The Forty-Nine Steps

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@lULICO ORIGINAL

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T H E FORTY-NINE STEPS

R O B E R T O CALASSO Translated b y j o h n SIiepley

PIMLICO

Published by Pinllico 2002

Copyright O 1001 by the Regents of t l ~ eUniversity of M i ~ ~ ~ r r s t ~ r . ~ Roberto Calasso has asserted h ~ rs~ g h tundrr the Copyr~qht,I ) ~ ( I ~ I I > and Patents Act 1988 to be ~dentlfied.IT the .iilthor o f rhlr \;mk subject to the r o n d i t ~ oth;lt ~ ~ ~t \11,1ll I I O ~ , . hil-rd o i ~ r . bY way of trade or othrrwisr, hi. I r l ~ t rc,sold. or otherw~secirculated w ~ t h o u t l ~ cp ~ ~ b l i i h c rprior '\ consent in any f o m ~o f b ~ ~ i d i or n s co;er- othcl- rl1,111 that 111 which it is p i ~ h l ~ s l ~. IcIdI ~w i t l i o ~ .I~ t\ ~ I I I I ~ ; I I . cond~tioni r r c l u d ~ ~ t h~~src o ~ ~ c l ~ t bi o n r ~ ~ ~ g ~ ~ ~ ~ poon sthe. r d \~~I>\riluvnt pu~il~.~sc~-

hi^ book is

O r i g i r ~ ~ l p~11111~11r~t ly 'I? 1 < ~ I I ~ ~ I ~ I I I ~ ~ I I I I I I J ( ~ ,ic~pyrigl~t ~ ~ , I < / I I I I , 1991, Aciclphi Ecllzioni \.I>..\.. M11.111,1r.1Iy T11is t r . ~ n \ l ~ t l ofirst i ~ puhli\l~rd111 tlir Unitrd St;rrc\ of Amel-~ca 11y the U ~ l ~ v c r \ iof t ) M i ~ ~ n c . ; oI1rr\s t . ~ loll1 Firct puhllchrd in Great B~-lt,r~n h v 1'11nlico 2002 Poetry hy I3rrtolt B r r r l ~ ti\ iron1 '1)itticult Time\', ill Ncrr,111ljrrrlrr POI.IIF, 1Y 1.1- l V . i G , cditrd hy John Willctr .111dIr rathcr, I tell myself that the will must acrually bc destiny for always being right once nlore even ; p i n s t ir. hyp2'r.indvon-.I'

If genius includes the capacity to take oneself literally, [hen Nietzsche, from the moment he sertles in Turin (5 April), ingeniously applies the terms of his letter to Deussen ahouc chance and destiny. If these phrases are accurate, then they must be fulfilled in every detail, first of all in the "closest things." From his first days in 1Urin we feel that Nietzsche is in]printing a positive sign, of ascendant life, on every aspect of the world surrounding him. "This is truly the city I need now!"'^-so begins the transformation ofTurin into the city of destiny. First to be transformed will be the city's general character and its aristocratic architecture; then all the circumstances of life, the prices, the food, the climate, the theater, manifest themselves as favorable signs. But by the last letters in autumn, in particular the Iasr one to Jakob Burckhardr, evervthing is transfigured. By now the will has devoured the external world, devouritlg itself as well, and ecstatically watches the spectacle it has set in motion. During his first days in Turin, the "hulnan cave" crosses an already prepared threshold, which his will, in the thrm of chance, now reveals to him. Early in April Nietzsche receives a letter from Brandes in which the Danish philosopher informs him that he will give a course at the University of Copenhagen "on the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche." Today it is difficult to assess the enormous extenr 01' Nietzsche's solitude at the time. Having beco~nea shadow for most of his old friends, a difficult and invisible man. by now accustomed to p ~ ~ b l i s h i nhis g books at his own expense, accustomed too to counting his loyal readers on his fingers a n d having to reduce their number as each new book comes out, to a Nietzsche seems to have circled as far from the world as point of insurmountable alienation, which his old friend Erwin Rohde had Felt at their last meeting, in thc spring oF 1886: "as though he came from a region inhabited by no one else." Brandes's letter arcivcs at this point as the first outside approval, produced by chancc t h n t has become destiny, the prelude to a stage, an action addressed to the world. T h e n , for the whole winter, rapid signs o f a n approaching upheaval kept flickering

Fatilf Mono fogur . 9

in Nietzsche, to erupt in the middle of his labors. August Strindberg's first letters in autumn represent ;I second threshold, where Nietzsche hcars the "tone o f universal history" resound and recognizes for the firsr time a n interlocutor of his stature, and this at the beginning of his vcry last days in Turin, f o l l o w i ~ ~the g drafting of Ecre Hnntn. Betwccrl these two thrcsholds, spring and autumn, we have a n entire cycle, a lightning advance o n a single ftont, in quickjtep, while his euphoria spirals upward. T h e first traces o f this activity directed to thc outside, t l ~ efirst sreps o f t h e l~urnnn cave o n the stage of the world, are already in Nietzsche's letter responding to Rrandes's announcement. With this letter he enclosed a lxief curriculum: thrcc vcry simple pages seeking only t o specifjl a few facts, but in them it is easy to recognize various observations that will reappear, sornetimes almost word for word, in Ecce Homo, the writing of which had begun. There is n o reason to doubt Nietzsche's statement chat Ecce Homo was written with the greatest speed and assurance between 15 October and 4 November 1888. This is not to deny the results of Mazzino Montinari's examination of the letters and manuscripts showing Ecce Homo ro be a work in progress: Some fragments already appear off a n d o n betwee11 April and October, and it is also obvious that after returning the proofs to his publisher, C. G. Naumann, on 6 December, Nietzsche went o n correcting the text a n d writing variations o n i t during his very last days in Turin. So even if the outline of the work was established in a few days, one can say that many of its sentences and paragraphs had been o n Nietzsche's mind for months, u p to the rnoment of his breakdown. Besides, there is a close connection among all of Nietzsche's writings between April 2nd October 1888. Each o f these works is governed by the same gesture, the bursting forth o f a wild theatricality, his self-presentation o n the stagc by concentrating his whole being in its most intense form. With Ecre Homo this impulse is fully displayed, but the style, tempo, a n d manner are similar in c ~ s of' e Wdgn~?,,The Twilight of t l ~ e?do/s, and T / JAntichl-;st-a1 ~ 1 of them composed between April and September 1888. First among then1 is 7 % ~ of'Wzsner, which Nietzsche already mentions incidentally t o Peter Gasr in April: "My fingel-s at the moment are busy with a littleprzmphlet on mi~sic.""~ By May the little book is finished, perhaps the most asrorlishing example in Nietzsche of the pure nrt ofgestu~e.O n e might wonder why just now, ten years after his break with Richard Wagner 2nd five years after the composer's death, Nietzsche should feel the need to write a

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savage attack o n him. Here too the answer involves the whole process of Indeed, as we will s r r , only thr pscexisring, albeit Nietzsche's laar thought of Ecce Homo call account for his need t o write

Thr Case of Khgncr. T h e first big problem that looms for Nierzsche at the beginning of his Turin spring is the acceptallce o f t h e theater, o f t h e stage. Having thought all his life nboztt the theater, he now finds himself faced with the i~nperative to prartic.~it. And for Nierzsche, theater has always been synonymous with Wagner. T h e stage i r Wagner, a n d to mount the stage himself Nietzsche must rid it of Wagner, must set down and etch the differences like scars. T h e tenor of the text is derisive; the action has an unseemly mobility; here for the first time Nietzsche tries out the I'Y~L/u sstyle,Ii the mask of The who is quick to assume the role of the "decent ~ r i m i n a l . " ~ ~ ) Nietzsche histrio [actor] raises the histrio Wagner to rhtt sinister archetype of the simulator, that deadly category that had been o n his mind ever since The Birth o f ' w e d y Here, for the last time, Nietzsche stares at the features of the being who is his exact opposite, before meeting hirn o n the same stage, his own features set firmly for the last time irz n role, in the last pages of Erce Horno. T h i s dual movernent already recalls the gesture of the tragic hero who wills "the utter collapse into his oppositen;'- otherwise, why should Nietzsche choose t o present himself with the greatest theatricality, rhe very weapon of his antipode? Attacking, in the name of music, the perversion o f the actor who make5 use o f music, and thereby breaking the suprerne spell of decadence-this is 7 b e 1 17

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very doubt that undermines che trsgic affir~narion,the constant f>ossihiliry of it, and he empties as well any human action through simulation. From the time of these early observations until 1888, Nietzsche will [lever stop thinking about the actor. And for h i m , Wagncr will be the mosr potent catalyst. the one w h o will truly show him the extent of the terrible trap concealed in the question. Moving ahead by eighteen years to con aide^ the situation of Nictzsclie~ thought o n the eve of Err? Homo, we see that in the course of many transformations t h e initial terms have been in a sense reversed. T h e critical point in rhis evolution was the moment when the problcm of the ;lctor came in contact with Nierzsche's radical gnosiological criticism, already set forth in Human, All Too Human and carried relentlessly forward to the end. The first thesis Nietzsche wanted to refute was the filndamenral one of all W e s ~ r r r l1110ugh~,affit.~xli~lg cruth as i ~ d ~ c ~ ~YLJ; u et ~ ti i~ot ~ l l ~ c t ~ ~ j Nietzsche's dogged inquiry tolerates no doubts on this point: Every form of is a ,recessclry f~lsificrtiorl.which immensely reduces reality but presents itself to us as f i t conlprised the whole ofrealiry. This incrinsic falsity of representation is, moreover, our greatest organic defense, for without it we would only be the chaotic movement of the will for truth, which is basically suicidal will. T h e dilemma o f k~lowledgcis posed in these terms: Either thought wants evrrything (and t h r n it kills che subject that thinks it), or thought renounces everything (and then it kills life). For Nietzsche, this would hold true for all Western philosophy beginning with Socraces. Representation is thus a j>iRnrd relation with reality: This is the only basis o f o u r knowledge, and i t is arbitrary besides. If the i~nconscioussimulation manifested in cognitive activity is defined by its character of necs the same essary inco~npletei7ejsin reproducing whac i c s i ~ r ~ ~ ~ lanntde at time by its claim t o be at all moments the whole o f w h a t it sirnulaces, then the man o f representations is tirst o f all the actor-a passive actor w h o does not know and must not know he is such. This, of course, applies nor only t o his relation with the world but, primarily, to the suliecr's relation with himself; or rather, here simulation appears ill its pure scare, since it lacks any possibility o f verification. T h e subject himself, in fact. is the first simulation, che one rhat makes all thc orhcrs possible, a sirnulacion characterized by maxilnum persisrencc. At rhis point, it is already clear rhat the more Nietzsche pushes o n with his criticism of the accor, rhc more he is obliged to grant him importance and thc closer hc brings him to [he

center of the very nature of man. Eve~iruallythe terms havc swirched positions: N o longer is i t the actor who grows like a parasite on the rl-unk of the Dionysian man; o n the contr;lry, it is the Dionysian man who call reveal himselfonly on condition that he don the g:lrb of the actor-, i l l a certain way grow over him. As Nietzschc proceeds with his devastating inquiry into the gl~osiologicalql~estion.he shows with incl-easing clarity that knowledge is primarily n r.ointdy o j ~ k n o n ~ l ~an d ~ineradicable e, theatricality that operates within the individual, constantly reproduces itself in solitude, and must reproduce itself for the cconolny of life to be rnairltairled. Here it is not even a qliestion of tracing "what really happens." About the "inner process," about the groui~d-if there ever is %groundwhat little Nietzsche had to say is obscure. Bur the upheaval produced by his t h o l ~ g hlies t in his having considered thought itself as exteriorit): pure symptomatolog): a series of gestures, like nature itself. Here is the question thar Nietzsche raises: "?b what extent can thought, judgment, all of logic he considered as thc outer aspect. o r s y m p t o m , o f a much more inner and fundamental ~ c c u r r e n c e ? " ~ I'he " answer is: completely. " T h e world of thought only a second degree of the pheno~nerlalworld." This is the final liniir u f Nietzsche's gnosiological criticism: t o turn all knowledge a n d thought inside out, presenting it as a continual surface across which rhc h b r i c o f nature extends, something that serves for r n n n ~ f . s t i z ~ a proccss but never for making a judgrneilt back from the process to its beginning: thought belongs t o the circle ofsig~zs.O n e does not, therefore, in rhe face of knowledge, now raise the question of trurh: Is it correct or incorrect? Knowledge cannot even insist o n the standard of correctness. T h e question is instead the very question of the theater: What and how much reality is knowledge capable of asserting and supporting? How much reality does it exclude? 'l'he actor thus continues to reappear at rhe cerirer. We met him at the beginning as the protagonist of decadence, that is. as a historical figure, but by now it would seern that his presence c m n o t bc eliminuted, since decadence itself has turned o u t to be something more thk111a historical process that can be engulfed by time. Decadelice is produced by the action of our consciousness a n d is the direct operation of t h o ~ ~ g h t . T h e Dionysian man. the Innn defincd'by his capacity ro emcrgc t i o ~ n hinlself t h r o ~ ~ gnletnmorphosis. h now heco~ucs;I slrecial exa~npleof life, a happy cxccption. And t o what will the S)io~lysian man return whe11 hc

is once more within himself? Haven't we seen rhat the subject himself is a simulation? T h e theatrical nature of Western thought, the cootinuous identity of its scenario, its look of a game in which the pawns always move 011the silnc chessboard-these result from the implicit acceptance of a r u k : that the p r h u m is always in the midst o c the numbers, that the origin lies along [he way a n d asrerts itself all the same as origin, while the origin can only lie the chessboard, the chessboard being elread? [he dispersion. ~~t other, coniplementary rule of the scenario is rhat the dispersion never be stated as such, that it always be reabsorbed into something, that the game not be uninterrupted, as called for by its nature. that it always stop at some opportune point in the ganlr itselfi Ifphilosophy is tliouRlir that starts from zero, thought without foundation, then Western philosophy is thought that starts from zero and always manages to establish a primurn. But there is no path between zero a n d one. Nierzsche has given away the rules of this game a n d is therefore the great traitor of Western thought.

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When Descartes, with his genius for the falsely self-evident, stated in his R e p h e ad directioii~~n ingmii that the operation of k n o u ~ l e d ~should e be preceded by the enumeration of the facts pertinent to the problem.i' the rnbdel latent in all Western thought came to light for the first time in the crudity of a practical suggestion. T h e device of enunleration is certainly , not a calm measure of the intellect; it has inlmensc powcr, a power that still suffuses scientific thinking. 7% require that the h c t s be enumerated is the first step leading t o rhc much more rigorous I-ecluil-emctltoi'a formal system. Bur wirh this step, exclusion is already adr1littc.d; the renunciation of the whole a n d the of simulation is explicitly introduced: Given a n enumerable set of facts, simulation is rhe process that allows o n e to consider thar set equivalent ro the whole of the probleln raised. Ikscartes is said ro have merely revealed a model already latent in the dominant line ofWestern rhought, its appearance being only a transition in the progressive rnanifesration of a single potential: forn~alizition.Nietzsche, in the course of his criticism of knowledge, his inquiries into the "sccrcr history of philosophers," sniffed o u t this identity qf'pl~lcc'in Western thought, this constant complicity of [he mosr diverse speculariolls, a n d he gave i t a

Ford Monologue .

center of thc very nature of man. Eventually the terms have switched posicions: N o longer. is i t the acror who grows like a parasite on the trunk of the 1)ionysian man; ~ I the I contrary it is the Llionysian rna11 who can reveal himself only o n condition that he don the garb of the actor, in a certain way grow ovel- llinl. As Nietzschc proceeds with his dcvastaring inquiry into the gl~osiologicalq ~ l e s t i o n he , shows with i ~ ~ c r e a s i nclarity g that knowledge is primarily a com?dy of'knoti~l+, a n ineradicable theatricality that operates within the individual, constantly reproduces itself in solirude, and must reproduce itself for rhe economy of life to be maintained. Here i t is not even a question of tracing "what really happens." About the "inner process," about the ground-if there ever is %ground-what little Nierzsche had to say is obscure. But the upheaval prcduced by his thoughr lies in his having considered thought itself as exterioriry, pure symptomatolog); a series o f gestures, like nature itself. Here is the question that Nietzsche raises: "70 what extent can thought, judgment, all o f logic be considered as the outer aspect, o r s y m p t o m , of a m u c h m o r e inner and fundamental occurrence?"^" T h e answer is: complerely. " T h e world o f thought only a second degree of the phenomenal world."3" This criticism: to turn all knowlis the final limit of Nietzsche's g~~osiological edge a n d thought inside out, presenting i t as a continual surficr across which the fabric o f nature extends, something that serves for uinnfesting a process but never for making a judgment back from the process to its beginning; thought belongs t o the circle of~igizs.O n e does not, therefore, in the face o f knowledge, now raise the question of truth: Is it correct or incorrect? Knowledge cannot even insist o n the standard of correctness. T h e question is instead the very question of the cheater: What a n d how much reality is knuwledge c:ipable of assel-ring and supporting? H o w much re;lliry does it exclude? T h e actor thus continues to reappear at the center. We met hiln at the beginning as the protrganist of decadence, that is, as a historical figure, but by now i t would seem that his presence cannot be eliminated, since decadcnce itself has turned out to be something more than a historical process rhat can be engulfed by time. Decadence is produced by the action o f our conscious~lessa n d is the direct operarioli of thought. T h e Dionysian m a n , the mall defined-by his capicity rv elnergc fro111 hinlsell-rhrough mctxmorphosis, now heco~ucs;l special example of-life, a 11;rppy c x c c p t i o ~ And ~ . to what will the 1)ionysian mall return when hc

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is once more within himself? Haven't we seen that the subject himself is a simulation? T h e rheatrical nature of Western thought, the c o ~ l t i n u o i ~identity s of its its look of a game in which the pawns always move on the same chessboard-rhese result from the implicit :lccept;lncc of :I rulr: [hilt rhe pumum is always in rhe midst of the numbers, that the origin lies a l o ~ l g the way a n d asserts itself all the same as origili. while the origin can o11Iy lje outside the chessboard, the chessboard bcing nlready the dispersion. Bur rhe other, complementary rule of the scenario is that the dispersion never be stated as such, that ir always be reabsorbed into something, that gamc not be uninterrupted, as called for by its nature. that it aIwqs stop at sornc opportune point in the ganic itsclt If philosophy is thought that starts from zcro, thought without tbundation, then Western philosophy is thought that stsl-ts from zero and always n r a ~ l a p s10 cstablihh a primurn. But thcrc is nu path b t ~ w e c nzcro a n d one. Nierzsche has given away the rules of this game a n d is therefore the great trnitor o f Western thought. W h e n Descartes, with his genius for the falsely self-evident. stated in his Regufae ad directionern ifyenil that the operation of knowled,ue should be preceded by the enumeration of the facts pertine~ltto [he p r ~ b l e m , the ~' model latent in all Western rhought came t o light for the first time in the crudity of a practical suggestion. T h e device o f enunleration is cerrai~lly not a calm measure o f the intellect; it has immense power, a power that still suffuses scientific thinking. I h require that the Lets be enumerated is the first step leading t o the much more rigorous recluiren~entof a for~nal system. But with this step, exclusion is already admitted; the renunciation of the whole a n d the practice of simulation is explicitly introduced: Given a n enumerable set of facts, simulation is the process thar allows o n e to consider thar set equivalent to the whole of the problcln raised. I3t.scarres is said to have merely revealed a model already latent in the dominant line of Western rhought, its appearance being only a transition in the progrrssive manifestation of a single potential: formalizition. Nietzsche, in rhe course of his criticis~nof knowledge, his inquiries into the "sccrct history of philosophers," sniffed our this ideirtity qfplcrce in Wcstern t h o i ~ g h t this , constant complicity of the mosr diverse s p e c ~ ~ l a t i o ~a insd, he gave i t a

Futirl Monologue . 19

name, implicating all o f it in a single vicissitude: the history o f nihilism. And formalization is only another name fbr nihilism.

