy prevails. It is a hierarchy that informs Augustine’s politics. His politics divides the universe into either an earthly city – represented by Cain’s murder of his brother Abel – or that of God where we encounter immortality as the absence of death and bloodshed. The ending of Plath’s poem ‘Burning the Letters’ (see the quote above), in contrast, unmasks as delusion this ethical system that differentiates between immortal life and lack of virtue, grace and death, sin and just punishment. The ways in which Plath illuminates a conflict between the aesthetic and the ethic – rather than a reconciliation between the two, as the critical consensus holds – have not sufficiently been recognized. In this way Adam Kirsch has recently faulted poems such as ‘Daddy’ or ‘Burning the Letters’ for allowing Augustine, Confessions, pp. 523–524.

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‘the ethical to intrude on the aesthetic.’67 Instead of letting the ethical intrude on aesthetics these poems disrupt our current understanding of ethics by hollowing out what they claim to represent. Plath describes immortality not as the blessing of more life but rather as the eternity of death. How can we come to see immortality not in terms of life but in terms of death? In order to address this question let me briefly engage more minutely with the lines quoted above from Plath’s poem ‘Burning the Letters’. At the beginning we encounter not the eternal but the momentary, which becomes momentous in a metaphysical and poetic sense. The transition from the momentary to the momentous re-enacts the pre-modern conception of eternal death: mortality not as a stepping stone to eternal life but as constituting a lifeless form of eternity where eternity turns into nothingness. The poem depicts the moment of dying in an image – that of a fox who is being torn to pieces by dogs: ‘The dogs are tearing a fox.’ Plath’s usage of the gerund (‘tearing’) reinforces a sense of the instantaneous. The lines then, however, break from the momentary to the momentous with the phrase ‘This is what it is like’. The likeness bears full bloom in a metaphysics of sorts: a new metaphysics of immortality with which the poem closes: ‘What immortality is. That it is immortal.’ The image of the kill ceases to remain singular and momentary. Through Plath’s evocation of likeness the physicality of the tearing to pieces turns metaphysical. It becomes a simile for a new type of immortality. The momentary transmogrifies into the momentous event of apocalypse. Plath’s poem disrupts and corrupts the traditional connotations of apocalypse: the apocalyptical is not final but eternal and its purpose is not, as theology has it, the redemption from the endless perpetuation of pain. Nevertheless, violence in the sense of tearing and disrobing appertains to the traditional usage of the word ‘apocalypse’. True to its Greek origins, the term ‘apocalypse’ denotes a denuding, an unclothing. In Augustine’s theological tradition apocalypse uncovers the revelation that redeems us from death. Against the background of this tradition, Plath redefines apocalypse as a poetic uncovering of delusions. The delusions in question here are those of traditional ethics. This may sound odd. Ethics seems to be far removed from the action taking place here. The actors are animals. Ethics is, however, the privilege of those who are rational as opposed to animalistic – or, in a theological context, those who have been created in God’s image of benevolence. Moreover, the action itself seems to have nothing to do with ethics: it is that of either a gratuitous or a hunger-driven kill. Kirsch, The Wounded Surgeon, p. 267.

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The poetic voice indeed lingers on the violence of the act. The ‘what it is like’ expression first unfolds as empathy with the victim. This is what it is like: put yourself into the place of the fox that is being torn to pieces. We are thus undergoing what Keats has called poetry’s negative capability  – its capacity to leave the self behind and live the life of others. The other in question here is quite alien to our sense of humanity: it is an animal, a fox. A fox that is violently taken apart and the poem enacts this taking apart by splintering into ‘A red burst and cry’. The fox has left behind the physicality – or, may we say, the animal nature? – of being a fox and has become a voice – the voice of a cry. The distress that gives voice to the cry both accelerates and universalizes its core of pain. It splits away from the ripped physicality of the lung and then unceasingly imparts its tone into the universe. The cry does not stop ‘but goes on/dyeing the air.’ Here the gerund has transformed its syntactic function. No longer does it focus on an instant – the kill of the ‘tearing’. Instead, it describes the process of staining or colouring. A synchrony of colour and sound takes place: the cry carries the redness of blood and thereby translates a singular death into the universality of its environment. Given the emphasis placed here on acoustics, it is worth noting that the verb dye bears an acoustic resemblance to the verb die. The dyeing of the red spreads and perpetuates the act of dying of which it is the symptom. In rapid spasms of both metaphor and metamorphosis, the symptom of pain then morphs into the symbol of immortality. The rapidity of poetic movement performs the revolutionary upheaval that overturns both the metaphysics and ethics of a philosophical-theological tradition that Augustine has helped inaugurate. The message of death and pain quasi-metaphysically informs us of immortality’s truth while forming the physicality of our universe: Telling the particles of the clouds, the leaves, the water What immortality is. That is immortality.

The move from the physical (clouds, leaves, water and so forth) to the metaphysical is in keeping with a traditional methodology of ethics. A metaphysician does not need to be hostile to the physicality of particles. As Peter Brown has clearly shown, in contrast to the radical Platonism of Origen, Augustine – as his career developed – increasingly attempted to include the body’s physicality within his ethical and theological metaphysics: The agenda that Augustine brought with him from Ambrose’s Milan changed subtly and irrevocably in his first decade as a bishop in the African Church. By 400, Augustine was no longer the convert who had

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broken, so suddenly and with such evident relief, from his need for a physical relationship with a woman.68

Instead of condemning the needs and longings of the body, Augustine appraises corporeal sacrifice through which the early Christians both lay claim to and witness the validity of Augustinian ethics. They forsake the mortal pleasure of body and mind for the immortality of the City of God. The resurrection into the City of God is corporeal. Augustine does not disapprove of the body. Instead he censures mortality. Death by martyrdom helps confirm belief in immortality. Hence, martyrdom tests ethics: ‘For Augustine, martyrdom always represented the highest peak of human heroism. To have triumphed over the bitter fear of death was a far greater sign of God’s grace than to have triumphed over the sexual urge.’69 The sexual urge partakes of mortality – indeed Freud would later conceptualize sexuality as death written small (as death drive) – and we could say that for Augustine it is a symptom rather than the cause of transience. The bliss of Augustine’s heavenly city thus incorporates the notion of an incorruptible or immortal body: The conclusion is that it is not necessary for the achievements of bliss to avoid every kind of body, but only bodies which are corruptible, burdensome, oppressive, and in a dying state; not such bodies as the goodness of God created for human beings, but bodies in the condition which the punishment for sin has forced upon them.70

The ending of Plath’s ‘Burning the Letters’ denies the goodness of God while evoking Augustine’s notion of immortality in an entirely different context. Here too immortality does not exclude the corporeal. Plath, however, turns upside down the dialectical relationships between corruptibility and mortality, between the incorruptible and the immortal. Instead of testing and thereby proving the goodness of God, death and bloodshed unmask the inadequacy of traditional ethics. Traditional ethics has been built upon the axiom of God’s goodness.71 As we have seen in our discussion of Augustine’s theology of an incorruptible body, Augustinian ethics establishes a causal relationship between goodness and immortality. While referring to the Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 396. 69 Brown, The Body and Society, p. 397. 70 Brown, The Body and Society, p. 397. 71 See Janice Soskice’s The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 68

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parameters of traditional Christianity Plath’s poem ‘Burning the Letters’ corrupts and disrupts precisely such dialectics that Paul and Augustine have established between the immortal and the non-deadly or non-violent. ‘Burning the Letters’ depicts immortality in terms of the eternal perpetuation of violence and death. This suffusion of turbulence not only works on a temporal axis but also determines the nature of space and the cosmos at large. Here pain (the cry) floats oblong throughout the cosmos. Rather than God’s goodness, pain infuses the universe. The act of killing a fox questions what this violent act functions to represent in Plath’s poem. Representation turns against itself and exposes the hollowness of grand concepts that may grow out of theology but still hold sway over our secular approach towards ethics. As we will see in the following chapter, works of literature (novels by E. L. Doctorow and Philip Roth) help us discover how scientific endeavours – such as the medical quest for longevity – are in actual fact mutations of economic and secularized theological paradigms.

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But the line between science and pseudo-science is smudged and shifting; where it lies seems clear only in retrospect. There is no pristine science untouched by the vagaries of faith. John Gray, The Immortalizing Commission

Introduction: The neoliberal obsession with life’s immortality Continuing the preceding discussion, this chapter investigates how, within contemporary literary and medical thinking about topics of health and longevity, signatures re-emerge of apparently outdated theological as well as philosophical ethics. This traditional ethical discourse closely affiliates the pursuit of goodness with the promise of eternal life. How can we account for the resurgence of a nineteenth-century obsession with the long life in a shortlived society shaped as it is by the short-term rationales of neoliberalism? Neoliberalism has helped enact the social practice of a new ethics; one that is short term rather than long term. This contemporary neoliberal ethics is founded upon the performance of the markets. Markets are volatile; they are quick to change: ‘The greater the geographical range (hence the emphasis on “globalization”) and the shorter the term of market contracts the better.’1 As we have seen in Chapter 1, David Harvey establishes a parallel between the market practices of neoliberalism and Lyotard’s famous characterization of the postmodern as the temporary and ever changing. The culture of postmodernism and the economic ethics of neoliberalism have both abandoned the grand scheme of social utopias and promising goals (teleology) for the future of humanity. They seem to be concerned not with the collective but the particular. Indeed Lyotard has declared the death of goals and meta-narratives the most striking feature of postmodern theory and practice (see Chapter 1). David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 4.

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A return to an ethical concern with longevity seems to contradict the neoliberal as well as postmodern embrace of the fragmentary, the quick trade, the instantaneous and open-ended. As Harvey has convincingly shown, neoliberalism is riddled with contradictions between theory and practice. These contradictions help account for a resurfacing of the traditional preoccupation with the long life within the contemporary culture of apparent postmodern instantaneity. These contradictions also highlight how we are, at least unconsciously, reawakening seemingly dead or outmoded models of health, ethics and politics of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In various historical novels contemporary writers such as E. L. Doctorow and Philip Roth make us aware of the repetition of harm in what we may take to be reparative breaks with the old and outdated. On closer scrutiny, neoliberalism intensifies and resurrects an older model of capitalism. Although neoliberalism celebrates the freedom of individuals and denies the validity of social solidarity – in the famous words of Margaret Thatcher ‘There is no such thing as society, only individual men and women’ – it has nevertheless always relied on state activism and state coercion in order to guarantee the stability of the monetary system (as has become most obvious during the recent financial crisis of 2007 through to 2012), which is its very foundation. There is also another dark side to the ‘freedom’ of economic interaction. While the state apparently refrains from interfering in market transactions, the government plays an all the more pronounced role in punishing members of a neoliberal society. As Bernard Harcourt has recently shown in many American states, ‘annual budgets allocate more funding for prisons than for four year colleges’.2 In this way the overweening moralism that characterizes neonconservatism emerges as the flip side of neoliberalism. Neoconservatism ‘seeks to restore a sense of moral purpose, some higherorder values that will form the stable centre of the body politic’.3 This search for moral purpose reintroduces a seemingly outdated ethics, which makes longevity the premise as well as the promise of virtue. The question of long life has a strong medical component. Faced with the erosion of public health care in the wake of neoliberal reforms, the emphasis conveniently shifts from social responsibility to that of the individual. Someone’s illness or early death thus becomes a moral issue, providing proof of the failing of the person concerned – rather than the society in which this could happen: ‘The social safety net is reduced to a bare minimum in favour of a system that emphasizes personal responsibility. Personal failure Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 199. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 83.

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is generally attributed to personal failings, and the victim is all too often blamed.’4 In contrast to the approach towards and treatment of such topics by modernist writers (Canetti, Kafka and Sylvia Plath; see preceding chapter), health, survival and longevity here serve as ‘evidence’ for an ethical way of life rather than as instances of privilege, luck and class power: in an increasingly neoliberal society where everything has become financialized, wealth has an intricate connection with health (see the discussion of US-style managed care in the following chapter). Grand moralistic thinking turns the contingency of wealth and health into the non-contingent foundation of ethics. In his historical novel Ragtime Doctorow brings to the fore how the modern upper classes grow dismayed about forces that helped accumulate money in the first place: financial transactions of the short-lived presence. Doctorow has the famous banker J. P. Morgan invite the inventor of the industrialist line production Henry Ford in order to discuss with him the prospect of the immortality of the ruling class. Morgan’s most extensive collection of historical books serves to establish proof of his previous life as well as of his future eternal existence. Doctorow evokes the theological promise of immortality within the historical collection of the world’s most renowned emperor of finance: Morgan ‘fingered the illustrated texts of rare Bibles of the Middle Ages as if to pick up dust from the City of God’.5 Theology returns via the backdoor. J. P. Morgan and Henry Ford share the pseudo-theological belief in the immortality of their class – the wealthy. ‘My money brought me to the door of certain crypts’, Morgan expostulates to Ford, ‘the deciphering of sacred hieroglyphs. Why should we not satisfy ourselves of the truth of who we are and the eternal beneficent force which we incarnate?’6 Here immortality renders the accumulation of wealth benevolent. Immortality guarantees a transcendence of mortality. After Darwin mortality is the condition of all animals – humanity included. Darwin’s tracing of human origins to the life as well as death of apes has turned traditional ethics into a deadlock where its reliance on the eternity of the good has rather lethal consequences. This traditional dependence of ethics on the enduring or everlasting does not rely only upon the Christian idea of an eternal life in Augustine’s City of God. This tradition reaches much further: namely to the ancient Greece of Homer and beyond – to ancient Egypt to whose cult of mummies J. P. Morgan and Henry Ford are enthralled. As Jasper Griffin has shown, in Homer’s ethical universe, a virtuous and heroic life promises the longevity of fame: ‘This status of Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 76. Doctorow, Ragtime (Macmillan, 1974), p. 108. Doctorow, Ragtime, p. 115.

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being memorable and significant after death, the status which Homer’s own characters have for him, is achieved by great deeds and great suffering.’7 In contrast to the immortals, the mortal hero earns his immortal fame through an exemplary ethical life: If the hero were really god-like, if he were exempt, as the gods are, from age and death, then he would not be a hero at all. It is the pressure of mortality which imposes on men the compulsion to have virtues; the gods, exempt from that pressure, are, with perfect consistency, less ‘virtuous’ than men. They do not need the supreme human virtue of courage, since even if they are wounded in battle they can be instantly cured; and since they make no sacrifice for each other, as Hector does for his wife and Odysseus for his, their marriages, too, seem lacking in depth and truth of human marriage.8

Doctorow’s heroes of industrial capitalism and neoliberalism do not sacrifice themselves, but they have others – the working classes – make sacrifices for their infamous accumulation of wealth. Morgan sees in Ford’s use of men as superfluous and de-individualized entities ‘a reincarnation of pharaohism’.9 It is as though their enormous accumulation of wealth provides Ford and Morgan with pseudo-theological reassurance of their immortality. Wealth reinstates eternity and thereby the indestructibility of the good. As we have seen in the preceding chapter, Plath’s ‘Burning the Letters’ reverses the semantics here: the immortal is the harmful; far from being good, immortality is violent. Plath’s subjective inversion of the official role of benevolence highlights the material truth of Morgan’s and Ford’s quest for immortality: its foundation in the misery of the working classes on the back of which modern industrial wealth accumulates similar to the way in which the Pyramids of the Pharaoh’s were built by slave labour. Doctorow’s novel makes us realize how such outdated equation of the benevolent with the eternal could re-emerge in the finance-dominated societies such as our neoliberal one (and earlier that of J. P. Morgan). Ford concurs with Morgan’s conviction of their immortality and that of their class: ‘Reincarnation is the only belief I hold, Mr Morgan. I explain my genius this way – some have lived more times than others.’10 A neoliberal ethics emerges that incorporates aspects of outdated theological ethics. As we have seen in the preceding chapter, this indistinction of the theological and the economic-scientific makes Griffin, Homer on Life and Death (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 96. Griffin, Homer on Life and Death, pp. 92–93.  9 Doctorow, Ragtime, p. 109. 10 Doctorow, Ragtime, p. 116.  7  8

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Augustine’s City of God fall amenable to pseudo-theological interpretations. Through his industrial line production, Henry Ford has rendered ordinary citizen superfluous: ‘From these principles Ford established the final proposition of the theory of industrial manufacture – not only that the parts of the finished product are interchangeable, but that the men who build the products be themselves interchangeable parts.’11 Merely ordinary life has lost its uniqueness, having become interchangeable and superfluous. Human uniqueness and longevity are now the domains of the wealthy. It is this class that sponsors research into immortality. The obsession with the ethics of the long life finds, however, its imitators beyond the boundaries of class. How could it not? The predilections and the so-called glamour of the wealthy partake of capitalism’s public attractions. It is as though the confrontation with highly volatile and forever shifting economic and ecological realities gives rise to obsessions with changelessness, stability and longevity. Contemporary writers like Doctorow and Roth turn to the historical novel in order to grasp both our lives’ unstable sense of finitude and the concomitant re-emergence of the outdated within the new. As we will see in this chapter, the traditional blurring of the distinction between the medical and the theological drives much of the narrative of Philip Roth’s recent novel Nemesis. Whereas Roth brings to light the signature of the theological within the modern and secular discourse about medicine, the seemingly subjective voice of Plath’s poetry tries to disrupt the continuity between tradition and modernity. Such disruptions of public ethics are warranted, because an outmoded model of the ethical no longer makes sense in the ordinary life worlds of modernist subjectivity. In Plath’s poetry subjectivity becomes the site where we witness the transformation of the public sphere. The transformation in question is one of crisis: it the crisis-ridden collapse of a traditional system of ethics that has been premised on the infinite endurance of the good rather than that of harm and violence. As we have seen at the end of the preceding chapter the poetic voice of Plath’s ‘Burning the Letters’ debunks the traditional link between the promise of immortality and the social validity of good deeds. The ‘letters’ of the title of the poem may refer to the private sphere of Ted Hughes’s letters to his now-estranged wife. The poetic voice is, however, not that of Hughes’s spouse.12 The subjective or private realm of ‘letters’ written from one person to another opens up to the wider field of letters that Doctorow, Ragtime, p. 104. Critics have so far focused on ‘the facts of Plath’s myth. That is the lesson of “Burning the Letters,” in which an actual episode – Plath’s vengeful burning of Ted Hughes’s papers in the summer of 1962 – can be all too easily discerned’. Kirsch, The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets (New York: Norton, 2005), p. 264.

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constitute the history of ideas and their impact on social, moral, economic, theological, scientific and political life at large. The drawn-out ending of the poem highlights this sense of opening from the singular to the universal: its penultimate sentence spans out over eight lines; its closing sentence, in contrast, consists of only four words, providing the sententious brevity of a universal or general truth. The poem closes with an image that breaks the traditional understanding of immortality as well as ethics. In antiquity immortality referred to the possibility of being raised from the dead. It described a form of bodily resurrection. As John Gray has recently argued, Paul and Augustine created Christianity by reinventing immortality as a Platonic, ethical spiritual issue; as reward and recognition for a spiritually and ethically embodied life here on earth: ‘In the Christian religion invented by Paul and Augustine, which was strongly influenced by Plato, immortality meant something quite different – a life out of time, enjoyed by the “soul” or “spirit” of the departed.’13 The ending of Plath’s ‘Burning the Letters’ evokes this spiritual dimension only to turn it upside down. As we have seen, the closing lines of Plath’s poem perform a shift from the physical to the spiritual or metaphysical. The red burst of blood and the accompanying cry turn into an all-pervasive universal element that dyes the ephemeral substance of the air. This universal principle that informs the whole of our world – the clouds, the leaves, the water – is not that of traditional ethics (goodness, charity, duty, work, service or kindness) but that of pain. Immortality is the everlasting cosmic pique of pain. Pain appertains to a medical vocabulary and so do Augustine’s notions of decay and the corruptible body. The body registers a threat to its existence or a crisis point within its existence via the sensation of pain. The intrusion of an object or outside force may trigger the feeling of pain. The intrusion results in a wound, in a trauma (‘trauma’ being the Greek word for wound). Pre-modern as well the modern and contemporary biomedical versions of medicine are premised on the healing of trauma and the extension of the duration of our life. Medicine in its theological as well as in its secular forms attempts to reduce death and decay. This brings us to the question whether medicine works to bring about longevity and in so doing sacrifices the alleviation of pain for its quest for the long life. As we shall see in the following section, Dr. W. Sartorius of Doctorow’s historical novel The March helps us grasp the ethical as well as practical consequences of this question. Gray, The Immortalizing Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death (London: Allen Lane, 2011), p. 33.

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Is not medicine traditionally concerned with the relief of suffering? As Norelle Lickiss has recently pointed out, ‘the issue of suffering and its relief is central to the medical tradition’.14 Despite the centrality of pain and suffering to the practice of medicine from antiquity onwards, suffering and pain, as E. J. Cassell has noted, are marginalized if not completely absent topics of contemporary medical education. Cassell sees the reason for this neglect in the subjective nature of pain and suffering. The science of medicine tends to keep a distance from anything that is not quantifiable and may give rise to the suspicion of being ‘merely subjective’. Cassell takes his own discipline to task for (1) ‘a continuing failure to accord subjective knowledge and subjectivity the same status as objective knowledge and objectivity’ and for (2) ‘an increasing denial of the inevitable uncertainties in medicine and a quest for certainty’.15 Medicine’s scientific quest for objective certainties has rather detrimental implications for medical practice, because medical practitioners have on an everyday basis to interact with the uncertainties of subjectivity when they treat patients. As Lickiss has shown there arise severe problems with medicine’s prioritization of (measureable or ‘objective’) longevity over and above the alleviation of (subjective) pain. Lickiss analyses how this single-minded concern with the objective and quantitative prolongation of life frequently occasions failings ‘in the core business of relieving human suffering’.16 In order to redress these failings, Lickiss makes a strong case for seeing medicine not only in scientific but also in cultural terms: ‘At the very least, the significance of the historical and the subjective, and the dimension of human values and experience (and narratives concerning these things) may begin to gain a status equal to quantifiable objective biological tests as tools for diagnosis and of evaluation of the worth of clinical intervention.’17 Medicine does its work within specific historical and cultural contexts. These contexts have a substantial bearing on certain scientific and theological continuities that surround the medical quest for longevity. To better understand this complex topic, it is worth referring to the work of Sander L. Gilman. Gilman has shown how medicine shapes culture and how culture shapes medicine from the pre-modern to the modern to our current politics of biomedical perfection. Heavily influenced by both Paul and Plato, Augustine’s eternal life is at one with the immutability and incorruptibility Lickiss, ‘On Facing Human Suffering’ in J. Malpas and N. Lickiss (eds.), Perspectives on Human Suffering (London: Springer, 2012), pp. 245–260 (p. 245). 15 Cassell, The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. xii. 16 Lickiss, ‘On Facing Human Suffering,’ p. 250. 17 Lickiss, ‘On Facing Human Suffering,’ p. 258. 14

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of Platonic ideal forms, which are emptied of any association with decay: ‘Augustine makes the ideal body the body divine, much as in the Platonic notion of beauty it is beyond the material. In his City of God, Augustine links carnal pleasures of the flesh with sins of the soul. They are the same.’18 Gilman here describes the osmosis between the medical and the theological that characterizes not only Augustine’s approach but also early Christianity and its proximate religions: ‘The notion that our bodies are God’s temples was also part and parcel of Western Christianity, beginning with Paul (who demanded that we control our venal appetites). (It thus also became part of both rabbinic Judaism and Islam).’19 Early Christianity plays a key role for the increasing rise of medicine’s larger societal significance: ‘Health becomes one of the powerful metaphors in early Christianity, especially in terms of the relationship between the newly healthy body of the Christian and the sick body of the Jew. Jesus’s cures are his most powerful miracles.’20 In a sense medicine took over the mantle of redemption, which in medieval society belonged to theology (theology included or subsumed medicine then).

E. L. Doctorow, William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, Augustine’s City of God and the science of eternal life In pre-modernity, the theological and the medical were closely related. In the wake of modern scientific advancements – most strikingly the rise of biomedicine in the twentieth century – the bio-political management of life increasingly holds out the promise of health and longevity. Here, however, the absence of decay is not due to belief in God but due to a certain politics of life: the individual’s management of his or her health according to strict regulations and obedience to health rules – the taking of medication, the abstinence from toxic substance and an unhealthy lifestyle and so forth – forms the lynch pin by which we may now believe in a secular form of goodness as the absence of death. The ethics of neoliberalism and contemporary medicine converge in their emphasis on self-reliance and human autonomy. There are those who welcome what they see as a benign and benevolent form of bio-politics. Nicholas Rose approves of governmental and business involvement in the management of health. According to Rose, we should embrace a managerial politics of life. He argues that such novel types of bio-politics alleviate the symptoms of stress and promote hope rather than Sander L. Gilman, Obesity: The Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 33. Gilman, Obesity, p. 32. Gilman, Obesity, p. 32.