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any one thing means to exclude evcrything." In this sentei~ceN i e r ~ s c h e presented his fulcrum, his gesture that compels him to seek beyond the man of decadence. T h e direction of this search, howcver, reveals s t once that it is a matter not of replacing one i t n a g o f nran by another b u t o f denying man himseli Indeed, exclusion is 1101il tenlkmrnry or secondlry

If the comlnon feature o f metaphysics, the index fossil o f the West, is precisely the tacit claim that thinking :hour the world can and should present irself as a formal systcln. and if, for this very reason, cvcn thinking about G o d , which would seem to be exempt from this compulsion, has been increasingly transformed in our history from theosophy. as e x e g s i i o f a given a n d unattainable word, into theology, the rudiment of a deductive argulnellt a n d chain o f proofs, then it is n o wonder that p,hilosophy professors are scal~dalizedover the n u m e r o u s contradictions f o u n d in Nietzsche's writings. I n fact, t h e sense o f contradiction in Nietzsche is quite new; he is speaking by n o w from somewhere else. H i s argument may be incongruous, but it can n o longer be refuted b~causeit is incongruous: Here it is not a question o f incorporating the contradiction into a lax a n d disguised formal system, as it is in the grandiose a t t e m p t o f German idealism and especially o f Hegel. Here the contradiction is stated as a n independent and ~ ~ n r e l a r epower, d which does not expect to be justified; it is the very game of thinking that wants it a n d continues to insist o n it. Nietzsche represents the advent o f thought that has no wish to expend itself in the construction of formal systems, conscious o r unconscious. Such thought cannot, nor does it want to, provide proofs; rather, it offers itself as pure imperative, a succession of forms, basically unaware at every srep of what has gone before and what follows. W h a t can such thought d o with its contradictions? Maybe it forgets them. If thoughts are gestures. like the forms of nature-"We must consider our thoughts as ge~tures".~'-rhe~~ one o f the more suitable criteria for considering t h e m will a c t ~ ~ a l be l y style, which is the "art of t h e gesture," as Nietzsche repeats for the last time in Ecce Homo. T h e sryle of decadence is U'agner's, but i t is also Socrates', and almost all our history is included between these two extrenmes. Hut by what signs does one recognize the style o f d e n d e ~ l c e First ? of all. decadence i l w ; ~ y sappears as a representative system, since it needs to exclude from itself a part of the world that it is not ready to support 2nd lacks the strength to sustain the pain and death implicit in all perception. This is thc withcring diagnosis that Nierrsche. man of decadence, let fall o n hirnsclf and o n our history. Since each thing is so connected with everything, to try to exclude "

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characteristic of knowledge but what defines it. We cannot help excluding, even i f w e consider knowledge a fiction. because o u r bodies cannot do Hence the despair of nihilism: O n c recognizes the illusory ,,cure o f knowledge but cannot give u p knowing; one lives in a compulsion to know a n d such knowing is gro~tndless.At this p o i ~ i~t twould n o longer be possible for Nietzsche simply to countel: as he did in the period of The Birth of 7kzgedJ with the antithetical image of the I3ionysian man. T h e analysis has already been pushed too far along the suicidal path where o n e has to verify knowledge, and there are n o more exits. T o abandon the m a n of decadence means by now to abandon man. It is now that the eternal return appears in a flash. A n d it will be the basis for the enigmatic image of the superman, the lnetamorphosis of the Dionysian man: the being w h o proclairlls the eterilal return a n d lives it. Above the rubble of knowledge a n d the fragmentation of chance, the s u n reaches t h e " m o m e n t o f t h e briefest shadow," t h e Par~icclarity o f noon; as the true world a n d the apparent o n e are engulfed, the fi~blegoes o n tel!ing stories about its fate: T h e "escutcheon o f necessity" appears from the sky, a n d the world asks to be expressed in another First in the guise o f his double Zarathusrrrl, then, with Ecce Homo, presenting himsei/as the double, Nietzsche abandoned the path of philosophy with an abrupt gesture, the ongoing result of his vision of the eternal return. T h e fact that Nierzsche himself did not write much about the erernal return, despite the supreme importance that that doctrine assumed in hi's thought; moreover, the fict that what he did have to say in no way justifies making any unequivocal statement on the idea of the eternal return, since it combines other, often incompatible elements, whereby the argumerit would appear at times as a chain of proofs based on scientific fact, at others as instant certainty-all this would suggest'that we are in the presence ofsomething that call be approached only on its own terms. Actually, the eternal return is not a thought that can be added to another thought but apractice that overrurns the very state of thinking about the world as the sole imperative making ir possible ro endure the whole of existence. Nietzsche's attack on representative thought was now concluded: By its

very natul-e, any reprc.scntative thought is forced to cxclude some piirls of the world; i t is obliged to build a lazaretto where that part ofexistence not admissible i l l good society must live. This is above all pain, constantly opposed by thought in an efFort at anesthetization (and this effort is almost the definition of the modern), and tirrle, which thought kceps sepal-nting from itself? thus laying the foundations for revenge. A~lesthctiz;ltionof pain a n d evocation o f revcnge: this is the final residue left by thought after Nietzsche's disrespectful inquiry. These two featu1.e~already comprise 311 of metaphysics; the attack on Christianity and morality will be only a deriviltion from them. Now Nierzsche's aim is to abolish the permanent srructure of Western thought: the clash between ego a n d world. Nietzsche wants to emerge. ho~nrepresentation, but by rejecti~lgthe Vedantic path of ide~ltificario~l, lle maintains all the terms o f the confrontation and illuminates and preserves the biological need for rcpresentatio~ls,while transporting them into another space, which is n o longer that of knowledge o r of any kind of objectivity. Now it is the sea of force, where each epistemological gesture, the fear of a fictitious subject, becomes a savage wave amid the immensity of others. We are made not for knowing but for acting as iF we know-this "as if" is the necessary guaralltee o f thought, b u t it is a guarantee that has always had to remain ti~iconsciousbecause to acknowlcdgc it is unbearable. For the be^tepl-,ilosopheit means paralysis a n d derision. Nietzsche chooses t o put this "as if" at the center of the action and insists that the action be exalted by i t , because only now does it lose all reference ; ~ n dappeal. in its pure form as an aggregate of signs that d o nor, cannot, and d o nor even u m t t o know their origins. With this last transition to the wholly groundless will, the world is once more an enigma, an enigma composed also of its various solutions. R u t h o w d o we emerge from t h c circle of exclusion? Let LIS g o back t o where we started: "Since each thing is so connected with everything, t o try t o exclude any one thing means to exclude everything." Given this necessary connection o f everything, each instant will therefore include within itself; in extremely abbreviated form, all preceding ones. And yet we live it as a separate entity, bowing in this to thc constraints of representation. 'lh how insteati t o the ~lccessityof the whole, MY should, in oppote discover a p)uc.tice that i~llowsus t o live sition t o our i ~ n ~ n e d i aimpulse, the nbbreviateci whole in [he instant. And this pl.actice is only one: to live the instant (I.\ fit U)PYP to br ~ n ~ i l rrepfvztf%l, j ~ l ~ thar is, recoveri~lgin the ne-

ceSsity of an unlimircd filturc, in wlliclr tlrc same is repeated, thc unlimired past of the necessity thar has constructed rhr present instant. This prrc,ice is the eternal retilrn. Thought has shed its skin. It is 110 longer a subjeer representing the world, b u t it is ils o p n o f t h e modd that it asserts itself, a n d therefore the world in its entirety. Rut this transition has occurred by making usc of the specific means of representative thought. I n order to approach necessity, thought has need of sirnulation-is this not the pactice of the eternal return?-just as it had needed i t to defend itself from necessity itself. T h e world is two-faced at every point: Its elements remain constant, their use is forever twofold. I'erhaps never before has this suspiciorl come to light as it does in Nietzsche, and not by chance i n theatrical form. T h e attack o n representative knowledge, accused of being unable t o recognize necessity, does nor lead t o not knowing or ro the construction of another kind of knowledge; rather, the very elements o f representation and its process-simulation-are now rurned toward necessity and converge o n the closest approach to the affirmation of necessity: the eternal return. "To itflrizp o n becoming the nature of bei~~g."jT

-

We have so far been following a single track in the boundless Nietzschean labyrinth, the track that might ultimately lead t o answering the question "What necessity gave rise to Ecce Horno?" We have seen how the air of theatrical twinx, the rnan of decadence and the Dionysian man, appear in Nietzsche from the starr and accompany him ever after, through multiple nuances, transitions, a n d disguises. yet representing thernselves each time as inseparable companions, mutually hostile but accustomed to rhc Sdlnt. instruments, the same weapons. After the lightning flash of the eternal return, the seal of the final phase, a word thar had always pertained t o l y the Nietzsche finds itself being glorified and once again placed v i o l e ~ ~ t at center. It is the word "destiny." In Ecce Homo Nietzsche faces his destiny, in his dual aspecr as man of decadence and Dionysian man, in his single aspect as harbinger of the eternal return.

Ecce Horno is the work that Nictzbchc devoted to destiny. *I'hc subtitleHOW One Recnrnrs What On? L-already offers the book as an cducation in destiny. This imporrant notion, continually impoverished by the West throughout its history and finally relinquished to [he exclusive use of palm readers and sentimentalists, resurfaces in Nietzsche with both its archaic

Fatal Monologue

and its newest features, since now the context in which the notion thrived has disappeared: to conceive desriny amid chaos is a task that thought sets itself for the firsr time witlr Nietzschc. Frzteirtzd Hiitory and Fire Willrlnd F(ite-these are the titles of two scliool rhemes by the eighteen-year-old Nietzsche. We find in them a rranspllrent prefiguration of the final Nietzsche, as though with a steady bur unwitting hand he W;IS already ourlini~lg his thought as destiny. Even at that time, Nietzsche, in his invincible determination, could not conceive the will except as "fatal will," or rather, as the "supreme power of fate." And the will sought in Ecce Homo is no different, except that now, having con~plered[he circuit, Nietzsche wants to bring his thoughi closer to a prtrctire, insisting that his own destiny he visibly c o ~ l f i ~ u r eind his wriring and recognized as such by the world. In this intention, Nierzsche dealt with the penultimate consequence of his thought, obeying his impulse . ~ ~ thar thought has abanwith the "ancient sovereignty ~ f n l i n d . "Now doned the claims of representation and has itself become a fragment of the world, the task can now be only to discover irs own necessity. But if this task presents itself as the story of one's life, it obliges one to describe and Enumertrte oneself. The word defining the thoirght that Nietzscht. wanted to avoid here reappears. But rhis rime enumeration is nor reduced to a mere practical measure. Here, on the contrary, it becomes an insolent challenge: to express one's destiny by gathering what one has casually sqirandered in life under the sign of necessity. T h e threat that we feel hanging over this enterprise is arlalogous to the ancient tradition about the baleful nature of the census. Nietzsche sil-nultaneo~rsly:~pproacl~es the utmost consistency and the i~tmostcontradiction-a word that here does nor Jesignare a logical objection but n+s [thc inlpious] itself.

'

Homo is constructed as n ser o f s ~ l ~ e r i m ~ o impossibilities: sed to don the garb of the actor (that is. of [he person with no destiny) to rread A huge stage and present the figures of one's own destiny; to point to Dionysus with the same wolds. m , e i~orrio,used f o Clrrist ~ dres~edii~p;IS Icing ("A~rd the soldiers plarrcd r crown of rliur~rs,s ~ x pirt l it o n his he;d. all(] they

.

zj

dence-all these discordant and misleading characteristics, by their very excess, end by convincing us thar Ecce Homo is exactly what i t promises to be, a sort of prodigious compendium of a polynrorphous being who oll fers 11s a complete explanation and enumerates not only all the passages bur all the gestures of his destiny. The mosaic of quotations from previous works inserted into Ecce Homo thus reveals in hindsight its formal justification, instinctively chosen by a great "fanatic for expression": to enclose in a single frame the entire repertory of tones and nuances, to compel oneself for the first time to make a frontal presentation. In ECCPHomo "I'll be seen complerely all at once,"") and this because, as Nietzsche was to write a month later, "now I no longer wrire a line in which I don't appear complcteiy on the stage."j' In this sense Ecre Homo is one of the ourstanding successes in Nietzsche's work. Its lightness and flexibility o f language, its capacity to move simultaneously and c o ~ ~ r i n u o uon s l ~many levels, its combination of opposing rhythms-the aristocratic lento of certain abrupt openings, the nervous pre~tissimo,the judgment expressed in a staccato drumbeat-are the signs of maturity, of [he grand style that embraces and holds in its grasp the discordant forms of a man who, like few others, was able to pass through the whole circle of appearance. A perfect work-but what occurs in Ecce Homo is also something quite different. The great changes of madness unfold in [he hidden chamber of [his work, something mysterious haunts these pages, and the mystery is destined to remain such. This will come as no surprise to a reader of Nietzsche: That his book of maxin~umexposure should also be one mote cave, perhaps more inaccessible than the others, is part of Nierzsche's game.'12And Ecce Homo may even be a sign of modesty, the distraction of a masquerade to cover a discreet event that requires obscurity and silence: Nietzsche taking leave of himself.

&re

put on him a robe");{- to say s i n ~ ~ ~ l t a n e o"1u s:m l ~ dyn:unire," and "I am a nuancc";.'"~ pass rhrougll one's destiny as a familiar place a ~ l d even open the doors casually on one's future; to ~rcp:irchumanity for "the lllost diffic111tdemand ever nl'ldc. of'it"."' with a slror-r book of i~ldiscrect autobiography, thiis indulging in onc o f the most o1)vious vices of deca-

f

t

I

I

last days in Before recapitulatirlg history and all that said "In-the Turin-Nietzsche recapitulated his own history reviewing his whole past, as the saying goes, in the hour of his death. .]'here is no intention in all this, only a temporary submergence, thc biolugical foreshadowi~lgof great transformations, like dreaming of the dead: "Ir~diccztinr~ (fuiolent changrs.-lf we dream of people we have long since forgotten or who have for long been dead, it is :I sign that we have gone through a violerlt change within ourself and [hat [he grou~ldupon which we live has been completely rurnrd over: so that the dead rise up and our .lnriquicy becomcs

24

. Fatal Monologue

Fatal Monologue .

our rn~dernity."~' In E C CHomo ~ Nietzsche dreams of himself as dead and looks at himself, the posthumous man, with posthun~ousgaze before his flight into all that is other has begun. To evoke the wllole i n l a g of one's own destiny means to evoke one's own death. This ;lnticipatio~lof destiny is the transgression that transformsfas into nefas, whar is lawf~11 into what is unlawful. At the end of his journey, in Ecce Homo, the very book devoted to destiny, the will to destiny is transformed in Nietzsche into the will to "if". and even Nietzsche, who had been able to dissolve the superstition of facts in the theory of knowledge, falls under the spell of destiny asfact. In Ecce Homo he dares to set down the facts of his life as desti~ly,before preparing, in his last days in Turin, to make his actions coincide directly with destiny itself. This movement violates the law implicit i i the notion of destiny-namely, that the time r e q ~ ~ i r etod anticipate oneself is, at the. nrost, equal to the time needed for the anticipated event to take place. Only Friedrich Holderlin found a word for this impulse to violate fate fir the love offate. Nietzsche did not name it because he was to die of it.

25

from the oracle, while the second gives itself over to an indefinite process, which will stop only when the particular is irreparably unveiled? TObe suebut there is also another, less obvious difference. The interpret-ltian offered by Holderlin is a response obedient to traditio~l,to an exegetic orthodoxy, whereby any interpretation is the reading of a sign that represents the state of the world, a process involving always and solely images ofthe whole. Oedipus's interpretation, on the other hand, looks for a chain offragments, Even an exegetic orthodoxy can allow an indefinite series of superimposed levels of interpretation. But between them there must nlways be a homology, without gaps. Oedipus pursues a series of fragments [hat have only a single tie, the most particular and thoughtless: Each one points endlessly to the next. And this is the crux: Oedipus chooses the blasphemous and at the same time priestly ('Rut Oedipus in response at once, as priest"), of infinite interpretation. but he rejects its inner law: the endless, boundless, unstoppable multiplication of signs, now no longer s~ibjectto a judgment, orthodoxy, that could halt their proliferation. Thus for Oedipus it is not his interpreting but his sin that becomes truly infinite. Oedipus chooses the path of no appeal because there is no judgment, but nevertheless he still violently craves judgment; thus there is no way to appeal his sentence, and he is condemned to execute it himself on his own body. With Oedipus's judgment on himself, a new image of ruin is born, to be reproduced through metamorphosis right down to ourselves, down to the most awkward, most vacuous "coming to awareness"-a final, modest echo of that original "almost shameless effort to take hold of oneself, the mad wild pursuit of a conscience."

T h e sin of Oedipus, according to H ~ l d e r l i n , "is~neither the murder of his father nor incest. It is in questioning Tiresias that Oedipus evokes the real nefnr in his life. Oedipus sins because "he interprets too infinitely," as if it was he who first experienced the exaltation Nietzsche felt when a world subject to infinite interpretations was thrown open by his own provocaFor this reason as well, Oedipus has become one of the pri~nordial emblems of the West. Infinite interpretation is the savage, briltal power that bursts secretly into history with the classical age in Greece. Oedipus, from the start, is unable to discriminate in the presence of the oracle: H e thus finds the twofold solution that once and for all indicates our ultimate ambivalence. First, the solution that allows him to escape dcalh at the hands of the Sphinx; then, the solution, torn from the soothsayer, that will sentence him to death. Only Oedipus succeeds in avoiding death from the oracle, and only Oedipus 6nds himself subject to a death sentence by the oracle. T h e indissoluble link between the two solutioos governs the whole space of thought as solution, within which we still find ourselves. Holderlin writes that Oedipus ought to have interpreted the or:lcle in this way: "Establish, in general, a pure and iigorous judg~neot.nlail>rai~l good civil order." Oedipus rejects gener:~lity;he wants the prrticullr, the person. But what is the real difference between the two intcrpretstions! That the first relinquishes a private solution and settles for the first derivation 1

"Empedocles, long disposed by his feelings and his philosophy to hatred for culture and to contempt for every well-determined occupation, every interest directed at different objects, the mortal enemy of every one-sided existence," seems to us a man who suffers because "as soon as his heart and mind grasp what exists, they become bound to the laws of ~ e q u e n c e . " ~ ~ ' The opposite extremes of natnre and arc-or, in Hcilderli~isterms, of the organic and the aorgic-live in this man in their rr>ostexacerbated form. He is, as Nietzsche writes of himself, ~ ~ n d cover er of the language of the feuilleton, "at the same time a decade~ztand a begir~ni~zg.""Empedocles is by nature a poet, but he is not destined for poetry. "'['he destiny of his time, the violent extremes in which he had grown up, did not require song. . . . the destiny of his time did not even req~liretrue action, which

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26 . Fatal Munologuc

f'

has an immediate effect and is a help. . . . it required a victim, in which the whole mall became actunlly and visihly the o n e in which the destiny o f h i s time see~rlsto dissolve, i l l wllicll the extremes of his time seem trllly and visihly t o be reunited in one."lS Hut let there be n o lnisunderstanding: T h e victim must n o t simply suffer the p e ~ i a l t othcrwise ~. we are back in the Christian circuit of revenge. T h e victim mz(.it lw g ~ ~ i l ~ )he : nlust be the o n e w h o collapses in his own guilt. A n d precisely this was Nietzsche's great obsession, expressed for the last time in C c e Horno: "nor to take the punishment upon oneself' hut the guilt, only this would be truly divine.".-'" T h e mysterious sin of Empedocles is that he makes destiny too visible, dissolving it prematurely in the too intimate reunion ofextremes:'

f

Dionysian m a n , divide t h e last scene between them. T h e contrarliction appears above all in t h e alternation of t w o opposite gestures that r u n through the whole text, leaving doubts as t o which of the two, if either, ,ill prevail in the end. W e recognize in them the transposition o f a s i n ~ i lar dual movement in Zarath~rst~zz, the movement that a t the same time made &at work "a book for everyone a n d for n o one." T h e first gesture appears immediately in the opening appeal of the work: "Hear-me! For I

[Because of this action] rhc individu.ll collapses ,111d musr collapse, since the rangiblc rcunion, prematurely prociuced 1)). cribis and dissension, hns been shown in him, the reilnion that dissolved rhe psol~lcmofdestiny bur which can never be resolved individu~lll~ and visibly, for othcrwise the universal would bc lost in the individual, and ( w h ~ist still \verse rhd11all great movements of destiny and is the only impossible rhing) the life of a world would be extinguibhcd in 4 single enrity."' Instead, it is precisely this single entity that must he dissolved as a "premature result of destiny," because it was "too intimate a n d real a n d visible." A n d finally: 'Thus Empedocles had to become a victim of his time. Theprr,blums ofdestiny, in which he war born, /lad only appi~rentl~ to be resolued in him, and this solzrtioli had to reunrl itse@'asolriy ti7rnpomry,as it does wore or less in irll tragic indiuidilnls. ''9 'l'he a f f i o ~ l tto destiny, as the will to r/r$s, corrodes the defense of being in its credrures and thus necessarily drives them to ruin. But then this is n o t n p u n i s l ~ m e ~correspondlt ing t o a sin. since that sin is itseIJ;z U I ~ Jofdyir/g. I Shortly before writing Ecr-r, H o t ~ ~ ion, a passage in 7i~~ili~yht ofth~ Ic/ol,r where a f r a g ~ n e n of t Human, AII Go H1rr)rLl~~" clearly reappears in different words. Nietzsche described in / 7 i i terms this way of dying, b u t he kept completely silent about the tragic mech.ltlisrn that would prepilre it for h i m . His words are a defense of the ~onstl-uctio~r oj'cfentll: "then a real farewell is still possible, izs throne zcilro is takirigleizvr, i i still tllew; also a real esrimate o f w h a t o n e h a achieved and what one ha, wished, drawing the sum of one's lift.. . . . O n e never perishes through ,Inyol1c. h u t o ~ ~ e s e l.f . . From love of lif;, onc should desire a difft.re~~t death: free, conscious, with-

out accident, without a m b ~ s h . " ~ ' Thave o so altered the terms o f a n indiscreet Rousseauian autobiography, the heigllr o f decadence, into o n e of the unknown "hundred tragedies of knowledge" is the wonder of Ecce Horno. In [his n o term is lost. From start to finish, the text thrives on the bitrerest contradiction; the two theatrical twins, thc actor r ~ l dthe

am such and such a pel-son. Aboue all, do not vrzisttzke me jir someone else." Nietzsche does n o t customarily ask t o be heard, a n d this is doubtless

!

i I

something, as he says, his pride instinctively rebels against. But the course of his movement now requires such a gesture: O n c e he has decided, in the will t o ~ t @ s to , take literally his transformation of representative thought into apmrtire (and his practice is the presage o f t h e eternal return), once he has recognized the absolute theatricality of thought, the stage of the world opens for Nietzsche, and then we also witness-with surprise, given Nietzsche's distaste for any kind of propaganda in itself-the determined effort to prepare the public for Erre Homo. We see the birth of the idea of having the book appear simultaneously in four languages, the choice and sovereign courting of translators, the announcement of the book itself as a decisivefact of history. In this view, Ecce Horno beconles an event of "great politics," an initial skirmish in the "war of spirits."'-' This also accounts for the stupendous anti-German fury condensed in this book, more than i n any other of Nierzsche's works. T h e r e is little t o a d d , after a hundred years, to the clairvoyant precision with which Nietzsche treated the Gcrm a n spirit. As in the case of Wagner, here too he was able t o choose something that deserved his fury: Germany as the illtimate bearer of the great thought o f t h e West a n d therpfore the origin of its corruption and a dismal end-the only possible interlocutor and anragonist for his words, as time has shown all the more clearly. T h e second gesture, o n the other hand, never manifests itself in explicit statements, but it is c o n s t a ~ ~asserted tl~ in t h e f0r111. O n l y with the final dithyramb does it flare 11p in its violence. But there was already a trace in

a few words at the beginning ("aod so I tell my life to r n y ~ e l f ' ~where ), the l~ public has now vanished and the telling of Ecce Homo Ine~lnst d l k i ~ to himself in thc solitude of the monologue. And a monologue is exactly what the whole form of Ecce Homo will turn out to be. Nietzsche, to l,e sure, will don an actor's costume in these pages, since it is czlso his own. hut unlike his antipode Wagner, he will not thereby try to become an expert operator 011 the sensory apparatus. T h a t is not what interests Nietzsche. His art is something else, discreetly, almost fleetingly, hinted at in a few writings from the lasr years; indeed, he called it "n~onologicalart," the art of one who speaks with the void in front of him, the art of one who has created the void in front of him: "I d o not know of any most. profound difference in the whole orientation o f a n artist than this, whether he looks at his work in progress (at 'himself') from the point of view of the witness, or whether he 'has forgotten the world,' which is the essential feature of all monological art; i t is based on forgetting, i t is the music of forgetting." jj Monological art is first ofall art without witnesses, but in i r the other two obligatory terms in the analysis of art-the work and the artist-likewise disappear, since monological art is the art of forgetting and of forgetting oneself. There is only one other activity that is pursued in solitude, in the necessary elimination of the subject and indifference to the outcomenamely, solitary play, a monological and cosmological practice par excellence: where everything arranges itself according to necessity in a spectacle without spectators. T h e cosmic player "has forgotten the world," just as the solitary player forgets himself in playing and forgets the world because this time the player is the world itself. Such a conception hurdles the usual boundaries of art in one leap; nor does it try to establish others. Nothing would be so deadening as to treat it in terms of aesthetics. O f course, if ever a writer's oeuvre could be considered, in its entirety, as an example of monological art, it would be that of the man w h o stated the formula, the work of Nietzsche himself. Whichever way we nlove in it, backwal-d, forward, sideways, we hear :I sound that may also be private, the echo of a vast nlonologuc, a counterpoint of ~nusicalphantasms that pass across years and contradictions. Ilestiny does nor ask of us consistency; i t imposes its own, while rhoughts and wishes serve i t as pretexrs. In thr Lice o t the overwhelming cjegradation of thought reduced to prosthesis, almost all the organs in direct contact with the world having been amputated (all that ren~ains,uprighr on

[he head, is the defective antenna of thought about thought, metatbough, while immediate thinking has atrophied), Nietzsche appears as a tree that grows "not in one direction but equally upward and outward and inward and downward,"jO able to forget the trunk in every branch and each branch in the trunk, a power of expansion, the power of great form, governing what is written, experienced, dreamed. As the last example, nor by chance a literal monologue, we discover the t u m ~ ~ l t u o uloquacity s of Ecce Homo, which overcomes all obstacles and concentrates too many things in every nuance, in a steady erotic connection with language, only possible by starting from perfect solitude. There, every visible interlocutor disappears, and nothing remains but the labyrinth of thc monologue, the sound of inner voices in endless pursuit of each other: Zarathustra, the Cynic, Ariadne, Wagner. This premise alone can allow Nietzsche such felicity in the indiscreet task of judging himself.

In the realm of facts, Ecce Homo emerges as the last part of Euilig/3t of the Idols, a quick self-portrait, which then becomes autonomous and takes shape as a work in its own right. In the realm of destiny, Ecce Homo is the book thar represents the tragic breakdown of Nietzsche's life, death as his conscious farewell to himself, the ultimate discursive result of his previous chinking, offering again in theatrical form all its fundamental features at their most intense, even their most incompatible. Many signs show thar Nietzsche clearly felt the fatal significance o f Ecce Homo. In two letters to Gast in Noven~ber,five days apart, he already, unexpectedly, ends by asking his friend to give his words a "tragic meaning."57And yet so far nothing seems to threaten him; Nietzsche is in a period of unprecedented creative fervor: "I go on and o n , ever more, in a tempofoflissimo of work."58 At the beginning of December, Strindberg's letter discloses the first interlocutor; now that Nietzsche has begun to turn so violently ounvard, he proclai~nshimself and wants to himself to the world. In these same days, Nietzsche once more revises the nlanuscript of Ecce Homo, weighing i t "on a golden scale." After sending i t back to Naumann, he writes to &st, "This work literally breaks rhe history of humanity in two!"i'' Before entering the series of enigmas of his lasr days in Turin, Nietzsche again twice mentions with obvious clairvoyance, what he has accon~plishedwith Ecce Hoino and what remains to be fulfilled.

"Meanwhile I don't see why I should hastcn the course o f the tragic catastrophe o t my lift., which bcgins with Eccr Hoimo," he writes abruptly in a letter to Gast otherwise devoted to t h e subject o f operettas, a n d this theme, too, as we will see, is coded."" Finally, o n 27 December, he writes t o Carl Fuclis, "All things considered, dear friend, From now 011 there's n o point speaking and writing crbo14t me; with Ecce Homo I have put nd tzctlrl the problem of zuhn I ~zm.So there will n o longer be any need to worry about me, only about the things for which I'ni here.""' T h e first activc signs of deliriunl, which would last untii Franz Overbeck's arrival in Turin o n 8 January 1889, now began to nianitest themselves in Nietzschr. A number of letters from thcsc days, sen1 to friends and political leaders, are variously signed "1)ionysus" or " T h e Crucified" or "Dionysus the Crucified." O n l y the letter t o Rurckhardr. the longest, is signcd "Nietzsche." In order t o far11o1-n the ~ n e a n i n gof rhrse "notes of madness," Nictzschc, cver the o n e must grasp urhar has happened with Ecce Nc~~rno: m a n , has n o w become p o s r h u ~ n o u s ,has buried hiniself ( " I h i s hll . . . 1 twice witnessed my f ~ n e r a l " ) , ~a"n d hc now reve:~ls the comic finale of the tragedy. B L Lwhat ~ in ancient (ireece had been the satyr S~, now reappears, in the Eul-ope of LP FiSt1rn ( " ~ F C O L I1~11lailltai11 closc rclatio~lswith Figtzro")."' in [he guise of perfect frivoliry. "'l'hat the most spirit should also be the most frivolous, this is almost the formula o f m y philosophy."('.' I n his ncwjnask as "jestcr of the new eters, nities," Nietzsche comes forth with n scrics of dreadii~l~ r i t t i c i s n ~culminating in the sublime sarcasm of the second letter to Hurckhat-dl, which ends as follows: "You may make any use of this letter which will not dcgrade m e in the eyes of the citizens o f K a ~ e l . "As~ ~ t h r final consecluence of his practice, Nietzsche loses his mind a n d his name: he strips hi~llselfof a m o d e of expression thar coincided with his person. "llon't read books!"(lil is o n e o f the last entries in Nietzsche's notebooks. Every line of the so-called notes o f madness sets up vibrations with the rest of his work. Each sentence seems to be ilttered under the seal of his previous thought, but the form of that thought is n o longer apparent; d . t h e second a n d lengthier letter to its structure has been s u b ~ n e r ~ e In Burckhardt, Nietzsche's language sccnlb r o collsist wholly of what before had Jived in its interstices: the burst of irony, the riddlc, the sudden disguise. T h e fabric of his rhirtking is n o longer visible. LVhat has hnppcllrd? Meanwhile, one can see that Nietzsche's perfect d1raliry is maintained to

*

the end: T h e Dionysian m a n is now Dionysus himselfi the actor has become thc f c i g ~ ~ emaJma11. d Every symptom can s ~ i l have l a double interpretation, and cvery interpretation now lacks any foundation. If. then, one would like a true picture o f w h a t happens in Turin, seen from the standDoin[ of the actor, there is n o point leafing through the various parhologi1 cal explanations that have been proposed. Nietzsche hiniself comes t o our aid, in a passage about the rnodern artist written precisely in 1888: The absurd excitability of his systenl, which makes him create crises out of every experience 2nd puts a drarnaric element into the srnallest incidents of life, makes i t impossible ro count o n him in any way: he is no longer a

person, ar most a rendezvous of persons, nmong \sfhorn now this one, now that one, appear with shameless assurance. For this very rcdson, h c is a great actor: All thcsc poor crrarures, lacking i n will, whom doctors scudy closely, are airor~ishingfor rhe virruosity of their mimicr); rheir capaciry to transform thernsclvcs and rake on almost (zny cl~crmcarthey de~irc2.'~Thus, once again, the usual scene is rewritten: I t is the last appearance of [he Dionysian man and the actor, b u t this time a split a n d a final interfusion take place. with no return. O n c of the rwo characters is h t e d to disappear into the secret: the other, to s ~ ~ r v i vfor e a few more years as a clinical case. Before our eyes, for thz last time, the LIionysia11 nian is transfig~lred into the god who, together with Ariadne, governs "the golden equilibriu m of all things,"('\a~ld alongside him, the actor is trluisformc.d into the madman who astonishes the psychiatrist by his acting talents. T h e actor is a coward not because he ral'es Iea\.e of himself but becalm he returns to himself (in self-defense he has persuaded himself that he has an identity), because he makes a distinction between the stage and of6srage. and because he comes ro a halt-like the process of knowledge, by its nature regressus i n i n j n i t u n l , which instead always stops at s o m e point: "What stops movement (to a presumed first cause, something unconditional, etc.) is laziness, weariness.""" In obeying the suicidal will to truth that he had recognized as a wilt hostile to life, as,thc destruction of life itself, Nietzsche in his last year was increasingly forced to realize the lctter of his thinking, which is moreover the mosr radical ca~lcellationof the letter a n d thus also of thc being who rhought it. T h i s affirmation of the lctter accordingly requires t h a t rhc dcclararive form of t h o u g h t disappear-. Thus, the notes of his madness can be considered as the last experiment

in a way of thinking that in them denies its own [urn]. This experiment puts life at stake: "To make an experiment of one's very life-this alone is fieedom of the spirit, this then became for me philosophy."'~ In this final practice, all of thought becomes silent monologuc, interrupted at intervals by forceful epigrams, just as the self-generation of the world is a soliloquizing and inaccessible acriviry, which proc1:lirns itsclfonly at intervals in fragnlents of forms. Any other disappears. T h u s each of t h e letters seems to imply a thought, as ~ h o u g hthe addressee knew it already. It is impossible to bring them together in a consistent argument, these scattered tesserae of a vast mosaic, which has never been shown because it could not be and did not want to be shown. More than thirty years after stating that the chief cask of Nietzsche's thought is the abolition of identity, "disindividuation,"-' Pierre Klossowski finally worked o u t a complete, convoluted, and masterful development of his theses on Nietzsche, creating a design with the "Turinese euphoria" as its center-corresponding to the hypothesis of departure, according to which Nietzsche's thought "rotates around delirium as around its a x i s " a n d with the vicious circle precisely as its circumference. T h e first commcntator on the tl~rologyo f the circulus vitiosus d e u ~ , -Klossowski ~ is also the first to tackle the last letters from Turin as a form of thought a n d to try to reconstruct, at least in part, their inner connections a n d progression. Previous attempts are valid at most as conscientious docunlentary evidence. Klossowski's intention, in a way the opposite of Heidegger's, is to remove Nietzsche from any context arid io try, inscead, t o reconstruct his thought as the unique sign of something distinctive a n d incommunicable. I n pursuit of this goal, Klossowski has made a number o f niemorable discoveries, bur in the final analysis it appears that Nietzsche, that most elusive of human beings, has once again refused to be pinned down. Swayed by the impetus o f his commentary, Klossowski also aiiclripts a reading of the Turin messages. Rut what particularly distinguishes these mcssages is thar, in their extreme transparency they refuse to be rcad: Illusory statements, random outbursts-in them the discriminating play of truth and sin~ulationcomes to nothing. At this point, any reconstruction of their inner movement, as though o n e were dealing with sornc other text by Nietzsche, seems doorncd horn the start. And we see this confirmed when Klobsowxki subtly tries, for example, to explain the allusion to rnagic in the second letter to Hurckhardt ("froni time to time [here

1

is magic")?J by tracing it back to what is also the biographical labyrinth of Ariadne-Cosima Wagner a n d Dionysus-Nie~zsche.'~ For the first time, we feel that there is an unbridgeable gap between this short text and not this explanation bur any ocher as well. N o con11ncnt:ltor will ever emerge from that labyrinth. Madness may simu1;lte. even with virtuosity, the language o f reason ("We artists are i n ~ o r r i g i b l e " ) , ~but ' where t h r play of truth a n d simulatio~ihas been forever suspe~lded,there is n o way for reasonable language to exercise its interpretation in accordance with the discipline of philolow. "0Ariadne, you yourself are the labyrinth: it is no longer possible to get out of it."-"

r

Necessity and chance are each the mask of the other. 'The total acceptance of this double mask means coinciding with the world's movement and at

.

i

same time abdicating the fictitious necessity for an identity o f one's own, Therefore, there is n o "endpoint where necessity a n d the fortuitous rneet;"'7 rather, chance a n d necessity always correspond, even though the conditions of existence require the two realms to be rigidly separated so [hat life can go on. O n c e this defense of life against itself is shattered, a third realm is opened, in which the discriminating play between truth and simulation is n o longer possible, and this realm is madness. With Erre Homo, Nietzsche had been prematurely separated from his own identity, which, according to the doctrine o f the eternal return, is nothing but a cl~clic~~l yndrurr~e.111NietzscI~e'sprevious thinking, the will to everything, the condemrlation of exclusion, required each state to affirm in itself the succession of all other states a n d thus deny any claim to exclusivity. Nietzsche is now governed by a literal application o f this doctrine, having been compelled to establish the image of his destiny in Ecce Homo, a n d it drives hi111 to wander in a vasc series of states, the plural destin), thar follows the collapse o f his own individual destiny. ''We should not desire a single state, but we should wamr to becomeperiodic beings: bccome, that is, equal t o existence."78 In this fragment, Nietzsche provided perhaps the most concise formulation, without naming it, of the eternal return. To abandon t h r s t t ~ t pof one's ideticicy is a particular instancc of rhe Process described: It means to put oneself into the cycle o f [he wholc, which musi corne back ro that identicy. but only after completing its periud, that is, passing through the chain o f all other states. T h e sequence that now opens out is that ofall s i m ~ ~ l a t i o n("What s is disagreeable and offends my modesty is that at bottom I aln every name in history"):"' h4an, who is

34

. Fatal Monologue

FIrtal Monologue . 31

nature but w h o by nature denies being so, must simulate nature in order to rediscover that he himself is nature. T h e being who has become equal to existence generates the world from himself-:.l ' h e signs o f this process are distributed throughout the last letters from Turi!~.''Si:llno contenti? sot, dio, h o fidtto questa cnricatura" [Are we content! I a111 t h e god w h o has made this c a r i c a t ~ r e ] . ~ "

-

j

I n August 1889, o n o n e of her visits t o the clinic in Jena, Nietzsche's mother realized that her son had secretly taken a pencil and sonle paper f r o m her: " W h e n I said t o h i m jokingly, 'h4y old Fritz, you're a little thief,' he whispered in my car, with a look of satishction, as we said goodbye, 'Now I have something to d o when I hide in my den' (Nun habe ich d i r l ~e t u m zu tun, wenin id] iin ~ ~ ~ Hiih/r e h elrrirchej."x' ffiih/r, as we have already seen, is a key word for Nietzsche. Zarathustra's cave, philosophy as a cave, the d e n where the w o u n d e d beast hides, as does t h e b?te philosophe-Nietzsche's remark t o his mother evokes a chain of thoughts and in the end recalls the lone mnn w h o in Nice silently separated himself from his past. After a year o n a 11~1ge stage, he went back into hiding. 'l'he "shining constellation" had passed forever: "a premonition that the end is near, like the prudence animals have hctore they die: they go off by thernselves, become s till, choose solitude, hi t-ie in caves luerkriechen jich in Hohlm], and become zui.re. . . . W h a t ? Wisdom as ;I screen behind which the philosopher hides fronl-spirit?"S? O n c e again, if Ecce Homo is a work intended to show "how one becornes what one is," if the madness in Turin is pri~llarilythe manifestation of a practice constructed by all o f Nietzsche's previous thoughr, it will come as n o surprise to find a text from the beginning of this journey rhat already seerns t o delineate all its phases in happy ignorance. I refer to the 1873 dissertation On G u t h a n d /,jing irz the Extrizmoral Sense, where in a few brilliant pages, which remain among Nietzsche's finest, the arduous process that we have been following seerns t o take shape hefore o u r eyes. There, simulation, as a dominant force of the intellect, is already affirmed from the start: "The intellect as a luearls for-the preservation of the i n d i v i d ~ ~ a l reveals its principal forces in si~nulation." Mask, stage. and performance are recognized at once as constituent elements of knowledge; the truth itself as "a mobile army of metaphors"; veracity is defined as the obligation t o "lie in accordance with a fixed convention."" Man appears as a metd-

phorizing being: "that instinct for consrrucring meraphors, rhat basic instinct of man, which we cannot leave o u t o f account at any moment since .. would thereby leave man himself o u t of acc0unt."~4There it is stated the si~nulativelaws of knowledge are already given in the construcpedicate, cause, and tion o f language, where all the categories-subject, so on-are prepared, categories that knowledge would claim ro establish by means of language. Knowledge is a t e ~ p i z r m a, colurnbarium, a sepulcher. Knowledge we pe- makes i t possible to avoid pain." iI)un~bfbunded, ruse these pages, recognizing in the swift progress of the argument the endless underground passages that Nietzsche would spend fifteen years digging after drafting this text. It all proceeds with fatal assurance. So we not find foreshadowed there not only the intermediate writings but the dissolution of Nietzsche's thought as well! We d o indeed: After describing the history of knowledge as the hisrory of concealed simul;ition, Nietzsche offers us another possibility, a perpetual alternative to knowledge as a defense against the world and the threat of heing crushed by it. It is t h e path of active, self-aware, playf~llsimulation, the one he s only aclequate himself would later follow. A n d here we find p e r h , ~ ~[he description that could apply t o Nietzsche's final state, as i t appears in the notes of his madness: That huge scaffolding anci srructure of concepts ro which the m;lll who must clings in orcier to save hinlsclf i n rhc coursc of Iifc. For rhc libcl.;lted intellect is merely a support and '1 toy for his d;lring dcviccs. And should he break i t , he shuffles it around and ironically reasscrnhles i r o11ce more, connecring what is Icdsr rclarcd : ~ n dsepar:xring \vhar is closest. By doing so he shows that those needful ploys are of no use ro him anci chat he is no longer guided by conceprs hut by intuirions. Thcrc is no rrg~~lar parh leading from these inruirions inro the land of spectral parrcrns and 'ihsrractions: There are no words for [hem; ni'in Kills silent when hc sees them, or otherwise speaks solely through forbidden metaphors and unprcccdcnred conceprual srrucrurcs, in order to respond at least in a creative way, by dcnlolishing anci deriding rhe old harriers of [he concept, ro [he fecling of powerful intuirion that ciwells wirhin

I

Nierzsche has been such a firhidden meti~pl~or from his day to ours.