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fatalism or despair: ‘Crucially, it is a biopolitics in which references to the biological do not signal fatalism but are part of the economy of hope.’21 Biopower’s economic regiment turns out to be one of hope and optimism. This may to some extent be the case. Optimism may, however, be cruel rather than innocuous. Rose deliberately glosses over any forms of cruelty. Our contemporary neoliberal economy, he maintains, is one of hope rather than ruthlessness. In doing so he ignores, however, the long history of medicine’s involvement with theological and economic hegemonies of power. It is delusional to proclaim that contemporary medical discourse and practice are ‘pure’ or completely cut off from the economic, social and cultural contexts to which they are intricately linked. In pre-modernity, this context was heavily informed by a theological framework that no longer exists. In modernity too, however, ‘purity’ is illusory, because, as Giorgio Agamben has shown, the old theological ideas may still exert their influences as signatures in a completely secular world. As Lauren Berlant has recently pointed out, capitalist attacks on ideas of a public and interconnected society go hand in hand with governmental and normative regulations of health. Capitalism, Berlant argues, ‘also involves the more normative and informal (but not unpredictable) modes of social capital that have so much to do with the shaping of managed and imagined health’.22 Rather than proclaiming that the contemporary politics of life simply assists the health of every citizen, Berlant alerts us to the hegemony of both neoliberal and bio-political policies: Biopower operates when a hegemonic bloc organizes the reproduction of life in ways that allow political crises to be cast as conditions of specific bodies and their competence at maintaining health or other conditions of social belonging; thus this bloc gets to judge the problematic body’s subjects, whose agency is deemed to be fundamentally destructive. Apartheid-like structures from zoning to shaming are wielded against these populations, who come to represent embodied liabilities to social prosperity of one sort or another. Health itself can be seen as a side effect of successful normativity, and people’s desires and fantasies are solicited to line up with that pleasant condition.23

Biopower turns ideological structures of crisis into conditions of life. Without these structures life becomes demoted as already dead or non-valid. A crisis describes a turning point; a point where we have to decide between at Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 167. 22 Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 104. 23 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, pp. 105–106. 21

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least two options. In order to decide between these options we need to judge which option is better or worse. A hierarchy of meaning evolves. Bio-political operations feed on crises because it is in times of crisis when it can best impose its conditionality upon life. Politics here denotes the opposite of an interconnected and diverse public. Here it describes the working of hegemony, which streamlines whatever does not fit its one-size-fits-all rule. It does not need to exert power through violence or the threat of violence. It can rule through forms of signification, demarcating health from pathology, the normal from the unhealthy. The Contemporary German philosopher Byung-Chul Han has recently described the streamlining of homogeneity in terms of a move from Foucault’s disciplinarian society to a competitive society (Leistungsgesellschaft). According to Byung-Chul Han we live in a society where we lack both power and discipline. The absence of power and discipline is the lack of ‘negativity’. Instead we are overwhelmed by ‘positivity’. This positivity is the new competitive society (the German Leistungsgesellschaft) where we have to keep excelling in terms of healthy lifestyle, financial performance, social presentation and so forth. It is this excess of ‘positivity’ that causes depression and other forms of illness wherein the self turns against itself. It is no longer an external but internal form of governance. Power no longer operates in disciplinarian but in normalizing terms.24 This begs the question whether there is indeed a difference between a disciplinarian and competitive society? Is it not the case that competition exacerbates and exhilarates the disciplinarian elements that Byung-Chul Han finds lacking in contemporary societies of competition? In this way health becomes an effect of normality within the working of bio-politics. Biopower operates hierarchies of meaning and significance where health turns into the opposite of illness. This is not to deny that there are real, embodied states of health and illness. The crucial point is that the perception of these visible and measurable states is already determined by registers of signification. The bio-political determination of life’s meaning causes normative violence, which divides the diversity of human life into either ethical worth or the foreclosure of what does not fit this notion of worthiness. Here the socio-political register of signification has deadly effects: as Judith Butler has put it, ‘I also came to understand something of the violence of the foreclosed life, the one that does not get named as “living,” the one whose incarceration implies a suspension of life, or a sustained death sentence.’25 Death here is a social death. Social See Han’s Topololgie der Gewalt (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2012), p. 110. Butler ‘Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversion (1990)’ in Sara Salih with Judith Butler (ed.), Judith Butler Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 90–118 (p. 98).

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deaths result from bio-political systems of signification, which endow the normal with life or eternal life and deny any form of value to those who are classified to be pathological or otherwise abnormal (in this way homosexuality has been registered as pathological in medico-political registers until roughly the sixties of the preceding century). There are, however, gradations – ranging from the rational to the irrational, from the bio-political to the non-discriminative, from the scientific to the pseudo-scientific – in the way in which normative signatures of the theological concept of eternal life have become a question of managing health. Taking medication for medical conditions is of course a rational course of action. It only delays and does not erase the prospect of mortality, though. The persistence of death and decay continues to give rise to a sense of ethical crisis, which, as discussed above, plays into the hands of bio-power. Although biomedicine keeps working on ways in which to increase longevity, contemporary literature focuses not only on the impasse that continues to be death but also on how the de facto impossibility of immortality spurns a concord between normality and madness rather than a mutual opposition between the two as proclaimed by the hierarchical register of the bio-political. Undoubtedly, scientific advances help increase longevity but the belief in one’s immortality is certainly delusional. The public and normative desire for the long life may further the delusional prolepsis of a life beyond death. Strikingly, contemporary literature turns to the nineteenth century while evoking the public and still ever-present crisis of traditional ethics – which is the subject matter for Plath’s ‘Burning the Letters’. The ethical crisis that we continue to inhabit has crystallized as response to Charles Darwin’s evolutionism, which located the origins of humanity not in a spiritual or transcendent sphere, which traditionally held out the promise of eternal life. Rather than being created in His image, we contingently develop from apes. Similar to apes and other animals we are subject to the arbitrary workings of decay and death. Scientific improvements prove powerless in the face of the impasse of mortality. The remaining impasse of death – without a genuine escape route via belief in a transcendent guarantee of eternal life – triggers a sense of crisis out of which grow demands for decisive change. The ethical transformation demanded is that of human nature: the hierarchical uplift of humanity’s state of affairs from mortality to visible and measurable immortality. Science should perform such shift from a mortal to an immortal species. Clearly science here turns into pseudo-science. As John Gray has pointed out, the distinctions between the scientific and theological continue to remain porous and are only clear from a reflective or retrospective point of view: ‘But the line between science and pseudo-science is smudged and shifting; where

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it lies seems clear only in retrospect. There is no pristine science untouched by the vagaries of faith.’26 Its intrinsic concern with questions of life and death makes the discipline of medicine liable to extend its reach into the theological as well as philosophical field of ethics. The famous Victorian moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick could no longer conceive of ethics with theological but rather with modern scientific – or, in other words, medical – guarantees of eternal life: ‘Sidgwick’s search for evidence of survival was intertwined with his work in ethics. Unless human personality survived bodily death, he believed, morality is pointless.’27 As Gray has argued Charles Darwin was reluctant too to abandon the idea of immortal progress on which traditional ethics in either a theological or modern philosophical sense has been premised: ‘Progress towards perfection’ – as this formula demonstrates, Darwin never fully accepted the implication of his own theory of natural selection. He knew that evolution cares nothing for humans or their values – it moves as he put it, like the wind – but he could not hold on to this truth, because it means evolution without a goal. Progress implies a destination towards which one is travelling, whereas natural selection is simply drift.28

Darwin did not develop the hierarchical and highly goal-oriented creeds of social Darwinism and yet, as Gray clearly shows, he would not abandon the lynch pins of traditional ethics: ideas of a never-ending progression of life towards either a transcendent or modern secular goal. Robert J. Richards has recently argued for a teleological understanding of Darwinian evolutionism where the good is immortal and in a state of continual perfection: ‘out of death and destruction comes life more abundant, life transformed. And this is exactly the resolution that nature, in Darwin’s divinized reconstruction offers: out of struggle and death comes the greatest perfection, the higher creatures.’29 Popular and vulgarized pseudo-scientific versions of Darwin’s evolutionism gave rise to social Darwinism. Herbert Spencer coined the expression ‘survival of the fittest’. He, Lamarck and others formulated a pseudo-scientific version of evolutionism, which would severely shape twentieth-century politics: For Spencer and Lamarck, as at times for Darwin, evolution moved from lower to higher forms of life. There is nothing in the theory of natural Gray, The Immortalizing Commission, p. 5. Gray, The Immortalizing Commission, p. 25. 28 Gray, The Immortalizing Commission, p. 40. 29 Richards, The Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 538. 26 27

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selection to support this notion. Yet it has proved irresistibly appealing, for it has the effect of reinstating humans (supposedly the highest lifeform) as the pure purpose of the universe.30

Contemporary literature’s concern with this Victorian obsession of the everlasting progression of human life indicates that the idea of immortality still remains irresistibly appealing. Indeed, in an article of 8 March 2012 the Daily Telegraph reports that there are renewed hopes for the creation of an immortal human species via the study of self-renewing flatworms. The goal to overcome human mortality may, however, give rise to extreme measures. Doctorow examines one such measure in his historical novel Waterworks. The doctor and scientist Dr Sartorius plans to produce what Augustine held out as an ethical-theological promise in his City of God: eternal life. Sartorius’s quest for scientific immortality blurs the distinction between normality and madness. He works as an eminent scientist and ends his career trajectory in a mental asylum. The motivations of Sartorius’s pseudo-scientific endeavours are the same as that which drives the sense of certitude in the sermon of the Episcopal preacher, the Reverend Charles Grimshaw. The so-called scientist and the man of God are both piqued by the implications of purposelessness, by the absence of teleology in Darwin’s theory of natural selection. ‘For how can anyone imagine that – everything we study, from the depth of the oceans to the constellated stars, in its chemical composition, in its taxonomy, and in its … evolution … is the happenstance of chaotic event?’31 – Grimshaw exclaims in one of his sermons. The defence of univocal taxonomies responds to Darwin whose, as Gillian Beer has shown, ‘struggles with categories break open settled taxonomies’.32 Human mortality offends those who attempt to see humanity as pinnacle of a divine design for the entire universe. Faced with Darwin’s theory of nonteleological or random natural selection there have been numerous attempts to restore pseudo-theological notions of biologist design (which resurfaced in contemporary genetics) and ‘historical design, a design which reaches its point of satisfaction in the present’.33 Humans are as much subject to the contingent forces of illness and mortality as the apes from which Darwin traces their descent. Mortality deprives humanity of ethics – this at least according to the prominent Cambridge ethicist Henry Sidgwick. In a letter to his friend Gray, The Immortalizing Commission, p. 41. Doctorow, The Waterworks (London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 139. 32 Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plot: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. xvii. 33 Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plot, p. 14. 30 31

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Roden Noel, Sidgwick makes clear that he bases his belief in immortality not on religion but on Ethics … in the face of the conflict between Virtue & Happiness, my own voluntary life, and that of every other man constituted like me, i.e. I believe, of every normal man is reduced to hopeless anarchy … The only way of avoiding this intolerable anarchy is by the Postulate of Immortality.34

From Darwin’s scandal of our likeness not of God but of mortal apes onwards, various attempts have been made to turn the postulate of human immortality into a scientific or medical fact – from telepathy to the contemporary work on gleaning the stem of future immortality from the renewing cells of flatworms.35 The quote from Sidgwick’s letter is a historical document. In order to defend the traditional order of ethics, we have either to believe in immortality as a scientific postulate or, better still, to establish it as a scientific fact. The medical protagonist of Doctorow’s historical novel attempts to do precisely this. Sartorius reduces the practice of medicine to one single goal: the quest for eternal life. His utter disregard for the well-being of his patients betrays the Hippocratic Oath: So everything was Sartorius’s triumph. Though he scrupulously fulfilled his part of the contract, he was entirely without care or concern for his patients except as they were the objects of his thought. What he warranted was only his scientific attention. But this was all! And from it he was recomposing their lives piece by piece, swaddling them like infants, riding them, dancing them, schooling them in an assemblage of life’s cycles, and with his emollients, and powders, and fluid injectants from the children, reconstituting them metempsychotically as endless beings.36

Here ‘scientific’ attention targets the renewing cells of young children. Sartorius inserts pieces of their bodies into his elderly patients from New York’s wealthy classes. This insertion of the renewing young cells into the bodies of the older generation promises immortality. The promise of immortality gives rise to ‘mindless happiness’ in the wealthy clientele who Quoted from Gray, The Immortalizing Commission, p. 57. For a detailed and fascinating discussion of this quest for a scientific form of immortality ranging from Helmholtz to the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, see Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). 36 Doctorow, The Waterworks, p. 193. 34 35

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believe that they are ‘being rejuvenated for … eternal life’.37 Sartorius’s science turns out to be pseudo-science. Nevertheless, it has been granted the status of being scientific on account of the cultural context of the time. As we have seen, Victorian society demanded a scientific remedy to the perceived ethical chaos left behind by Darwin’s discovery of our descent from merely mortal apes. Sartorius is a fictional character and yet what he does in the novel is to some extent true to the enhanced public recognition of scientific achievements which – so captivated public opinion hoped – could fulfil longings for eternal life via immanentist rather than theological means. The outcome of such scientific work is death rather than eternal life. This proves the pseudo-science of the purported scientific endeavour to produce immortal human bodies. The lethal end of Sartorius’s scientific operations also demonstrates that he has not been a doctor: ‘Dr. Sartorius is not a doctor … except as medicine engages with the workings of the world.’38 The workings of the world refer to ‘the limbo of science and money’39 in which Sartorius lives. The workings of the world are, however, also the cultural contexts that medicine and the economy inhabit. New York’s wealthy provide the money for Sartorius’s experiments with eternal life. In other words, there is a general, culture-generated wish for immortality, which creates a market for Sartorius’s pseudo-scientific and deadly work. In the mental asylum, it becomes obvious that this societal wish for eternal life constitutes the location where the medical and the theological meet in the murky zone of delusions, of the pseudo (i.e. the pseudo-theological and the pseudo-scientific). As inmate of the mental asylum Sartorius keeps dreaming of immortality, but now not in a pseudo-medical but pseudo-theological vein: ‘he says … in his city of God they have the secret of eternal life … and when he returns to it he will be anointed to live forever’.40 Sartorius’s city of God has an intertextual point of reference in Augustine’s City of God, which promises eternal life not in the immanent realm of science but in the transcendent sphere of a supernatural beyond. The German doctor reappears in Doctorow’s historical novel about the American Civil War, The March. Here, Dr. Wrede Sartorius does not go to extremes as he does in The Waterworks. Here again, the lines between the pseudo-theological and the pseudo-scientific are blurred. He appears as a divine presence bridging the lines of warfare: ‘He seemed above the warring factions, Wrede Sartorius. He was like some god trying to staunch the flow of human disaster.’41 This perception of God-like powers is that of the culture Doctorow, The Waterworks, p. 224. Doctorow, The Waterworks, p. 190. 39 Doctorow, The Waterworks, p. 217. 40 Doctorow, The Waterworks, pp. 237–238. 41 Doctorow, The March (London: Abacus, 2006), p. 58. 37 38

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in which Sartorius does his work. He is not a quack. His scientific credentials are impeccable. His European education proves the advancement of his research skills: But as a European, with a medical degree from the University of Göttingen, he had from the beginning found himself apart. If there was any compensation for the barbarity of war, it was enriched practise. The plethora of causalities accelerated the rate of learning. Apparently he was alone in considering this American civil war as a practicum.42

In his quest for scientific advancement, Sartorius sets himself apart not only from his American environment but also from traditional medicine: ‘But he had become intolerant, passionately intolerant, of traditional medical thinking.’43 The tradition is not so much scientific as it is ethical: ‘The first ethical commandment for doctors was to do no harm.’44 According to Sartorius the interdiction of doing harm interferes with the research interest of scientific progress in medicine. Instead of alleviating suffering, he prolongs it in order to observe the itinerary of lethal inflictions. The outcome of such observation could then improve medical knowledge for the future. Ruthlessness characterizes Dr Sartorius of The March and The Waterworks. It is scientific ruthlessness that turns pseudo-scientific at the point at which it foregoes the traditional medical ethics of abstaining from doing harm in the here and now. Sartorius sacrifices the here and now for the greater good of working towards eternal life by dint of promised scientific progress. For this goal the war is an apt practicum. Doctorow’s historical novels bring to the fore how at the point at which modern science overturns the traditional ethics of medicine, the scientific turns pseudo-scientific and in actual fact increases rather than alleviates harm. The Sartorius of The March thus rationalizes and condones the horrific injuries inflicted on the battlefields of the American civil war (arguably the first war perpetrated via modern-mechanical weaponry). He substantiates his rationalization of pain with the scientific value for medical experimentation – experimenting how to prolong life – which the war wounded provide. In The Waterworks the high demand for Dr Sartorius’s ruthless work towards producing eternal life shows how the culture that medicine inhabits is capable of pushing it towards a foreswearing of the Hippocratic Oath; the latter forms precisely the traditional medical thinking with which Wrede Sartorius of The March takes issue. Doctorow, The March, p. 276. Doctorow, The March, p. 276. Doctorow, The March, p. 274.

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From the perspective of Doctorow’s historical novels modern medicine seems to be in danger of bowing to cultural pressures, which demand easy solutions for complex and longstanding problems. The encroachment of cultural expectations on medical practice is also the theme of Roth’s historical novel about the impasse faced by the polio outbreak in the Newark of the 1940s (as will be discussed later in this chapter). Here it is crucial to show how literary works make us alert to the miracle-like virtues our culture invests in medical practice and a healthy lifestyle. In this context of cultural expectations, literature features not only extraordinary doctors but also ordinary patients. A satirical treatment of the modern virtues as embodied in the virtuous patient is Mr Pivner of William Gaddis’s mid-1950s’ novel The Recognitions. Pivner recognizes the ethical promises held out by modern medicine: ‘Diabetes is a serious disease. No one can afford to take chances; there is no reason to take them, when the marvels of medical science are worked out to the most minute point, making the notion of hazard contemptible, if only one follows the direction of the bottle.’45 The bottle is quite an ironic expression, because it is polyvalent, potentially referring not only to the medicine of the virtuous patient but also to the bottle of the non-virtuous alcoholic who engages the delusions of an alcohol-enhanced trance. The quote thus invokes the co-presence of cure and poison, which is encapsulated in the Greek word for medicine: pharmakon. As such, medicine might heal us from delusions but it can also work like alcohol or like a narcotic and thus blind us to the delusionary state it sets free and calls forth in us. In one respect modern medicine might fit the description Karl Marx has reserved for religion: it might work like an opiate that alleviates pain but it does not cure us from it. The ending of Plath’s ‘Burning the Letters’ evokes this persistence of pain. Here the persistence of distress outdoes the alleviation of pain: in reality, pain is the immortality of the universe and any extenuation of this perception is nothing but a delusion. What Marx has called religion morphs into the tradition of ethics, which derives from Augustine’s theory of the world’s goodness. Goodness in Augustine’s work is a philosophical and theological category rather than a physiological or psychological or even ethical term. Augustine does, however, frequently use terms related to health (such as well-being/salus) in order to describe the societal impact of his theologicalphilosophical discourse. As Gilman has shown, ‘for Augustine it is the body, in which all desires seem confused and interchangeable. It is the body most at risk from inaction and desire’.46 In its societal repercussions goodness – in terms of an absence of violence and death – does, at least from Plath’s William Gaddis, The Recognitions (London: Atlantic City, 2003), p. 287. Gilman, Obesity, p. 34.

45 46

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perspective, the work of delusion insofar as it theologically promises the overcoming of eternal death. Against this background of traditional theology and contemporary medicine, the title of Plath’s poem gains in metaphysical valence. ‘Burning the Letters’ puts to the scorch the delusions of both the pre-modern and the modern, of theology and medicine. By associating immortality with death, Plath sets out to unmask the delusion of immutability that holds sway in theological as well as in some strands of medical thinking where medicine is monolithic and thus violates human diversity (clinging to one conception of health that condemns as pathological and immoral forms of human behaviour that are not necessarily harmful). Following Plato’s understanding of God as belonging to the eternity of the idea, Augustine equates truth with the immutable. In his Confessions he proclaims, ‘That which truly is is that which unchangeably abides.’47 Here the epistemological (truth) and ethics (God’s goodness as unmoved mover) meet in a notion of immortality conceived as absence of change. Modern medicine replicates the philosophical and theological idea of changelessness at the point where it constructs an immutable notion of health, which disregards cultural diversity and does not take into account various forms of frailty and disability, which do not fit the healthy body and mind into a monolithic account. A monolithic conception of corporal and mental well-being within modern medicine is premised upon the axiom of immutability. Immutable health as the prearranged path of a perpetually healthy lifestyle would – so Rose’s account (in his The Politics of Life) of contemporary medicine propounds – further longevity – the secular version of Augustine’s immortality. Within the context of traditional ethics and theology, the coexistence of truth with the non-changeable results in the famous Augustinian understanding of evil as the deprivation of the good: ‘Accordingly whatever things exist are good, and the evil into whose origins I was inquiring is not a substance, for if it were a substance, it would be good.’48 Being non-substantial, evil is nothing but a deception or delusion. Indeed the first parts of Augustine’s City of God attempts to prove the deception of pagan deities. Pagan deities, so says Augustine, did not protect Rome from defeat and decay. Sin does its work as a lie: ‘Hence we can say with meaning that every sin is a falsehood. For sin only happens by an act of will; and our will is for our own welfare, or for the avoidance of misfortune.’49 Augustine, Confessions, a new translation by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 125. 48 Augustine, Confessions, pp. 124–125. 49 Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, a New Translation by HenryBettenson with an introduction by John O’ Meara (London: Penguin, 1984), p. 553. 47

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Sin wilfully distorts God’s creation in order to enhance the earthly prospects of humanity. In keeping with the alignment of truth (epistemology) with the good (ethics), Augustine argues that sin manifests itself as a lie that violates God’s order as well as command. Sin operates on the grounds of heresy, of disobedience. The disobedience consists of putting humanity’s interest (those of mortality) over and above those of God’s and God’s creation (which overcome the eternity of death): And hence the falsehood: we commit sin to promote our welfare, and it results instead in our misfortune; or we sin to increase our welfare, and the result is rather to increase our misfortune. What is the reason for this, except that well-being can only come to man from God, not from himself? And he forsakes God by sinning, and he sins by living by his own standards. I have already said that two cities, different and mutually opposed, owe their existence to the fact that some men live by the standards of the flesh, others by the standards of the spirit. It can now be seen that we may also put it that way: some live by man’s standard, others by God’s.50

In this salient quote Augustine arranges his theology around the term of wellbeing (salus): we are truly in a state of well-being or health as long as we are oriented towards God rather than focused on our own desires and longings. In different but related ways the discourse about well-being is also central to contemporary medicine and health care.51 The traditional understanding of ‘goodness’ re-emerges in modern medicine with the ideal of a healthy body and mind. The ever-increasing longevity of those who cultivate a healthy body and mind holds out the secular and immanent promise of scientific immortality. Medicine’s promise to evade and avoid the corruption of time moves the medical into the regions of Augustine’s struggle with decay and transience. Gaddis’s The Recognitions satirizes this coincidence of theological immortality and medical longevity: ‘Men might live to be two hundred years old, unclothed perhaps and unfed since there would be so many, but Science took care of the details when they arose.’52 Modern medicine turns biblical longevity into a secular reality; albeit with disregard to the quality – ‘unclothed’ and ‘unfed’; a truly bared, apocalyptical immortality in Gaddis’s quote – of life it attempts to perpetuate. Augustine, Concerning the City of God. For a brilliant critique of contemporary medical discourse see Charis Thompson’s Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2007). 52 William Gaddis, The Recognitions, p. 287. 50 51

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In this way biomedicine promises to leave behind theology’s fideistic connotations. It turns from the promissory to the performative in the contemporary practice of cosmetic surgery. Through cosmetic surgery we, so we are told, come closer to the ethical ideal of immortality, of the absence of decay and corruption. To reach this ideal we have to submit to pain. The knife of the cosmetic surgeon hurts us physically, but it also confronts our psyche with the prospect of risk that accompanies every surgical intervention. It is, however, not only the momentary violence of surgery that we have to endure. We also have to submit to an ascetic – monastic if you wish – way of life where we abstain from indulging our inclinations. It is our individual duty to avoid risks to our health. The pathological is the abject; as opposed to the state of well-being (or flourishing), which is the new norm that promises prosperity and longevity. Well-being in contemporary health care takes issue with what Augustine calls ‘the flesh’. As Lauren Berlant has recently put it, neoliberal forms of exploitation ‘also involve the more normative and informal (but not unpredictable) modes of social capital that have so much to do with the shaping of managed and imagined health’.53 The spirit–flesh opposition harks back to Paul ‘who crammed into the notion of the flesh a superabundance of overlapping notions’.54 In Paul the flesh embraces not only the promiscuity of the sexual drive but all such aspects of our embodied existence that are subject to harm, illness and death: A weak thing in itself, the body was presented as lying in the shadow of a mighty force, the power of the flesh: the body’s physical frailty, its liability to death and the undeniable penchant of its instincts toward sin served Paul as a synecdoche for the state of humankind pitted against the spirit of God.55

Augustine retains Paul’s notion of the flesh while highlighting its latent medical connotations. The flesh has become everything that endangers an immutable reality of well-being. We could say the flesh is the cry of pain with which Plath’s ‘Burning the Letters’ closes. From Augustine’s perspective, the cry is deceitful because it distorts the theocentric view of the world as having been created by a benevolent God. It is deceitful as well as harmful because it calls into question the sustained well-being or health (salus) of our existence as preliminary to our immortality in the City of God. Pain and evil are here Berlant, Cruel Optimism, p. 104. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 48. 55 Brown, The Body and Society. 53 54

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falsehoods that are ‘ours’56 whereas truth and well-being are changeless and are thus ‘God’s’.57 Theological ethics operates like medicine – healing us from illness and deceit. Plath’s ‘Burning the Letters’ detects immorality not in wellbeing but in the change that accompanies pain and death. What emerges as truth is the immortality of moments of vulnerability and mortality. Immortality remains, but what is gone is well-being and flourishing. Contemporary medicine and health care has a greater affinity with Augustine’s theology of the true, the good and the changeless than with Plath’s putting the torch to such theological ethics where the ethical appears to be a deceit of truth. Medicine attempts to counter changes in order to preserve a posited state of well-being. There is, however, a third practice that also cooperates with a secular version of immortality and ethics as well as attempts to offer an alternative form of non-theological longevity. In the wake of an increasing shift towards the secular, art holds out the promise to guard mortal life against the ravishes of time. Poetry and art proffer the prospect of immortalizing our life by preserving it in a quasichangeless form. Contemporary forms of medicine – such as cosmetic surgery or bioengineering – subscribe to classicist aesthetics of immutable and immortal beauty or perfection.58 Medicine attempts to perfect our human nature and move them closer to the perfection and timelessness of Augustine’s City of God. Here, medicine meets art on the grounds of a secularized theology, which has been shaped by Augustine’s Platonist and Pauline understanding of ethics. Against this background it is not surprising that many practitioners of medical science ‘see themselves as artists’.59 Plath’s poem ‘Burning the Letters’ does not only burn the letters of immortality as found in Augustinian theology and its associated ethics but also warps classicist aesthetics, which upholds the ideal of a timeless form of beauty. Thus, Plath’s poem implicitly propounds a new poetics that swerves away from traditional notions of beauty and goodness. The questions it raises are to do with how we can live in a world that turns out to be delusory in its traditional form, a world that is not grounded in the Augustinian immortality of goodness, beauty and well-being but in the raw rush of aching, pain and hurt, which – and this is the revelatory or quasi-apocalyptical point – reveal the unethical as the eternal or immortal. Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, p. 553. Augustine, Concerning the City of God. 58 Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 59 Wendy Steiner, The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 182. 56 57

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Medicine, ethics and the delusions of representation in Philip Roth’s Nemesis Nevertheless, the question persists of how to live in a world in which traditional ethics (as propounded in various theological and philosophical works from Augustine onwards) seems to have lost its validity: What is the place of medicine, theology and art in a universe that is infused with the eternity not of goodness and beauty but of violence? This question confronts Augustine’s ethics in contemporary society, which is marked by the catastrophes of the twentieth century and the fear of even greater forms of destruction in the future: the apocalyptical riders of climate change, nuclear disasters, the collapse of financial markets and the rise of different kinds of fundamentalisms. Within this context Philip Roth’s recent novel Nemesis reads the medical, the ethical and the theological in ways that mediate between Plath’s poem ‘Burning the Letters’ and Augustine’s theological ethics. The setting of the novel is the devastating polio outbreak in 1942 in Newark. The physical education teacher Mr Cantor first remains unshaken by the outbreak and refuses to leave the city for the supposed safety of the mountains. When he eventually leaves – on the insistence of his fiancée – he has already caught the polio virus. In the mountains, he witnesses the unsuspected polio outbreak amongst the children who have been evacuated there only to find out that he may be the carrier and originator of the virus. At first sight, the state of fear about polio grows out of the recognition that faced with this virus medicine has failed to keep intact the equilibrium of health or well-being. In the forties of the previous century the causes of polio were unknown and hence it was not possible to treat it effectively or to develop a vaccine against it: ‘Concern for the dire consequences of falling seriously ill from polio was compounded by the fact that no medicine existed to treat the disease and no vaccine to produce immunity.’60 The helplessness in the face of an incurable, life-deforming and potentially deadly illness transcends the orbit of medicine. It raises questions of life’s fairness and, associated with it, theological concerns about justice and theodicy. Parents who did everything they could for their offspring are confronted with their sudden death. The decay and the passing away of the body thus raise intellectual and spiritual questions that are akin to the discussion in the preceding section of the relationship between the medical, the ethical and the theological. Roth’s novel focuses on the Jewish community in Newark. One of his theological templates is the testing of Job. Like Job, Jewish families at the centre of the Philip Roth, Nemesis (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010), p. 3.