The Sleep o f the Calligrapher . 37

ern the place. O r they peruse the book What Is the Goal of the Rrnjamrrrta B ~ ~ s ' S ~ h o o l ? Tlearn h e ~how to behave, devoting themselves to hours of imitative repetition 0f"everything that can happen in life." Specific knowledge is not imparted. At first young Jakob thinks of the place as a scam. But he will immediately change, forever. His loyalty to the Institute and his distance from every other form of life will keep growing. "What had then seemed to me ridiculous and idiotic looks fine and decent to m e today." At the end, with the Institute in ruins, the faithful Jakob will be the last to leave. A transformation has taken place, and it has been brought about by instruction. "There, at the gymnasium, there were a lot of notions, here there's something quite different. We pupils are taught something quite different here." And what is this "quite different" something that Jakob finds at the Institute? Later we will discover cryptic traces, boundless echoes, eddies of prehistory, but in speaking of Walser one must first of all rake note of his style, which goes forever off the track, shies hastily away from any hidden or obvious meaning, and calms down only as it approaches the lull of the insignificant. Writing is born from scribbling and must return to it. With Walser, we keep chasing around this circle.

The Slesp of the Calligrapher

In this sense ~ v r i t i n gis a deeper

slrep,

o r rarhcr,

death, a n d since you rieither can nor would pull a dead m a n our of' his grave, so you canriot gcr m e away From my desk at nighr. -/.>~zt/z tidjk'z, 1.ctcers

to Felice

From the moment Jakob von Gunten starts describing the Benjamenta Institute until the last lines in Robert Walser's eponymous novel, where we see the young hero preparing to leave for the desert, we get no sense of time. It may all be happening in days, months, or years; there is no way of knowing; duration is unspecified. A different measure of time is the real fence that separates the Institute from the rest of the world. Nor is there any indication of the seasons. Only once does Jakob observe that it is snowing, and he is quickly reminded of another snow, the vision of snow that he experienced on his visit to the "inner chambers" of the Institute, and we have no idea on what ground this snow fell. And yet the subtitle reads: A Diary. We are faced with a design and a rhythm, but they d o not match what is going on. "One thing is true: Here nature is lacking." This is how the Benjamenta Institute is presented: as life delivered from cycles, as a sky beyond the most distant revolution of the stars, and at the same time, as the waters of the abyss. Walser, who considered discrimination in general to be an extravagance, was certainly not one to make a sharp distinction between mirrors. T h e Institute proposes to teach its pupils how to serve. T h e teachers "are asleep, or else they're dead, or only apparently dead, or maybe they're fossils." T h e pupils have little to do. They memorize the precepts that gov-

,

Like Jakob von Gunten, Walser could only breathe "in the lower regionsn; he looks primarily at minuscule events, scattered bits of life, whatever is negligible; his tone may be light or childish or rambling, the tone ofwords that go by and cancel each other out. At symbols Walser can only smile. Above all, he would find it a dreadful task to connect one meaniilg with another-and tactless pedantry to consider such a connection permanent. T h e titles of some of his prose pieces, however, seem to suggest weighty issues: "Something about Jesus," "Caesar," "Essay on Bismarck," "The Red Thread" (of history). But here the letdown is even greater. After a few opening words that appear to foreshadow serious, panoramic observations o n the world, there is a sudden wavering, a change of direction that becomes ever more abrupt over the years, sometimes revealing a little of its darker meaning, and then Walser falls back o n the first small, or at any rate extraneous, things that lie within range of association and from there begins to digress until he reaches an arbitrary stopping place, with nothing more to remind us of whatever major thoroughfare we had first set out on. Last heir of the great romantics, Walser has a steady irony that presupposes the certainty that words are superfluous. Hence the prevalence of

38

. The Sleep of the Calligrapher

chitchat. "Here We Chatter" is the title of one of his short prose pieces and could ;~lsobe the motto for all his works. The labyrinthine chatter in which Walser writes is a sign, a bulwark of murmurs and doodles against the threat of the Minotaur, a spell cast o n the reader that allows the author to disappear. Whoever Fails ro recognize thar each of Walser's words implies a previous catastrophe is likely to get him all wrong. Something has cut the moorings, and the hallucinatory vessel of Walser's prose sets sail without a crew, obeying impulses from wherever they may come. This wandering course certainly does not suggest free association; rather, it suggests the shifting receptiveness of matter. THE KOMAN.I.I(: W O M A N :

The Sleep o f the Calligrapher . 39

particular for the secrets of his secret novel. At a distance of some years, he rccalled]ak~b von Gunterz as the book closest to his heart but also as perhaps "a bit rash,"4 probably for fear of having, despite it all, revealed too rnLlchin his tale. Discovering Walser is a little like Jakob von Gunten discovering the Benjammta Institute: You go from suspecting a hoax, to being sure of a mystery, and finally to discovering that the heart of this mystery is its near identity with a hoax. Jakob discovers char there is really no thought behind the facade of the Institute ("Is there perhaps some g n e r a l plan here. a thought? No, nothing"), but the true secret of the Benjamenta brother-and-sister pair, and W.llserls as well, is theJ"7ightfj-om thought

1 used co be more

cliheveled a n d sponrdneous. For rhr sake of order I losr a s o u n d . A largeness, 3 freedom, an ease, which was alre:ldy sufficienrly restrained, I repressed forsook rile. In purifying n~!elf, b ~ with ~ t w h a r ' lcfc of something esenti~~l, lny ego I still get up to all sorts of rrlischief. -Kobr.rt VSirhrr; Klcinrs I'hcater cles 1,rhcns Impatient with any sort of meaning and indulgent toward all styles, Walser would read trashy novels in order to have the pleasure of recycling their plots, with the addition of a few particulars, and he was satisfied by his invention.' In his thousands of pages of short "prose pieces," he spoke of everything while judging nothi~lg-or rather, letting it always be understood that judgment was to be considered suspended each time at the moment of improvisation. Tact, which he pushed to an extrelrle, kept him from assuming solid convictions. Over the impassive surface of this void, Walser furtively unleashed language, his only confidant. with a lack of scruples seldom equaled by his more eager and aggressive contemporaries. "When I really let myselfgo in writing, it may have looked a bit comical to serious people; and yet I was experimenting in the field of language in the hope it might conceal some unknown brightness that it would be a joy to reawaken."' Walter Benjamin spoke of the "inhuman, in~perturbablesuperficiality" of Walseri characters,' who are so imperturbable that Walser is ;llways discouraging anyone who might go looking for secrets in his writings, and in

Time is suspended in the institute but not suppressed. N o one in thar dull a disguised Eden, is able to reckon time; all are engulfed in a common unconscious state, an abnormal kind of sleep, that absence that Jakob notes in his teachers and in Benjamenta himself. And Benjamenta tells him, "Jakob. you're a little surprised, aren't you, at the I X L ~ way we spend our lives here at the Institute. almost as though we were ahsent in spirit?" In the face of such scandalous behavior, Jzikob thinks briefly of rebelling; but nothing comes of it, and later he will understand that this kind of sleep is the supreme result of the curriculum. "Today, you see, religion is no longer worth anything," he will observe. "Sleep is more religious than all your religion. Maybe when one sleeps one is closer to God." The Benjamenta Institute is the diametric opposite of Coethe's "pedagogic province." Moreover, we know that Walser had studied Goethei Wilhelm Meistel-s Warzderjahre and was very fond of it.; Instead of f o r m i ~ al ~ personality, as they say in pedagogic jargon, the Institute breaks it down and dissociates it. Here the obstacle the ~ u p i l smust overcome is consciousness itself. They therefore train themselves in empty repetition and mimetic obedience: They follow any external order to rid themselves of the the compulsion to think. They tend to reduce themselves to zero-in end Jakob will be able to say, "And if I go to rack and ruin, what will get broken, what will be lost? A zeron-and these zero subjects know they have nothing of their own and are thus perfect servants; above all they know that their own thoughts do not belong to them. T h e first, and least important, reasons that convince young Jakob von Gunten of the deep

The Sleep ofthe C:alligrapl~rr. 4 1

mearling of the teachings imparted by the Institute relate to society. The last descendant of a decayed aristocratic family, Jakob already has an inkling char in a world where everyone claims to be free and everyone is a slave (are not even those who seem to be most free actually "slaves, governed by a maddening, gross, scourging idea of the world?"), uniform obedience restores that ultimate asymmetry that is the indispensable sign of sovereignty. Reversing Hegel's thesis, in the realm of slavery the sovereign can only try not to be recognized, to approach the nonexistent and invisible, in accordance with the exampIe that Jakob sees in his perfect companion Kraus: "Kraus is a genuine divine work, a nothing, a'servant." Rut this is only a preliminary lesson in the Insrirure's curriculun~:T h e pupils are preparing themselves not to enter the world but to leave it, unseen. 'The world corlsists of time and wakefulness; the idea is to suspend them. T h e first weapon for bringing about this silent, stealthy upheaval is uninterrupted repetition, the category of the perpetual, a hybrid transition from the measuring of time to an indivisible continuum. Every gesture is deprived of its function, everything becomes exercise, meaning is eroded, automatis111 is regained, and the synlbolic function is sabotaged: "The eyes act as a go-between for thoughts, and that's why 1 close then1 every so often, so as not to be forced to think." Finally, a declaration of principle: "If only they knew how many things they spoil, the thinkers. Someone who applies himself to not thinking is doing something; well, that's just what's needed most." Und gesellr sich zum Verborgnen. Zu den Lit-blingen des Schlafes. [And is joined with ths hidden. W ~ r hrhc favorires of sleep.] -Goetl,e,

Sieben~hliifer

There is an old legend of Chris~ianorigin-one that for centuries lent itself to Islamic speculation, having been recorded in the enigmatic S U of ~ t h e C ~ Z(S~ira J P 18) in the Qur'an-whereill we find the same sleep that is re-evoked, ambiguous, and counterfeit bur secretly faithful in Walser's novel. It is the story of the Seven Sleepers. An underground passage impossible to find runs from the cave at Ephesus to the "inner chambers" of the Benjarnenta Institute. In the chain of witnesses cunstituting the his-

tory of the ~llyth,this last and most recent one is so subdued as to be unwere compressed into a recognizable, as though the ge~lealogyof the nursery rhyme. T h c connection between sleep and the suspension of time can now be see11 in perspective, no longer in the life of a boarding school but in the story of r l ~ ecosmos. Fleeing persecution by the idol-worshipping emperor Decius, tht: seven Ephesian youths who take refuge in the cave without physical decay for 309 years. Their reawakening prefigures eschatological time in rhe most violent way that the order of the world can offer: After one of the111goes forth anlollg men "in search of whoever has the purest food" ( 1 8 : r ~ )and to testify involuntarily to the miracle, &ich guarantees the resurrection of the body, the Seven will finally die. "Time can only be reckoned by means of movernenr; when no movement is perceived, no time is perceived, as in the story of the Seven Sleepers," wrote Avicenna (Najdt, 189). But this story was itselfa variation, and in following its wanderings we fall into prehistory. There is a passage in Aristotle that matches Avicennas words: "Thus there is no [rime] without change; indeed, when our mind does not undergo changes, or does not notice them, it does not seem to us that time has passed, just as i t did nor seem when they reawakened to those who, according co the myth, lay beside the heroes in Sardinia: They connect the prior moment with the nloment after, combining them in one and abolishing the interval they have not perceived" (Physics, 218 b 2 1 ) . According to Sinlplicius, Aristotlc is here referring to another variant o f the myth of uwcor.rupted sleeprrs: the story of the nine sons of Herakles and the daughters of 'Thespios, who died in Sardinia and whose bodies remained intact, looking like men who had fallen asleep. T h e passage presumably alludes to a pracrice of inwbntio, of lying next to these bodies in order to commune with thern in dreanls."ut this is only one of the many ramifications of the theme to be found, b o ~ hbefore and after. Most important, there is a rich variety of sources to show thc connection benveen the Seven Sleepers and Canopus, the star close to the celestial South Pole and belonging to the constellation of Argo Navis, the ship on which, according to Islamic tradition, the Seven Sleepers were to embark.' Certain words in the Qur'an supposedly refer to the roll of the waves in the celestial abyss, a movement outside of movement: "You would have thought they were awake and instead they slep[, and we turned them to right and to left" (18:rX). It is in the same region of the sky,Xand nor on sonle Ogygia that cannot be located on terrestrial maps, that Kronos, the now dcposed god of the Golden Age, is said

to reside: "For Kronos hi~nsclfsleeps i111priso1iedin a deep rock cavern thar shines like gold; he sleeps the sleep ordained by Zeus co hold hi111 fast, and the birds that fly over the rock b r i ~ l ghim arnbrosi;~and the whole island is dre~ichedby the fragrance chat descends from the rock as from a foun rain" (Plurarch, L ) ~ , f i c i eirz orbe lz~rzrzp,941 F ) . And yet his sleep governs the world; irnnlersed in slumber, he still "o\~erseesall crcation" (Orpl~icorurnFr~zg~~zentd, ed. 0. Kern, n. I j 5). By m a k i n g one's way through the labyrinths o f the symbolic, o n e would reach in the end the opposition of the two celestial poles, whcre [he north stands for perfect wakefillness and the south for ~ l divine ~ e deep rhac sustains the world. Rorh are collnecred wirh S a t u r ~ who ~ , holds the umbilical cord entwining heaven arld earth," but in accordance with cosmic inversion they have opposite meanings, like the rwo corresponding halves of an hourglass-shaped drum.'" f h e seven stars of rhc Hear, points o f light from outside the cosmos, are associated with the seven A b d i l , "mysterious characters w h o h l l o w and replace o n e another from o n e cycle ro rhe nexr. . . . they themselves are^ che eyes through which the Beyond looks ar the world":" l ' h e Sesen Sleepers arc received aboard the ship Avgo. 'They are apotropaic guardians, some of the initiatory vigil, the orhers of seafarers wa/led-up alivr in the storm.:' Walser, with n o conceivable conscious reference on his part, was impelled by what Ahy Warburg called che " n ~ n e m i cwave" to develop a new variation on the rherne of the uncorrupted xlecpcn, once again exposing the cssenrial feature of thar myth, rhe suspen~ionoftirizc, b u t leaving the whole grandiose cosmological structure char supports it submerged. It could hardly be orherwise, not only for the obvioils reason rhat Walser was unaware of whac h r was doing, b u t precisely because of the supplcmenrary m e a ~ i i n gthar the myth rakes o n in his hands. "I-Iere lat ti ire is lacking," says Jakob in rhe Institute. Reference to ally order whatsoeser is ruled our: the rapture o f nihilism presupposes indeternlinancy of meaning a n d is gratified by it. But by canceling meaning and abolishing a time frame for all that happens, this rapture leads back ro ilic very category that hnds irs supreme denionstrarion in the story of the Seven Sleepers: pure abandonment; abandonniel~twherein Islam identifies its own essence; abandonmen1 rhat it1 the Christian tradition is held to be sotnewhat suspect, the quietist heresy having been evoked to exorcise it, 2nd char accordingly appears in heterodox furms, as in Molinos or lean-l'ierre d e Caussade. T h i s

I

also explains why there has been s o lirrle speculation about the Seven Slccpers in the Wesr, where the legend has bee11 transrnirtcd nlostly in naive poetic versions, some of them full of charni, like Charbry's little Anglo-Norman poem.'> As Louis Massignon's illuminaring ;inalyses" havc sliown, the slunlber of the Seven Sleepers is an image of eschatological expectation beyond verbal expression. T h u s the pupils at the I n s t i t ~ ~ tin e , this most recenc version of the image-childish, minuscule, bur perfecrly correspondingknow "only one definire thing: We are wailing! 'Chat's all we're ~ o o for." d It is only by shunning all discourse that experience, e~iclosedin a lethargic and stubbol-11silence, is transformed into a sytnpcom o f che Hoz~r,che olie "perfect, self-sufficient morne12t," while any orher rnoment of c o m m o n consciousness can only be split off, irs fulfillment postponed co rhe future:'5 "Thus we rrlade all sign o f thern disappear so thac people would know rhar the promise of G o d is true and [hat the H o u r is sure lo comc" (Qur'an, Sura 18:zr). Consciousness is doubled by losing itself in u cevtcrin ujay ("a cercain kind o f sleep is useful, if only t b r the ficr chat ir leads a just as the inabiliry ro d o something, for t h e specific life of its pupils of the Benjamenta Insrirute, "is like prerending to do ir in some other way." O n e o f the many meanings o f t h e story of the Seven Sleepers is thus che reraliation of wakefi~lnessagainst irself. If the common human condition is a fictitious wakefulness rhat signifies sleep, the slumber of t h e Seven Sleepers is a wakefulness beyond wakcfulncss, where a possibility precluded by [he consrirution of the living is realized myrhically: the blur between wakefulness and the flux of what is happening, which corisciousness is ,fo?.cedto watch. T h e Seven Sleepers d o nor have thc measure o f time because [hey live in a flow thal itselfcounts tinle and is c o i ~ n t e dby it.

"I a m a dethroned king," the surly Beniarnenca tells lakob o n one occilsion. This ambiguous gianr, [he absenl ~ n a nwho gri~mblesas he reads the newspaper, has " n o ~ h i n gbeautiful, nothing 1nagnificent3' about him but allows "lengthy vicissitudes, serious strokes offare" l o bc glimpsed within him. so that for lakob i t is "this human elernerl[, this '111nost divine element thar makes him beau~iful." Benjamenta is K r o ~ ~ oearliest s, ~ n o d c lo f the derhroneci king, god of the Golden Age, whoni the lacer gods relegated, in rhe seeming inconsistency of great- myths, both ro the horrid cave o f Tartarus and to thc cave

44

. Thr Sirep of thr Griii6dphrr

dripping with ambrosia o n the fortunate isle of Ogygia. In either case. he is b~dyird,as Benjarnenta says of himself: "l've actually . . . buried myself here." And Ogygia is at the same time a b r t u n a t e isle and the lsle of the Dead.'717he face of Kronos that we first see in Renjamenta is rhc one so ofren reproduced by more recent tradition: sinister nlelancholy; rhc old m a n who contains in himself the knowledge of nzrmer~rs,menszlm, pondus [number, measure, weight] a n d the powcr of destruction; the plnrfrctris cavcrri~,lord of destitution. But the Benjamcnra Insricute is also the happy Ogygia, where Kronus awaits in sleep the ultimate revolution of the stars that will reestablish his order, the resplendent earth o f the Golden Age. Behind the dismal stairways and corridors of the Institute, "an old aband o n e d garden'' can be seen. which the pupils are n o t allowed to enter, cvcn though they know abour it: "In our Benjamenta Institute there are plenty of other We are forbidden to enter the real garden." O n e day, "if o n r of us were, or rather had been, a hero w h o had performed some courageous exploit a n d put his life at risk, he would be permitted (thus it is written in our book) to enter the marble portico adorned with frescoes that lies hidden amid the greenery of o u r garden; a n d there a m o u t h would kiss him." To the s u d d e n strains o f The hfggir Flzrta Saturn's opens and snaps shut. Est ignota prosul nostraeque impervia ~ n e n t i , vix adeunda deis, annorurrl squalida rnater, immensi spelunca aevi, quac rempora vnsto suppedirat revocatque sinu. Complectirur antrum, ornnia qui placido consumit numine. scrpens perperuumque viret squamis caudamqlie reductam ore vorar racito relegens exordia lapsu.

-Cl,~ud,i~n. D e Consulatu Stilichonis, 424-30

l h e one truly visionary scene inldkub uorz Guizttn is when Jnkob visits the "inner chambers" of the Institute, following the wand of Lisa, Ben1amt.nt;<ssister and magical go-between. AS always in Walser, the odd~iessof the event is diminished and trivialized by the tone of the narrative, as though someone were relating a true fact while warning ar every irlornent that he is probably lying. But this in n o way detracts from the scene's specificity: This time it is [he darkness of the cosmic cave that is thrown open. "I had the feeling o f being at the center of the earth": dampriess, cold, darkness.

The Slee,~,of the (klligma,nher

.

41

T h e divine consort of Benjamenta-Kronos, Lisa here assulnes the role of Adrastea, born "of foresight a n d inevitability" ( O ~ h i r o r i i m F~a~mr?zm, 110, lox), who joins the old god i n governi~lgthe w o r l d . XDuring the regujar initiatory journey to which Lisa s u b j e c ~ siskob-inlmersing h i m in the "pyre of lightq and in "crypts and arnbul~itories."finally guiding him onro the "skating rink o f ice o r gl;~ss"-oae o f her reniarks sums up tile lesson: " O n e niLlsr learn to love necessity, ro care ibr ir." T h e reader, by now accustomed to the transcr,ndr.ntal biifi,onpy of the various gnomic expressions encountered at every step in the Insticute ("l.itrle, hiit in depth," "Hands are the five-finger proof of vanity a n d h u m a n concupiscence," and so o n ) may be disconcerted to realize that a similar thought about necessity was uttered by Zarathustra a few years earlier. Hut the sorceress Lisa is a necessity about to be undermined and got rid ofi T h e cosrnos designed by her lord and brother in the Institure is a fragile image, a temporary and at the same time rigid calculation. O n c e again the d e t h r o ~ l e d king will have to move on. All these comparisons may seem irreverent-and with good reason. I'robably no o n e would be more surprised than Walser to see gods and celestial bodies circulating injukob uorl G u r ~ ~ rH n :e used a great many words, but it would be hard to find 'mythologf among them. A n d so? W r - i ~ i l has ~g a life o f its own uriknown to its author; this, ar least, was something about which Walser was never in any doubt. Few authors have succeeded in effacing themselves t o such perfection, becoming cocooned in their own words, happy in their invisibility; few authors havr been so secure in the self-sufficiency of their writing. and today, many others are ready to take i r o n faith, as a new dispensation. Yet this is not enough; there m u s t be a double leap: It is a question not simply of writing but o f the independent life o f images. Treacherously, "like thieves in the night," images burst in. O n e does not "do" mythology by filling pages with the names ofgods-an illusion that goes back to Carl Spitteler a n d Theodor Ddubler-but nei~ prose with ther can one be sure ofavoiding nlyrhology by i r r ~ b u i none's -, disruptive charm, in radical indifference t o rnsaning and with the ertinction of will. O n the contrary, i t may be that ir is just such a practice that summons the images back. But it would be too dishcartelling to find a rule in this, for thc involuntary would t11t.11 rurri o u t to be merely a subterfuge of the will. Walser instead shows us that. if anything, the rcvcl-sc is rrue. Lisa n ~ ~ s t e r i o u s wastes ly away and dies, and with her thc lnstirutc is ~

u

The Sleep of the Callig~apher . 47

likewise consun~eci,unstable experiment in emerging from the aiom. Now there is no protective space. Lisa's death follows a n o i i e o s ~co~nrnitred by her brother. I t is up to Jakoh to redeem the o f i n s c With these rwo movements, the Institute dissol\rs s n d the way to the desert opens tor the old man and the boy. In a final Saturnine shock, Bcnjamenta first tries to strangle Jakob a n d then to kiss him. Saturn, M e r c ~ ~ r i ujenex, s as the idcllernisrs called h i m , would like to restore his whole riiat and ageless image, his "crookcd thought." and loosen u p his old man's useless r i s d i ~ : "Saturnuj cum sit w 2 e . ~ ,p o j ~ e ~ e r j p ~ ~ e r $ n g i t(Myt/~ograpi7i z~r'' k?ticani, 5 8 ) . Seze.r [old man] a n d p u r r [boy] are transformed, each becoming the other's g~iide.Jakob seems to possess by nature the virtues fostered by the insritute a n d thus has no need to will them. Benjamenta, on [he other hand, collapses bcforc the contradiction o f having w i l e d to bury himself in n o n will. Neither fences outside rhe world nor those hiddell in the world are allowed. Bur in the end, everything dissolves, once again in sleep. A new earth appears to Jakob in the night, Walseri real earth: "It was naturc and yet it wasn't, image and body at the same time." And hidden in Jakob's exquisite, ridiculous Middle Eastern fantasy appears the final nrotto, which absorbs and sets its seal on the previous ones: "Stop explaining." T h e patapair Benjamenta-Saturn a n d Jakob-Mercury now set o u t on the road; they will never come back t o tell us about Llirir final getaway: "It was as though we had escaped forever, or at least for a very long time. from what it is customary ro call European civilization." W h a t ia certain, however, is that thcy will not be going to Samoa, where UValtber Rathe~lau. in a n operetta-like gesture renriniscent o f Robert Musil's hrnheini. offered to 6 n d Walser a job so that he could live as a free artist. Walseri reply to such i ~ ~ v i t a t i o nsums s ~ i pperfectly his conception of his role: " I thank you, b u t 1 consider it unnecessary t h a ~you take me by the arm. 'rhe world is tho,~sandsof years old and full o f u n h o ~ c d - f o rprospects.~"" Walser's journrys wcre always oiatioi,less. As Ire had already said in his first novel, (;Cjci11(1iiter Enner: "Does nature g o abroad?" l.he Henjamenti Institute is a [emporary regression o f utopia to its cosmological origins, which annihilate the very concept of it. Nature-culture, that pairing of opposites a n d our imperrincnt identity card, is elinrinated by exha~isrionin an intermediate world of p ~ l r efluid, a new natum rzsrnpi)ydidicii, where the signs that identi+ the individual or group, but especirlly ~ l l esprcics, are drainrd away in a sleep that is a biological coninion-

$ace, where consciousness is reabsorbed into what nourishes it. But for this very reason, i t is not surprising that many have seen in the Benjamenta Institute an image of oppression, o n e among many represenrations of a wicked society. T h e mistake is understandable: S u c i c ~these ~ days sins ~)J~UU excess ~ / I ofspirit and dispels the letter, in a n infernal similarity to the practices o f the lostitute. Society has become a single esoteric bodF b u t with nothing to cover it, wherein all that is most awful and secret passes for everyday banality. N o one w h o stands in its light can see: So rigorously closed as to be equally hidden from its leaders a n d its ibllowers, it purr rulers and ruled up against the same wall, and neither are aware that the). cannot know what they are being forced to cio. T h e great criticism of culture, the line that runs from Friedrich Nietzsche to Theodor Xdorno and survives today mostly in spurious variations, established a n exact portrait of the new mati: niediocre above all, good, malleable material for society's experiments. But only in rare glinrpses did i t foresee the dazzling parody into which the whole structure would be transformed: cities hard as diamonds, tautology riddled by a multiplicity of opinions. a n d those opinions weighed by an invisiblc jeweler, in order that the sum o f all disorders mighr be the best equilibrium-"gnats of subjectivity," wrote Hegel, destined to be burned in the great central fire o f repetition. AL the e n d o f a long battle with nature, almost unprecedented in the roster of societies for the crudeness of its established methods, tire new nameless society". Industry," its only name so far, is laughably inadequate-tends ro replace nature: By n o w self-sufficient, i t assimilates itself to the o n e accessible image ofself-sfficienc. Nature itself has become a particular instance of this huge operation, which does nor require a purpose brit a litany, a mystical machine that can d o without any ofits pa1-l~and disown its operators, the ulrimare srylizatio~iof power, ready for diffiision and contagion, as in the beginning. Names are only its precarious supports, straw d o g . Max Brod tells how Kaika suddenly came to see him one day to express

his enthusiasm for/nbob wn Gzinrm. H e also says that Kafia enjoyed reading W:~lser'sprose aloud a n d couldn't stop laughing2"--laughter that recalls that uf Kafia and his friends when he read them The F 7 i . Finally. Kafia had an office supervisor named Eisner w h o noted a certain resemblance between Kafia a n d Simon Tanner, the hero o f Walser'b 61-st novel." This detail already seems to belong to a remote civilization. T h e affinity between Kafia and Walser was noted by Musil in a ,914 review,

' The Skep o f the Ca/Iigrapher . 49

48 . The Shrp aftbe Calligrapher

where Katka is even dcscribcd, unjustly, as a "special example of rile Walsrr type."^^ O f course, it is nui unusual to find passages in Katka and Walser thar seem to reflect one another naturally. When we read in Jakob von Gunten that "in a very simple, and in a cerrain way stupid. exercise, there are greater benefits and truer notions than in /earlling a Jot of cone l ~ in Katka an illustration of cepts and meanings," we call i ~ n ~ n e d i a tfind what WaJser meant: "to nail a plank with patient, careful skill and at the same time not do anything, and without anyone being able to say, 'For him rlailing is nothing,' but 'For him nailing is really nailiilg and at the same time notlling.' whereby the nailing would indeed become more reckless, more decisive, Inore real, and, if you like, more Foolish." In Walser. as in Kafia, prehistoric winds blow from the Ice Mountains. But whereas Kafka firrilly and increasingly (I-ansformedwriting into a steady confrontation with power ("Of all writers, Kafka is the greatest expert on power")," Walscr, incurably damaged before taking the first step, was too weak and in subs tan rial for such a challenge. He rnust always have known it, since only once in his life as a writer-with Jilkob von Gunten-did he face up to what later would slowly destroy him. The short prose pieces of his last years are quick, often splendid, attemprr at escape by dissociation. While Kafka left a number of testimonies, both magnifiient and embarrassing, of his chronic clash with what he still called "life." Walser always pretended to be talking about lrimself without really confessing a singlc word. " N o one is entitled to behave toward rne as though he knew me"','-these w o r J are tacitly posted at the heginning of everything Walser wrote. In his boundless helplessness, Walser never lacked the strength to keep silent. His loyal friend Carl Seelig, who contirlued to visit Walser in the various psychiatric clinics where the writer spent the last nuenti-right years of his life, recounts an episode in which we see the shadow of rhe Benjamenta Institute reeinerge for a moment: "1 will never forget rhat a u t u m n morning when we were walking [I-om Teufrn to Speichen, through a fog as thick as cotton wool. 1 told him that day rhat his work might last as long as Gottfried Keller's. He stopped as though rooted to the spot, gave me a rnosr serious look, and said that if I valued his frirndship I shollld never agaill pay hirn such compliments. He. Robert Walser, was a zero and wanted to be forgotten."" 727e Chile and Jzkob yon Gt~nrcrih ~ v eobviol~ssimilarities. Both revolve around a rltr ofpmrr; both arouse a cl-aving for symbolic interpretation

I

and disappoint i t in the end. Walter Beniamin, the m o t enlightened reader of both Walser and Kafka, avoided the temptation to identi+ them too closely by relating Kafka's work to prehistory and Walser's to fableregions where that later invention, synlbolism superimposed on literature, does not exist. T h e Castle and the Benjamcnta Institute are concrete expressions of power and as such contain the gerrns of every image, but in a dubious and still undifferentiated state that precedes the subdivision into arnbivalences thar constitutes the symbol. We will never be able to decide whether the Castle is a place of gate or hell or wllether rhe Benjamenta Institute is an image of oppression or the liberated life. The images lie hidden and entarlgled at the bottom of the well. What makes the diffel-ence is not so much their positive or negative meaning as the two reverse axes o n which (hey rest: for The C~zstlethe axis of wakeful~iess,for Jakob zjon Gzrnten the axis of sleep. K. conaral~tlystruggles, without success, to stay awake, in order to match the Castle's relentless wakefulness. He rriej to discover its secret and falls asleep just when the secretary Biirgel, a marginal figurr and chance emissary, calmly reveals to him some of the Castle's-crucial!-rules. And K. irnn~cdiacclywonders "why he couldn't put up with a few bad nights and one sleepless night, why it was here that he had been overtaken by such irresistible fatigue, here where no one go[ tired, or ra~llerwhcre everyone was continu:~ll~ tired without it affecting their work, indeed their fatigue seemed to encourage it." ( h v e r s e l y , Benjarnenta [ails for having trzed to establish the walled chamber of sleep within the big city. He will have to go far away. Both K. and Jakob are caught up in a journey where neither ever gets anywhere. Moral issues aside, abjection is the disturbing pleasure oilinking up with what is given. whatever i t may be; abjection always leaves meaning out of consideration and bows only to presence, in order to guarantee the separation of the abscnr; the sum of possible actions is embraced once and for all, and henceforth the process begins of debasing anything rhat might recall an ego's choice. Such a vice does not have many devotees, bur Walscr is one of them. This is the f~indamentalorigin of the great obsession rhat runs throughout his life and work: to serve. T h e mask of the servant as lift's supreme possibility appears in all of Walser's novels, From (kchwister Tanner to GehiilfP to Jakob von Gunten and the lost ~lovcl?Kcodor, of And we know that in his which only one hilarious chapter s~rvives.:'~

jo

. Thr Sleep of the Calligrapher

various jobs, Walser always sought subordinate roles. that of domestic servant being his highest aspiration. Enoch/Elias, according to Ibn 'Arabi, becomes completely animill, and thereby loses speech as well, thus u n d e r p i n g a mute unveiling forbidden to the human being;" Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Lord Chaodos. himself struck dumb, is gripped by a dizzying paralysis: "Even my own hcaviness, the general torpor of my brain, seems to acquire a meaning; 1 experience in and around me a blissful, never-ending interplay, and among the objects playing against one another there is not one into which I cannot flow. To me, then, it is as though my body consists of nought but ciphers which give me the key to everything."** Likewise Walser, by' the pure force of dissociation, and certainly without laying claim to any sort of revelation, patiently slackened all the threads that might have given dignity or consistency to his ego. He likens himself to zero, which can be added to any element without changing it, other than imparting to it a touch of nullity. And if abjection has a sign, it is most certainly zero. Jakob, Walser's agile double, says, "Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to give a false image of myself to those I have locked in my heart. . . . For example, I imagine it would be indescribably beautiful to die in the terrible knowledge of having offended and inspired the worst opinions about myself in those 1hold dearest in the world." And finally, he alludes in passing to the pleasurc aroused by such a reckless way of life: "What a strange perversion, to rejoice secretly at seeing that you're being robbed a little.'' For Walser the literary form of the abject is the gloss; it too "represents a perversion," certainly reprehensible in terms of "literary morality." The gloss attracts Walser because it "operates in all directions.'"' is determined by indifference in the presence of impulses, thwarts all cuotoun, continually duplicates itself, and is multiple and erratic. Between his many jobs as an underling-among others, bookstore clerk. law clerk, employee in two banks and a sewing-machine L~ctory,and finally butler in r castle in Silesia, and only readers of Jnkob uon Guntm will be able to understand his delight-W'l.kcr from tinie to time withdrew to the "Writing Roolrl for the U n e n ~ ~ l o y e d(the " nanle is Walseri;,n but true) in Zuricb, and there, "sented on an old stool in the evening. by the weak light of an oil lamp, he made use of his graceful handwriting to cop) addresses and do other such jobs assigned hini by stores. firms. and i~idividuals."") It is not only these periods but Walser's whole existence that

The S l e q

of

the Calligrapher

,

P

take us back to Herman Melville's Bartleb); the impeccable scrivener who revealed nothing and accepted nothing except ginger cakes. In these vegetal creatures, disguised in the clothes of the common man ("I am not particular," Bartleby liked to repeat) negation thrives. All the more radical in going unnoticed, their destructive breath is often not registered by any instrument: For man); Walser remains a cozy figure. His nihilism has even been described as "delicate and domestic, good-natured as a Swiss bourgeois.''3' O n the contrary, he is a remote man, a path parallel to nature, an almost indiscernible thread. Walseri obedience, like Bartlebgi disobedience, presupposes a total removal. An original failing bars them from the body of communicants, and this failing constitutes their riches. As sovereigns, they make no effort to find a remedy for their condition or even to commeilt on it. They copy They transcribe letters, which pass through them as through a transparent plate. They express nothing of their own. There is nothing they would alter. "I do not develop," says Jakob in the Institute; "I would prefer not to make any change," says Bartleby In their affinity, we see the equivalence between silence and a certain ornamental use of words. In the thousands of pages written by Walser-an oeuvre indefinitely extendable, elastic, devoid of bone structure; endless chatter to conceal the lack of any forward movemeor in its discourse-Bartlebyi words, though never uttered, are a consrant refrain: "I would prefer not to." ! i

i

!

the park, and at times he also trains his long-range binoculars on the sky, which is crawling with worms. He has already taken note of many things. H e is trustworthy. I advise you to take a good look at his impeccable account ledgers. T h e economic connections, in this regard, need to achieve their proper luminescent obscurity, which only a rigorous paralogical analysis can release from those regions of nature and the spirit that are themselves muddled and arbitrary. "Your insistence on maintaining relations with me beyond the prudent measure of two books will probably d o you no good from the scientific standpoint, but I make bold to whisper in your ear that so far there has not been much hope for you.

Dkesses entretenues

Yours, D. I? Schreber")

FORTRESS

A v i ~aux non-comrnuni~te\:'Tout est conlmun, m6me Dieu. [Warning to nonsornmunists:

Everything is common, exen God.]

-Bnudelazre

(After long and roundabout wandering, 1 found myself back in Sonnenstein park, under a green tent of leaves that became ever more transparent. A serrated crack opened in them and there, a little farther ahead, I saw the Konigstein fortress: If the Stone of the Sun is also-and who can doubt i t i t h e Stone of the King, then the judge had discreetly yielded his place, for the time being, to Frank Wedekind. T h e latter, jailed in the fortress for committing the crime of lkse-n~ajesttin cabaret songs, was in the first months of the year 1900 working on the second and final draft of Mirie-Hahn. T h e vegetation before me kept thinning out, and 1 came upon, as in a sudden drawing ruom. a small table and a chair. both of stone. An envelope stamped with red sealing wax stood propped on the table, and i recogtrized the judge's alchemical eagle i t was one of his letters of instruction: "Dear friend, "I thought it well to absent myself for a short time from the and leave it at your disposal for a glotto-theological appendix on the real social situation of my girls, the bird-maidens, s o n ~ e t h i very n ~ close to my heart. Frank Wedekind, land agent fc)r my house and ringmaster of my circus. keeps watch from the height of the fortress on everything that goes on in

ark

Life in the Konigstein fortress had turned out to be agreeably eccentric. T h e prisoners were treated like officers in a frontier garrison, with cigars and liquor and readings while the wind whistled around the walls, doors banged, and windows creaked. There was a suggestion of paradise in the air, of the memory of Lenzburg Castle, almost hidden by the dense trees. There, in territory open for the impudence and dangerous games of childhood, Wedekind had already absorbed many of the phantasms in his work, later to be developed in advertisements for Maggi bouillon cubes until the clumsy mythological dramas of his last years. From one extreme to the other, he had touched on almost all the delicate topics of the time and had traced their nervous intertwinings at length. His words flowed doggedly between sex and money, the press and the circus, intrigue and the body, while always keeping an eye out for the police.

A first draft of Mine-Haha, now lost, dates from July-October 1895. T h e second and final one was written in the Konigstein fortress, between September 1899 and March 1900. In those same months, Wedekind also reworked the manuscript of Tile Marquis unn Keith: "The fact is, my eyes now turn only to that region where the cross between philosopher and horse thiefis appreciated for its true worth"; "People never know whether they should look out for me o r if i r k my d u t y instead to look o u t for them"; 'There's nothing I can do about my insatiability," says the marquis, the only possible consort for Lulu. Mine-flai~awas published in Die h s e i (voi. 2 , no. 3) in 1901. In 1903 it appeared in the Little Library series

j4

. Dekses entretenues

published by Langen, who was responsible for many of Wedekind's legal and financial difficulties, with the addition of the prologue, fourth chapion the letters of Helene Engel, ter, commentary, and the s p e ~ i f i c ~ ~ t"From edited by Frank Wedekind."