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polio outbreak in Newark feel betrayed by life and potentially by the creator of this life. What is there to do? What should we have done? I rack my brain. Can there be a cleaner household than this one? asks Mr Michaels. Can there be a woman who keeps a more spotless house than my wife? Could there be a mother more attentive to her children’s welfare? Could there be a boy who looked after his room and his clothes and himself any better than Alan did? Everything he did, he did right at the first time. And always happy. Always with a joke. So why did he die? Where is the fairness in that?61

In his reply to Mr Michael’s questions Mr Cantor denies that there is any fairness in life. This response is more sympathetic than the responses Job has to endure from his friends. The matter of fact statement ‘There is none’ is, however, quite removed from the empathetic sense of an all-pervasive pain that permeates the ending of Plath’s ‘Burning the Letters’. The denial that there is any fairness in life could still hold out the promise of some form of theodicy. Roth’s novel tests this question. As the novel unfolds the main protagonist loses his matter of fact sense of calm. This loss occurs unexpectedly. The novel emphasizes Mr Cantor’s discernment of propriety, his excellent judgement and his clear perception of the world at large and his environment. When his fiancée’s father – Dr Steinberg – urges him to leave the polio-ridden Newark for the safety of the mountains, he counters with a voice of calm-headed reason: ‘I am against the frightening of Jewish kids. I am against the frightening of Jews, period. That was Europe, that’s why Jews fled. This is America. The less fear the better. Fear unmans us. Fear degrades us. Fostering less fear – that’s your job and mine.’62 The doctor (Steinberg) and the physical education teacher (Cantor) are both concerned with the well-being of the body and in a classical sense the body’s health seems to be intimately connected with that of the mind. The continued practice of medicine as well as physical outdoor sports counters fear in the face of an overwhelming and unidentifiable threat (the polio virus). The issue of mental and corporeal well-being seems to be related to politics and ethics. Fear of destruction and devastation is part of the politics that characterizes European anti-Semitism. America differs. It seems to guarantee the carefree pursuit of an ethically fulfilled life where we encounter the goodness and beauty of the world unencumbered by prejudice, stigma and stereotyping Philip Roth, Nemesis, p. 47. Philip Roth, Nemesis, p. 106.

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(which seem to be the domain of a violent Europe, but as we know from Roth’s hypothetical account of a fascist US government in The Plot Against America, this is not exactly the case). As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear that Mr Cantor’s vision of an ethically, politically and medically secure America evokes a theological ground ex negativo. With the intensification of the polio outbreak, the family of victims increasingly blame Mr Cantor for recklessness – his fearless, rational and also ethically motivated business-as-usual approach to physical education. A moral panic develops in the face of disease and death. The community charges the medical practice of Dr Steinberg with incompetence (because of the lack of a vaccine and cure for the disease). At precisely the point where the pressure of the community bears down on Mr Cantor, we hear of how he hates God and how he gradually gives in to his fiancée’s demands to leave Newark for the presumed safety of the mountains. The father of his fiancée (Dr Steinberg) attempts to persuade him to forsake his seemingly uncompromising sense of ethics: ‘A misplaced sense of responsibility can be a debilitating thing,’63 he admonishes him. However, Mr Cantor defends his position from an empathically ethical stance: ‘What would the boys do if they couldn’t come to the playground? Stay at home? No they play ball somewhere else – in the streets, in the empty lots, they’d go down to the park to play ball.’64 He is thus not concerned so much with his own wellbeing as with that of others (the boys). When he gives in to the demands to look for his own interest and to escape the risk of contracting the disease – ‘to flee from the unceasing awareness of the persistent peril’, as Marcia Steinberg ‘wanted him to’65 – his ethical stance seems to turn out to be delusionary. At precisely this point of coincidence of ethics with delusions, Mr Cantor evokes a theme with which we are familiar from the previous discussion of early Christian thought: that of the supposed goodness of God. In Plath-like fashion, Mr Cantor refers to this theme in order to turn it upside down. Against the background of the preceding chapter’s discussion of the closing lines of Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Burning the Letters’, we could argue that Mr Cantor comes to burn the letters of ethics, providence and theodicy only to supplant them in a negative way. Suddenly his whole life falls into pieces under the auspices of a violent form of immortal providence: After all this time, it had suddenly occurred to Mr Cantor that God wasn’t simply letting polio rampage through the Weequahic section but Philip Roth, Nemesis, p. 102. Philip Roth, Nemesis, p. 105. Philip Roth, Nemesis, p. 115.

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that twenty-three years back, God had also allowed his mother, only two years out of high school and younger than he was now, to die in childbirth. He’d never thought about her death that way before. Previously because of the loving care that he received from his grandparents, it had always seemed to him that losing his mother at birth was something that meant to happen to him and his grandparents’ raising him was a natural consequence of her death. So too was his father’s being a gambler and a thief that was meant to happen and that couldn’t have been otherwise. But now that he was no longer a child he was capable of understanding why things couldn’t be otherwise was because of God. If not for God, if not for the nature of God, they would be otherwise.66

This important quote marks the turning point of the novel. Here we witness how Mr Cantor abandons his open-minded and rational approach to life’s fearful uncertainties. Instead of being open-ended and therefore uncertain, the course of events has already been established. They have been fixed by some higher force. Irony vis-à-vis Augustinian and other Christian themes pervades the quote. First there is the theme of a transition from being childish to being wise with which we are familiar from the letters of Paul, where a state of faithless and unknowing childhood contrasts with the growth of redemptive wisdom (of Christ’s resurrection in this case). Then there is the issue of predestination, which, as H. R. Niebuhr has pointed out, led Augustine ‘to embrace a dualism more radical than that of Paul and Luther’.67 The quote treats these theological topoi not so much in a theoretical vein but as literary concerns – to be more precise as concerns of and for representation. Pondering over Mr Cantor’s reflections, we may realize that we come to terms with various shocks in our lives via representational techniques. In this way the early loss of his mother and the abandonment by his unfortunate father are accompanied by the way these traumatic events are translated into representations: here they appear in the soothing image of a peaceful childhood, thanks to the good care his grandparents bestowed upon Mr Cantor. We make sense of the traumatic via techniques of representation. These techniques of representation are secular: they do not necessarily evoke a relationship to a transcendent realm. They nevertheless operate as notions of fixity, if not immutability. We come to terms with the impermanence of our existence by constructing representations of permanence and inevitability. The loss Mr Cantor endures in early childhood thus represents to himself a meaningful event. Philip Roth, Nemesis, pp. 125–126. R. H. Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Torchbooks, 1956), p. 206.

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The invocation of God radicalizes this embracing of meaning that motivates the otherwise secular techniques of representation. The supposition of God as arbiter and creator of mishap and suffering further develops the desperate search for meaning and certainty. There is thus a certain growth involved here, which Mr Cantor attempts to define with the move from childhood to theological wisdom. Ironically, he seems to be unaware of both its Pauline and Augustinian connotations. The secular ‘it could not be otherwise’ representation now transmutes into the Augustinian theology of predestination. Now the absolute power of God guarantees that things can indeed not be otherwise. God figures as the omnipotent and omniscient source of how our world and our lives develop. According to Augustinian ethics this transcendent source guarantees the immortality of the good. The world cannot be but good and immortal – everlasting without end – and it cannot be disrupted in its ethical eternity. This statement needs to be qualified. Early Christian thought envisaged the destruction of our world, which is subject to the decay and death emanating from the original sin. Augustine’s notion of goodness is primarily philosophical and theological. As such, it is premised on eschatology and apocalypse: the destruction of the corrupt through transcendent redemption. However, the destruction of the world in its corrupted form paves the way for the true realm of an eternal and unchanging life. As Jacob Taubes argues, Augustine’s eschatology is not politically subversive, because it establishes a distinction between the city of men and the city of God.68 It is not a political eschatology but one of and for the individual who gradually disengages from the temporary abode: the earthly and impermanent city of men.69 The main protagonist of Roth’s Nemesis retraces this retreat and disengagement from politics and the world. Mr Cantor refers to categories of the early middle ages within a modern context of immanence. According to both the closing lines of Plath’s ‘Burning the Letters’ and Mr Cantor’s ironically growing theological wisdom, the world cannot be otherwise too. Here, however, the ‘otherwise’ would not be unethical but the performance of ethics. ‘Otherwise’ in this context would be redemption from harm and pain; harm and pain that the closing lines of Plath’s poem ‘Burning the Letters’ as well as Roth’s Mr Cantor posit as the permanence of the impermanent, the traumatic and the violent. Mr Cantor’s consequent anger ‘against the source, the creator – against God, who made the virus’70 may be in keeping with a certain Jewish tradition of being outraged with God, to which Job’s lamentations clearly belong. Taubes, Abendländische Eschatologie (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1991), p. 79. Taubes, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 80. Roth, Nemesis, p. 127.

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Perhaps more pertinently Roth defines his sense of Jewish identity in terms of indignation and a refusal to obey traditions and rules. He reflects on his schooling in a Hebrew school not as the following of commandments and their representation but as an unruly break with them: In those after-school hours at the dingy Hebrew School – when I would have given anything to have been outdoors playing ball until suppertime – I sensed underlying everything a turbulence that I didn’t at all associate with the airy, orderly, public school where I was a bright American boy from nine to three, a bubbling, energetic unruliness that conflicted head-on with all the exacting ritual laws that I was now asked to obey devoutly. In the clash between the anguished solemnity communicated to us by the mysterious bee-buzz of synagogue prayer and the irreverence implicit in the spirit of animated mischievousness that manifested itself almost daily in the little upstairs classroom of the shul, I recognized something far more ‘Jewish’ than I ever did in the never-never-land stories of Jewish tents in Jewish deserts inhabited by Jews conspicuously lacking local last names like Ginsky, Nussbaum, and Strulowitz.71

Mr Cantor’s anger with God is irreverent too. He asks his fiancée ‘But how can a Jew pray to a god who has put a curse like this on a neighbourhood of thousands and thousands of Jews?’72 The year of the polio outbreak, 1942, more poignantly points to the Nazi genocide, which saw the killing of millions of Jews on the European continent. Mr Cantor’s question ‘But how can a Jew pray’ has shaped much of Jewish theology and literature in the post Holocaust. Roth’s novel frequently refers to anti-Semitism but it does not mention the Nazi genocide. Its focuses not on world history but on a small community: the Weequahic Jewish community of Newark, New Jersey. From this circumscribed perspective, Nemesis’s attention rests on one individual’s decision: the decision to leave Newark for the supposed safety of the mountains. Mr Cantor gives in to the demands of his fiancée and her father. Nemesis will revisit this decision for the rest of his life. Once out of Newark, Mr Cantor only belatedly succumbs to the polio virus. His main suffering is not physical but mental. It is an ethical form of pain: ‘what he no longer had was a conscience he could live with’.73 Here we witness the divide between ethics and the transcendent. No longer confirming in Roth, The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (New York: Penguin, 1988). Roth, Nemesis, p. 171. Roth, Nemesis, p. 174.

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Augustinian fashion the goodness of the world, transcendence has ceased to ground and support ethics. A complete reversal has taken place. God has become the antagonist of ethics and longevity (or immortality). As we have seen, according to Mr Cantor God is the source of suffering, decay, death and gratuitous violence. The disappearance of a benevolent God does not, however, override the existence of an immanent ethics – of a conscience. This immanent force of Mr Cantor’s conscience is precisely the Nemesis which is the title of Roth’s novel. At the point where Roth’s Nemesis touches upon Mr Cantor’s pangs of conscience, the novel embarks on a journey to another point of view. As we have seen the anger against God in the face of catastrophes and illness may be justified and that especially within the context of post-Holocaust writing and thought. By focusing on Mr Cantor’s rage against God – a sense of outrage that is accompanied by a strong sense of conscience – Roth’s novel tests the validity of ethics in a catastrophe-ridden age of immanence. Let me explain. The collapse of an ethically valid transcendence goes hand in hand with the overbearing force of nemesis turned both immanent and inward: taking the form of what goes under the notion of ‘conscience’. As the novel draws to its end we witness the power of this self-inflicted wound that is not so much physical (Mr Cantor’s physical disability as a result of his polio infection) but mental: By and large he had the aura of ineradicable failure about him as he spoke of all that he’d been silent about for years, not just crippled physically by polio but no less demoralized by shame. He was the very antithesis of the country’s great prototype of the polio victim, FDR, disease having led Bucky not to triumph but to defeat.74

It is not the physical consequence of his polio infection that ruins Bucky Cantor – this is what the contrast with Roosevelt emphasizes – but the mental devastation brought about by conscience: his debilitating sense of shame, which turns out to be his self-inflicted nemesis. In its traditional or classical context, nemesis denotes the ethical work of transcendent forces: it is the ethics of divine providence. In Roth’s novel, however, it has turned completely immanent. It has become the domain of Mr Cantor’s conscience. His conscience assumes the omnipotence and omniscience that has traditionally been the prerogative of God. Out of his inflated sense of conscience – or, in other words, an immanent self-inflicted form of nemesis – Mr Cantor turns down the prospect of marriage. Polio has Roth, Nemesis, p. 246.

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crippled him. This does not matter for either Marcia Steinberg or her family. She is keen to marry him. Mr Cantor nevertheless remains adamant. He refuses marriage on the grounds of conscience, insisting: ‘Marcia, marry a man who isn’t maimed, who’s strong, who’s fit, who’s got all that a prospective father needs.’75 Mr Cantor clearly fears the prospect of a future engaged with the world. Indeed the novel closes with his retreat from any form of human community. How can we best understand this refusal to engage with others? How can we explain this retreat from a shared and anxiety-ridden public sphere that might give rise to unknowable and uncontainable disasters such as the polio contagion of 1942? Roth’s novel is a seemingly plain and highly contextualized account of a common man, in a sense of everyman. To understand the critical as well as transformative aspect of this seemingly simple account, we need to take seriously its references to both ethics and theology. From this perspective, it becomes increasingly clear that Nemesis is as much about human hubris as it is about conscience. Indeed at the end of the novel conscience has turned hubristic. Marcia Steinberg emphasizes this point when she says that his conscientious refusal to marry her appears to be noble but in fact instantiates the hubristic conflation of selfhood with divinity: ‘You’re always holding yourself accountable, she explains, when you’re not. Either it’s terrible God who is accountable, or it’s terrible Bucky Cantor who is accountable, when in fact, accountability belongs to neither. Your attitude toward God – it’s juvenile, it’s just plain silly.’76 As his former fiancée recognizes, Bucky Cantor’s self-performance of nemesis and his absolute refusal to engage with both the diversity and the unpredictability of humanity characterize his hubris. He aligns himself not with the human but with the divine. Marcia emphasizes this point when she takes issue with his assumed knowledge of what God is: You have no idea what God is! she exclaims. No one does or can! You are being asinine – and you’re not asinine. You sound so ignorant – and you’re not ignorant. You are being crazy – and you’re not crazy. You were never crazy. You were perfectly sane. Sane and sound and strong and smart. But this! Spurning my love for you, spurning my family – I refuse to be party to such insanity.77

How does Mr Cantor’s insanity manifest itself? He spurns his fiancée’s love, that of her family and that of the human family at large. Roth, Nemesis, p. 259. Roth, Nemesis, p. 260. Roth, Nemesis, p. 261

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This refusal to engage with others has a theological and, associated with it, uncompromisingly ethical source that has here turned immanent. The most devastating aspect of this immanent nemesis is that it still retains the absolute authority of a transcendent God whom it claims to know. Mr Cantor’s presumed knowledge and consequent alignment with God makes for the paradox of his sane insanity. He is not mentally ill and has no predisposition to mental illness – ‘you’re not crazy. You were never crazy’ Marcia Steinberg notes. The narrator attempts to fathom this medical paradox, which turns out to be medico-theological as well as ethical. ‘God the great criminal’ the narrator provokes Cantor and then further questions, ‘Yet if it’s God who’s the criminal, it can’t be you who’s the criminal as well.’78 To which Cantor responds ‘Okay, it’s a medical enigma. I’m a medical enigma.’79 How can we explain this shift from God to medicine, from the theological to the medical? The narrator is confused: Did he mean perhaps that it was a theological enigma? Was this his Everyman’s version of the Gnostic doctrine, complete with an evil Demiurge? The divine as inimical to our being here? Admittedly the evidence he could call from his experience was not negligible. Only a fiend could invent polio. Only a fiend could invent Horace. Only a fiend could invent World War II. Add it all up and the fiend wins. The fiend is omnipotent. Bucky’s conception of God, as I thought I understood it, was of an omnipotent being whose nature and purpose was to be adduced not from biblical evidence but from irrefutable historical proof, gleaned during a lifetime passed on this planet in the middle of the twentieth century.80

Roth’s novel shows how Mr Cantor’s lifetime experience is premised upon how he represents his life to himself as well as to others. In Conrad (or Conrad’s Marlowe)-like fashion Roth’s narrator makes problematic what the novel and its main protagonist attempt to represent. It shows how the way we represent ourselves and our world spurns delusions of eternity and immortality. At first sight literature here seems to bear witness to the power of ideas. The ideas in question are medico-theological: the domains of theology and medicine in an Augustinian way are yet again united even though in a constellation that questions Augustine’s normative account of God’s and the world’s unworldly goodness. Roth, Nemesis, p. 265. Roth, Nemesis, p. 265. Roth, Nemesis, p. 264.

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More importantly, this inversion of the normative calls into question the content of the ideas propounded in a pre-modern as well as modern context. Roth’s Nemesis shifts the focus from the normative content of ideas to their persuasive force that disregards the ethical as ethical and instead focuses on the representational mechanism inherent in the structure of the ideational. This structure is the allure of permanence, perpetuity, stability, in short the ground of and reward for goodness: immortality. The content of the foundation of this ground shifts at the closing of Plath’s ‘Burning the Letters’. Here it is not goodness but the immortality of violence and distress. Mr Cantor’s self-inflicted nemesis coincides with a similar immutability of pain and evil of which the only cure – the question of medicine – appears to be a retreat from the world. The ultimate question is thus not that of the validity of the idea but of representation. Representation works by fixing the flux of life into the immutability of the image or preordained sign. Representation emerges as an immanent version of Augustine’s transcendent predestination. It turns the movement of life and the diversity of particular actions into a concept that serves to ossify and thus manage the unruliness of anger and outrage at the world’s injustices. So Mr Cantor’s self-inflicted nemesis turns out to be what the Greek’s called hubris; and hubris has nothing in common with the unruly recognition of unknowing pain, which is the anger of Job. The flux of life cannot be predicted or conceptualized in representations that are commonly called ideas of God, guilt or nemesis. Mr Cantor does precisely this. As the narrator of Nemesis points out: ‘Any biography is chance, and beginning at conception, chance – the tyranny of contingency – is everything. Chance is what I believe Mr Cantor meant when he was decrying what he called God.’81 Contingency is the persistent inconsistency of life. As I have shown in How Literature Changes the Way We Think, literature’s truth consists in its consistent inconsistency. Literature meets life not by representing it but by dint of reconciling our thoughts and actions to what disrupts the deceitful mechanisms of representations, which turn our lives into ethical and conceptual lies. In Nemesis Roth disrupts the deceitful concept of nemesis as an outside force by unmasking it as the power of representation: of how the main protagonist creates his own nemesis by turning his life and that of this environment into a representation of static images and categories. The flux of life’s contingency thus morphs into a representation of God, which inverts the traditional content but clings to its allure of immutability and immortality. The narrator analyses how such coincidence of pre-modern notions of immortality and Mr Cantor’s modern medico-theological approach to immutability shares a troubling – if ridiculous – loss of life and action: Roth, Nemesis, pp. 242–243.

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To my atheistic mind, proposing such a God was certainly no more ridiculous than giving credence to the deities sustaining billions of others; as for Bucky’s rebellion against Him, it struck me as absurd simply because there was no need for it. That the polio epidemic among children of the Weequahic section and the children of Camp Indian Hill was a tragedy, he could not accept. He has to convert tragedy into guilt. He has to find a necessity for what happens. There is an epidemic and he needs a reason for it. He has to ask why. Why? Why? That it is pointless, contingent, preposterous, and tragic will not satisfy him. That it is a proliferating virus will not satisfy him. Instead he looks desperately for a deeper cause, this martyr, this maniac of the why, and finds the why either in God or in himself or, mystically, mysteriously, in their dreadful joining together as the sole destroyer. I have to say that however much I might sympathize with this amassing of woes that had blighted his life, this is nothing more than stupid hubris, not the hubris of will or desire, but the hubris of fantastical, childish religious interpretation.82

Clearly, this is not a moralistic condemnation of Mr Cantor. Instead of condemning Mr Cantor’s inclinations, his desires or his will, the narrator takes issue with the preponderance of interpretation – or, in other words, representation – to the detriment of an active engagement with the world, despite its often tragic contingency and therefore ever so shocking unpredictability. This retreat from the world grows out of the supposed safety of interpretation where we come to fix the flux of the contingent into representations that are by their very nature fixed into signs or images. In this way Mr Cantor turns the fluent and the active and thus intrinsically unrepresentable into immutable notions of representation and interpretation: contingency represents God, and the tragedy of contingent life is nothing but representative of unmovable and unmoving ‘guilt’. The narrator takes Mr Cantor to task for being imprisoned in the representational framework of quasi-ethical interpretation. We can thus read Roth’s Nemesis as a critique of both pre-modern delusions of ethics and their inverted modern representations. A striking example of such inversion is the closing of Plath’s ‘Burning the Letters’. ‘Burning the Letters,’ however, moves representation into a force field of its own undoing. It does so when it represents immortality by what is the opposite of the immortal: violence, killing and death. Here we encounter what I call literature’s consistent inconsistency. Literature’s consistent inconsistency performs a transformation from the scriptural to the living – the living of contingency that we encounter in everyday life. The Roth, Nemesis, p. 265.

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attempt to control contingency via various means – predicting its occurrence through pseudo-scientific formulas for example  – is a quest for rendering permanent exploitation and violence. As we have seen this is precisely the concern of Doctorow’s historical novels about the wealthy class’s obsession with immortality. Plath’s ‘Burning the Letters’ makes us both painfully and beautifully aware of the perpetual repetition of violence throughout history from the Pharaohs to Henry Ford in whom J. P. Morgan sees a reincarnation of slavery in ancient Egypt. Whereas Roth’s Nemesis focuses on ordinary citizens longing for a providential and ethically guided eternal universe – a longing that ends in bitter frustration and withdrawal from the world – Doctorow’s historical novels reveal the brutality of a seemingly benign attempt to outdo the common human contingency of mortality. Doctorow focuses on the gap between representation and reality that characterizes life in capitalism (applicable to both the end of the nineteenth and the end of the twentieth centuries). The painful beauty of Plath’s ‘Burning the Letters’ precisely resides in the tension between the ethical promise of immortality and its brute, ruthless reality of everlasting exacerbation and exploitation. As we have seen in this and the preceding chapter, Augustine’s interpretation of immortality has shaped the representation of ethics from the pre-modern to the modern medico-theological paradigm of longevity (as practiced in cosmetic surgery and bioengineering). We represent immortality by the absence of death. Augustine is pertinent here, because he defined immortality not simply as the absence of death but, more importantly, by the absence of change. Absence of change is exactly what literature takes issue with. It confronts our various preconceived representations of the world with the messy changefulness of embodied life. Plath disrupts representation by confounding the immortal with the lethal. Roth’s Nemesis engages in a similar disruption not only of traditional representations or interpretations but also of forms of representation that rebel against the tradition. As we have seen, he disrupts the mechanisms of representation by insisting on life’s contingency. Life’s and literature’s consistent inconsistency may thus prove capable of guarding against medical, theological representations that either retreat from or violate the contingency of our ever so worldly condition. This is not meant to be a critique of Augustine’s theology nor does it reject contemporary biomedical creeds and practices. As I have pointed out – via Peter Brown’s work – Augustine does not completely retreat from the world (as Mr Cantor does at the end of Nemesis). Literature’s disruption is not aggressive, destructive or dismissive. It questions, however, certain presuppositions of immutability and changelessness in both Augustine’s notion of immortality and current biomedical ideals of the virtuous patient who sacrifices worldly inclinations towards the attainment of the now immanent promise of changeless health and longevity.

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Towards a Numerical Ambiguity

Under modern conditions, not destruction but conservation spells ruin because the very durability of conserved objects is the greatest impediment to the turnover process, whose constant gain in speed is the only constancy left wherever it has taken hold. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Introduction: Overview of the preceding discussion, neoliberalism and Doctorow’s public literature As we have seen in the preceding two chapters, Augustine’s interpretation of immortality has shaped the representation of ethics from the pre-modern to the modern medico-theological paradigm of longevity (as practiced in cosmetic surgery and bioengineering, for example). We represent immortality by the absence of death. Augustine is pertinent here, because he defined immortality not simply as the absence of death but, more importantly, by the absence of change. Literature takes issue with the delusion and deception of an ethics of changelessness, according to which the eternal or the frequently returning is representative of the benevolent. In a Nietzsche-like fashion, we associate the eternal return with well-being. Stability all too often turns into a synonym for everything that goes well. The preceding chapter has analysed the way in which our contemporary neoliberal society bears an eerie resemblance with the brutal economic practices prevalent at the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. We have seen how Doctorow turns to this historical period in order to highlight our current obsession with the health of the individual and the long life of those who can afford it. Doctorow’s novels make us see how the intense interest in immortality is a class issue. From the vantage point of a capitalist government that has abolished the welfare state, wealth not only seems to go hand in hand with health. More radically, the power exerted by wealth promises the emergence of a new species: the immortality of the wealthy. How can we explain this affiliation between capitalism and the intense insistence on immortality? Mortality imposes a limit on humanity:

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comparable to apes from whom (as Darwin showed in the middle of the nineteenth century) we derive, we are bound to die and are thus bounded or limited by death. Capital accumulation has, however, abolished all limits. It thrives in being accumulated in a seemingly eternal and limitless manner. David Harvey describes Marx’s analysis of capitalism’s impatience with the limited realm of material or embodied life as follows: He [i.e. Marx] contrasts the potential limitlessness of monetary accumulation on the one hand, with the potentially limiting aspects of material activity (production, exchange and consumption of commodities) on the other. Capital cannot abide, he suggests, such limits. ‘Every limit appears’, he notes, ‘as a barrier to be overcome’. There is, therefore, within the historical geography of capitalism a perpetual struggle to convert seemingly absolute limits into barriers that can be transcended or circumvented.1

Amongst the most challenging limits are entropy and mortality. In Doctorow’s Ragtime, J. P. Morgan – the king of finance – obsesses with the idea of a capitalist class that is different from merely mortal humans: a class that has done away with mortality perpetuating its class rule in the form of infinite reincarnations. In this way, Morgan sees in the founder of industrialist-line production, Henry Ford, a reincarnation of ancient Egypt’s ruling class: the Pharaohs. Doctorow highlights the issue of class in a country whose contemporary neoliberal pathos has seemingly abolished class differences. American media may present contemporary society in terms of being completely removed from the harsh economic realities of late-nineteenth-century capitalism. In the face of such public deceptions and delusions, Doctorow turns to an austere past in order to accentuate the austerity of the present. In his 1993 preface to a collection of essays, Doctorow brings back the issue of class and addresses the resurgence of nineteenth-century economic practices at the end of the twentieth century: In this final decade or so, with the mandate of a populace compliant with ruling circumstances, the last administration of the cold war conflated its ideology with the capitalist principle of the nineteenth century. Deregulating industry, dismantling social legislation of benefit to anyone but their core constituencies, abjuring law enforcement where their law was not to their liking, and politicizing the courts, they distributed the Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. 47.

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enormous costs of the cold war democratically among all the classes of society except the wealthiest. The effect on our national standard of living was as a vampire’s arterial suck.2

The vampire’s arterial suck evokes Dr Sartorius of The Waterworks, who drains blood from impoverished children in order to rejuvenate the old members of the upper class. The present repeats the brutality of the past in modernized forms. Here we have another form of immortality: the endless repetition of social injustice and violence, which has been the focus of Plath’s ‘Burning the Letters’ too. Doctorow’s contemporary concerns are thus embroiled in the economic and social turmoil of a seemingly bygone form of capitalism: the wild, speculative capitalism of industrialization. Social scientists tend to define contemporary capitalism as neoliberal. It is by reading the literary work of Doctorow that we come to realize that the ‘neo’ in question here has little to do with freedom or liberty but with ruthless principles that shaped the economic practices of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Doctorow’s novels let us experience intellectually as well as emotionally the repercussions of such class exploitations, making us undergo the present as repetition of past horrors. Harvey formulates the problem in a social scientific way – the persistence of class exploitation in a world that denies its existence. Doctorow’s authoritarian Dr Sartorius indeed reappears in the political authoritarianism of neoconservative dogma that has been employed to impose neoliberal economics: The further turn to neoconservatism is illustrative of the lengths to which economic elites will go and the authoritarian strategies they are prepared to employ in order to sustain their power. And all of this occurred in decades when working class institutions were in decline and when many progressives were increasingly persuaded that class was a meaningless or at least long defunct category. In this, progressives of all stripes seem to have caved in to neoliberal thinking since it is one of the primary fictions of neoliberalism that class is a fictional category that exists only in the imagination of socialists and crypto-communists.3

Contrasting with some aspects of postmodern constructionist thinking, which insinuate that we were inevitably imprisoned in our private fantasy Doctorow, Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution: Selected Essays 1977–1992 (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), p. xiv. 3 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 201–202. 2

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world as, in Zizek’s words, ‘substanceless subjects’, Doctorow insists on the public significance of what is seemingly private. Literature has become rather marginal to political or social life; it appears to have lost its public role. Against this trend of privatization in literary studies, Doctorow proclaims and reclaims Shelley’s famous definition of the poets as unacknowledged legislators of the world. According to Doctorow the writer is the foundation of politics. The writer is ‘an unacknowledged legislator’ who offers an alternative State of the Union address: ‘I am giving you not a State of the Union address but a State of the Mind of the Union address.’4 What is the political texture of literature? According to Doctorow it is its closeness to the state of ordinary life in a given society. This makes for literature’s broad interdisciplinarity, because the ordinary includes the geography, the psychology, the state of health, the economic state, the ethical state and so forth of common men and women: ‘We conceive the work of art as the ultimate act of individuation, but it may also be seen as the production of community.’5 Here Doctorow moves beyond issues to do with mimesis, interpretation and representation. The function of the writer is not that of a mimetic mirror: representing society as it is. As a legislator, the writer does not create representations that are private. Contrary to received opinion, representation and interpretation do not lie at the heart of literature. Representations and interpretations are rather forms of producing new communities. Doctorow goes on to say that ‘narrative is the art closest to the ordinary daily operation of the human mind’.6 Literature produces narratives where we may see our ordinary lives in disturbingly new ways. We may see in the narrative of The Waterworks a reality of neoliberal economics that economists deny exists any longer: that of class warfare. Literature counters such denials, delusions and deceptions. A brilliant social scientist of the stature of Harvey has perceptively analysed the ‘widening gap between rhetoric (for the benefit of all) and realization (the benefit of a small ruling class)’7 within neoliberal economics. That this ever-widening gap ‘is now all too obvious’8 does not mean that it has gone under our skin. We may well perceive problems and yet remain reluctant to face them, because they seem to be too removed from our immediate circumstances. Literature does not only make us perceive issues we would otherwise ignore. More importantly, it has the capacity to involve our heart and soul and not solely intellectually. Doctorow, Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution, p. 87. Doctorow, Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution, p. 114. 6 Doctorow, Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution, p. 114. 7 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 203. 8 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 203. 4 5

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Introducing Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity One of the most emotionally engaged contemporary writers is the Australian Elliot Perlman. From his first novel Three Dollars to his recent novel The Street Sweeper Perlman brings issues that are historically removed (the Holocaust as well as the civil rights movement in The Street Sweeper) or social scientific in their complexity and abstraction (neoliberal economics and the stock market in Seven Types of Ambiguity) – home to the level of the every day, the ordinary and at this level his writing interacts with the chemistry of affect. This chapter discusses the relationship between literature, subjectivity and commoditization in Perlman’s second novel Seven Types of Ambiguity. First it introduces the reader to the novel’s specific Australian context. It then proceeds to analyse the relevance of Seven Types of Ambiguity for an accurate understanding of global societies at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In his second novel Perlman raises the question of how it is that the neoliberal economic destruction of society in the name of individual freedom paradoxically paves the way for the systematic abolition of singularity. The novel thus pivots around the ever-widening gap between rhetoric (promising freedom and securing individualism) and practice (enforcing conformity and hegemony via various threats to the social standing of any given individual in the form of dispossession and social death). Analyzing Seven Types of Ambiguity, this chapter unveils the dogmatic foundations that constitute the assumed pragmatism of the neoliberal free market. Its concluding section discusses Perlman’s view of literature as a critical force that disorders the order of faith, be it a quasi-unshakable belief in a religious creed or in a political/economic way of organizing society. Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity could be read as a sequel to his awardwinning novel Three Dollars.9 Both works of fiction attempt to depict the social, cultural and economic state of contemporary Australian society. Perlman’s second novel focuses on the introduction of economic rationalism and globalized corporate managerialism into Australia. Seven Types of Ambiguity is thus specifically located in time and place. Yet its concern with the relationship between literature, subjectivity and commoditization is not just specific to an Australian context. The novel’s plea for the retention of ambiguity as a counter to neoliberal economics of hegemony and consumerism has a global resonance at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Perlman’s novel Three Dollars received the 1998 Age book award, the 1999 UK Betty Trask award, the 1999 FAW Book of the Year award and was shortlisted for the 1999 Miles Franklin Award. Perlman also co-wrote the screenplay based on Three Dollars. See Elliot Perlman and Robert Conolly, Three Dollars (Sydney: Currency Press, 2005).

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Seven Types of Ambiguity is thus a work not only of Australian literature but also of world literature. This statement has certain ramifications. It means that even though the novel represents contemporary Australia, this representation can be put out of its immediate context. Decontextualized, it would then yield an account of the intellectual and social history of the twenty-first century. To be sure, decontextualization of this kind does not constitute an intrinsic part of the novel. However, Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity has such a compelling force for a critical reader, because it provokes the discursive dislocation of themes out of the Australian context into the wider decontextualized and deterritorialized arena of global market economics. Within this framework, it sheds light on the fate of singularity within the global society of the twenty-first century. This engagement teases out of the novel not only themes but also a critical line of argumentation that resides invisibly within its texture as part and parcel of its confrontational potential. Perlman does not explicitly state his critique: he does not advance ‘unambiguous’ statements of truth, precisely because he is a novelist and not a philosopher, sociologist or political scientist. Instead he embarks with his readers on a complicated passage of narration where the critical issues that concern our contemporary global society are rendered palpable. In this way the novel not only produces intellectual effects but also transforms our affective capacities. The novel engages with our chemistry of affect. Rather than articulating his critique in an abstract (i.e. non-contextual) mode, Perlman explicates the social consequences of market economic rationalizations in and through the different narrative perspectives that constitute his novel. He represents in tangible form the ‘life’ of capital in the otherwise virtual world of postmodern commodity exchange. Perlman thus materializes the ‘immaterial virtual order which’, according to Slavoj Zizek, ‘runs the show’10 of economic rationalism.11 In this way, Perlman’s novel presents specific narratives that represent the social consequences of a seemingly virtual economy: the particularity of his narration relates to larger issues. The particular storyline of Seven Types of Ambiguity invites spatial and temporal dislocations, while remaining firmly Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), p. 103. Zizek focuses on the virtualization of capitalism in the age of globalization as follows:

10 11

This shift towards electronic money also affects the opposition between capital and money. Capital functions as the sublime irrepresentable Thing, present only in its effects, in contrast to a commodity, a particular material object which miraculously ‘comes to life’, starts to move as if endowed with an invisible spirit. In one case, we have the excess of materiality (social relations appearing as the property of a pseudo-concrete material object); in the other, the excess of invisible spectrality (social relations dominated by the invisible spectre of Capital). Today, with the advent of electronic money, the two dimensions seem to collapse: money itself increasingly acquires the features of an invisible spectral Thing discernable only through its effects. (Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 103).

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rooted in one specific place (i.e. Melbourne, Australia). One of the main protagonists and narrators of Seven Types of Ambiguity describes literature’s ability to dislocate itself in terms of timelessness. Writers such as Kundera, Steinbeck and Dickens did not write for their time but for the truly universal audience of all times and places: Kundera, whether you like him or not, […] you cannot say Kundera was the eighties. Steinbeck wasn’t the thirties and Dickens wasn’t the eighteenhundreds. They were of their times but for the ages. Their writings are not products marketed for a brief time until they’re out of vogue and discarded on the scrap heap. They are not silver scooters or hoola hoops, slinkies, Rubic cubes or breast implants. They’re not trivial pursuits to be enjoyed when you think you need something new and amusing to fill the emptiness of your pointless job and your sham of marriage.12

Like Doctorow, the narrator of Seven Types of Ambiguity highlights literature’s public function. Writing is not a private activity: it addresses the universal audience of all times and places. Perlman’s style could be called pedestrian. It is certainly not removed from ordinary language (hoola hoops, slinkies and so forth). It does, however, not simply represent the ordinary. Rather it shows how we may find new ways of living or different lives that are not part of the hegemony of our economic and trivial pursuits. In a review of The Street Sweeper, Jay Parini has recently described Perlman’s way of writing as follows: ‘Although no literary stylist – his prose is rarely more than functional – Perlman obviously cares about his characters deeply.’13 Perlman’s care for his characters embroils his readers. Through this affective network between writer and reader, specific concerns and particular situations become dislocated from their local position. A remapping takes place, where the subjective turns public and where the local turns universal (see Chapter 4). This relocation from the specific time of its conception to a contemporary setting enables the survival of traditional works of art. It is, however, equally true that within a synchronic framework, a similar process of dislocation can be undertaken not so much in terms of time but in terms of space. Australian society as depicted in Seven Types of Ambiguity represents the hostility towards ambiguity that characterizes the political as well as the business strategies, which, on an all-encompassing global level, shape the public sphere of the twenty-first century. Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity (Sydney: Picador by Pan Macmillan, 2003), pp. 419–420. Parini ‘The Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman – review: This Subtle meditation on the healing powers of storytelling is impressive,’ The Guardian Friday, February 2012.

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Criticism thus extends the workings of the work of art. It makes it prosaic.14 It focuses on its content or, as Walter Benjamin would say, on its truth value.15 The work of criticism searches for the subject matter of the novel not by attending to the immediate surface of its narration but by working through its particular makeup. The question of literary form and the analysis of literature’s truth value in terms of larger, decontextualized references and issues are thus not self-exclusive. Neither are these analytical activities to be followed up in separated attempts of critical engagement. Discussing Perlman’s novel, this chapter sheds light on the dogmatic foundations that constitute the assumed pragmatism of the market economy. Seven Types of Ambiguity unfolds this decontextualized problematic as the defining moment of the twenty-first century. At the same time the novel develops a specific and highly contexualized storyline in the seemingly antiquated manner of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel. In this way, Perlman’s authorial intentions emerge from a close reading of the different narrative perspectives that constitute his novel. (To be sure, many nineteenth-century novels have multiple narrators – such as Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White – though not in the Rashomon-like way to which Perlman refers in Seven Types of Ambiguity). The technical set-up of the novel appears to be a revamp of nineteenthcentury narrative prose. In a contemporary literary context, the length of the novel – some 600 pages – might raise the immediate suspicion of facing an anachronistic undertaking. This impression distorts, however, the specific narrative parcours that Seven Types of Ambiguity performs and that marks the course of the reader’s critical engagement. The back cover of the paperback edition describes the novel as ‘reminiscent of the richest fiction of the nineteenth century in its labyrinthine complexity’. This might very well be true as far as issues of complexity are concerned. However, this Here I am extending Andrew Benjamin’s recent discussion about the relationship between art criticism and painting to a discussion of Perlman’s novel. Following Walter Benjamin’s reading of German romantic Friedrich Schlegel’s work on criticism as poetry and vice versa, Andrew Benjamin argues that the critic continues the work of the artist. Art’s difficulty resides in its incompleteness. A work of art, if it is truly art, can never be completed. It remains incomplete. Therein exactly lies its potentiality. The potential must not be confused with the teleological. Rather having one determined route toward that which makes it more complete, there are many ways in which the critic can extend the work of art. Furthermore, a state of full completion remains ever elusive and illusive. Completion thus does not refer to full presence but denotes the art of ruination: ‘Modernity has little to do with what art “looks like”. A fetishisation of style – which conflates style with appearance – refuses what is central. The lynchpin, rather, is the recognition that, as Walter Benjamin argues, criticism completes the work. It completes is by “ruining” it. The key point of departure here is Benjamin’s early dissertation on Romantic criticism.’ Benjamin, Disclosing Spaces. On Painting (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2004), p. 84. 15 For a detailed discussion of Benjamin’s approach to reading see Mack, How Literature Changes the Way We Think (New York: Continuum, 2011), pp. 100–126. 14

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characterization fails to take into account the particular arrangement of the novel’s technical manoeuvres.16 To neglect the particular way in which a novel presents its content is to miss much of the content itself. In contrast to a nineteenth-century novel à la Dickens, Seven Types of Ambiguity does not evolve out of the mouth or pen of one central narrator. Instead, it is divided into seven parts. Each presents the version of a specific protagonist. The content of the novel partakes of the technique by which it narrates its plot. Seven Types of Ambiguity profiles its particular literary form through the presentation of different points of view. Each evolves from the perspective of its specific narrator. However, technique is not an end in itself. It would certainly be banal and would of course also be far from innovative if the point of these differing perspectives provided by different narrators were to show that each of our life worlds constitutes a unique entity. Rather a critical reading of the narrative technique employed in the novel yields insight into the societal truth value of the content depicted in Seven Types of Ambiguity. The idea of these different points of views as offered by the main protagonists who have thus become narrators has nothing to do with factual statements about the relativity of perception. Instead the technical arrangement through which the story tells itself by being split up into differing accounts of its plot enables recognition of how and why contemporary society does not allow for an adequate understanding of the singular context that shapes the specific agency of a given agent. This refusal to take into account the contextual breeding ground of both thought and action goes hand in hand with the elimination of ambiguity. The novel, in contrast, creates ambiguity precisely through its narrative technique, which allows the reader insight into the complexity of each protagonist’s interiority.

Serial humanity and the ideology of neoliberal economics The rest of this chapter does not offer a comprehensive account of Perlman’s novel.17 Instead it focuses on two central themes: (1) the introduction of private health care into Australian society; (2) the relation between forms As Steven Poole has lucidly pointed out, Seven Types of Ambiguity is not, as might at first glance appear, a novel that lacks innovative narrative techniques: ‘Not only is each of the novel’s seven sections narrated by a different character in the story, some are also addressed directly to another character. So the reader is challenged to perform a sort of dual identification – the traditional one with the narrator, and another one with the addressee’ (Poole, ‘Seven Types of Moralising,’ The Guardian, 11 December 2004). 17 For a comprehensive plot summary see Kate Kellaway’s ‘Unreliable Witnesses,’ The Observer, 8 August 2004. 16

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of market economics that are indifferent to human singularity and a dogmatic approach to literature. The latter turns out to be the flip side of an economic reality that is hegemonic in its ‘one size fits all’ approach to human diversity. That is to say, the dogmatic approach to literature exclusively allocates ambiguity to poetry while denying its validity in the sphere of everyday intersubjectivity. While not reducing the novel to its narrative core, for preliminary purposes, it is worthwhile to provide a brief account of its plot in relation to the two issues discussed in this chapter. Seven Types of Ambiguity describes how an unemployed schoolteacher, Simon Heywood, ends up in a maximum security prison, isolated in solitary confinement, because he attempted to help someone else. This state of affairs seems to be the direct result of his apparent altruism. One could call this short description an in nuce account of its main plot. Significantly, the topic of the prison gives rise to a wealth of associations within the context of Australian history and literature. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Australia was the destination of European prisoners. Australian history thus strikingly illustrates that global mobility can resemble the movement into the place of captivity. As Nicholas Birn has recently pointed out, ‘Australia has historically been the prison dilated’: it ‘has resembled what we would today call a “virtual prison”’.18 The role of the prison within Perlman’s novel is thus to underline the darker aspects of globalization. Simon’s narrative, which preliminarily terminates in prison, also signals a pre-eminent theme of the novel, namely, that of the fate of concern for the other in the twenty-first century: like Simon it seems to end up incarcerated. On a less superficial level, Simon kidnapped Sam, the son of his ex-girlfriend (going back to the time of his student days) Anna – with whom he is still obsessively infatuated – in order to draw attention to the intensity of his love. Is Simon as selfless as he pretends to be? Certainly not and yet his desire to save the 6-year-old boy Sam from the psychological turmoil of a collapsing marriage lays as much claim to certainty as the statement about Simon’s selfish interest. This clash of a variety of different certainties marks the workings of ambiguity. By the time at which the different narrative accounts of the novel are unfolding, Simon’s ex-girlfriend has become the wife of the stockbroker Joe Geraghty. Their marriage introduces us to the heart of market economic transactions. Joe, together with his colleague Mitch, whose nickname simply represents an abbreviation of his surname Mitchell, is about to facilitate a big Birn, ‘Receptacle or Reversal? Globalization Down Under in Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life, College Literature,’ 32.2 (2005): 127–145 (p. 129).