Dkesses entretenues . 55

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T h e M a r q ~ ~von i s Keith had the "coarsc red hands of a clown," a n d so Wedekind hid his own in cool gloves. W h e n Wedekind appcared on the scene, his figure immediately created c o n h ~ s i o na n d nervousness, and so in his mature years his demeanor was disrant and formal. Bertolt Arecht looked o n him with admiration: "There he stood, ugly, brutal, dangerous, with his short red hair, his hands in his trouser pockets, and you felt that not even the devil could carry him off."' 111t h e beginning there were visirs by seagulls to Lenzburg Castle, the Srni~tuspoetirus of the grammar school pupils, an epidemic of suicides. Benjamin Franklin Wedekind, named after that mean and thrifty hero of liberty, reads Heinrich Hei~re'spoems to his companions. a n d the female images that vanlpirize the nredulla are immolated i l l the attic: Palma il Vecchio's Venus, but also Hans Makart's L ~ ~ LLossow's L, Galatea, a n d J. van Beers's Ada, this lasr swiped from a secret drawer of his father's; in the background are the protective shadows of a "philosophical aunt" and an "erotic aunt." Having fled the paternal roof, he finds in Zurich two things that will llever desert him: words written for money, "philanthropic buttresses for earning c a s h ~t the firm of Juli~lsMaggi; and the Herzog Circus: "Every time I set foot under that tall teirr. airy and light, I feel a truly voluptuous shiver run through olc. Here I i l n envcloprd by an ;lir of celebration, something s u n ~ p t u o u sand grand, and yet in its way so u11speakably childish." (We ;ire in Zurich ill 1888: still in the f i ~ t u r elies that evening of 7 February 1720 in Piiris, when a delightfill bunch o f partyre rrndait dans goers broke u p at the door of the Fr;itellini brothers-"On dans e celle d'une danseuse" [ O n e \vent to their dr,essing leur loge c r ~ n ~ m room as to that o f a dancer]-while the C o m t e Anne d'Orgel cordially greeted young Frlosois de Skiyeuse. thus t1lrc)wiog the 1:ltter's friend PluI Robin, impenitent rachottier, into despair: "11 )I avait la des Ppaves grnndioses, des objets dkpouilli.~d e leur signification premitrc. et clui, chez ces clowns, en prenaient uric hien plus haute" (Ihere was grandiose wreckage, objects stripped of their prime ~ i ~ ~ l i f i c r nanti c e . wbich. Llrnollg these clowns, rook on a much lrighcr o n e ] . 'I'he eljtire heroic per-iod of m o d ernism was snuffed out at that moment). In M ~ ~ n i c the h , manda-

,

tory bohemia of those years, the general imperative was sich ausleben. t o live to the full, to drain the cup to the dregs (which very much worried his landlady), a n d it was mostly proclaimed by lifeless a n d talentless poets. But Wedekind was driven by a particular preference for the lower d e ~ t h s a n d was already perfecting his rare ability to descend lucidly into the sewers. H e was especially interested in these categories o f men: the speculator, the plagiarist, the acrobat, the gambler, the pimp, the swindler, the journalist, the fire eater, the runaway schoolboy. And of women: the whore, categories among which he then tried desthe grisette, the hetaera-three p a t e l y to draw sharp distinctions. In Paris, between 1891 and 1895, he attends the Cirque d'Hiver, the C i r q u e d'Etk, the Nouveau Cirque, the Jardin d e Paris, the Casino de Paris, the Hippodrome, the Eldorado, a ~ l d the dlysee Montniartre. H e is accompanied by Rachel; the artiste h r i q u ~ Liontine; Kadudja from Alexandria; Henriette, mnumrlt saws rz.gretj 2 lZge de 26ans et nkyantjamaij victl [dying at the age of twenty-six witho u t regret and having never lived]; the morphine addict Marie Louise; Alice; Madame Fernande; Gerrnaine; Madeleine; Raymonde; and Lucie. H e again runs into the legendary Rudinoff, a wanderer and jack-of-alltrades, albeit temporary a n d disreputable ones, known in all the circuses and cabarets of the rime. H e acts as secretary to Willi Grttor, inspired adventurer, forgel; a n d cultural agent for money and the pleasure of creating messy situations. Among these characters, exotic plants at her court, resound the first strains of Lulu's delinquent saxophone. It is Wedekind's single perfect text but lacks his Paradox of i2fine-H~~ha: peculiar virtues-the jarring notes, the knowing degradation, the frantic puppetry, the grotesq~len'ltur~lbackground. And yet all these qualities lie at the bottom o f the pond in the park, as gigantic carcasses, ~lnderwater plants feeding the wcirerswith their juices. 011 the surfice: little ripples of transparent, elusive laughter. T h e paradox of' Mim-Hahn leads to an equivocal and secretly fertile rapport between Wedekind and his test. T h e girls' park appears for the first time in L)er S ~ n n e n s p e k t r uan ~ ~"idyll" , in the for111 o f a play, o n which ~ t completed. T h e Wedekind worked onti1 the surnliler of1894 b ~ never park is here the yard o f a bordello. T h e inmates are named Melittil, Kadudja. Elise. a11d Franziskr-fin;,lly Mi~lehrha-and they clrarly foreshadow. though in another sphere o f style a n d meaning. the girls being trained in the park in hlinr-H~7hn.I'hey are watched over by a sharp-eyed

~ u n c a n ' sprefigurative tunics, which covered the flaming heart of the matter, would fall after a few final fl utcrrs: "Exactness, reality, is the sacriI , 10, 11). fice" (Mditreen p u t forth by the one adversary who could measure u p to Heidegger in a Germany i~ltimatelyforsaken by philosophy: *I'heodor W. Adorno. In a little book, admittedly not o n e of his best, Adorno furiously attacked Heidegger as the incarnation of the "jargon of authenticity." Wh;it is this jargon? In the cultural pages of conservarive German newspapers and the inaugural lectures of Nazis hiding out in universities, in appeals to sound German customs and the praise of ecstatic mountain climbing. in the condemnarion of foreign words and the recourse to "dialogue," "hierarchies," and the "spil-it," all threatened by mass society, Adornoi ilntkiling ear detected dire words and expressions that had their origin somewhere in the romanric tradition and were now wandering adrift, like pernicious messengers and revenants, in the Germany o f Bonn: "Sacral without sacral substance, frozen emanations, the clich$s of the ;argon of authenticity are the waste products of aura. " Thus, behind the terrorism of Heideggerls philosophical language, Adorno, like a shrewd dog sniffing for truffles, detected those treasures of profound banality that had nourished Germany since the Biedermeier years in the first half of the nineteenth century, the rise of Nazism, and created a pedestal for Konrad Adenaoer and that still inspire the slogans of the German Christian Democrats. In Adorno's view, Heidegger in the end was to blmm for having concocted a complex speculative plot to justit? the acceptance of the norm. And we know that for critical theory, to whose [radition Adorno belongs. [he worsr disgrace of thinking is to renounce Marxian "criticism ofwhat exists." All this would no doubt be praiseworthy were it not fundamentally false. Not that the "jargon of authenticiry" is not alive and well, often i l l a sinister way, in Heidegger's writings. But to take (r as a key to everything is no less a blunder rhan the blatanr error comlnitted by those seeking to demolish the great composer Richard Wagner on [he hasis o f t h e unnritigated rubbish he sometimes uttered. i)espite ail rhc ~llluringmythology usually associated with Heidegger's pmo11-[he forest hur, [he paths in the fields, the "interrupted paths1'-his fearful philosophical mzchine is

88 .

0 t 1 ~ / I Ct:~tt~d/r~t~o~~ti~lj of ' t / (,'oc~/~-(:~Ii/ ~ [30t/h

operated by something quite different fro111tlint ' l k i ~ t o a i cbigotry that c r o p u p at times in sonie of his writings. In each of H r i d ~ ~ g e l 'phases, s from that of Sei,i a,id Zcit to tliat of his last o r r c ~ ~ friigments, la~ we feel

held

that thc game is by a cold, lucid, imlrlacnblc pown: qiiintesscnce of the modern: T h e monumental nihilism that has guided Wcstero thought sinre its origins toward a glorious self-destruction here celebmtes its twilight of the gods. Like a Tibetan monk endlessly spinning his prayer wheel, Heidegger, with prodigious virtuosity, goes over a n d o v c ~ttic whole history of f r o n ~the Greeks t o Nietzsche. dropping down into abandoned gorges and irrevocably twisting the meanings of accepted terms. T h e history ofrnetaphyrics. a history that is a desrillr has never attained such terr i b i n g clarity as in Heideggerb analyses. ILis, t o be sure. a clarity at the price of much violcnce and injustice; it is a destioy retouched by r ~,iastcrh~ cosmetician l so that its line leads direcrly to the threshold of Heideggeri hut in the Black Forest. There he would like to takc it by the hand a n d carefully guide it beyond itself, over "slender little b r i d g i t o the "overcoming o f metaphysics." But even those who, with constant suspicion, follow this trail of the destiny of metaphysics must admit that it il~r.olvesan original and illuminating design. N o o n e ha5 succeeded in reconstructing with such compelling rxsctitude the cage within which Western thought has fatally operated from Plato t o o u r own dry, repeatedly doomed t o call itself into question until all its possibilities are cxtiausted. T h i s limit. Hridegger stares, may be said io have been reached with Nietzschc. last thinker in rnetaphyiics and irs closing sign, who evoked that devastati~igand intoxicating "will to will'' that governs us today. (The subtlr iscvcnge inflicrril by Heidegger at this point is clear: H e sends the most elusive philosopher o f the West hack t o the garden of Arn1ida.I fronl which he had always tried to escape; this is already a good example of Heideggeri strong-arm tactics.) Wliar happens to thought after Nietzschc? l ~ l c r cI must rrturn t o the fundanlcntals of the (:oc;~-Cola bottle, which I mentioned at the bcginn i n g Bcsidcs being :I fascinating intcrpretcr o f ciassical philosophical texcs, as well as a s ~ ~ r p r i s i ncontriver g o f s t r i n g of v e r l ~ i lassociations. Heidegger was an indispensable guide to the prcsellt. Ib veriG this, one need only turn t o two of his es5ays: "*l.hc Question ( : o ~ ~ c e r n i n g l e c h nology" and "Overcoming of Metrphysics."~How maliy congresses, huw many vexed reflections o n the evils and blessings of t r c h n o l o ~we h w ~

I !

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had to put up with throughout the twentieth century! H o w many vacuour disputes hetiveen "scientists" a n d "hunianists"! H o w many recommendations o f different ways of using ~ c ~ h ~ i o l oAs g v thorlgh ! any of it actually depended on o u r will! Whcn technology has already set its stamp o n our will! Technology, to all intents and purposes, nleans metal>hysics, Heideggcr suggests. Having run off the tracks of history, the Wrst s p chronically relives thc destiny of metaphysics in the eloquent silence ofits own operation. I t is in~possibleto account for the Coca-Cola bottle without going back to Plato's Idens. It is impossible to speak of the Coca-Cola bottle as a thing without explaining that it could otily appear in a world chat "has already destroyed things as things." All this may seem abstruse. But it is a n a t t e m p t to approach the supreme abstruseness of what surrounds us. l i v e r y iew in our midst feel the need for meraphysics (a wvrd now almost always used in a derogarory sense), it is because everything is already metaphysics. And-ultinlate joke!-philosophy has now become primarily a useful fact. Useful for what? For Ge-Steli 1 will skip the usual ironic senlarks about Heideggeri linguib~icacrobatics and abuses a n d merely speci$ that this word, ordinarily used in the sense o f "scaffolding" as ivell as "bookshelf," becomes in the late Heidegger the black sun around which he arranges, in eccentric harmony, compounds o f the verb steNerz (to put), fro111 the uoiiiellcfi (to represent) of classical nieraphysics t o the bestelleri (to order, in the comrnercial sense) that is heard every day in the business world. And what, finally, is Ge-SteN? Ge-Ute& indicates above all the appeannce of a11 that exists (and therefore includi~lgman) as availability, material t o be used, exploited. Man becomes "the most important raw material." capable of being ravished ad lihitun~.and is m,pioycd as such. In a vein of metaphysical irony, i t then turns out that the employee is the figure c o r r e s p o n d i ~ l ~ in every sense to this state of the world. And so-and it may come as a surprise to many-only Heidegger could have come up with a definition of Hitler as first among employees. And i t is significa~lthow the obscure Ge-Stell accords ~ e r f e c t l ywith the analyses o f the visio11:iry Marx in the first book o f Cvpitir/,which depicts the world u r "w:irrhouse o f c o n l modities." a lace of total av;iilibiliry and exchang. I n considering fut-ther v~ri;irionso n Ge-StcN we see that they also throw l i ~ l on i ~ Hcideggurb forc~nostc~icniy,Adorn.). Adornoi d i ~ l e c t i co f the Enlighrennlent is superimposed, in its cruci;ll fcaturcs. o n ttie destiny o f nihilism as ~ e c o a n t ~ ~ dHeidegger by in his Nieiachr and in many of his

larer writings. Thus, h d o r ~ i o itheories o n i~ldustryand 011 the culture industry find a natural place a i n o i ~ gthe inany il>plicrtions of c ~ - y t e i / .

The Perpetual War

H o w d o rhese collisions a n d coincidences among hostile thinkers happen? Because beyond all the obvious things that makc then1 mutually i s conlpatihle, they are united b y s o m e t h i ~ much r~ deeper, allowing us to pass from one to the other as from one knor to another in the mrne oerwork (of secret agents'): the fact that they drive nihilism rci its most radical forms while trying at the saole time to look at itfirti ozltsidi,, an enigmatic a n d fleering chat Heideggel called the L'overcoo~ing of metaphysics," Adurno called "utopia." and Marx highlighted as the end of prehistory Nihilism is the great funnel of Western thought. T h e c1o;er one gets to its mouth. the more the inconlpatible eiemmts are foi-ced to mix. This may produce a senrc of vertigo. But without that vertigo, t h o ~ ~ gisl ~ t now impossible.

"Hardly anyonc could venture to write a n introduction for The Last Dajts ofMankind. It would be both arrogant and s~~perfluous. T h e introduction is carried ir~sideby everyone born in this century and doomed to live in it." T h u s wrote Elias Canetri, who for nine years had "let every spoken and written word [by Karl Kraus] take effect on me: for five years without resistance, for four with growing criticism."' KJhat follows is not an introduction but a cluster of occasional notes that have sprouted around some of the joints in that majestic and monstrous construction known as The

Last Days ofMankind. Kraus's fundamental experience was acoustic, a n d it was constantly repeated. Like H i l d e ~ a r d evon Ringen, Angela da Foligno, and many anonvmoils schizophrenics, he heard voices, b u t his voices were all the more alarming since they had bodies, circulated in the streets of Vienna, seated themselves in cafks, a n d even put on affable smiles. T h e inflections beat on him like waves; their ileadly horde provided the nlost faithful company for his "threefold solitude: that o f the coffeehouse where he is alone with his enemy. of the nocturnal room where he is alone wirh his demon, o f the lecture hall where he is alone wirh his work."' behind a reading desk on a bare stage, Kraus hinlself became the voice-thac-catchesall-voices, while in the darkrless other unknown b e i n g were translnrnled into the Wild H u n t of legend: " l ~ n r g i n ethc a r ~ u ?of the Wild H u n t i n a concert hail, trapped, locked up, and forced to sir still, and then repentedly summoned to its true nature." '1-here was :I vibration i l l his voice t l ~ a t sent a quiver through the audience: "Chairs a n d people secr~red1 0 under this

I wouldn't have been surl,rised if the chairs had

yz

. 7be I'erpetunl

The Perpetual War . 93

War

over, he was to go on adding new scenes to that proliferating texr, which had started to grow along with the war and now ended by expanding until it reached a length unsuitable for any theater, but the only suitable and ultimately adequace length tbr the voice-that-catches-all-voices, for his sharnanic gift, which had allowed him to capture nll possible prisoners in his net of words, &on1 newsboys to foppish officers, from the fiamous

bent."-'These sequences ot'scorching and magical elecrric shocks were repeated more than srve11 hundred times. vcry often in Vienni. And according ro eyewitnesses, the L'iennese r e a d i ~ l pwcrc the mosr nlemorable. For Kraus needed thdt arena, thr~tair, for his hallucinations. I.ike all true demons, he was bound to a snlall terrestrial circle, drawn by a n invisible pair of comp;tsses. From that soil he derived his powers. and to thar soil he returned them. Kraus's first public reading in Vienna took place on 3 Ma). 1910.T h e program offered three p f e c t texts for perfomlance: the uncharitable hut playful Heirie zcrid die Folgeo (where Kraus clain~edto he serting up for once and for all a watershed in the literature ofdecade~lce),Dir chir~esiscl~e M ~ U Pand Y , Die W l t der Platake: essays at once visionary and frivolous-if hlonsieur le Bourreau will, for the rnoment, allow such a thing. Thus they manage to bring together the erotic hack room of 12 Chinatown l a i i o d r ~

I

journalist Alice Schalek to old Biach, from patriotic housewives to court chamberlains, from shopkeepers and poets to the two emperors.

, I

! If we keep clea~lyin mind this incongruous intage of a shaman wearing a starched collar and little oval spectacles, we can see how fully The Lnjt Days oj'Mnnkind departs from every literary genre. It is not an early example of "documentary theater" or "epic theater" or "political theater" or "theater of the absurd." to cite the paltry labels chat people have sought to apply to this work (and it is not hard to apply them, at the cost, otcourse, of losing the essential), hut a miisicalpracticr. A remote and chilling magic, in which breath and blood mingle, in which every name is already bewitched and expression is given over, without any nodes sty or restraint, to the "whim o f t h e surroundings," as Kraus himself once called it with fierce understatement, adding. "It is its flood and throng of names and manners, voices and faces, apparitions and memories, quotations and posters, newspapers and rumors, rubbish and circumstances that accidenrally gives me the signal for attack-and every letter of the alphabe[ can become a sign of fate."')

I

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wirh the imminent eruption of the planet, all of it then confirmed by the erratic appearance of advertising posters. This, then, was Kraus: an essayist barely arrived at that ripeness that is a11 and ready to extend the tentacles of an omnivorous and already "arrnored"' idiom, with its sparkling combinations of syntax, to the new enormities and trifles offered to him e\.ery day-and Kraus asked nothing more--by rfie Neue Freie I'resse. But that was simply his last cover before unveiling the more demoniac substance, more dangerous to touch, of his worcis. That moment would come a few years later, the day he began to give public readings from his "rngedy in five acts," The Last Day ofMankind Outside. there w:is still the war, and in the darkness of the hall, rhis tiny Inan, wirh "a face so niobile that it couldn't be pinpointed, penetrating allti exotic, like the face of an animal, but a new, a different Face, a n i~nfamiliarone,"' lul~erzrsedthe in a provincial war. H e rehearsed it as though it were a creaking old

Kra~isdemonstrates that a new astral body, composed of fmgments of sentences, the shells ofroving images, and splinters of accents, has formed in the world. It covers the earth like a motionless hood. o d every movement of language is firsr ofall a gasping effort to breathe under that mantle while trying in the end to rend it. For some years, this new leaden sky had covered up n reality thktt had been making heedless headway through the streets of Vienna. Kra~ishad already been intcnt on showing that those phantoms out of humorous gazettes, when closely examined, revealed hellish features and turned out to he so many attendants ofdis:tster. But now the background ofthese minor facts had her11i~ncovercd,like the wings of a stage suddenly l i t up by floodlights, and it was s l a ~ l ~ h t e' Irb. write The Last D q ofhlnnkind, Kr:il~shad almost n o need to e~llrsgcor iiltcr his perspective, as F4r his local chro~licleswcrc concerned. Hc garhered his

theater, while the war was going 011.This man, pursued from the start by acoustical hallucinations and believing from the start, with the consistency of an ancient Chinese, that the most evil F~crsensued directly from scraps of conversations he had overheard on rhe screets of Vicn~la,had finallJf succeeded, by the rllost prodigious coup de th&tre of his life, in reversing the situation. And rhis awesornc even[,-which eluded everyone and h u ~ l g over everyone, found its hallucinatory replica ii,/,ik. i t was h;lppenillg, its acouscical facsimile, at a reading desk on the b;lre stage of a theatel. in Vienna. O r rather, from there a voice was raised that called the facts into existence, just as the ktcts had aroused the voice. And once thc war was

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The Perpetual War . 95

usual materials and let fly agairist a new backdrop. l'hc "wall o f fire" o n which his hallucinario~lswere projected in the siler~ceo f his room ("'The experiences 1 need. I hrvr them b e h r c m e or1 the wall of hre I see f r o n ~my desk"): h;ld merely beconlr a "barrier of fl;~nies,"the backdrop OF any theater o f war. 7'hel-r his loqu;icious characters now appeared, along with countless soldiers "k~llenfor the resumption of tourisrn.""There appeared their shadows, to be ever more swiftly devoured, until the "barrier of flames" became a cosmic stage curtain enveloping the blazing

la net.