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share transaction, which, if successful, would enable the market economic transformation of the Australian public health-care system into US-style managed care. This deal will fall through, if only for a brief moment, but it will leave both Joe and Mitch unemployed. The neoliberal privatization of public health care will, as prophesized by Joe and Mitch, pass parliamentary opposition eventually. Ironically, it will do so briefly after the failed share deal, which the two stock market employees were instrumental in bringing about. This failure will cost them their employment. Significantly, Joe and Mitch do not believe in the market economic ‘reform’ of public health care. Why are they then risking their employment for something about whose intrinsic merit they are not convinced? They put their career lives at risk in order to reap the reward of financial remuneration that would promise them security for life. In this way, the survival instinct seems to dictate the unconscious commitment to something resembling suicide. Indeed the word ‘career suicide’ often appears in the novel within the context of the risk and reward system that characterizes the stock market community. Various characters in Perlman’s novel perceive economic power as a potential danger to those who might not succeed in the task allotted to them. The losers are effectively killed, or in other words, they have to kill themselves to complete the job of losing: ‘When something like this happens [i.e. loss and losing], there is usually at least one person in a firm like ours who will come as close as a human can to breaking apart without the application of physical force. […] Laffenden was finished.’19 The human body turns into a machine, into a computer. If it fails to work it has to be ‘terminated’: ‘ “It’s what they say, when you’re iced, when you are terminated. “Control” plus “Alt” plus “Delete”, like on a computer” ’.20 As Mark Seltzer has pointed out, serial killers are a product of capitalist modernity, not least because of the machine-like non-personal character of their undertakings: ‘The complete yielding to nonpersonality is one of the serial killer’s signatures, the proper name of the minus man. Or, as Bundy, “a type of nonperson” who was also such a verbal person, expressed it: “Personalized stationary is one of the small but truly necessary luxuries of life”.’21 As professionals, Joe and Mitch act like non-persons, resembling machines that are strictly programmed to perform a mechanical task without any concern about its content. They must not believe in anything they are Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 87. Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 273. Thus employees are asked to commit ‘career suicide’ (p. 286). See also 300 and 304. 21 Seltzer, Mark Serial Killers. Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 12. 19 20

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undertaking apart from its statistical, that is to say, economic-numerical aspect. To be sure, both are convinced that US-style managed care will be introduced sooner or later and both are, as the narrative development of the novel proves, certainly right about this. They do not, however, hold this belief because of some personal insight or thinking on their part. Instead, they are simply reaffirming market economy’s claim to homogeneity – according to the motto: ‘History has proven that nothing works as well as neoliberal capitalism.’ ‘The appeal of liberty’, as Bernard E. Harcourt has recently shown, ‘is indeed a powerful force – especially if it is tied, as it has been since the Physiocrats, to the notion of orderliness.’22 Some anachronistic intellectual like Simon Heywood’s psychiatrist Alex Klima might raise objections. He might go so far to send letters to a daily newspaper and these letters might even be published. But all of this will not hinder the inevitable course of the progressive absorption of society in its totality by ‘market economic efficiency’. Alex’s letter about the opposition’s secretive deal with the government that would give the green light to the introduction to US-style managed care only causes a short-lived annoyance. As a result of this intervention, the oppositional party has to delay their approval of the so called health-care reform. After a brief lapse people will have forgotten about it. Time will thus allow for a clandestine or rather, quiet introduction of neoliberal economic reform into the lifeline of Australian hospitals. This time it will work, because no one will have realized it. Alex Klima’s critical letters raised public awareness of the issue. Public awareness, however, would later be drowned out by other more grabby scandals like the capture of the so-called child kidnapper Simon Heywood. Joe and Mitch will have lost their employment, because they were dependent on someone else for whom they did the stock acquisition of Sid Graeme’s insurance National Health. Once the reform bill would have gone through the opposition party, Graeme’s company would be owner of almost all so far public Australian hospitals. His company would thus hold a double monopoly: one in the primary care sector and one in the insurance sector. The big investor, Donald Sheere, whom Joe Geraghty advises on the value of specific share deals and does stock transactions for, agrees for the time being to pump millions of dollars into National Health that would thus enable Graeme’s acquisition of the Australian public health-care sector. But he does so under the condition that Joe and Mitch’s investment firm underwrite his undertaking. This means that their employer will bear the costs of the financial loss, should Sheere decide to pull out of the transaction. This is Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 241.

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exactly what will take place after Alex will have published his letter about the opposition party’s clandestine agreement on US-style managed care. Joe and Mitch’s lack of personal commitment make them all the more committed to pushing the deal through without considering the risks it might pose to their personal life as employees in a huge investment firm. This defines them as non-persons, which they have to be in order to perform well as programmed by the command to achieve success in the free market.23 They have to yield to non-personality in order to push through deals that hold out the promise of wealth and thus life security. A certain serial character thus defines the single-mindedness of their struggle for societal success. Although this is not the place to enlarge on the details of the failed share deal, an analysis of the way in which Sid Graeme, the head of the insurance company National Health, advertises the benefits that would accompany his privatized possession of almost all Australian hospitals brings to the fore the substitution of human ambiguity with the straightforwardness of statistical or numerical illusions of certainty that, as the novel reveals, drives the unacknowledged ideology of neoliberal economic praxis. A critical reading of Perlman’s novel is thus vital for an analysis of contemporary society. Such critical engagement illuminates how the fate of human singularity goes hand in hand with the marginalization of literature as an art form that sensitizes its audience to the ambiguities of human character. Both human singularity and the literary are, due to their multivalence, far from being adequately understood in a single-minded manner. As has been discussed above, the literary technique that constitutes the specific texture of the novel highlights the need to see a given individual’s deliberations, altercations and actions in their specific contextual setting. Why does context matter? It would certainly not be significant, if human agency were that of computerized numbers, that is to say, programmed and thus knowable. The human, however, as Judith Butler has recently pointed out, ‘comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know’.24 The human is revisable because the universalist notion of humanity embraces diversity, which cannot be fixed into homogenous frameworks. The openness As Jessica Winter has pointed out,

23

Joe, for one, is by any objective standard an inwardly deformed monster misbegotten of The Market, a muscle-bound, violence-prone slickster capable of networking at a SIDS support group. Yet he’s also a uniquely piteous creature, embittered by a despondent childhood, humiliated by what he assumes to be his wife’s adultery, and paralyzed with guilt over his lonely, declining mother – a bag of boiled sweets that she gives to Sam acquires near-talismanic qualities of pathos and indelible regret. (Winter ‘Money Shot,’ The Village Voice, 13 December 2004)

Butler, Judith Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), p. 49.

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of the term ‘human’ does not preclude universal rights, but on the contrary extends these rights to excluded or marginalized people (the mentally ill, ethnic minorities and so forth). By presenting us with the complexities of psychic interiority, which turns out to be the opposite of context-indifferent numerical programming, the technical arrangement of Perlman’s novel evokes this horizon of the unknown, delineating the lines that separate both soul and body from the ‘efficiency’ of neoliberal economics. The introduction of US-style health care, on the other hand, demands of patients the predictable and unambiguous constitution of programmed numbers. Significantly, at the utmost point of vulnerability, namely, in the state of illness, human bodies have to conform to the prearranged order of statistical probabilities. The reform of health care promises to bring about a 100% increase in efficiency precisely through the pellucid sight into the future that shapes the fate of every patient. This clairvoyance comes of course at the cost of a radical distancing to the singularity and thus possible severity of any given patient’s particular illness. Here we encounter numerical homogeneity as applied to social contexts: the same procedure has to be brought to bear on everyone. At this point, the true character of neoliberal economics emerges. It becomes clear that the praxis of neoclassical liberalism belies its theoretical espousal of individual freedom. At a crucial moment in their conversation about the details of USstyle managed care, Joe questions the foreseeable nature of medical decisionmaking. ‘But how’, he asks, ‘does the health-care insurer [i.e. Sid Graeme as boss of National Health that would then have also become the primary provider of heath care] know in advance which procedures are necessary in any given case?’25 In response to this ‘good question’ Sid Graeme explains how human unpredictability can be overcome through the efficiency of economic programming: ‘It is not a stab in the dark for us.’26 What makes for this triumph of foresight? Medical diagnosis certainly falls outside the domain of the efficient functioning of health care, which alone would be compatible with the smooth perfection of market economic transaction. A doctor’s examination focuses on the singular illness of his or her patient. As such, it violates the economically prescribed indifference to singular needs and contextualized concerns. Indeed Sid Graeme praises USstyle managed care, because ‘it would transcend the relationship between a patient and his [sic] doctor’.27 By which technological means, however, does a reformed health system achieve compatibility with the demands of neoliberal Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 95. Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 95. Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 94.

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economics? Through the numerical technique that propels persons into nonpersons, through the process that transmogrifies individual contexts into the serial scheme of the numerical, in short, through statistics.28 As Sid Graeme explains: ‘By rigorous use of statistics, we can actually know what is likely to be necessary for the treatment of any particular illness or injury and also, how long we can reasonably expect a patient to need to be in hospital.’29 This likelihood turns out to be a numerically programmed certainty. Should a patient’s illness contradict the reasonable timetable, as measured statistically through the generality of numbers, he or she ‘can either go somewhere else or else pay out of their own pockets’.30 Here we encounter the assumed pro-choice individualism as proclaimed by neoliberal ideology. How can one go somewhere else, if the point of the reform consists of the all-embracing transformation of public hospitals (which are still revolving around the patient–doctor relationship) into privatized intuitions that operate along the statistical principle? The statistical principle precisely enacts indifference to context and thus to human singularity. This indifference endorses disregard for anyone who lacks the means to ‘pay out of their own pockets’. Seen from this perspective, pragmatism functions to justify the cruelty that accompanies a lack of concern for the specific vulnerability of the other. The plea for the transcendence of ideology and the concomitant approval of the reasonable (i.e. of common sense) serves to preclude any critical engagement with the violence that underlines the statistical rendering of persons as non-persons. Here neoliberal thought meets the neoconservative refashioning of a philosophy of history, which proclaims the inevitability of redemptive developments (the arrival of freedom through the course of history and so forth). Signatures of supposedly bygone theologies inform a completely secular and immanent social scientific way of thinking in both economics (neoliberal) Here again the psychology of the serial killer illustrates the conformity of humans to the indifference of machines as propounded by the so-called ‘pragmatics’ of the free market: ‘The type-profiling system devised in serial murder investigations posits the serial killer as one of the ideal typical inhabitants of machine culture: the statistical person. But it is the intimate experience of self-gerneralization – again, the at once alluring and insupportable experience of a sort of hyper-generalization in typicality – that seems to define the case-like-ness of the these cases. As one of the most influential popular surveyors of the serial murder scene expresses it, the serial killer is a simulated person, “a type of nonperson”. As the serial killer Henry Lee Lucas puts it, “a person was a blank”. Or, as the serial killer Ted Bundy experienced such a statistical identity in typicality: “Personalized stationary is one of the small but truly necessary luxuries of life” ’ (Seltzer, Mark Serial Killers. Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture, p. 41). 29 Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 95. 30 Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 95. 28

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and foreign relations (neoconservative). According to John Gray, the goals or teleologies of both neoliberalism and neoconservativism repeat Christian as well as Enlightenment narrative of a better future: ‘Modern Politics is a chapter in the history of religion. […] It continued in neo-conservative theories that claimed the world is converging on a single type of government and economic system – universal democracy, or a global market.’31 In polemical spirit Gray goes so far as to say that the utopian elements of neoliberal and neoconservative pseudo-scientific certainties about the future depend on their apparent opposite: ‘Neo-conservatives are noted for their disdain for Europe but one of their achievements is to have injected a defunct European revolutionary tradition into the heart of American political life.’32 Harvey has rejected ‘the conservative political philosopher’ John Gray’s assessment of neoconservative as well as neoliberal ideology as ‘a case of senseless pursuit of a false utopia’.33 Instead Harvey sees solid material interests at work in neoliberalism: the strengthening or (in China’s case) the restoration of class power. Reflecting on the economic drama unfolding in Seven Types of Ambiguity’s plot about the privatization of health care, we may realize that the struggle for economic and class superiority is always already part of an ideology into which protagonists buy at their peril. The material interests of class are part and parcel of ideological narratives by which they justify themselves. The idea of inevitable progress and unpreventable increases in efficiency and economic rationalization is of course a question of belief or sound scepticism. Money too depends on some form of trust. We need to believe in its exchange value in order to take it seriously. To further this belief or trust, neoliberalism relies on the grand story of something better to come: an increase in surplus value, ‘wealth creation’, the spreading of neoliberal freedoms and so forth. Similarly, Joe Geraghty tries to convince his VIP client Donald Sheere of the inevitable imperiousness of the health reform to any critical engagement. Inevitability – the posited impossibility of an otherwise (see previous chapter) – denotes a secular type of faith that silences doubt and critique. Doubt and critique are part of the drama that Perlman’s novel performs. The dramatic is not fixed, it allows for change brought about by critical engagement with harsh aspects of socio-political life. Neoliberal ideologies label those who question the inevitability of privatizations ‘ideological’, thus refusing to acknowledge the ideology of their own position. Pragmatism, on the other hand, denotes the inevitable triumph of market economic reasoning. The opposition party thus has to give way to that which it opposes: ‘Ideologically’, Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptical Religion and the Death of Utopia (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), p. 1. 32 Gray, Black Mass, p. 33. 33 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 152. 31

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Joe explains, ‘the party has always held that medical care is not rightly a forprofit industry, a state of affairs that managed care is designed to facilitate. It is only recently that … well, how can I say it? Pragmatism has begun to prevail over this view and in favor of managed care’.34 Market economic reason thus denies its position as a point of view. The view which the paintings in the mansion of the financial facilitator (i.e. Donald Sheere) of US-style managed care opens up to describes however the ruthless abuse of bodily vulnerability, which the touted pragmatics of market economic reforms seeks to hide. One oil painting depicts a bear ‘being torn apart by five or so wolf-like dogs, with some seventeenth centurylooking men thrusting spears into the bear for good measure, all of it encased in a thick baroque frame’.35 Another painting celebrates ‘the dismemberment of a large furry mammal somewhere in Europe’.36 Donald Sheere adorns his living space with artwork that assures us, him and his guests that violence instantiates nothing else but normality. The paintings represent a reality that is inevitable, unchanging, eternal or, in Plath’s words, immortal. Rather than affirming the inevitability of the endless or eternal repetition of harm and violence, Seven Types of Ambiguity encourages readers to see what it represents from a different, non-replicating, ambiguous point of view. The paintings depict the dismemberment of bodily vulnerability as common practice that runs like a red thread throughout the ages – be it the seventeenth or the twenty-first century – as well as throughout different geographical locations (Europe and thus not only Australia). The serial machine-like perpetration of violence seems to constitute the anthropological kernel of humanity. Human bodies appear as timeless killing machines.37 The artwork displayed in the interiors of Sheere’s house seems to highlight the potential for discovery yielded by processes of polyvalent readings that Seven Types of Ambiguity evokes. The crucial difference between art as mimetic surface and ornament (i.e. the paintings in Sheere’s possession) and Perlman’s novel has to do with the affective space the latter opens up into each character’s entanglement with other characters. This insight into interiority reveals mutilation as self-mutilation. In contrast to the subject matter depicted by the artwork as encountered in Sheere’s mansion, Seven Types of Ambiguity describes not so much the killing of animals, but the destruction and self-destruction of human life. The numerical indifference Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 124. Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 111. 36 Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 111. 37 For a critical discussion of satirical depictions of the human body as a killing machine, see Mack, Anthropology as Memory. Elias Canetti’s and Franz Baermann Steiner’s Responses to the Shoah (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001), pp. 3–98. 34 35

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to the vulnerability of bodily existence in fact renders some life superfluous or valueless. The ill human body indeed figures as nothing else but a bear that is being torn apart by wolves and seventeenth-century-looking men. The application of the serial and the general to the medical assessment of a hospital patient serves as a device of selection, which separates valuable life from existence that should not be. The efficiency of neoliberal economics thus subjects bodies who cannot afford privatized managed health care to the indifferent and at the same time judgmental criteria of statistical perfection. Only those who are either wealthy or healthy do not need to question the validity of their existence. One may fall ill, but this only on condition that one has accumulated as much capital to pay for the costs of this calamity. Joe and Mitch thus desperately try to enable the introduction of US-style managed care into Australian society in order to reach the financial position that would render their lives safe and quasi-invulnerable. Their long-term existence would then not be called into question by the indifferent statistical guidelines that draw a line between what is affordable and what is not. Focusing on bodily as well as mental vulnerability, Seven Types of Ambiguity reveals the mechanistic hostility to imperfection (imperfection being another word for the unsettling multivalence of the ambiguous) as the social organization of violence.38 Types of behaviour or medical states of affairs, which do not live up to the predictable mechanism of programmed numbers, require financial remuneration in order to be tolerated. What about those who cannot afford to pay for ambiguity, or in other words, for cracks in their bodily and mental constitution? Their lives then become non-livable. Life has become precarious. It depends on public help. The privatization of the public health-care system, however, enacts the abolition of support. Perlman links this decline of a concern for the vulnerability of the other to the larger context of twentieth-century history. This is why he uses Alex Klima, a Central European character, for the role of articulating a critique of neoliberal economics. What precisely is the background of Alex Klima? He is a Czech-Jewish refugee and a psychiatrist. His family was a victim ‘of the nightmares of twentieth-century Europe’.39 His parents ‘miraculously’40 survived the Holocaust. After the war, they returned to Prague – Alex’s birthplace. As Jews, they were again vilified by the new regime: ‘Those most at risk from the regime’s caprice were the intelligentsia, non-communists See Michael Sandel’s Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 39 Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 553. 40 Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 552. 38

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leftists – seen as bourgeois class enemies – and the Jews.’41 Eventually in the mid-1960s they were able to emigrate from Czechoslovakia to Australia. Australia, as a place of refuge, does not offer a haven that would protect Alex Klima from the nightmares associated with his Central European background. Why does he so energetically fight the introduction of USstyle managed care into Australian society? In order to address this question it is worth asking why he put so much effort into freeing Simon from his confinement in prison. As he makes clear in his conversation with Anna, the wife of the stockbroker Joe Geraghty, the refusal to help someone in a lifethreatening predicament, such as Simon faces through a prolonged prison sentence, brings to the fore the dismal state of contemporary society. After Anna refuses to help Simon in his court case, Alex replies: ‘So this is where we are now – all of us separate people.’42 In his new novel The Street Sweeper Perlman establishes an interconnection between memory, care and a sense of social responsibility. The question of remembrance cannot be separated from socio-political concerns. The remembrance of the other establishes a sense of solidarity. The refusal to help the other grows out of a denial of remembrance. It is this denial that causes isolation, separation and ultimately aphasia. This state of separation marks the absence of an awareness of the common good. Alex Klima vigorously fights the introduction of USstyle managed care because it is the symptom of both the complete neglect of social interconnection and the refusal to remember past injustices meted out to others. Briefly before committing suicide Alex Klima reflects in his diary not only on the fact that an institution for the mentally ill was allowed to fall prey to fire but also on how this event is being portrayed in a newspaper clipping. The media makes government neglect responsible for this accident. This depiction concurs with the characterization of market economic mechanisms as inevitable: things happen, people die but there is neither an intention nor a system behind these unfortunate happenings. They are accidents due to the non-calculating nature that seems to describe the workings of neglect. Alex Klima, in contrast, detects behind the ‘inevitability’ of the neoliberal market a system and an ideology that equally destroys literary ambiguity as it hands over bodily vulnerability to the forces of decay: ‘It wasn’t neglect. Governments have relinquished their responsibility for the provision of health and welfare and education to the user. It is ‘user pays’, and so these users paid.’43 This crucial excerpt from Alex’s diary sheds light on the Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 553. Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 494. Italics in the original Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 604.

41 42 43

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conversation between Joe and Sid Graeme about the economic advantages of US-style managed care, which has been discussed above. The wordplay on pay has a significant bearing on an adequate understanding of the idealization of the machine that drives the unacknowledged ideology of neoliberal economic reform. Pay denotes the objective, statistical and thus machine-like indifference to the vagaries of human vulnerability. ‘Payment’ is exactly the element that distinguishes life worth supporting from that which is not. Those who cannot pay with anything external to the value of their life have to pay with their lives. The seemingly detached and numerical indifference of market economic ‘pragmatics’, which is supposedly never personal but always business, turns out to be the systematic perpetration of violence on a non-personal and thus serial scale. The abrogation of responsibility in the face of human vulnerability constitutes violence: ‘The condition of primary vulnerability, of being given over to the touch of the other, even if there is no other there, and no support for our lives, signifies a primary helplessness and need, one to which society must attend.’44 According to Judith Butler, gender and race determine whether life becomes classified as either worthy or worthless. In this way ‘certain lives will be highly protected, and the abrogation of their claims to sanctity will be sufficient to mobilize the forces of war’.45 Butler here discusses the hierarchy of values attached to human life, as manifested in the public attention given to Western casualties of war as opposed to the silencing of death and suffering on the part of the Afghan and Iraqi populations. Perlman’s novel describes how such distinction between the valuable and the valueless shapes the internal societal constitution of the developed world and not only (but of course also) the latter’s overbearing domination over developing countries. The ideology of neoliberal economic reason demands the hierarchical division between those who can afford bodily vulnerability and those who cannot. Disease denotes the lack of ease that accompanies the smooth cashing in of a cheque that does not bounce back. Seven Types of Ambiguity traces the ways in which economic rationality’s destruction of society in the name of individual freedom paves the way for the systematic abolition of singularity. The novel’s thematic focus on the seemingly mutually exclusive freedom of the market and on the confinement of the prison brings to the fore the illusions of free markets. Harcourt has recently analysed the deception ‘of this dominant rationality that enables us to look at a situation and see Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), pp. 31–32. Butler, Precarious Life, p. 32.

44 45

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order but not the web of regulatory threads that beget and maintain that order’.46 This illusory rationality of ‘free efficiency’ has also ‘enabled the growth of the penal sphere by naturalizing and legitimating government intervention in criminal matters’.47 Perlman’s novel depicts a society in which everyone has to function like programmed numbers. Everyone has to keep winning. Winning here means the endless accumulation of wealth, which alone would ensure survival facing the odds of the body’s vulnerability (i.e. illness). Those who fail in doing so have lost their numerical predictability and homogeneity. They are damaged goods: ready for incarceration in either prisons or psychiatric places of confinement. These are the losers. Winning represents the unambiguous. As will be discussed in the concluding section, literature emerges as the critique of this idealized lack of ambiguity.

The loss of ambiguity: Literature as dogma Nothing, it seems, avoids being drawn into the vortex of the non-ambiguous. SimonHeywood combines his passion for literature with the idealization of his ex-girl friend Anna Geraghty. He radically separates the sphere of the literary from the real, allocating ambiguity to the one and the certainty of one-dimensional meaning to the other. He denies that fiction cannot be judged as either true or false, because, from his point of view, literature does not have any relation to everyday life. To this proposition, his psychiatrist and friend Alex Klima counters: ‘After all, fiction is usually anchored to at least elements of reality to give it verisimilitude. And insofar as these real elements are concerned, surely their representation can be said to be true or false even if the work of fiction as a whole can’t be said to be true or false?’48 Provoked by Alex’s questioning of literature’s truth value, Simon descends into a furious rage at postmodernism and deconstruction. What exactly connects this anger at deconstruction with the radical separation between literary ambiguity and the posited certainty of texts that are part and parcel of everyday life? Simon inveighs against the postmodernist attempt to accord to texts that are bound up with quotidian usage a similar degree of ambiguity as has traditionally been reserved for works of poetry. This non-hierarchical approach distinguishes Derrida’s deconstruction from William Empson’s practical criticism as exemplified in his groundbreaking book Seven Types of Ambiguity. Perlman’s novel adopts Empson’s title in Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets, p. 241. Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets, p. 241. Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 380.

46 47 48

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ironically (Empson after all reappears as Simon Heywood’s dog). It is a work of fiction and not an analytic account of literary criticism. As fiction, however, it depicts, in admittedly a highly contrived and constructed manner, aspects of contemporary Australian society. The sense of multivalence it generates as a narrative work – through a focus on both the interiority and the interconnectedness of its protagonists – makes the critical reader aware of the repressed ambiguity of everyday life. Simon Heywood, on the other hand, condemns deconstruction for the seriousness it accords to the multidimensionality of issues connected to the quotidian. Empson, he maintains, ‘was only talking about poetic language’.49 Derrida and the deconstructionists differ: ‘Empson merely suggested that what separates much of the best poetry from the rest is the latent ambiguity within it. He was only talking about poetic language. He didn’t claim that literature, let alone all texts, were riddled with ambiguity. For Christ’s sake, don’t ever confuse Empson with Derrida.’50 Alex Klima does precisely this: he does not radically separate between poetry’s ambiguity and the complexity of social as well as private life. In this way, he questions the common assumption that devalues the social validity of literature by demoting it as escapist and thus as a form of entertainment that cannot impact agency and self-reflection in everyday life: ‘Not all novels are purely escapist, to be read only for entertainment. Fiction, at least some fiction, can also confront us with truths we might otherwise never have encountered. It can provide us with insights we could never have gained elsewhere.’51 Rather than offering an easy escape from reality, literature confronts us with oblique, suppressed or repressed truths that are pertinent to problem solving in society at large. Simon, who claims that lived experience lacks poetry’s ambiguity, reserves change and complexity exclusively for the realm of the poetic. This is why his aestheticism uncannily mirrors the automated response system favoured by the ideology of the market economy. Herein resides the irony of the all too passionate onslaught he wages against what he labels the ‘army of ideological storm-troopers’.52 The ideology he projects onto deconstruction might very well be his own. His radical separation between the poetic and the quotidian certainly backs up market economic claims apropos the pragmatic inefficiency of a literary and intellectual culture of critique. As a result of his division between the fluid realm of poetry and the static world of embodied social interaction, Simon does not realize how he himself Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 381. Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 381. 51 Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 14. 52 Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 383. 49 50

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falls prey to a dogmatic reading of poetry. He transfers the theme of love’s constancy, which Shakespeare’s ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’ problematizes rather than simply confirms, to his idealization of Anna. Deaf to Alex’s characterization of her as changeable and ambiguous, Simon reaffirms her ‘essential constancy’.53 In this context Alex as friend as well as psychiatrist confronts Simon with the suppressed and repressed truth of his infatuation. This is exactly what distinguishes literature’s critical potential from the consumerism of capitalism, in which perceiving images and texts means escaping from reality. Alex tries to make Simon aware of the quasireligious, i.e., dogmatic character that makes up his relationship with Anna: You hold on to this memory of her [i.e. Anna] the way a religious person holds on to his faith. There’s no test for a theist that can displace his faith in God. If God fails there must be something wrong with the test or else with the theist’s interpretation of the results. It is the same with a political ideologue too, a communist or an evangelical free marketer. It’s not ever possible to displace an article of faith.54

Literature disorders the order of faith, be that quasi-unshakable belief in a religious creed or in a political-economic way of governing society. Theism, communism, free market capitalism and neoconservatism do not allow for ambiguity in everyday life. They do so precisely because awareness of the ambiguous could question the societal appeal of a static societal order, based on the intransigence of class interests. Epistemological stasis shapes the self-recognition of the quotidian, which has been placed on a Procrustean bed where it has to conform to the kernel of a given dogma. Belief thus becomes unquestionable not because it poses as faith as such but because it purports to represent reality. Anything that impedes this dogmatic construction of the real has to be bracketed off as ideological. In this way ideology proclaims itself as ‘realistic’ or, as in the case of neoliberal market economy, ‘inevitable’. Simon’s radical separation between the literary and embodied life, ironically, affects the nature of his relationship with those he loves. He does not realize that his dogmatic approach to literature prevents him from noticing the complex, changeable and ambiguous character of his ex-girlfriend Anna. In the same way, he refuses to recognize how his literary orthodoxy contributed to the break-up of their relationship. Anna increasingly realizes the loss of reality that accompanies Simon’s aestheticism: Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 364. Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 365.

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Here was Simon, ever the champion of skepticism and independent critical thinking free of the tyranny of intellectual fashion, and for around two and a half year’s I had been agreeing, accepting every word of his gospel. And there lay my problem. It was a gospel, the gospel according to St. Simon. He had created his own orthodoxy.55

The orthodoxy of Simon’s private religion of literature reflects the ideology of the free market, because both revolve around a hierarchical and discriminatory structure. He clearly perceives this hierarchy in the life of his father: ‘Risibly, my father’s insistence on the distinction between these people and us has been the closest thing he had ever had to a calling, to a religion.’56 Yet Simon refuses to recognize that he himself employs literary culture as a device of selection, marking the worth of his life off from ‘these people’, which ironically include his father. The father confronts his son with this state of affairs. ‘You read poetry’, he angrily avers, ‘and looked down on the rest of the world, on your bothers and on me, and now look at you’.57 Here the father reaffirms his triumph over the son, while at the same accusing the latter of having attempted to do the same. The phrase ‘and now look at you’ refers to Simon’s position in a high-security prison. The son set out to beat his father at his own game but he miserably failed. Literature did not secure for him the social distinction his father aimed to achieve through the quasireligious assembly of consumerist status symbols. The novel ends, however, with Simon Heywood’s rehabilitation into mainstream society and with his prospect of embarking upon a respectable academic career. The true victim of hostility towards ambiguity in all aspects of social and cultural life is someone else. It turns out to be Alex Klima who failed to prevent the introduction of US-style managed health care into Australian society. His persistent and focused help saved Simon from being sentenced to prolonged imprisonment for his kidnapping of Anna’s 6-yearold son Sam. He failed, however, on another account. Alex does not convince Simon of the equal respect for ambiguity in literature as well as in embodied social life. In this way Simon does not recognize the need for help as regards Alex who has saved him from personal disintegration that a prolonged prison sentence would surely have brought about. At this point Alex despairs at the thought of the futility that characterize his well-meant attempts at enlightening society about the self-destruction implicit in the undertaking to live in contempt of ambiguity: Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 454. Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 374. Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 370.

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The Enlightenment is over. […] Fundamentalism, be it religious or of the market variety, is everywhere and everywhere there is a reaction to complexity, an attempt to ignore the contradictions and conundrums of our existence. People crave the simplicity of easily assimilable black and white paradigms and any blurring, any ambiguity, is viewed with hostility.58

Simon’s denial of ambiguity within embodied social life and his concomitant literary orthodoxy seems to testify to the omnipresence of fundamentalism that permeates all kinds of hostility to the complex and thus the ambiguous. Adorno’s dictum about the impossibility of the good life within the false emerges as intrinsically bound up with the fate of literature in the twentyfirst century, as depicted in Perlman’s novel.59 Seven Types of Ambiguity narrates how the intolerance towards ambiguity, towards that which is not straightforward but requires contextualization – i.e. putting one’s self into someone else’s skin – ruins not just personal relationships and the seemingly private appreciation of literature. As the discussion of this chapter has shown, it also sheds light on how society’s self-absorption with fundamentalism marks the point of its disintegration into isolated selves that have become utterly hostile to helping each other and themselves.

Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 603. See Adorno’s Negative Dialektik/ Jargon der Eigentlichkeit (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), p. 359.

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7

Conclusion: From Numbers to the Individual – A New Ethics of Subjectivity Much of the discussion in this book has been about medicine and economics. Medicine partakes of the life sciences (biomedicine and biochemistry) and the discipline of economics belongs to the social sciences. Part of the aims of this book has been to question the often assumed of irrationality of literature and culture. The concluding chapter focuses on ethics in the post Holocaust in order to critique the dismissal of what we are reluctant to contemplate: the unsavoury aspects of our lives that we tend to isolate and marginalize as ‘irrational’ or non-numerical. The first section analyses two recent novels about the Holocaust in order to foreground the scientific, social and cultural validity of memory in our time; a time that seems to be premised on the quick drift of algorisms, amnesia, panic and various forms of societal separation and disconnection (such as zoning).1 The social sciences and the life sciences meet in the late Derrida’s application of the medical term ‘autoimmunity’ to the body politic in times of terrorism and the so-called ‘war on terror’. Strikingly the medical notion of immunity derives from a legal-political or social scientific context. As Arthur S. Silverstein has shown, ‘the Latin words immunitas and immunis have their origin in the legal concept of exemption’.2 One’s body’s immunity exempts one from catching a disease. Autoimmunity, however, denotes not the invasion of a virus – against which the immune system turns – but the body turning against itself. Here the immune system attacks its own as if it were an invader coming from outside. In autoimmune reactions defence has become suicidal – the self engages in internal warfare. This chapter extends the discussion about remapping the mental perceptions of self and society, of cultural particularity and scientific standards, of borders and the crossing of borders, of our shared mortality and divisive hierarchies, of individuality and social interconnection – themes and topics that have been subtending the entirety of this book. The first section For a detailed discussion of the current increase in social segregations and the ordinariness of crises in contemporary society see Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 2 Silverstein, A History of Immunology (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1989), p. 1. 1

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will briefly discuss two recent novels about war, genocide, racism and violence in the twentieth century: Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones and Perlman’s The Street Sweeper. These two novels could not be more different from each other. The narrator of Perlman’s Street Sweeper writes in a compassionate and intensely emotional tone, whereas Littell has a gay SS officer narrate the most disturbing and offensive reality of the Nazi genocide in a detached and cold or camera-like manner. In quite different ways both novels present the equality of our shared vulnerability in the face of pseudo-scientific constructions of racial divides, nationals borders, the perpetuation of economic inequalities and the violence of an ethical system that violates ethics when it silences or annihilates individual life forms. In the previous chapter we have seen how Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity depicts a global society entrapped by the homogeneity of an economic paradigm, which makes individuals chose their self-destruction. Based on a reading of Hannah Arendt’s work on totalitarianism, Adriana Cavarero has recently shown how the death of the individual is the purpose of horrendous forms of terror. Horror ends in death, but its ultimate aim is to eradicate the possibility of both at the same time, the singular and the plural: ‘What is at stake is not the end of a human life but the human condition itself, as incarnated in the singularity of the vulnerable body.’3 The singularity as well as the plurality of our shared vulnerability has rarely been the concern of science, the social sciences and philosophy. Literature and the arts, in contrast, operate through the singular usage of common or shared material, concepts, images and notions. Their idiosyncrasies foreground our vulnerability in different ways (some will be discussed in the chapter). This chapter discusses Benjamin’s hope for as well as Sebald’s and Derrida’s despair about the fate of the singular within the economic and military fortifications of capitalist modernity. This introductory section discusses how after postmodernism we may come to realize literature’s and art’s promise to fulfil Benjamin’s hope for the hopeless. Through both an affective (Perlman) and coldly removed (Littell) encounter with disturbing subjects and subject matters we may come to encounter an ethics that has so far been marginalized in the now-predominant philosophical ethics shaped as it is by the ‘deontological, anaemically post-Kantian sense of duty, law, obligation and responsibility’.4 In this context Terry Eagleton has recently compared post-Kantian de-ontological ethics with what he sees as the virtue ethics of literature: Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 8. Eagleton, The Event of Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 59.

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Like virtue ethics, the object of moral judgment in a poem or novel is not an isolated act or set of propositions but the quality of a form of life. The most effective kind of moral inquiry, from Aristotle to Marx, asks how human beings are to flourish and find fulfillment, and under what practical conditions this would be possible. It is within this framework that judgments of individual actions or propositions play their part. Literary works represent a kind of praxis or knowledge-in-action, and are similar in this way to the ancient conception of virtue. They are forms of moral knowledge, but in a practical rather than theoretical sense.5

Eagleton not only takes issue with the emphasis on context-independent norms in post-Kantian philosophical ethics but also criticizes philosophers of literature for their demotion of form. He rightly berates Peter Lamarque, Stein Haugom Olsen, David Novitz and Richard Gale for their hostility to literature’s literary form, its artistic sophistication. Eagleton points out that literature’s formal qualities bring about its qualitative moral texture and vision: ‘A work’s moral outlook, in short, may be as much a question of form as of content – a parallel between plots, for example, a way of handling a storyline or a two-dimensional mode of depicting character.’6 Literature’s ethics is certainly closer to Alasdair MacIntyre’s virtue ethics than it is to post-Kantian philosophical ethics of duty. However, if literature turns for us into an ethical laboratory where we can practice and review various forms of virtue, we risk becoming reductive. Eagleton attempts to avoid reducing literature to only one of its rich characteristics. That is why he criticizes philosophers of literature for ignoring issues of form. He goes on to accuse literary theorists for being not only reductive in method but also negative in content. Eagleton argues that structuralism, response theory, Russian formalism, hermeneutics and deconstruction only allow for ‘a largely negative function for literary studies, involving as it does a criticism of the actual rather than an image of the possible’.7 This focus on the subversive or negative aspect of mainly continental theories about literature may itself be tested as to whether it reduces intellectual critique to being merely dissenting. Avoiding the reductive tendency either to stress literature’s negative function of critique or a similar narrowing down to its ideologically affirmative potential – which Said has argued Austen and the whole of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature practiced supporting (according to Eagleton, The Event of Literature, p. 64. Eagleton, The Event of Literature, p. 65. 7 Eagleton, The Event of Literature, p. 104. 5 6

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Said) colonialism8 – this book has established a new form of ethics, which is at the same time an aesthetics. Implicitly criticizing Said’s view of literature/ culture as a consolidator of empire, this book has highlighted a different aspect of literature and cultural inquiry: one that helps us change rather than consolidate harmful practices within politics, religion, medicine and society at large. Here literature and cultural inquiry perform an ethics of resilience, which resists the repetition and thus consolidation of harmful practices. Literature and cultural inquiry as a whole has the potential to intervene in the violence and denigration of the past and the present. Broadly understood, literature intervenes in and interferes with the status quo. Being neither singlemindedly negative nor single-mindedly affirmative (supporting colonialism and other forms of exploitation and discrimination), literature does not so much represent and consolidate past and current harmful practices, but instead it scoops out the mental space in which we can rethink what it means to be human and to live in our world. As has been intimated above resilience here does not denote the survival of the fittest. Instead, my notion of resilience goes back to Spinoza’s conatus – a term that denotes the common nature of every living form to persist and enhance its being. In this Spinozan understanding of resilience aesthetics is already partaking of ethics. It is an inclusive ethics of aesthetics, because every living form is intrinsically valuable and thus equally beautiful or perfect. Resilience describes the attempt to counter the continual denigration, demotion or, worse still, destruction of human beings who do not fit into predetermined norms or quasi-scientific, quasi-religious or other ideological and economic rubrics, categories and standards. Being resilient is to resist the divisive categorization of beauty and ugliness, perfection and imperfection. Here literature clearly has a negative function – critiquing and disrupting stigmatization of minorities and other forms of violent social practice – but it also affirms singular as well as plural forms of politics, technology, law and medicine, which enhance our understanding of our world’s diversity. Violence attacks both singularity and plurality. A literary work like Littell’s novel The Kindly Ones alerts us to the ethical and, at the same, aesthetic foundation of human diversity. In order to kill we have to forget about our shared vulnerability and our shared mortality. Our interdependency resides in our collective state of precariousness. As Judith Butler has recently put it, ‘Of course, it is possible, even actual, to try to allocate death to others and reserve life for oneself, but that is to fail to understand that the one is bound to the life of the other, and See Said’s, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994).

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that basic social obligations emerge from this most basic social condition.’9 She goes on to clarify that even though these conditions and obligations are ‘basic’, they have not been included into normative ethics: ‘Such apprehension takes place at the limits of established norms of recognition, especially when those norms are in the service of war waging.’10 A good way to forget about our precarious physical, as well as mental, condition is to have a single-minded focus on categories, rubrics, statistics and standards. Max Aue – the narrator of Littell’s The Kindly Ones – records a conversation between the chief of the Gestapo Heinrich Müller and Eichmann, the organizer of the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’, in which Müller enthuses about mass murder via categories: Eliminating the Jews but leaving the Poles makes no sense. And here too in Germany. We’ve already begun but we have to follow it through to the end. We also need an Endlösung der Sozialfrage, a ‘Final Solution of the Social Question.’ There are far too many criminals, asocials, vagabonds, Gypsies, alcoholics, prostitutes, homosexuals. We have to think about people with tuberculosis, who contaminate healthy people. About the heart patients, who pass on defective blood and cost a fortune in medical care: them at least we can sterilize. We have to take care of all of them, category by category.11

The reduction of the human into a category removes humanity from being singularly alive. Having already been turned into a dead object – i.e. a category – renders the act of killing tautological, a foregone conclusion. Or so it seems. Through the reading of a novel like Littell’s The Kindly Ones we palpably experience and mentally discover that this is not the case. The most strenuous passages in Littell’s novel highlight how being singularly alive constitutes a not to be eradicated feature of the whole of mankind. How does the novel bring about this experience of discovery? By confronting us with a reality that we would otherwise shirk to reflect upon: the perspective of the coldly reflective mass murderer who is also a hidden outsider (being covertly homosexual). Susan Rubin Suleiman has analysed the literary as well as ethical innovation of Littell’s novel as follows: Littell, in making his SS narrator into a reliable historical witness – that is, one who functions as a witness informed by retrospective historical Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010), p. xxx. Butler, Frames of War. Littell, The Kindly Ones, trans. Charlotte Mandell(London: Chatto & Windus, 2009), p. 768.

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knowledge – accomplishes something completely new. For here the historical truth – which includes not only the facts but also an attempt to grapple with their ethical and psychological implication – comes out of the mouth of one who was part of the very system responsible for the horrors he is recounting, a system whose functioning he describes in detail. This procedure which lacks plausibility historically, is extremely effective in fiction.12

According Suleiman it is effective in fiction because it produces a degree of ‘derealization’. She argues that Littell’s novel is a postmodern narrative that alerts us to its constructed rather than realist nature. Yet she also makes the pertinent point that literature provides realistic details that are absent in the more general and archival discourse of the historian: ‘A novel can allow itself, must allow itself, such detail if it is describing what happened at Babi Yar, where more than thirty-thousand Jews were murdered in two days – and it is all the more striking when these details are recounted in the first person, by one of the murderers.’13 As Eagleton has pointed out fiction in general – and not only Littell’s and postmodern fiction – involves keeping reality at a remove: ‘the paradox of fiction is that it refers to reality in the act of referring to itself ’.14 I would argue that rather than making the Nazi genocide less real, literature – through its detailed evocation of historical circumstances – confronts us with a reality we would otherwise ignore or want to forget. The hyperreality of Littell’s novel is of course not that of nineteenth-century realism, but it is certainly removed from the playful accounts of fantasy and bricolage that characterize much of postmodern theory. Rather than indulging in mental games that are socially inconsequential, Littell’s novel confronts us with the stark reality of what happens when real human beings are reduced to non-human categories and rubrics. The consequences of such reduction come graphically to the fore when the narrator of the novel participates in the actual killing of Jews. He and his fellow perpetrators are enraged by the fact of the shared humanity of the Jews: If they suffered, as I had suffered during the Great Action (i.e. the mass killings at Babi Yar), it wasn’t just because of the smells and the sight of Suleiman, ‘When the Perpetrator becomes a Reliable Witness of the Holocaust: On Jonathan Littell’s Les bienveillantes’, New German Critique (Winter, 2009), pp. 1–19 (pp. 8–9). 13 Suleiman, ‘When the Perpetrator Becomes a Reliable Witness of the Holocaust: On Jonathan Littell’s Les bienveillantes’, p. 10. 14 Eagleton, The Event of Literature, p. 138. 12

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blood, but because of the terror and the moral suffering of the people they shot; in the same way, their victims often suffered more from the suffering and death, before their eyes, of those they loved, wives, parents, beloved children, than from their own deaths, which came to them in the end like a deliverance. In many cases, I said to myself, what I had taken for gratuitous sadism, the astonishing brutality with which some men treated the condemned before executing them, was nothing but a consequence of the monstrous pity they felt and which, incapable of expressing itself otherwise, turned into rage, but an impotent rage, without object, and which thus almost inevitably had to turn against those who originally provoked it. If the terrible massacres of the East prove one thing, paradoxically, it is the awful, inalterable solidarity of humanity. As brutalized and habituated as they may have become, none of our men could kill a Jewish woman without thinking about his wife, his sister, or his mother, or kill a Jewish child without seeing his own children in front of him in the pit.15

In this important quote the SS narrator calls the recognition of shared vulnerability ‘awful and unalterable’. For the perpetrators of the Nazi genocide it is awful because it violates their ideology: that only certain ‘healthy racial groups’ are human whereas others (Jews above all) do not belong to humanity but are stillborn as vermin or bacteria. Littell’s novel brings us face to face with a reality that confounds categories of race and health. Through this paradoxical account of the violent and ‘monstrous pity’ of the perpetrators, we experience human and social interconnection at the point where it is most starkly violated and ceases to exist (in mass murder and the Nazi genocide). As the discussion in the previous chapter has shown, Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity creates a space for social interconnections that has come increasingly under threat in an economic system that privatizes what has once been public – education, health, basic resources like water and security (privatizing police and military services as has been done in Iraq). In his new novel The Street Sweeper, Perlman discovers how social interconnections and responsibilities are premised on acts of remembrance. The novel tells narratives about different people in different locations and times. Nothing seems to connect these different particular individuals, geographies and times. The work of remembrances establishes connections between what, on the surface, seems to be disconnected and isolated. Littell, The Kindly Ones, p. 147.

15

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Perlman’s The Street Sweeper establishes the encounter between an African American ex-convict (who has been wrongly imprisoned) and a Holocaust survivor. William Lamont, taking part in a trial scheme for newly released jail inmates and working on probation in a New York cancer treatment centre, befriends the patient Henryk Mandelbrot (the character is based on the historical Henryk Mandelbaum), who urges him to remember his story of survival as a member of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz. The Sonderkommando was forced to carry and burn the millions of corpses of the Nazi genocide. Mandelbrot’s account is truly upsetting and disturbing. Perlman’s novel shows how the remembrance of such horrific crimes committed in the early 1940s are of vital importance for social well-being here and now. Some readers might ask why this may be so. The act of listening and remembering bridges the divide between oneself and others. As such, it is constitutive of social interconnection. Perlman illustrates this through a twist in one of the plots that run through and across each other in The Street Sweeper. Before he dies of cancer, Mandelbrot insists on giving Lamont his candelabra as a sign of remembering the story of his survival in the Nazi genocide. His family brought it to him in hospital. Lamont takes the candelabra home. After the death of Henryk Mandelbrot, the family accuses the hospital of theft. The hospital’s Human Resources department calls on Lamont, who is ready to admit that he took the candelabra as a gift of the deceased. As a result of his supposed theft Lamont loses his job. Lamont does not give up, however. He tries to speak with the African American oncologist Dr Washington, who treated Mandelbrot. Lamont now asks Dr Washington a question that Mandelbrot has often asked Lamont: ‘“Do you remember?” The question hung frozen in the air.’16 Hanging in the air describes the moment before something is going to change. ‘“I think I do,” she [i.e. Dr Washington] said, now looking him into the eye. “But even if I do what difference does it make?”’17 Lamont responds that she could act as witness and testify to Human Resources about his friendship with Henryk Mandelbrot. The act of remembering and witnessing is one of direct and practical social support as the novel here illustrates. Another meeting follows in the Human Resources department of the hospital. At this meeting Lamont gives a detailed account of Mandelbrot’s story of his work in Auschwitz: He told how human beings with memories, affections, ambitions, relationships, opinions, values and accomplishments all sunk into a tangled phalanx of human beings a metre deep covered in their own Perlman, The Street Sweeper (London: Faber and Faber), p. 515. Perlman, The Street Sweeper.

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fluids, all of them gasping, their bodies jerking, their faces distorted by their agony till they were no more. Williams Lamont left nothing out.18

Lamont tells the story of the well-calculated and efficient machinery of the Nazi genocide in a place – Human Resources – which puts a premium on efficiency. The Nazis took one of the prime achievements of the industrial revolution  – the factory – as a model for the smooth workings of what is undoubtedly monstrous and horrific: ‘It worked like a factory, smooth like a factory, a factory that turned living people into corpses’,19 Mandelbrot tells Lamont earlier in the novel. Lamont is perhaps the only person who is willing to listen to and remember what Mandelbrot has to say. Mandelbrot is isolated in his own family. ‘And don’t ever have grandchildren’, he advises Lamont, ‘your death will only interrupt them. Their whole life is a party. They don’t listen to me when I’m alive. They understand suffering like they understand … like … like they understand Chinese.’20 This refusal to engage with past as well as present suffering exacerbates hurt and pain. The family and the familiar become strange and estranged and who is a stranger like Lamont turns into friend. The account of literature that has been presented in this book combines negativity – which Eagleton and the Anglo-Saxon tradition of common sense associate with the work of intellectual critique – and the affirmation of the singular and at the same time diverse. From this perspective, literature in Russian Formalist and Frankfurt School manner defamiliarizes the familiar but the act of defamiliarization is only a first step towards the establishment of a new relationship with the world. The second step is the foundation of new friendships: Mandelbrot’s friendship with Lamont of which the gift of his candelabra is a symbol. What Eagleton calls literature’s ‘negative function’ (see discussion above) and berates literary theory for having as its obsession or fetish, could be called a border crossing act, which is not self-sufficient but dependent upon the constructive work of establishing new connections between what we would otherwise be led to perceive as irreconcilably opposed. As a result, the homely meets the strange, the past meets the present and borders turn porous. The work of memory dissolves borders between the present and the past, between stranger and friend, between victim and survivor. We may mistakenly call autoimmunity the turning porous of what has been separate. Autoimmune reactions are, however, not concerned with a relationship to the Perlman, The Street Sweeper, p. 539. Perlman, The Street Sweeper, p. 377. Perlman, The Street Sweeper, p. 426.

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outside. Here borders between inner and outer are certainly not crossed. On the contrary, the self turns inward against itself without being provoked into doing so by an outside force. The antidote to the self-destruction of immunity in autoimmune processes is the work of memory, because memory establishes salutary forms of bonding between self and society, between the internal and the external. Autoimmunity, however, instantiates paranoia in the extreme: everyone has become an enemy, even the immune system itself, which thus turns against itself. As W. J. T. Mitchell has recently put it: The most dangerous threat to the immune system, then, is amnesia, the forgetting of what it has learned: forgetting for instance, that today’s terrorists (al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden) were yesterday’s allies, trained as antibodies against Soviet military power in Afghanistan; forgetting, even more dangerously, that yesterday’s terrorists are often tomorrow’s heroes of national liberation, and that moral absolutes are not just useless, but positively dangerous in any counterterrorist strategy.21

In a different but related context, Perlman’s The Street Sweeper describes the role of memory and remembrance for the praxis of social well-being in the present. Towards the end of the novel, Perlman calls upon neurological research to substantiate its central theme – that of memory’s actuality and socio-political urgency: ‘What is memory? It is the storage, the retention and the recall of the constituents, gross and nuanced, of information. How is it called upon?’22 Retention depends on recall, on activity in the here and now. It requires energy and effort similar to that which goes into the production of electric light or the performance of music: A certain protein in the brain, an enzyme, acts upon one neuron after another in rapid sequence as if to light them up in such a way as to paint a picture or spell a word, as if to cause an arpeggio of cellular stores of data to suddenly ring out some long stored melody in your mind and you remember her face, her voice, her laugh, the way she moved, something she said, her views, her tastes, until you remember the way her eyes widened with the pre-rational wonder of a child when watching a wildlife documentary or the way they move slowly downwards when her frustration with someone she loves starts to leak sympathy. When she is gone, that cascade of cellular data is all you have. Each neuron Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 51. Perlman, The Street Sweeper, p. 529.

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holds some pixel, some datum, and if even one is lost, the sequence is interrupted. Then you have started to forget.23

Strikingly in a novel concerned with disturbing political and historical topics – the Holocaust and African American history – this quote centres on recalling the memory of an individual. It does so in order to highlight how the practice of remembrance is vital for the inter-subjectivity of family and private life. This quote refers back to William Lamont remembering and retelling what Henryk Mandelbrot had told him about the murder of European Jews in the Nazi genocide. Lamont leaves ‘nothing out’. As the quotation above makes clear, Lamont’s act or remembrance depends on the frequent activation of neurons without which memory could not function. Here the neurological and the socio-cultural truly meet. One cannot work without the other. For there to be neurological energy, we require the affective as well as intellectual commitment to remember someone or something else. The engagement with and the remembrance of someone who is different from oneself may be an undertaking fraught with risk. Perlman’s The Street Sweeper makes a strong case for courting this risk. As he points out in the ‘the author’s note’: In the writing of this book I was conscious of the possibility of causing offence by employing the idioms of cultures other than my own. It is my hope that no offence has been caused. On reflection, I think this possibility, in a general sense, is a risk more or less inherent in writing about anyone other than oneself.24

By establishing relationships with others, literature stretches the acceptance level of our nervous system. It is our nervous system rather than our immune system that is currently in dire need of diagnosis and therapy. We live in an age of panic, governed by fear of private and national bankruptcies and the associated collapse of our economic system. This panic about medical – obesity, depression and global epidemics – social, economic, ecological and other forms of collapse has been figuratively and literally prefigured in the collapse of the two towers of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. The media does not tire of re-airing images of such collapse. As Mitchell has argued, terror works via such images that trigger panic, debilitating not our immune but our nervous system: Perlman, The Street Sweeper, p. 529. Perlman, The Street Sweeper, p. 545.