The L n ~DfiY,t of;bfatrki,zd has orlly one literary p r c c e J e ~ ~one t , thar Kraus could not have known and that we ourselves can seal-cely krlcjw, since part o f t h e material is still unpublished: the "second part" of Flaubert's Bouvlrrd et Pic~~clwt, known as [he ,vpit, rhat mass of qtlotutiunj, collected in rigllt bound volumes, each colnprising about three hsndrcd sheets. which reposcs today in the Municipal Library in Koue~i.It is the purzc~~time equivalent of what rhe 791p a g s o i ?at L n t Dnjl~.ofhfankiad, aboot h a l f o t which consist ofquotations, were in w'zrrinie T h e two texts could be seamlrssly joined, and the whole [hillg would form thar Great Hybrid within which we live and where every distinction between wartime and peacetime has become a iokc. Even though all agree that rcirrv is ever niore inconceivable, the slaughter only increases. that dazzled Kiaus is the same one thnt had made The Flauberr's last ycars comp~ilsiveand kvrrish: the prodigious eruption of la bh~st,[srupidity] as the beginning of a new em, an era paved and cemented with ir once ally kind of alkahesc or universal s o l v r ~ had ~ t disappeared. This appalling event, h o n i whose light most averted rheir eyes, was obsessively followed and properly recorded primarily by three writers: Flaubert. Kraus, and finally, Lion Bloy. To them we grarefully turn as to the pioneers of a new science, the only one wherein we can iollow the [reacherous waverings - of that uninterrupted experi~nent-without-experimenter that is rhc world's recent history. If one were to choose the syrnbol~ca n d juridical act niarking the hegin1 1 i r l ~of this "gJurious era" of ixperirnent, it would nor he so much some overworked episode of the French Revolution as a simple and effective bureaucratic inc.enrio11char came so11iewh:lr Inter, o n r thar the Conventic111h:id already i~lrroduccd;IS a 'bli)od n x " bur that Hon:lparte, by the t h e year X (28 May 1802), ratified as the normal of 28 Flor&l

merhod for army recruitment: conlpulsory conscription. Since thrn, humanity has become more and more obviously "human material," as the l~ walk-ons with rheir placards in 7 t h Ldsf Days ~ f h f i ~ n k i n d p r o u dal1d tirelessly repeat. lust when hun1:lniry wrs proclain~ingthe reign o f the subjcct at the top of ics lungs, i t was getting ready to coLlnt its members as so many items available for the operations of an ultrrior subject, which was then society itself. We ourselves are now a managcable entity, one that rnay even survive tor a long time in the stillner, ul. the w;lrehouse bur char rnust expect at any moment to be called upon to help redress the balance of slaughterand no longer because we i r e basically the privare property of'a princc bur bccause humanity (which is obviously still Western), having a~tairledits full rights, has nothing to look forward to but to let itself be molded crudely by society 2nd eves thrown on the scrap heap at the end. Throicghout the ninctccnth centur); this new truth srrps slowly (what else is Berljatl~inConstant's Ue i'e~pritdl, ronqz/it~,et de /iisz/ipntzon ahout?) and sluggishly into perception and declares itself in reality. But the moment in which i t emerges in all its oppressive pomp is 1914.Then, in a few months, the first thing to go to pieces once and for all, is that conception of European equilibrium that since the Peace ofWesrphalia, that is, for a little less than three c e ~ ~ t u r i ehad s , been the in~possibledream of those who siill thought that to engage in politics meant ro corztrol sorncthing. But this is a l ~ ~ l o as tmodest corollary to the most iniporcanr theorenl demonstrated by the war: thnt the murderous impulse of events would seem to he autonomous, or else guided by an invisible experimenter who surprises and ~ilocksthe very leaders who are convinced they caused these events. Now everything goes beyond all expectario~lsand intentions and yet obeys a consistency of its on1n while acting direcrly un [he bodies and souls of the victims. It is too late to contain an enterprise that ir already preparing new surprises, and no war can be allowed to end without laying the foundarions for the concentration canips that will bloom in the nexr one. War is, in short, a spirit of industry wholly devoid of ideological prejudices: Lxnin's goatee or Wilhelni 11's curled musraches are all the same to i t , and atlove all useful. l'hus we come to thc age thar hangs perperually under the sign of these "last days of nlankind," which are endless, ~ o which ~l the and also to the culmi~iationof t h i i t peculi;~rp h r n o r ~ i e ~ by more complex events become, the rrlorc irrelevant do those clainling to guide them turn orit to he. T h e Great I'olirician of the new .ige puts ;I l i ~ ~ l c

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plaster I\japoleon on the mantelpiece and locks himself in his office t o work o n a crossword puzzle. But there are always a few squares he cannot fill. Meanwhile, the continuity of life is assured by lazily shiftin,cr the massacres from o n e square to another o n the planet. 1r is Stupidity th;lr envelops these brural hrppeni~lgsin a protscti\~ccloud: There was a time when its necessity would have been called structural. If the cracks that open between evenrs d i d nor get filled by wads o f stock if laboratory schizoidism were nor concealrd by the conviction of doing Good, and a Good that keeps steadily improving: if the devastating rationale did not contain the incarnation of Conimon Sense; i f . '. . -the machine would jam, a n d the great age of experiment woulti fall into a sudden, dull silence. T h e buzz of Public Opiniorl helps to prevent it. This is the unsurpassed psychical fuel that now drives life forward. As Kraus once remarked, "'Life goes on.' More than is lawful."" 111addition to being the worldwide proclamation o f the Lltal news that had already been circulating for some time throughout Europe, to giving us enrry into a world where the further we advance [he less we know, a n d finally t o welcoming the seeds of chaos that had long been lurking o n the threshold of our psychical a n d social life, the war of 1914-18 signified t h e pulverizing o f experience. Strictly speaking, all rhst can be said of that event is contained in a sentence of Walter Benjamin's: "A generation that had still gone t o school in a public carriage found irself under the o p e n sky in a landscape where ~ l o t h i ~ bi gu t the clouds remained u n changed, and in the middle, at the cen ter of a field of llrces where explosions a n d devastating currents clashed, was the tiny, fragile h o d y o f man." Anything that goes beyond this senrence is in a way painrless and redundanr. Rut the fact. hostile and opaque. [hat resulrs from it srill remains before us: that men returned from the front "struck d u m b , n o t richer but poorer in c o m m ~ ~ n i c : ~ be xl ep e r i e n ~ e . " "All ~ the psychological forces were set against that realization, for had it been :~ccepted, the whole war would have had to end, destroying the zeal that emerged because n o o n e was able to recognize the "bloodthirsty look" o f peace, especially o n illat V i e l ~ ~ ~ innkeeper's esc face whcrt c'~nildncssreigns."' At first. young (;ernlans had heen allowed t o dep;ll-r for the "tempests o f : grown up in a of ststeel" as described by E r r ~ s Jt i i n ~ e r "Having curity, we all felt a desire for the unusual, Ibr great danger. And so the

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war seized o n us like drunkenness. We left for the front under a rain o f flowers, in an air intoxicated with roses a n d blood. T h e war was supposed to offer us, finally. great, strong, solem11 Thomas Mann's attitude, r h o ~ ~ gmore h fearful a n d n~ean-spirited,was not much different: H e hoped that war meant the repudiation of the laxities of peace and a resroratiorl o f the Germanic essence, which h a d been trarnplcd o n by malign commercial nations. 'l'hey expecred a grander experience, a n d they witnessed the disintegrarior~o f experience. Today "experience" can only refer t o a past. Orherwise it is synonymous wirh "horror." As Junger himselfwas to observe ten years later, in 1930, the real experience o f r h e war would turn o u t to be not fir from 6actory work, from the "precise work rhythm o f a turbine fueled by blood."'.' He thereby intraduced the category that designates the secret aspect of the availability of "human niaterial': total mobiliwtio~l.Under the sign of this category, the final assimilation of peace a n d war was in place as prepark~tionfor a chronic civil war as a future possibility. Having left for the front with the ardor o f a yoling Germanic warrior, Junger in the end thus specified with admirable detachment the peculiar sense in which the war o f 1914-18 seemed "different from other wars whose history has been handed down to us." I n that "great carastrophe," first o f all, "the p i u s o f war had been permeated with the spirit of progress." And the first fruit of that amorous encounter had been t h e rapid absorption o f the "image o f war as a n armed action into the vaster image of a gigantic working process." N o t only did the war serve industry, but the war itself was already a n advanced form of industry. War based o n total mobilization was "an act by m e m s ofwhich the current of modern life, with its whole vast network of ramifications, is channeled, thanks t o a single move o n the comnlaild dial, into the great current o f warrime energy." A n d so what the young warriors, who went to the front dreaming of aristocratic tournaments, found there was primarily "the democracy of death."'" Kraus never theorized about the war or, strictly speaking, about anything else. Ensnared i r every moment by his voices. he conlpletely lacked speculative d e t a c h ~ o e n t .D u r i n g the war, t h e s ~ v o i c e smoltiplied a n d was not splintered. but-and this was his most astonishing fe;lr-"There one voice that he did not hear. he was possessed with every specific timbre o f the war a n d rendered it compellingly."" Hut behind these shanla~lic journeys lay concealed from the sr:lrr, clear and steadfast, those same nvo implication later to be for~nulatedby such dissinlilar wrircrs as Be~lj;l~nin

char thc public will get exiilcd and rnake enough small offerings to allow the s l ; ~ i ~ ~ htu r e continue. r Unlike many. Kraus did not depirl the horrors of the war. H c only brought the news that peace in the end was imposriblc:

and Jhnger: o n the o n e hand, the pulverizing of expel-ienrc; o n t l ~ eother. total mobilization as the main procedure of the new eta. And to ;lrrive at this conclusion, Kmus never needed to abarldon himself to the "air intoxicated with roses and blood." %'hat is the most terrible senrence, rhc faithful echo of horror, in The Ldsr D a y of Mnnkind? "Clusrers form." These two little words discreetly accompany us in the stage d i r e ~ t i o n sfrom rhe very first page, the second line to be exact. T h e y swell like poisonous clouds for hundreds o f pages and strike us at the end, when their unique significance is finally revealed in scene 4, 29,") where they are spoken by rhe Faultfinder to designate the throng of bystanders who want to have their picture taken alongside the corpse of the hanged Batcisti, while the j o ~ i a lhangman looks on. Groups are not an expression of democratic spontaneity. Their origin is much older. Groups always form arourld a corpse. When there is no corpse, that empty place evokes the many corpses thar have bern there and the many yet to appear. It is the last rite that holds civil society together. T h e group is a "crowd crystal."'; Those who form it obey a calling, suddenly revealing their adherence t o a vast sect: devotees of an officially innocuous, essentially persecutory power: Opinion. T h e y throng togethcr a n d josrle each other without realizing it; they all converge toward one point, which is the empty circle at the center of the group. There, as R e n i Girard has pointed olrr, they were once able to see the mangled hody of rhe victim of the original lynching. Kespcct for Kraus as a modern exponent of satire that "is not only critical and negative h u t in the highest scusc bccorncs thc guardian of ~ a l u e s " ' ~ has kept many from accurately perceiving the narure of his work, and especially o f ii7e L,nrt IIiry, ufMizizkind. i ' h e rirle is well k ~ l o w n ,the texr much less so. If Kraus had filled 792 pages just to say that war is a bad would have thing-as many have believed and insist on believing-he been not the author of his play b ~ one ~ to f the characters Hayed in it. I n the cafi, among friends, in the office o r ~rcsraurant,there is no harm in speaking out lg.1i~lsr thc "nladness of wrr." And how m l n y people have we seen going into raptures over that dreadful peace dor-c thac Picasso presented to Stalill? Kra~rss;lid something quite different: H e said that peace is founded o n slaughter and that wur is the chariry hall at which humanity stages what i t normally does. but does nor like to talk a b o u ~so ,

I:ACL:II I N L ) I . I < Not : r l ~ i hr)lle. .l.his ollc has n o t rakcn place on rI1c surf'ace of lifc. . . . n o , i r has raged inside liFe itself: 7.11~front hns beer, extended ro the whole counrry. And there i t will sra); Arid this changed lik, i f there still is life, will be accompanied by the old spiritual condition. The world is ~erishingand won'r know ir. Everyrhing was yesrcrday arid will be forgotten; no one will see today or he afraid of rolnoriow. They will foraet thar [he war was losr, Forger they began it, forget rhey foughr it. That is why the war won'r end.'')

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T h e most cffective of K r r u s ' magical practices is quotation ("putting my times bemeen iluotatiori marks").?'l But we arc not dealink with a declaration of principle, ready to he cilrried nuray by a burst ofsupposedly autonomous creativity. Kraus is never autonomous, not even in relation to the posters he glimpses in the street. When at the very outset of Lmt Days, h e warns that liere "the rawest ii~ventionsare quotation^,"^ we must once for the marvelous typographical again take him literally. Indeed-except utterances that flow from the Faultfinder's n l o u ~ h(and they are Farewell Kraus toward the world in whose corngestures of irlsult by the rl~uw~rtelpanv he ~ e r i s h e s and ) except for the portions in verse, which serve to cxtend the limits of an enormous range of sound at whose extremes srand Goethe and Offe~lbach-Kraus tarnpered as little as possible with the raw lnaterials offered to him horn time to time by the world scene. Whcreas perhaps one-sixth o f C m r g Biichner's Lla,itonj Death-the only play that be called polirical in r sense similar to Krous's-consists ofquotatiuns, the quoted texts in Liijt l l r i y i make L I al~llost ~ halfof thc whole. To give a few concrete cxanlplrs of what miphr s e n ) t6 be t l ~ e111ortunlikely sccocs: scene 2, 19 (Schalck ~ v i r lthc ~ laughirlg S e r h i ; ~ wolncn} ~~ repe'lts the situation and some qaips horn a n :lrticlc by Schalek hcrsclfi sccnr 3 , 19 (in rhe mosque) is derived, again by extracrilig snlall blocks of words, i r o ~ na n ar~ ; 3, l o (Alfred Kerr; "Runla~li:~n ticle in thc Siiddcirtrche M o n n t ~ h rscene song") reproduces wordfir word the poem publislled by Kerr under the

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pseudonym "Gottlieb" in DPTE g ; scene 3, 21 ( t h e docror who warns againsr smoking) is taken from a letrer by Professor Molerclar of Dlrmstadt thac had been printed in Die Fackel; scene 3, 31 (letter to O t t o Ernst) is cornposed of quotations from lctters hy Ernst's enthusiastic reldcrs; scene 3, 33 (Schalck speaks) is woven entircly o u t of quotations from a news report by Schalek, quoted more f~illyin ilic h c k e i ; in scene 4. 7 . the psychiatrist's grandiose speech o n the food situation in Germany orchestrares topics presented dryly in a bulletin from the Wolff Agency; in scene 4, 22, the contents and price o f the "Hero's Pillow" are repeated verbatin? from a n advertisemenr; in scene 4, 25, remarks by Paul von Hindenburg a n d Erich Ludendorff are mostly taken from a n interview with the^ by the journalist Paul Goldmann; scene 4, 37 (Wilhelm I1 a i d his men at General Headquarters) is based on testimony by Rear Admiral I'ersius, which Kraus had found in his book o n the war at sea. A n d one could go 011 a n d o n . Finally, even the Faultfinder's speeches are woven o u t of q u o t a t i o ~ l s from Kraus. Aphorisms, bits from essays written in peacetime, articles from Die FackeL published while h e was writing Last Days-all this is swept into that ultimate vortex of words whereby Kraus prrsents himself just as he does the other historical characters, that is, as a picturesque a n d raving solitary in the picturesque Vienna of the war, w h o is dubbed the "Fackelkraus" a n d pointed out in the street by the ~ n e m b e r sof h c t i o u s groups. But ar the same time, since his name is hidden behind the figure of a comic character (the Faultfinder), his words are a voice that n o longer belongs t o h i m a n d that guarantees the life o f this n o n s t o p spectacle. T h e i r function is like that of the blade used by Chuang-tzu's butcher, w h o for nineteen years used the same knife to quarter thousands of oxen; the blade never lost its edge, "because I Ict it s o through only where it cann-in the imperceptible empty interstices. And I'rince Wenhui answers the butcher: "7'hank you, you have just taught m e how to prolong one's life, by using it only for what docs not consume it."" Exactly a year a n d a month afier the assassination in Sarajevo. Kraus, in three days, wrote the "l'relude" to Lmt l h y s a11d conceived the ~ l a of n the work. 'The first months of war had been'a period of paralysis and silence for him. And he gave the reasoils for this silence in the pulsing words of the speech "In dieser grossen Zeit,"" where he even alluded to the growing din o f voices in his room, "whether they come from animals, from cliildren, o r only from mortars," but stopped short with the injui~ctiorl:"If

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anyone has something to say, let him step forward and shut u p !" 4 For ten months thereafter, only o n e slim issue of Die Fackel would be published, in February. But for Kraus, this silence, as would later be the case on the advent of Hitler, was the dark side o f a molistrous discourse about to burst ouc: "Everythi~lgKraus wrote is like that: a silence turned inside o u t , a silence thac catches the storm of events in its black folds, billows, its livid lining turned outward. "li O n c e Kraus's tension had reached thar state o f mimetic and judicial fever that for hitn was the necessary condition for writing, he threw himself into his most reckless enterprise and succeeded: "The world war entered completely into Tile Lmt Days of'hilznkind, with no solace and no respect, 110 embellishn~ent,n o sweerening, and above all, this is the mosr important point, without ever getting accustomed to it."16 H e announces it in a splendid letter to his beloved Sidonie Nidhern); o n 29 July 1915, a letter rhat might stand as an epigraph for the whole work: I've seen too many sad things in these days, and yet they have given birth to a new job-a job char ends each time at six in the morning, just when I sniell the victims rorring under my window. I'll tell jlou what sort of job i t is, of which I've finished writing a first section in three days and three nighrs, but first let me give you an idea of my state of mind from chis page in my diary (which 1 already nieant to send you): 16 July Now, while from my desk T can hcar the daily, inevitable, and awful cry-Extra! Extra!-which will henceforth afflict the human ear for all rime, now T have spcnr an hour in Thierfehd [a Swiss village where Kraus had been with Sidonie]. And nothing, nothing has changed! No idea, whether thought, spoken, or shouted, would be loud enough, no prayer fervent enough ro pierce this material. So to J . / I O Z L ~this impotence, won't 1 have to disclose everything rhat I c m i d o iust now-and at least do sotncthing: expose myself! What elsc is there to do? This road will have to bc taken, even if it goes on too long, as long as the road to China is srill open. I'll chokc on w h ~ ought t to he shouted, s o as not to chokc somc other way. I'm not sure anymorc of nly nerves in the street. But it would l x bettcr if all t h i s were to happen according to ,I precise plan, and also that it be dedicated to t h a r person for whom I live, and I'd n o longer care to live if s/v thought thllt to keep silent threatened lier own human dignit\: t o

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che point where 1 can no longer stand to witness evcrlcs i n silence, or rather words chat have erased humanity's memory for all of cosrnic time. There is a person without whorn nothing c a n happen, because everything must happen for her. . . . This stare of fatigue has still released a spark, and i c has given birch to che plan for a work that, should i t cver appear. would cerrainly be equivalent ro exposing myself in the most total fashion. The firsc art, the prelude to the whole, is finished and could even srand by irself. But where to send i t ? Switzerland, where we rook refuge wirh our dear little automobile, fails us in this. Maybe it will

,

he of some help to us later; or otherwise America. Anyway, whatever may or may not happen at chis poinc. I now feel freer.l' T h u s The Last Ddys ofMankind was born. Kraus implies that the "last days of mankind" are unending a n d tend to become a chrorlic condition in which one can survive with tranquillity. T h e war that Kraus described was an eruption of the peace that he had just finished describing. a n d the next peace would be an eruption o f that war h e was describing, until a new war would turn out to be an eruption of the previous peace. But Kraus was not to see that war. This very new age in which we live would descend from it, t o repeat the mechanism of the former age a n d moreover, t o a i m to make tranquillity and slaughter coexist, now no longer separated in time but only in space-and a very elastic space, besides. At times the distance is measured in continents, a t times in neighborhoods, as in Beirut.