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In short, the attack was not immediately on the immune system, but on the nervous system. And it was carried out by a fabricated, produced image, an ‘impression’ or ‘spectacle’ staged for the world’s cameras by the terrorists, exploited by a political fraction to declare an indefinite state of emergency, of exemption – that is, of immunity – from all the normal niceties of civil liberties and international law, not to mention, from all the legitimate, well-established institutions of its own immune and nervous systems, in the form of its own intelligence services, diplomatic and military experts, and the work of scholars who actually know something about the nature of the threat.25

An attack on the public’s nervous system produces nervousness and panic about those who attack and who are figuratively or metaphorically associated with the attackers (Middle Easterners, Arabs, Saddam Hussein, Muslims and so forth). Mitchell sees in the production of panic the causes of sociopolitical autoimmunity: ‘It is the “nervousness” of the nervous system, then, that is producing the ‘autoimmunity’ of the immune system.’26 Literature works against such conflation of the other with paranoid hallucination of evil and destruction. It does so by crossing boundaries between the self and the other by making us experience our shared vulnerability while safely residing at a remove from reality – a position where we can take such panicreducing risks that Perlman refers to at the end of his ‘author’s note’ to The Street Sweeper. To help alleviate present harm, injustice and violence we have to call upon literature’s energy through which we can recall the sufferings and experiences of others. One of the provocative points of Perlman’s novel is to establish a parallel between the African American experience and that of European Jews. Different geographies, different times and different people are interconnected rather than opposed with each other. The recall of memory establishes these interconnections in the present.

Capitalism’s abolition of time in space or memory’s reason d’être: Walter Benjamin and W. G. Sebald The narrator of Imre Kertész’s Kaddish for Child Unborn is a Holocaust survivor who – similar to Henryk Mandelbrot – insists on contemporary society’s obligation to not only recall but also explain the horrific and Mitchell, Cloning Terror, p. 52. Mitchell, Cloning Terror, p. 52.

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yet smooth working operations of the Holocaust. The past is never only past: […] the only facts that cannot be explained are those that don’t or didn’t exist. However, I most likely continued my train of thought, Auschwitz did exist, or, rather, does exist, and can, therefore, be explained; what could not be explained is that no Auschwitz ever existed, that is to say, one can’t find an explanation for the possibility that Auschwitz didn’t exist, hadn’t occurred, that the state of facts labeled Auschwitz hadn’t been the materialization of a Weltgeist […].27

With these words the narrator of Kertész’s Kaddish for a Child not Born reflects on the disturbing historical and metaphysical affiliation between Auschwitz and Hegel’s philosophy of history. Interpreting Hegel’s famous equation of the real/historical and the rational, the narrative voice of Kertész’s Kaddish for a Child Not Born puts the Nazi genocide squarely within the context of the historical realization of Hegel’s World Spirit. In a related but different manner, W. G. Sebald’s genre-crossing writings reflect upon the disconcerting concordances between the rationality of modernity and the modern phenomena of colonialism and genocide. Given the bleak subject matter, Eagleton has recently wondered as to why Sebald enjoys such critical and popular acclaim: ‘W. G. Sebald is one of the most stunningly accomplished of all English-language writers (sic.), and as such the subject of remarkably little negative criticism; but one might wonder even so whether his unremittingly bleak portrayal of modern history is not seriously one-sided.’28 It is due to the enormous success of Sebald’s work in the English-speaking world that Eagleton takes him to be an Englishlanguage writer. In fact, Sebald’s novels and essays have been translated from the German. In translation they seem to have become part of the modern English canon. This is surprising not only in the light of the language barrier but also regarding the bleak views – as noted by Eagleton – they seem to put forth. Eagleton may call it too negative; nonetheless, Kertész’s and Sebald’s respective critiques of modern rationality are not necessarily irrational. On the contrary, a critical working through of the darker site and sight of the Enlightenment is part of an enlightening project. This project is generally associated with the work of Walter Benjamin and with the Frankfurt School in general. Imre Kertész, Kaddish for a Child Not Born, trans. Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), p. 28. Eagleton, The Event of Literature, p. 127.

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Against this background it is not surprising that critics have so far focused their attention on how Sebald has creatively reworked Walter Benjamin’s writings on architecture, photography29 and natural history in his novels and essays. In this way, Eric L. Santner has recently analysed how the link between Benjamin and Austerlitz, and more specifically between Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Austerlitz’s own monumental work of architectural and cultural history, is sealed by the connection Austerlitz finally acknowledges between his research and the forces of political violence that would destroy his sense of home and of belonging (the very forces that of course, pushed Benjamin to suicide).30

Austerlitz, the main protagonist of Sebald’s eponymous novel, is indeed modelled on the German Jewish writer Benjamin and, as Santner points out, both are fascinated by the architecture of nineteenth-century Europe – Paris in particular, which is the focus of Benjamin’s Arcade Project – and both see in the buildings of the bourgeois epoch the foreboding of the unprecedented violence that was to come in the twentieth century. It is this violence that causes Austerlitz homelessness and Benjamin’s suicide during his attempted escape from the Nazis on the French-Spanish border. Both Sebald’s Austerlitz and the cultural critic Walter Benjamin see in capitalism a religion of despair. In his 1921 aphoristic essay ‘Capitalism as religion’ Benjamin radicalizes Max Weber’s thesis, according to which the bourgeoisie has emerged from a Protestant work ethic. Benjamin does so by arguing that capitalist economic practices are in fact, rather than simply developing from, the religious ceremonies of Christianity after the reformation: ‘The Christianity of the Reformation did not favor the growth of capitalism; instead it transformed itself into capitalism.’31 Benjamin makes clear that this religious formation is unprecedented, because it lacks any Amir Eshel establishes a direct correspondence between Sebald’s use of photographs and what Benjamin understands by ‘dialectics at a standstill’ as follows:

29

Sebald’s photographic images are thus hardly an artful ornament to textual images, hardly a means to enhance aesthetic pleasure, but rather ‘genuine images’ in Walter Benjamin’s sense, devices that relate the reader to what is and will remain absent – the events and the protagonists of the past. Sebald’s photos are indeed Benjaminian images, ‘dialectics at a standstill,’ or, in Benjamin’s words: ‘what comes together in the flash with the now to form a constellation.’

Eshel, Against the Power of Time: The Poetics of Suspension in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. In: New German Critique 88 (Winter 2003), pp. 71–96, p. 94. 30 Santner, On Creaturely Life. Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 54. 31 Benjamin, ‘Capitalism as Religion’, trans. Rodeney Livingstone in Benjamin, Selected Writings. Vol. 1, pp. 289–290, p. 290.

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form of transcendence that could offer a way out of immanent despair and destruction: Capitalism is entirely without precedent, in that it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction. It is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation. God’s transcendence is at an end. But he is not dead; he has been incorporated into human existence.32

Significantly, Sebald’s Austerlitz is ‘seized by a sense of being beyond the profane, in a cathedral consecrated to international traffic and trade’33 when he steps into the entrance hall of Lucerne’s nineteenth-century railway station. Austerlitz sees in the architecture of the Antwerp station ‘a logical stylistic approach to the new epoch’,34 which Benjamin has described as being governed by the unprecedented religion of capitalism. Here he encounters the divinities of trade and transport and so he argues that it is only fitting that ‘in the Antwerp Station the elevated level from which the gods looked down on visitors on the Roman Pantheon should display, in hierarchical order, the deities of the nineteenth century – mining, industry, transport, trade and capital’.35 According to both Austerlitz and Benjamin, this religion of capitalism celebrates ‘the principle of capital accumulation’.36 Austerlitz, however, introduces an aggravating element into what Benjamin has previously analysed as capitalism’s religion: ‘time, said Austerlitz, represented by the hands and dial of the clock, reigns supreme among these emblems’37 of capital accumulation. Why is time an aggravating factor in the despair that Benjamin first detected in the religion of capitalism? First of all time introduces the element of speed: it increases the process of destruction. There is, however, another aspect to Austerlitz’s focus on temporality. In his account the modern synchronization and accompanied acceleration of time not only affect an obvious temporal dimension, but also have major implications for our relationship to space. The synchronization of the railway timetables towards the middle of the nineteenth century increases not only the speed of travel but also the degree of distance that separates people from each other geographically: ‘It was only Benjamin, ‘Capitalism as Religion’, p. 289. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 12. 34 Sebald, Austerlitz. 35 Sebald, Austerlitz, pp. 12–13. 36 Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 13. 37 Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 13. 32 33

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by following the course time prescribed that we could hasten through the gigantic spaces separating us from each other.’38 Sebald’s work of memory counteracts the distancing devices that are part of the economic destruction of human interdependence. Quick travel through extended space does not enhance human and societal interconnections. On the contrary, rapid means of transportation paradoxically confines the traveller to what is familiar: ‘And indeed, said Austerlitz after a while, to this day there is something illusionistic and illusory about the relationship between time and space as we experience it in travelling, which is why whenever we come home from elsewhere we never feel quite sure if we have really been abroad.’39 Strangely enough, the speedy bridging of huge distances precludes rather than facilitates the experience of our shared vulnerability. As this book has shown, it is an experience we discover in literary and other artistic forms of intersubjectivity and memory – however bleak those memories may be. Indeed the bleaker they are, the more likely it is that we want to forget – all of this speaks for the social validity of Perlman’s, Littell’s and Sebald’s literary and neuroscientific encounter of others across the borders of time and space. The increasing speed of travel enhances rather than diminishes the shock of despair that overwhelms isolated individuals over the course of processes of decay and entropy, because these processes are marked and constituted precisely by the rapid movement of time. J. J. Long has shown how Sebald’s description of history ‘is characterized by a negative teleology [i.e. what characterizes the Kertesz quote above] in which entropy, both literal and metaphorical, results in the decline of cultures, the diasporic scattering of peoples, environmental destruction, and the inexorable decay of matter’.40 This pervasiveness of a negative teleology in Sebald’s work contrasts with a weak messianism that subtends Benjamin’s writing and thought, even in passages where he seems to be full of despair. Moreover, Benjamin questions whether we can adequately understand history in terms of teleology: his notion of the modern radically breaks with teleological conceptions of history and time. The presence of messianism in Benjamin’s thought indicates that he has not completely abandoned a concern for the construction of a better future. This messianic element is, however, part of an unpredictable realization. It manifests itself in what Benjamin understands by the term ‘awakening’. The awakening breaks with historical continuity: it is an interruption. Benjamin’s conception of interruption is significant because it offers an alternative to teleological thought. If one Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 14. Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 14. 40 Long: History, Narrative, and Photography in W. G. Sebald Die Ausgewanderten. In Modern Language Review 98:1 (January 2003), 117–137. (p. 137) 38 39

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can speak of teleology in Benjamin’s work then it is a teleology that outdoes itself: it does not know what it is truly about; one simply cannot force or even foresee the coming of the Messiah. The presence of messianism in Benjamin’s writing and thought endows it with a certain trust in a better future that is conspicuous by its absence in Sebald’s entropic view of history. Hence, it is not surprising that despite the despair that characterizes much of Benjamin’s work,41 Sebald has struck some critics as far more despairing than his predecessor Benjamin.42 As Santner has put it, ‘for Benjamin the saturnine gaze on the detritus of the capitalist universe is sustained by a vision of political acts that would interrupt the course of history (understood as that of capitalist globalization), whereas for Sebald it remains unclear if there is any space left for such a vision’.43 It seems Sebald represents what a sociologist à la Max Weber would call the ideal type of literature’s negative and non-scientific irrationality. For a detailed discussion of the despair implicit in what I have called Benjamin’s transcendental messianism see Mack, German Idealism and the Jew. The Inner AntiSemitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 155–167. 42 In this way Graham Jackmann writes: 41

Sebald’s melancholy understanding of history permits not even the faint messianic hope which Benjamin sought to maintain in face of the apparent triumph of Fascism; he appears, however, to share with Benjamin the view that the dead have a claim upon the living, not perhaps for a ‘Rettung’ in Benjamin’s sense, but at least that they should be remembered and that some kind of memorial be raised in their memory.

Jackmann: ‘Gebranntes Kind?’ W. G. Sebald’s ‘Metaphysik der Geschichte’. In: German Life and Letters 57:4 (October 2004), pp. 456–471, p. 468. In a related manner, Amir Eshel has criticized Sebald propounding a ‘questionable teleology’: ‘Like his pendantic critique of the new Paris Bibliothèque Nationale and other elements of the book, Sebald’s kulturkritische notions amount to a questionable teleology in which modernity is all too clearly configured as necessarily leading to Theresienstadt.’ Eshel. Against the Power of Time, p. 88. Eshel does, however, refrain from accusing Sebald of either apocalyptic outlook or from falling prey to necrophilia: ‘Sebald’s work is more concerned with reflecting on life after the catastrophe, with living in the face of destruction, than with death itself.’ Eshel. Against the Power of Time, p. 95. 43 Santner, On Creaturely Life, pp. 61–62. Later on in his book Santner revisits this topic of a form of despair in Sebald’s work that does not allow a space for political action. He questions whether this is really the case: ‘The relevant question with respect to Sebald is whether his way of constructing our historical situation leaves open the possibility of an event, a radical shift of perspective whereby something genuinely new could emerge.’ Santner, On Creaturely Life, p. 133. Santner replies to this question when he argues that there is an ethical stance in Sebald that is capable of inspiring something like hope that might be a crucial prerequisite for political action. Sebald’s ethical stance consists of the bearing witness to the life of his traumatized neighbours: We see, then, that Sebald takes considerable pains to dramatize the complex process of ‘inheriting,’ of taking responsibility for, the various symbolic and ‘proto-symbolic’ transmissions from his various ‘neighbors’. Sebald inscribes himself in this complexity as a crucial locus of ethical action with respect to those whose very way of being – whose ‘angle of inclination’ – bears witness to traumatic histories.

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Polyphony and the discovery of different times within space Sebald’s work consists of a polyphonic texture that commingles different genres and also disciplines. His writing often centres on reflections and events that reveal the coexistence of seemingly mutually exclusive opposites. In this context, Derrida’s recent discussion of autoimmunity is pertinent to a better understanding of polyphony in Sebald’s work. According to Derrida, the autoimmune consists not only in harming or ruining oneself, indeed in destroying one’s own protections, and in doing so oneself, committing suicide or threatening to do so, but more seriously still, and through this, in threatening the I [moi] or the self [soi], the ego or the autos, ipseity itself, compromising the immunity of the auto itself: it consists not only in compromising the self, but the autos – and thus ipseity.44

Polyphony compromises the autonomy, the presumed freestanding existence of various entities, such as the speed of travel, which Sebald’s Austerlitz links to its supposed opposite: to spatial isolation. Austerlitz is fascinated by the destructive aspects of presumably productive and life-enhancing inventions. He focuses his critical gaze on various double binds, on the polyphony of voices, which, while being opposed to each other, nevertheless form a cohesive unity. In this way the speed of modern Sebald, On Creaturely Life, p. 166. In one of his essays ‘Constructs of Mourning. Günter Grass and Wolfgang Hildesheimer’, Sebald indeed emphasizes that the way out of the German inability to mourn the dead is the empathy or rather identification with the victims: As a result, in most literary works of the 1950s, which are quite often decked out with a love story in which a good German man meets a Polish or Jewish girl, the incriminating past is ‘reappraised’ sentimentally rather than emotionally, and simultaneously the author extensively and successfully avoids – as the Mitscherlichs note in the case history appended to their essay – saying any more about the victims of the Fascist system. If in individual psychological cases this course of action serves ‘to keep signs of affection that are in short supply anyway within the pattern of family roles,’ then in literature it maintains traditional narrative forms which could not convey an authentic attempt to mourn by identifying with real victims.

Sebald, Campo Santo, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Penguin, 2006), pp. 106–107. For a critique of Sebald’s identification with the victims on account of Sebald’s German ethnicity (and thus his genetic as well as cultural affiliation with the perpetrators and not with the victims) and for a critique of Sebald’s universalist perspective see Brad Prager’s The Good German as Narrator. Sebald and the Risks of Holocaust Writing. In: New German Critique 96 (Fall 2005), pp. 75–102. 44 Derrida, Rogues. Two Essays on Reason trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michel Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 45.

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travel purports to facilitate reunions between separate people and yet, as Austerlitz’s reflections on the synchronization and acceleration of time show, it only increases a sense of isolation. Without explicitly pre-announcing the precise development of his argument, Austerlitz’s Benjaminian discussion of the religion of capitalism takes his train of thought further to an analysis of the self-destructive forces of modern inventions (like the synchronization of time). Meanwhile the narrator is struck by ‘the way in which, in his [i.e. Austerlitz’s] mind, the passing on of his [i.e. Austerlitz’s] knowledge seemed to become a gradual approach to a kind of historical metaphysics, bringing the remembered events back to life’45 – and indeed Austerlitz moves back in history while further developing his critique of capitalism in particular and modernity in general. The topic of an increase of isolation through the synchronization and accompanied acceleration of time eventuates in a discussion of ‘star shaped fortresses which were being built and improved everywhere during the eighteenth century’.46 In this context it is worth drawing attention to an eighteenth-century English novel in which fortifications in fact play a prominent role: in Lawrence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy uncle Toby gives an extensive account of how the building of fortifications has progressed in recent times to which Tristram Shandy’s father replies: ‘but I wish the whole science of fortifications, with all its inventors, at the devil; it is has been the death of thousands, – and it will be mine, in the end. – I would not, brother Toby, have my brains so full of saps, mines, blinds, gabions, palisadoes, ravelins, half-moons, and such trumpery, to be proprietor of Namur, and all the towns in Flanders with it’.47 Austerlitz and the narrator of the titular novel will indeed focus their respective discussions on fortress Breendonk in Flanders. The quote from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy in a light-hearted manner centres on the dark side of fortifications: on how they do not ward off but on the contrary invite destruction on a mass scale. This is a prominent theme in Sebald’s Austerlitz. Sterne’s novel has much else in common with Sebald’s literary project: the Tristram of Tristram Shandy denotes the melancholy that pervades the various modes and moods of Sebald’s way of writing and this eighteenthcentury text incorporates a variety of visual materials that anticipate, as J. J. Long has recently put it, ‘the ontological hide and seek that Sebald plays with Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 14. Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 19. 47 Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. Gentleman, ed. by Graham Petrie with an introduction by Christopher Ricks (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 130. 45 46

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its readers’.48 This brief discussion of Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy prepares for analysis of warfare, immunity as well as autoimmunity, which the image of the fortification epitomizes in Sebald’s work. In contrast to Sterne’s satirical novel, the narrator of Sebald’s prose works identifies with both the dead and the living. Sebald’s narrators turn borders porous. In The Rings of Saturn the narrative voice almost assumes the life world of the English poet Michael Hamburger who left Germany to escape persecution when he was a child in the late 1930s. In this way the narrator dwells on his state of puzzlement when confronted with his mutation into the life and world of Michael Hamburger: ‘But why it was that on my first visit to Michael’s house I instantly felt as if I lived or had once lived there, in every respect precisely as he does, I cannot explain.’49 In The Emigrants this identification with the other goes one step further: here it clearly includes the dead. This becomes amply clear in the narrator’s account of his visit to the Jewish cemetery in Bad Kissingen when he recollects how ‘I was touched in a way I knew I could never quite fathom, by the symbol of the writer’s quill on the stone of Frederike Halbleib, who departed on the 28th of March 1912.’50 Once again we are confronted with the inexplicability of such identification, as if it were a miracle of sorts. This empathy with the dead and the victims of history represents the work of mourning, which Sebald misses in his native Germany. The coincidence of empathy and mourning – it is a coincidence that is related to Roland Barthes’s discussion of photography and the experience of loss – comes to the fore in the Bad Kissingen cemetery scene when the narrator first identifies with the hand of the dead and then goes on to be devastated by the death of this same hand: ‘I imagined her pen in my hand, all by herself, bent with bated breath over her work; and now, as I write these lines, it feels as if I had lost her, and as if I could not get over the loss despite the many years that have passed since her departure.’51 Here the imaginative work of identification results in the real experience of loss and memory. Long: Histotory, Narrative, and Photography in W. G. Sebald Die Ausgewanderten, p. 117. Christopher Ricks has analysed the way in which Sterne plays ontological hide and seek with his readers as follows:

48

So Instead of the omniscient, omnipotent narrator humorously deployed by Fielding, Sterne substitutes the vague half-knowledge and frustrated impotence of Tristram. Of course the result is very funny and not all despairing; the book has an unquenchable optimism and vitality, despite the sufferings of Sterne’s own life. But all the same the limits of a novelist’s (and indeed any man’s) knowledge and power are wittily, and resolutely, insisted on.

Ricks: Introduction in Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, pp. 7–28, p. 13. Sebald’s work does of course not necessarily emit an ‘unquenchable optimism and vitality’. 49 Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 183. 50 Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 224. 51 Sebald, The Emigrants, pp. 224–225.

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Sebald’s narrator as well as reader discovers what Roland Barthes has called the punctum. In his analysis of photography – and Sebald’s novels are filled with the reproduction of photographs – Barthes distinguishes between the studium and the punctum. Whereas the studium approach takes the photograph as a document by means of which we can learn something about a given historical period or given cultural or personal formation, the punctum denotes the immediately moving experience of cultural or personal loss. More precisely, Barthes’s notion of the punctum describes the death or the absence of what is documented (which is the subject of the calm and learned approach that characterizes the studium): The photograph is handsome as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die. […] the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she going to die: I shudder like Winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.52

In the introductory section to this chapter, we have seen how, even the highly dubious and cold narrative voice of Littell’s The Kindly Ones stresses the experience of an event (what Barthes calls the punctum) over the historical statement of fact (what Barthes calls the studium). The punctum of literature, of photography and the arts, in general, retrieves the discovery of human interconnectedness in a world that keeps establishing divides or war-like fortifications between different communities. Sebald emphasizes what Barthes calls the punctum when he puts in italics the ‘I’ that cannot get over the loss. Sebald appears to argue that we can only experience a sense of community if we bridge various distances that separate ourselves from others. Similar to the effect of the narrator of Littell’s The Kindly Ones the empathy and sometimes identification with the victims of history in Sebald’s writings disturb rather than assure or calm the reader. What causes this moment of disturbance? It is precisely a certain rational force that crosses the limitations and boundaries imposed on our perception of reality by a common sense approach. Derrida has analysed the rationality that characterizes Sebald’s famous criss-crossing of the divide that separates the dead from the living, that Barthes, Camera Lucinda. Reflections on Photography trans. Richard Howe (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 96.

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differentiates ‘a nation’s literature’ from expatriate writing and that marks the ‘spectral’ and ‘haunted’ quality of his style: ‘It is rational’, Derrida writes, for example, at the very moment of endorsing, developing, perfecting, and determining human rights, to continue to interrogate in a deconstructive fashion all the limits we thought pertained to life, the being of life and the life of being (and this is almost the entire history of philosophy), between the living and the dead, the living present and its spectral others […].53

The narrative of voice of Sebald’s prose works gives an account of various border-crossing activities – both literal as the crossing of national boundaries, which defines his writing as expatriate – residing in England while writing in his native German – and also metaphorical/metaphysical as a crossing of the boundaries that divide the living from the dead. We can better understand the rationalism of Sebald’s avoidance of both meaning and rationalization when we attend to Derrida’s notion of an Enlightenment that is deeply enmeshed in the ‘idea’ of psychoanalysis. Derrida reminds us that ‘we must sometimes, in the name of reason, be suspicious of rationalization’.54 He sees this suspicion of rationalization in Freud’s notion of the unconscious. Derrida links his understanding of ‘the Enlightenment to come’ not to a doctrinal understanding of psychoanalysis as the key to psychological meanings but, on the contrary, to the contradictoriness of the unconscious that resists both meaning and rationalization: ‘the Enlightenment to come would have to enjoin us to reckon with the logic of the unconscious, and so with the idea, and notice I am not saying here the doctrine, arising out of a psychoanalytical revolution’.55 As has been pointed out by several critics, Sebald’s narratives are Freudian in so far as ‘they retrace the past and explore the inescapability of the past in the present’.56 Freud sees this inescapability located in what Derrida understands by the ‘idea’ of an ‘Enlightenment to come:’ namely in the unconscious or more precisely in the workings of dreams. Derrida, Rogues, p. 151. Derrida, Rogues, p. 157. 55 Derrida, Rogues, p. 157. 56 J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead, Introduction. In Long (ed.) W. G. Sebald – A Critical Companion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), pp. 3–14, p. 8. For a detailed discussion of Freud’s influence on Sebald see Maya Barzilai’s: Facing the Past and the Female Spectre in W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants in Long (ed.) W. G. Sebald – A Critical Companion, pp. 203–215 and John Zilcosky’s, Sebald’s Uncanny Travels: The Impossibility of Getting Lost in Long (ed.) W. G. Sebald – A Critical Companion, pp. 1102–1119. 53 54

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Via dreams we may scientifically determine what otherwise escapes our grasp of reality. Dreams yield the knowledge of repressed or unwanted memories. Dreams in fact proffer the material with which the new scientist and new enlightener Freud debunks the concept of the ‘irrational’. The supposed irrationality of dreams confirms the illusory claim advanced by the old scientists about reason’s autonomous independence from nature’s unsavoury aspects. Freud’s new science, in contrast, sees dreams as yielding memory traces of what has been repressed by consciousness. Whereas the old science operating along the lines of Kant’s old Enlightenment (i.e. the categorical imperative) attempts to do without an analysis of dreams, Freud’s new science examines their truth content.57 The move from Kant to Freud accompanies the transformation of a Kantian de-ontologized ethics (of duty and norms) to a virtue ethics concerned with qualitative experiences (rather than statistical surveys) and values. Freud’s notion of the ‘old science’ describes conscious attempts to resist a psychoanalytical representation of a traumatic past. The work of dreams brings remote and unsavoury realities to the surface in a surreal manner – similar to the way in which the narrator of Littell’s Kindly Ones confronts the reader with the ethical and emotive details of mass murder (Barthe’s punctum). Indeed, Freud treats dreams as memories of that which consciousness does not want to remember. As he points out in his case study of the wolf-man (1914/1918), ‘to dream is nothing else but to remember, even though under the conditions of nightlife and dream-formation’.58 Sebald’s literary works are dreamlike in a Freudian sense, because they focus on the ineluctable return of an unsavoury, traumatic past (war and the Nazi genocide) of which the narrator cannot make sense. As we have seen in the respective quotations from The Rings of Saturn and from The Emigrants, the narrator cannot explain his dreamlike experience of a border-crossing process of identification: it is not a meaningful but an utterly inexplicable occurrence through which the past haunts the present. This return of a violent or deadly past confounds structures of meaning. It puts our contemporary coordination of sense and structure into question: the past is no longer past; it has invaded the present. Sebald’s narratives reverse the entropy of both time and space, which Austerlitz criticizes in capitalism, in particular, and in modernity, in general, at the beginning of the eponymous novel. For a detailed discussion of Freud’s critique of the old Enlightenment see Mack’s German Idealism and the Jew, pp. 136–154. 58 ‘Träumen ist ja auch ein Erinnern, wenn auch unter den Bedingungen der Nachtzeit und der Traumbildung.’ Freud, Studienausgabe, Vol. 8 ed. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Starchy (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1969), p. 169. 57

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Similar to the distancing devices in Littell’s The Kindly Ones moments of empathy and identification with the dead in Sebald’s work establish not closeness but distance to reassuring structures by which the present attempts to make sense of a traumatic past. Sebald’s novels do not attempt to endow genocidal killings and their traumatic aftermath with what could be called rational explanations (Barthe’s studium), which might be capable of generating a sense of the meaningful. This reluctance to offer the ambient of comfort derived from explanations that make sense is, however, not tantamount to an espousal of irrationalism. On the contrary, Sebald is at pains to distance his work from what he sees as the irrationalism implicit in literary works that impose order and meaning on the meaninglessness and radical contingency of catastrophic events. A case in point is his critique of Hermann Kasak’s ‘meaningful’ quasi-rational, quasi-philosophical depiction of World War II. Kasak’s quasi-philosophical style and his zeal to make sense of the senseless ‘show with alarming clarity the degree to which philosophical speculation bound to the style of the time subverts its good intentions even in the attempt of synthesis’.59 This imposition of reason unto what resists any rationalization amounts to the aesthetic transfiguration of violence, which Benjamin has famously criticized in his essay on Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Here reason and myth converge and Sebald is therefore not surprised to see how the quasi-philosophical code of Kasak’s writing ‘accidentally happened to coincide with Fascist style and diction’.60 Countering the fascist attempt to render horror and destruction as pleasing to both reason (i.e. giving a ‘rational’ quasi-philosophical explanation as to why it has happened) and the senses (transfiguring it aesthetically), Sebald refers to Elias Canetti’s attempt at presenting trauma and horrific suffering in a truthful report-like manner: In such conditions [i.e. of historical catastrophes] writing becomes an imperative that dispenses with artifice in the interest of truth, and turns to a ‘dispassionate kind of speech’, reporting impersonally as if describing ‘a terrible event from some prehistoric time’. In an essay he wrote on the diary of Dr Hachiya from Hiroshima, Elias Canetti asks what it means to survive such a vast catastrophe, and says that the answer can be gauged only from a text which, like Hachiya’s observations, is notable for its precision and responsibility. ‘If there were any point,’ writes Canetti, ‘in wondering what form of literature is essential to a thinking, seeing human being today, then it is this.’ The ideal of truth contained in the Sebald, Campo Santo, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 74–75. Sebald, Campo Santo, p. 75.

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form of an entirely unpretentious report proves to be the irreducible foundation of all literary effort.61

This passage shows that Sebald sees in Canetti’s literary project an exemplary way of writing. It is a style of writing that deals with modern catastrophes as if they were ‘from some prehistoric time’. This approach presupposes distance and the ability to face the meaningless without the comfort of rational and aesthetic devices that could impose an accessible structure onto the radical contingency of traumatic events. Like Sebald, Canetti does not want to give an account of fascism as a phenomenon of the twentieth century, as this would only explain how fascism fits into the historical context of its time. This would confine genocidal violence to the past and would leave the present untouched by it. Similar to Sebald’s Austerlitz, Canetti goes back in time to grasp the roots of violence and to understand the contemporary ramifications of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of genocide and colonialism. Rather than relativizing fascism in general, and Nazism in particular, by saying that it could have happened only at the time it happened, Sebald sets out to show that the roots of colonial and genocidal violence lie in certain forms of behaviour of the past as well as of the present. He does so by dint of his quasi-documentary approach towards literature, which significantly includes the visual language of photographs. In different but related ways, Perlman, Sebald and Littell confront us with an account of fascism as something that still lives with us, which indeed forms part of our daily life. As Klaus Theweleit has shown, Littell presents the Nazi genocide not as being past and only of historical value. His disturbing narrator speaks not as a monster cut off from the rest of humanity. Here Barthes’s studium turns into a punctum: Max Aue is, however, not the ‘middling hero’ of the historical novel. He is, rather than any man with qualities, an artistic monstrosity, stretched to the most improbable extreme. He is comprised in the claim that he is not a barbarian but forever a human being. Man himself is what is monstrous.62

Littell, Perlman and Sebald blur the distinction between a traumatic/ autoimmune past and a safe/immune present. In what follows, I will discuss how Sebald confronts the reader with the painful knowledge of modernity’s self-destruction as well as with the selfdestructive aspects of his own production of literature. Derrida’s recent work Sebald, Campo Santo, p. 86. Theweleit, ‘On the German Reaction to Jonathan Littell’s Les bienveillantes’, trans. Timothy Nunan, New German Critique (Winter 2009), pp. 21–34 (p. 34).

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on self-destruction as autoimmunity sheds light on the self-criticism implicit in Sebald’s writing about the lethal effects of both fortifications and ‘writing’.

Conclusion: Fortifications and autoimmunity or the loss of memory The second section of this chapter has focused on how Austerlitz’s Benjaminian critique of the religion of capitalism eventuates in an analysis of the destruction that is the unwanted effect of modern inventions such as the synchronization and compression of time into space or the building of fortifications and fortified cities. In the closing section, I will return to Austerlitz and to his concern with the self-destructive fate of the fortified city. Austerlitz argues that with the construction of fortifications in the eighteenth century it had been forgotten that the largest fortification will naturally attract the largest enemy forces, and that the more you entrench yourself the more you must remain on the defensive, so that in the end you might find yourself in a place fortified in every possible way, watching helplessly while the enemy troops, moving on to their own choice of terrain elsewhere, simply ignored their adversaries’ fortresses, which had become positive arsenals of weaponry bristling with cannons and overcrowded with men.63

Loss of memory accompanies the building of fortification. Hence the accumulation of weaponry and troops is as much defensive as it is destructive, because the ‘frequent result, said Austerlitz, of resorting to measures of fortification marked in general by a tendency towards paranoid elaboration was that you drew attention to your weakest point, practically inviting the enemy to attack it’.64 In other words, the image of the fortified city reveals the destruction of military defence as nothing else but self-destruction. The French term cordon sanitaire for ‘fortification’ evokes medical associations (sanitaire) and establishes a link between public health and military defence. Significantly, Derrida describes immunity as both ‘public health and military security’.65 Derrida’s as well as Austerlitz’s point is of course to show the autoimmunity of immunity. Indeed Sebald himself discusses the Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 19. Sebald, Austerlitz, pp. 19–20. Derrida, Rogues, p. 155.

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task of the writer as being governed by the process of autoimmunity. In his introduction to the essay collection Logis in einem Landhaus he characterizes writing as self-destructive addiction66 and The Emigrants close with a literary self-destruction of sorts. The narrator’s gaze itself becomes a subject of a piercing, quasi-destructive gaze. Three women in a photo (which is not shown to us in the The Emigrants) depicting life in a Nazi concentration camp look at the narrator whose literary projects seem to be questioned by their gaze: […] but I sense that all three of them are looking across at me, since I am standing at the spot where Genewein the accountant stood with his camera. The woman in the middle is blonde and has the air of a bride about her. The weaver to her left has inclined her head a little to one side, whilst the woman on the right is looking at me with so steady and relentless a gaze that I cannot meet it for long. I wonder what the three women’s names were – Roza, Luisa and Lea, or Nona, Decuma and Morta, the daughters of the night, with spindle, scissor and thread.67

This is one of the most problematic passages in Sebald’s works and it seems as if the narrator here sets out to problematize his act of storytelling, because this passage after all thematizes the illegitimacy of authorship. The end of The Emigrants thus turns autoimmunitary, it destroys the narrator’s authorial credentials. Critics have read this passage as Sebald’s admission of failure.68 The remapping of culture and science as performed in this book contributes to another reading of literature’s seemingly non-rational, non-scientific, in Sebald writes that in the time that separates Rousseau from Robert Walser nothing has diminished the writer’s addiction to his self-destructive task:

66

Beinah über zweihundert Jahre spannt sich der Bogen, und man kann sehen, daß sich im Verlauf dieser langen Zeit nicht viel geändert hat an jener sonderbaren Verhaltenstörung, die jedes Gefühl in einen Buchstaben verwandeln muß und mit erstaunlicher Präzision vorbeizielt am Leben. […] Es schein kein Kraut gewachsen gegen das Laster der Schriftstellerei; […].

Sebald, Logis in einem Landhaus. Über Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter Hebel, Robert Walser und andere (Munich: Hanser, 1998), pp. 5–6. 67 Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 237. 68 As Julia Hell has put it: Sebald’s Emigrants thus ends with a sudden reversal, the sudden return of the Medusa: three possible victims of the Holocaust looking at the narrator. The text then concludes with a narrator writing his text under a potentially deadly gaze. The issue of a voyeuristic gaze thus takes on a different significance in the context of Jewish victims, or survivors. What really is at stake in this scene of a disrupted voyeuristic gaze? The question this passage poses is: who has the right to tell the story of the dead?

Hell: Eyes Wide Shut: German Post-Holocaust Authorship. In New German Critique 88 (Winter 2003), pp. 9–36, 34–35.

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short, ‘negative’ aspect. Reading Sebald in the light of this book’s discussion of economics, ethics and medicine permits us to see his work under the sign of a certain autoimmunity, which Derrida has recently discussed not necessarily in terms of self-defeat but as a form of vital self-criticism. According to Derrida, the analysis of autoimmunitary processes is not destructive of either the self or the other. On the contrary, they enable the unbinding of defence structures, be they military, intellectual or economic: In this regard, autoimmunity is not an absolute evil. It enables an exposure to the other, to what and to who comes – which means that it must remain incalculable. Without autoimmunity, with absolute immunity, nothing would ever happen or arrive; we would no longer wait, await, or expect, no longer expect one another, or expect any event.69

Austerlitz’s critical elaboration on the autoimmunity of fortifications and Sebald’s concern with the autoimmunity of his own literary work are thus not irrational or aggressive or nihilistic. On the contrary, they open up another view that questions the received wisdom of common sense perceptions and thus undermine the destruction perpetrated under the status quo. That Sebald does not stop short at questioning the status quo of his own writing might indicate not so much self-defeat but the measure of his ‘exposure to the other’. Sebald’s exposure to the other is intricately bound up with the experience of both geographical border crossing and the movement between borders that separate the present from the past (the work of memory). In a related but different way, Littell, Perlman, Sebald and many other modernist and contemporary writers have crossed national and cultural borders. There is a sense in which the image of the fortified city that wreaks destruction upon itself evokes literature as a border-crossing alternative. The border-crossing writer has left his or her country/city and finds a home in what is supposed to be ‘strange’ whereas those who fortify themselves against the onslaught of ‘the strangers’ in actual fact destroy not only those whom they consider strange but also themselves. Literature’s ethics of resilience contributes to scientific rationality and this most strikingly at those points where it appears to be irrational. The activity of literature makes us resist economic segregations and medical immunizations. Segregations and immunizations cause the destruction of those from whom we are segregated but through these borderenforcing acts they also bring about the death of our self, which is integral to and continuous with the life of others. Derrida, Rogues, p. 152.

69

Index Adorno, Theodor 199 aesthetics 20, 21, 32, 56, 64, 99, 122, 161, 204 affect 11, 12, 14, 19, 20, 28, 30, 56, 78, 84, 86, 179, 181 Agamben, Giorgio 11, 12, 48, 49, 50, 51, 100, 108–11, 130, 149 The Kingdom and Glory 48, 50, 51, 108, 109, 130 The Signature of all Things 100 Anderson, Benedict 38 anti-Semitism 2, 64, 77, 95, 96–98, 105, 163, 167, 217 Arendt, Hannah 13, 27, 59–63, 116, 175, 202 Eichmann in Jerusalem 60, 61, 63 Essays in Understanding 60 The Human Condition 175 Aristotle 71, 73, 86, 92, 101, 203 Arnold, Matthew 22, 38 Augustine Concerning the City of God against the Pagans 158, 159, 161 Confessions 134, 135, 158 corporeal delay, 138, 146, 157, 158, 159, 160 death, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138 eternal goodness, 157, 166 ethics, 161, 162, 165 immortality, 147, 148, 158, 166, 173, 175 lesser evil 2 sin, 134, 159 transcendental predestination, 171, 173 Barthes, Roland Camera Lucinda 221 distinction between studium and punctum 221

photography and the experience of loss 220 beauty 59, 148, 161, 162, 173, 204 Benjamin, Walter 98, 103, 108, 182, 202, 212–24 Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 224 Bergson, Henri 6 bioengineering 161, 173, 175 biomedicine 17, 55, 151, 160, 173, 201 biopower 149, 150, 151 biopolitics benevolence 148 ethics 2 longevity 133–34, 148 management of life 51, 148 neoliberalism 149 normativity and normative violence 17, 55, 150 panic 134 promise of perfection 147 Blumenberg Hans 108, 110 Butler Judith 20, 52, 53, 54, 107, 108, 110, 120, 131, 150, 187, 194, 204 ‘Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversion’ 120, 150 ‘Desire, Rhetoric and Recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit’ 52 Frames of War 205 Giving an Account of Onseself 110, 131 Precarious Life 107, 187, 194 ‘Variations on Sex and Gender’ 55 Camus, Albert 87 capitalism free-market 49, 197 global 45, 180 immortality 175, 176

230

Index

Keynesianism 33 neoliberal 142, 144, 149, 186 nineteenth-century 176, 177 religion 214, 215, 219, 226 scientific knowledge 35 technology 33, 36 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 38 cinema 4, 5, 6, 7, 14, 71 Clune, Michael W. 5, 112, 113 conatus 52–56, 72, 73, 103, 204 consumerism 179, 197 Crutzen Paul 59

The March 155, 156 The Waterworks 153, 154, 155 Dreyfus 99, 100, 101

Damasio, Antonio 5, 6n. 9 Darwin, Charles 69, 143, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 176 Deleuze, Giles cinema 6, 7, 14, 71 Difference and Repetition 65, 66, 67, 70, 71, 72 ethics 55, 56, mimesis 7, 73 neuroscience 6, 7 on Freud 70, 71 on Nietzsche 67, 68, 69, 72 on Spinoza 64–65, 72 philosophy of difference 67 philosophy of repetitions 7, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71 posthumanism 65, 67 representation 66, 72 simulucra 67, 73 Spinoza and Practical Philosophy 55, 56 Derrida, Jacques 56, 72, 73, 120, 195, 196, 201, 218, 221, 222, 225, 226, 228 Descartes, René 54, 55, 75, 76 Doctorow, Edgar Lawrence 1, 17, 139, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 153–57, 173, 175 Jack London, Hemingway and the Constitution 177, 178 Ragtime 143, 144, 145

flat mimesis 84, 85 formalism 203 Foucault, Michel 30, 100, 109, 110, 120 Freud, Sigmund 43, 55, 70, 71, 114, 115, 116, 138, 222, 223

Eagleton, Terry 29, 202, 203, 206, 209, 213 economy 49, 68, 149, 155, 180, 182, 186, 196, 197 Eliot, George 25 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 86 Enlightenment, The 32, 190, 199, 213, 222, 223

Galileo 67, 68, 69 games fort-da 114 language 31 mental 206 representation 65 Ghosh, Amitav 16, 39–44 works Incendiary Circumstances 39, 40, 41 Sea of Poppies 41, 44, 45 The Shadow Lines 42, 43 ghostly Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ 12 in Agamben’s The Signature of all Things 100 in Hamlet 90–91, 92, 93 in Malamud’s The Fixer 97 Spinoza as the ghost of modernity 97 in The Tempest 91 Gilman, Sander 99, 134, 135, 147, 148, 157, 161 Franz Kafka, The Jewish Patient 99

Index Making the Body Beautiful 161, Obesity 134, 148, 157, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 39, 122 Habermas, Jürgen 109, 110 Harvey, David 27–9, 35, 36, 141, 142, 176, 177, 178, 190 A Brief History of Neoliberalism 29, 141, 142, 143, 177, 178, 190 The Condition of Postmodernity 35, The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism 28, 36, 176 Hegel, George Friedrich 32, 40, 52, 78, 112, 213 Heidegger, Martin 40, 69, 72, 73, 87 hermeneutics 203 hierarchy in biopower 150 in Spinoza 65, 76 in writing 127 of values 194 theological 65, 135, 198 history according to Aristotle 92 Agamben’s notion of repetition in 100, 109 African-American 211 Australian 184 Benjamin 103, 216, 217 Derrida 222 Eichmann 116 Harvey 36 Holocaust 116 Jewish 101, 116 Hegel’s philosophy of 213 in Malamud 84, 96, 98, 101, 102, 104 in Plath 173 in Roth 167 in Russian society 102 Lang’s literary philosophy of 80 neoliberal 189 of medicine 149 religion 190 Sebald 216, 217

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Hölderlin, Friedrich 121 Homer 143–4 Horace 170 Hughes, Ted 128–9, 133, 145 idealism Deleuze 67 German 32, 33 Kantian and post-Kantian 69 transcendental 73 ideology 17, 111 class superiority 190 in Doctorow 176 inevitability of 193, 194 of market economy 196, 198 of neoliberal economic praxis 187, 189, 193, 194 identity 16, 29, 30, 43, 130, 167 Jameson, Fredric 21, 27, 28, 29 jewish body 64 community 100, 162 history 116 identity 167 immutability 103 theology 167 Kafka, Franz 17, 71, 86, 108, 130–33, 143 Kant, Immanuel categorical imperative 64 de-ontologized ethics 223 ethics 47, 48 idealism 69 old Enlightenment 223 philosophy of humanism 75 post-Kantian sense of duty and responsibility 202 theory of pleasure 8 transcendental idealism 73 Keats, John 82, 84, 137 Lacan, Jacques 28, 43, 112 mirror stage 42

232

Index

Laden, Osama Bin 210 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 152 Lang, Berel 115 language barrier 213 computer 35 Freud 55 games 31 of photographs 225 ordinary 181 poetic 196 society 130 literature and creativity 52 and cultural enquiry 15, 39 as border-crossing 41, 228 as critique of certainty 1 definition of 4–5 ethic 7, 47, 51 ethics of resilience 15, 16, 45 heuristic tools 4, 17 inventiveness 5 interruption of homogeneity 16–17 irrationality 217, 227 medium of 4 narrative forms 218 on economics and medicine 15 paradox of 40 perception 6, 39 politics 52 punctum of 221 quasi-documentary approach 225 Spinoza’s ethics of 53–58 universal 39–40 Littell, Jonathan 1, 18, 202, 204–07, 216, 221, 223, 225, 228 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 21, 27, 28, 29, 31–37, 38, 40, 44, 141 Mack, Michael ‘Anthropology as Memory’ 122, 191 German Idealism and the Jew 48, 64, 217, 223 How Literature Changes the Way We Think 53, 182

Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity 6, 55, 59, 72, 128 ‘The Holocaust and Hannah Arendt’s Philosophical Critique of Philosophy’ 63 Malabou, Catherine 43 Malamud, Bernard 75–105 ‘An Idea that Animates my Writing’ 88 ‘Beginning the Novel’ 87 ‘Bennington College Commencement Address’ 82 Dublin’s Lives 105 God’s Grace 75, 87 ‘Psychoanalysis and Literary Criticism’ 85, 86 ‘The Contemporary Novel’ 87 The Fixer 76, 77, 96, 97, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104 The Magic Barrel 75, 84 ‘The Writer in the Modern World’ 81 de Man, Paul 40 Mann, Thomas 86 Marx, Karl 157, 176, 203 medicine 1, 11, 17, 50, 57, 100, 133, 134, 141–74, 201, 204, 228 mimesis 7, 39, 88, 92, 99, 102, 104, 178 mind-body relation Descartes’s dualism 54, 55 Spinoza’s parallelism 53, 69 myth 49, 83, 92, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104, 110, 117, 224 nature 3, 16, 19, 25, 48, 53, 76, 78, 81, 82, 130, 132, 152 Nazism 60, 61, 64, 117, 225 neoliberalism 36, 141, 142, 144, 148, 177, 190 neurology and neuroscience 5, 6, 7, 54, 55, 210, 211, 216 Nietzsche, Friedrich 59, 67–69, 71, 72, 78, 110, 175 Nussbaum, Martha 59, 62, 63, 83, 96, 112, 167

Index opium 41, 44 Origen 137 Perlman, Elliot 1, 18, 179–199, 202, 207–8, 210–12, 216, 225, 228 Plath, Sylvia aesthetics 122, 135 anti-psychiatry movement 112 ‘Ariel’ 118 ‘Burning the Letters’ 133, 135, 136–8, 139, 144, 145–6, 151, 157, 160, 161, 163, 172, 173 conformity 16, 124, 128 ‘Daddy’ 113, 117, 132 gender policies and identities 123, 126 Journals 121, 122, 125, 127, 129 immortality 136, 138, 158, 191 ‘Kindness’ 129 moral panic 129 psychoanalysis 116 religion and religious act 128 selfhood 112, 123 social dialectic of recognition 113 subjectivity 17, 111, 112, 113, 115, 118, 122, 145 ‘Tale of a Tub’ 118–120, 124 The Bell Jar 4, 118 theology 108, 125, 161 Three Women 124, 126 womanhood 123 Plato 40, 73, 146, 147, 158 Proust, Marcel 71, 84 pseudo-medicine 98, 100, 155 pseudo-science 2, 4, 11, 18, 41, 44, 83, 85, 98, 99, 100, 102, 132, 141, 151, 152, 153, 155, 173, 190, 202 pseudo-theology 2, 4, 12, 13, 18, 27, 49, 100, 102, 143, 144, 145, 153 race and racism 2, 64, 95, 194, 202, 207

233

representation disrupting homogeneity 17 in Deleuze 65–67 in Freud 55 in Hamlet 88–9 in Kafka 131 in Malamud 101, 104 in Plath 132, 139, 173 in Roth 165–7, 171–72 modelling subjectivity 6, 16 of value 13 psychoanalytic trauma 223 social sciences and politics 38, 53 sovereign artistic practice 6 theological 17–8 Roth, Philip 1, 17, 139, 142, 145, 157 account of everyman 169 ethics 18, 162, 168, 171, 172 Jewish identity 167 Nemesis 145, 162–73 rebel against tradition 173 The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography 167 theodicy 162–3 trauma 166 Said, Edward 38–9 Schiller, Friedrich 21 Sebald, Winfried Georg 18, 202, 213, 214 Austerlitz 214–19 Campo Santo 218n The Emigrants 220 The Rings of Saturn 220 Shakespeare, William 1, 16, 88–93, 95, 99, 197 break with Aristotelian tradition 92 Cain’s killing of Abel 89 comparison with Spinoza 93 ethics and aesthetics 99 ghost 92 Hamlet 16, 88–93

234

Index

‘Let me not to the marriage of two minds’ 197 Lucretian conception of truth 95 parallelism between life and play 91 question about the natural 89, 90 substantive realities 91 The Tempest 91 Spinoza, Baruch 1 acquiescentia 95 ‘attributes’ 65 break with the mimetic model of culture 6 conatus 52, 53, 54, 56, 63, 72, 73 continuity of affect and idea 93 critique of anthropomorphism 67, 76 critique of humanism 52, 63, 64 critique of representation 73 critique of supernaturalism 77 ethical thought 52, 56, 72 imagination 72 materialism of the mind 54 notion of nature 81 one-substance ontology 66 post-humanist humanism 53, 59, 78

revision of Cartesian mind-body dualism 54, 65, 69 understanding of reason 58, 64 Spivak, Gayatri 112 Sterne, Lawrence 219, 220 teleology 93, 94, 95, 141, 153, 216–7 terror and terrorism 21, 34, 63, 64, 201, 202, 207, 210, 211 totalitarianism 60, 62, 63, 113, 202 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 31 Žižek, Slavoj ‘A Plea for a Return to Différance’ 70 economic rationalism 180 existence of meaning 34 Freud’s death drive 70 Less than Nothing 34, 40, 79 Organs Without Bodies 68 substanceless subjects 178 take on Hegel 78 The Plague of Fantasies 180 The Puppet and the Dwarf 40 virtualization of capitalism 180n. 11