A perceptive reading of The Lajt Days ofM~znkindwouIdbe fatally damaging to Bertolt Brecht Such a reading is long overdue. Having drawn for decades o n the rich storehouse of t h a t text a n d having derived from it most of the formal devices that were t o make his theater's fortune (from rnont;lg to the scrambling of levels, from cabaret parody to the use of raw material), Brecht would find himself forced t o accept a direct comparison, a n d this would crush him. Kraus abandons himself t o the force o f Ianguuge without restraint. like one possessed, without any ulterior motive of social pedagogy, and hc achieves almost unbearable heights o l c o m e d y and terror: I mention only the appearances of Schalek (the 'true her-oirze ofthis

glorious era,"2Xwho puts any Mutter Courage in the shade) or of old Biach ( n o death is Inore epic than his, when he gurgles and chokes o n sentences from the newspaper, whereupon, in retaliation, "groups form" around his corpse in scene j, 9), or the invincible, sug;lry ravings o f the feuilletonist H a n s Miiller ( s c e ~ i eI , zj), o r the scene with the patriotic housewives (scene 2, r8), or the tormented intimate dialogue of the Schw;lrz-Gelber couple (scene z,33)) or the exhortation to tourism uttered by the schoolmaster (scene I , ()), o r the meek and bloody ravings o f Franz Tosef (scene 4, ? I ) , o r the Prussian von Dreckwitz's vigorous and sportive bloodbath spirit (scene 2, 14), o r the choral delirium, as of a domestic slaughterhouse, in the filial scene of the last act. Brecht, like a good German, instead of putting "art a t the service of the shopkeeper," p u t s it a t t h e service o f the Cause, which is n o t always better. Didacticism in itself is already a disaster for form, but most o f all this captious a n d blackn~ailingdidacticism, this attempt a t the aesthetic transfiguration o f Sovietism, ends by arousing a certain disgust. In the course of time, the same thing may happen with Brecht as happened with Voltaire: a complete chemical separation of texts. O n the one hand, many of his poems will be read as being by the greatest Chinese poet o f the century; o n the other, there will be an increasing tendency to forget his misused theater. Like Voltaire's tragedies, which everyone used to know a n d today n o one dares read, Brecht's plays belong in great part to those literary creations that marry for love the mediocre side of their period's intellectuality and sink with it to the bottom. Leopold Liegler's book, the T h e hagiographic literature on Kraus-from first authorized study, to the products o f a few zealous campus dwellers w h o in recent years have started browsing o n "the Austrian Mind"""offers t h e most convenient a n d immediate arguments against h i m . According to the image o f Kraus that emerges from this apologetic mosaic, we would have on o u r hands a h u m a n being exclusively endowed with fine sentiments, prone to all the proper indignation. vaguely nost;llgic lor a purer and mol-e noble past, fond o f w o m e n and animals, and encased in his ideas as in a coat of [nail. All of which would lead o n e to suspect the worst. But fortunately the image is False. Me:lnwhile, if we want to grant Kraus the highest honor; th:~tof being "the greatest (;erman satirist, the 011Iy one irl the literature of this l r ~ l g i ~ a gwhom c one II;IS the right to llalne next to Aristophanes, Juvennl, (>uevetlo, Swift, and (;ogol," by the same token we will have tu recognize tll;lt he sh;~reswith thesc writers ":I very

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definite kind of substance, which I would simply call 'murderous.""" And Canetti's curt remark should be enough to deter us from the image of a humanitarian hero. As for his relation to the past, one can fully concur with what Benjamin observed wirh subtle irony: "It is his program to reverse the developme~rtof bourgeois-c:lpitalist affairs to a condition that was never theirs."ji But things change in the face of existing realities, and one need only read once the "tragic c o ~ ~ p l e t of s " Franz Josef (scene 4, 31) or the fbrlorn judgment on him (with its marvelous beginning: 'He and not a tyrant, merely cold and not ferocious. . . . was ~ ~ l c r eal y H e was a tireless worker, and among various death sentences he also signed one that struck down humanity")" to understand that Kraus was the first and only writer to bury, without hesitarion, without tears, and with perfect knowledge of the W ~ b s b u r g"demon," the whole gloriour history of that mon;lrchy thar "for reasons of prestige . . . must long havc wanted to commit suicide."33 He was really not the right person for the kind of operation that in stock-market jargon is called a recovery in values.

In his lollg essay on Kraus, Benjamin quotes a single but decisive passage from T / ILnst ~ Da-a $Mankind: "Kraus portrayed himself 1s hopelessly subjugated to the demon; in the pandemonium of the age he reserved for himself the most melancholy place in the icy wilderness lit by reflected flames. There he stands on the Lart Day ofMankind-the 'grumbler' [that is, Faultfinder] who has described the receding days."j4 T h e passage from Kraus follows: "I have taken the tragedy, which is divided into the scenes of decaying humanity on inyself, so that it might be heard by [he spirit who takes pity o n the \lictims, even though he may havc renounced for all time his connection with a human ear. May he receive the keynote of chis age, the echo of my bloodstained niadness, through which I share the p i l t for these n ~ i s e s . These " ~ ~ are the lines in which Kraus. more Iucidly than a~lywhereelse io his work, acknowledged his involvenlent in the evil he was skewcriilg. Not only is reality here tinged by hlilck nlagic, but so is the l ; l ~ i ~ u a gthat e hurls itself ac that realit) To grasp 111i.sinfernal connection, one must venture all the way to th;~tarchaic 2nd demonic nucleus thrr Betljamitl was rhe first to perceive in h n u s : '"The dark background from which his image detaches itself is nor formed by his conremporarier, but is the prinleval world or the world of the demon." Thus. again we approach obsessive voices. and the voice-that-catches-all-voices:

The Perpetual War . tux "His passion for imitating them [his fellow men] is at the same time the expression of and the struggle against this implication, and also the cause and the result of that ever-watchful guilty conscience in which the demon has his habitat." Finally, with an elegant wave of his hand, Benjamin presents us with the genealog). of the satirical wrirer: "I'he satirist is the figure in whom the cannibal was received into civilization."-%Benjamin's words echo Canetti's about the "murderous substance" in which all great satirists communicate. And they also echo a late sentence by Kraus, who in a few words describes his work of gloomy exorcisnl, where from the starr he had not been spared contagion: "Night after night, for twenty-six years. I laugh when the raw material o f m y time gets ready to pass inro my mold."" T h e subtitle 7mqrdy i,z Five Acts should be understood primarily in its rhetorical function as antiphrasis. Just as the single acts d o not have the necessary requirements to be such, since each would last at least a whole night, so the word "tragedy" hangs suspended like a neoclassical relic over the heads of hundreds of characters, all of them unfit to be called tragic. As for the dialogues between the Faultfinder and the Optimist, which perform the f~lnctionof the chorus in Greek tragedy-and perhaps no text in modern literature achieves the fiery eloquence of sce~ies4, 29 and 5, 54they d o no more than suggest that tradition. T h e Faultfinder, of course, is Kraus himself, who subjects the war to the acid test of words, hut he is also a little Viennese figure alongside the others, an eccentric whom the! have all seen grow up and who now, behind a lectern, recites his works like a maniac. "They can say what they like . . . but what a writer!"'%bserves one of his anonymous Viennese listeners, and with this the judge with the flaming sword is cut down to size and becon~esno bigger than all the other little Viennese figures "There have been periods when causal thinking was a fine thing, the mark of a small clique ofdiscerning people; today it's dishwater, every newspaper reader offers us the fundanlentals of his W e ~ ~ a n s c h ~ z ~ u r ihis ~ a rheumatism; iid today whar we most put up with is the iuxtaposition of things, and to give expression ro i r h:a beccmm our most suitable and substantial task."i') So, amid rkc rubhle of a later war, wrote Gottfried Benn, one of those great wrirers who111 Kraus did not care 10 understaod. And yet in Lart tlayr. Krsus was acting .~n the sense of that sentence. Antiquated as he was in some of his tastes. 11lds ~ ~ s p i c i of o~s the modern, he was nevertheless devastating in drawing the ul tim;lte h r ma1 consequences from [he situario~laround him. I n s t e d o ~ ; ~ h a n d o I ~ i t ~ g

106

. The Perpetual KTzr

himself to expressionist pathos, which tries to compensate for the impossibility of tragedy by the immediacy of pain, Kraus set up the only theatrical structure suited to the case: a theater of repetition and aimless chatter, in which atrocities go forever hand in hand with futility, a perennial juxtaposition of everything with everything else, which allows for no development, where every direction is equally legitimate, and one is not even given the satisfaction of seeing a finger pointed on the stage at those responsible. Do you really think the world war was decided on by a handf~~l of wicked men? OP'rlMlS'I':

FAUI:I,FINI)I:K: NO, they'r? only the irlstrurnents of the demon' who brought us to ruin, and with us Christian civilizatio~l.But we'd better take it out on them, since we can't catch the demon who branded US.^''

Kraus is careful to bypass any question of responsibility, which can always be conveniently attributed to reactionary intrigue or to the intrinsic malevolence of capitalism. These last facts may not be in doubt, but they are still secondary to the "abysmal void" of Foreign Minister Poldi Berchtold's face as he appears, smartly dressed and charming, in a photograph on which Kraus comments. This is "the void into which we have all been flung and that has swallowed us up."" Because it has not cared to pay attention to these little things and has treated such words as paradoxes and not as sober observations, a society devoted to Good Causes, with its moist eye and ever thoughtful brow, has gone on accumulating "correct analyses" in the face of the century's successive atrocities, while a greater consideration of tone of voice, gestures, and minutiae of style would have spared it from making such an enormous contribution to the legacy of stupidity in our time. Thus, before Nazism existed, even only as a name, Kraus wrote the most precise description of Nazism to appear in the German language. And not because he was informed in advance about the iniquities that would be committed by Hitler and the big industrialists. All he had to d o was to hear the voices and look at the faces in the street twenty years before. Behind idle questions of responsibility, Kraus found something much more distressing: the certainty of general irresponsibility, the now ritual impossibility of achieving that knowledge of guilt that is the very soil of tragic events. T h e world that Kraus rehearses before our eyes is "a world

The Perpetual Wdr . 107

Ii 1

i I

that fights wars for which no one can be held responsible." And this because never before had it been so obvious, as in August 1914, that no one, among all those clearly and thoroughly responsible, had any idea what he was doing: "None of them was fully aware. Austria can't help it! She just let herself be e ~ ~ c o u r a g eby d Germany to drag Germany into the war. And Germany drove Austria to wage this war that she didn't want.",^' T h e Viennese "I can't help it" here takes on a cosmic dimension, like the posters of the Gersthof innkeeper Wolf. That sentence contains the most despairing condemnation, one that reverses the Gospel saying "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). For Kraus, no one is more loathsonle than those who did not know what they were doing: 'They now rank first among the unforgiv~lble.And since our whole world, in peace and war, is an e x p e r i m e ~ in ~ t which no one knows what the experiment is about or where i t is heading (not only that, but-and this is the worst-people den], not knowing), it is subject to the same condemnation. And so nothing was left but the comical, a category elastic enough to absorb the parade of catastrophes. Indeed, this is what sticks in one's mind after reading Lnst Dnys: first a se11se of oppression, the feeling of a progressive loss of breath; then a progressive exhilaration, as gradually the circular and demented nature of the action emerges, along with scenes of frightful comedy, like the one between the court councillor Schwarz-Gelber and his consort, nke Bardach, at the end of the second act. None of the great playwrights of the twentieth century has conceived anything comparable. And perhaps only Ernst 1,ubitsch could have filmed it properly. But I said that this comedy is frightfill. Behind its hundreds of voices, each riveted by its slightest nuances, we can hear Kraus's unique and compulsive voice. 7.his is the demon who sits beside us and goads 11seach time to inescapable, automatic laughter, which has the sound of dry leaves. T h u s the actual ending of Lnst Dnys should only be listened to, a11d it overflows the text. It can be found on a recording," where Kraus reads the true introductio~lto what h;~ppe~led nfier "the last days of ~llankind";its title: "Advertisement for Tours of Hell." T h e subject is a b r o c h ~ ~ that re spares us nothing in offeri~lga prograln of visits to the battlefield of Verdun "at the reduced pricc of 117 h n c s . " Kraus printed i t in full on a single folding spread in Die fizrkel,' and he used to read it in p ~ ~ b l iTc h. e text is divided into two main sections. .I'hc first gives the reasons for this

touristic initiative. W i t h the scrupulous pedantry of someone w h o insists o n showing that his offer is well w o r t h 117 francs, t h e arlunymous a u t h o r explains w h y krerdun deserves r u be included in t h e pantheon of t h e picturesque: "In this small area, where more than a million, indeed perhaps a million a n d a half m e n gave their lives, there is n o t a single square cenc i m e ~ r ro f surface t h a t has nor been blasted by grenades." T h i s makes Verdun "the battlefield par excelle~lce"a n d therefore "an image o f terror a n d horror of unprecedented grandeur." But in the details o f the l o u r dnd t h e satisfactions it offers, a sort of psalnlody begins in which each versicle begins with a verb addressed to the customer:

Depnrt by rhr evening express train, seconci class, from Basel. . . . S t q ovcrnighr i r l a first-class horel, service and rips included. . . . Enjoy an ample breakfasr i n rhe morning. . . . Cross rhe destroyed villages in rhe Forritied zone of VALIX \virh their gianr cemererics with hundreds of rhousands of dead. . . . \/itit the Ossuairc (charnel house) ofThiaumonr, where the remains of unknown casualries conrinue ro be collected a r ~ dscored. . . . Visit rhe Trarlchee des Ba'ionnerres o r des Ensevelis. . . . Skirr rhe Ravin J e la Molm. . . . Eiljoy lunch a r Verdun's best horel, with wine and coffee, tip included. . . . Keturi? in rhe afrerr~uonthrough the horribly devasrared Hauciiaumont zone. . . . Dine a r our horel in Merz, wirh wine and coffee, rip included. . . . Lue~ythinginrbrdetl iri tile price o f 117fi'zn'.s, with krvish / ~ o s p i t a /in i ~filst-ckus ~ l~otels. Kraus reads in a solemn a n d persuasive voice, as though slowly extracting a salesman's high-q~talitysamples from a suitcase. T h e n comes a page in his text where t h e psalmody o f verbs is resumed a n d transformed i n t o a volley o f raging syllables. T h e voice lacerates a n d paralyzes; its violence sweeps everything away, like an elephant in a H i n d u village. T h e decisive sentence is hidden in t h e middle of t h e psalmody: " U n d c r ~ ~ t rhat a ~ ~ dthis goal was w o r t h t h e trouble o i making this trip, a n d this trip was w o r t h t h e rroublc o f fighting the w o r l d war."'j For this is t h e m o t t o o f o u r world: "Er/eryt/7iizgiiz(,lzrded."

Exegesis

The Forty-nine Steps

By nature, Walter Benjamin was jusr the opposite of a philosopher: He was an exegete. T h e shameless boast of' the individual who says ''I think such-and-such" seemed basically foreign to him. Instead, from the beginning, we see in him the disguised determination of the exegete, the gesture of hiding behind piles of material to be commented on. We know that his dream was to disappear. at the height of his work, behind an insuperable flow of quotations. And so far [ have not mentioned the premise thzt constitutes the first and crucial transgression of such a commentator: to relinqllish the sacred text with hypocritical nodes sty, but at the same time to treat any other text or object ofdiscussion with the same devotion and care traditionally required by the sacred text. O n e has no hesitation in saying that nothing essential changes in Benjamin from the clandestine theology of his early writings to the Marxism ofhis last years, except that the vice of the commentator becomes increasingly perverse, urging him toward ever more refractory material, as he himself reveals in a rare and marvelous moment of confessio~lin a letter to Max Rychner in 1931: "I've never been able to study anti think except in the theological sense, if I may put it that way, that is, in accordance with the Talmudic doctrine of the forty-nine steps of meaning in every passage in the Torah. Now, my experience tells me that the most worn-our Marxist platitzrde holds more hierarchies of meaning than everyday bourgeois p r o f ~ ~ n d i twhich y, always has only one meaning, ~ ~ a m e apology." ly Certainly those Marxists who, born to adore Georg Lukics, now struggle to come to grips with Benstairways. Were they cajamin are not equipped to face such rne:~ningh~l pable of ascending even the first steps ot'his work, they would already have dismissed him as an cxanlple of the most superstirious depravity.

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. 7 % Forty-nine ~ Strps

T h e pompous a n d mournful triumphal arch that introduces Benjamin's work is Der U~sprungdes deut~chenfi~uerspielx, o r The Origin o f G(>rmnrlSorrowfhl I-'laYx, to translate literally the ambiguous title of the s t ~ l d ythat Benjamin, with a t o ~ ~ co fh pure rclmantic irony, was bold ellough to offer as part of his application for a u ~ ~ i v e r s i tte:iching y post. 'The irony, as one might expect, was not understood, and the post was denied him; indeed, rhis is a book likely to throw anyone, not just professors, into confi~sionand dismay. It can be read o n at least rhree levels: as the niost inlporta~ltstudy ever written o n the rich theatrical literature of seventeenth-century Germally; next, as a dissertation o n the history of allegory, in which Benjamin, with perfect instinct, bases his'arguments primarily o n t h e early iconologicrl analyses by the Giehlow-WarburgPanofsky-Saxl school (that is, the most knowing eyes in this century to read the images of our past); and finally, secretly and in a play of mirrors, as allegory in action in Benjamin's thought, which here justifies his own predilection for the allegorical form. Hut how did Benjami~icome by this form? Let us try to tell it as a kind of imaginary biography. Picture Henjanlin as a cabalist shipwrecked in the vision of a nature wholly entangled, to its ruin, in the chain of sin, a nature that no longer offers illuminating letters, written o n things, such as only Adam might have read, b u t a Babelic tangle o f signs, a text forever corrupt. Having abandoned the Scriptures and clandestirlely emerged from the ghetto, he joins a group of the most radical romantics a few centuries later, keeping q u i r t about his origin a n d observing t o himself, with a hidden smile, how these youngsters go wild i l l their disorderly search for certain themes a n d notions long familiar to h i m from the Cabala. W h a t attracts h i m in the romantics is rather the lightness with which they move amid the sinews of form, their capacity to dismiss any consistent totality, as though they too had recognized the disfigured character of nature. But Benj~iminsoon observes in them an ever clearer tendency t o exalt the powers of the symbolic, t o seek a language o f images implicit in things. T h e saturnine cabalist incognito ; ~ c c o r d i ~ ~tnrns g l y his bick. slightly i i i s g ~ ~ s r eby d these foolish ambitions, and retires t o a spent crater i n the shelter of buttresses built with heaps o f books: the seventeenth c e n t u r y There, under the "So/ei/ ~lclird ~/[I' M ~ ' / ~ I z c / ~[black o / ~ P "sun of n~elancholy],his grandiose nleditation is finally fulfilled; there Renja~ninmeets a dark Beatrice, allegory, so often misunderstood by her romantic companions, and discovers in her the only device propol-tionate t o the a b r u p t , nlaimed, a n d

The Foviy-nine Steps .

111

forlorn essence ofhistory as a natural process a n d of nature as the history of the chain of sin. And this is precisely because of the violent arbitrariness of the allegorical connection between the image a n d its nieaning, which reveals the ~lnbridgeahledistance between the two orders, similar, Benjamin suggests, to the example o f alphabetic writing, the first brutal imposition o f meaning o n a letter that does not want t o accept it. I n short, for the very reasons that drove Goethe to reject allegory and devote himself instead to the blessed immediacy a n d totality of the symbol, Benjamin reclaims it, because only in allegory can o n e recognize what classicism was never able to grasp: "thefaci~.shippocratil.fz o f history as an unrelenting primordial landscape." 'There is n o sharp distinction between symbol and allegory, since allegory is the symbolic itself in disarray, dead from hypertrophy. But this decomposition of the symbol liberates a vast power, the cold algebraic meaning, and it is rhis that makes it possible to decree conventions with sovereign will and insist that anything can stand for anything else. "Seventeenth-century allegory is not the convention of expression but the expression of convention": This is likewise the basis o f the myth of writing, a perennial feast of death, given over to the "sensual pleasure with which the meaning rules, like a grim sultan, over the harem o f things." Uninhibited allegory, now remote from any living order o f ~~ images a n d repeatedly conmeaning, t h e pure c o m p ~ ~ l s ti oo marshal struct their meaning through distorted combinations, above all causes the images themselves to overflow. Just as objects obsessively invade the stage o f the baroque theater until they become the true prot:igooists. so pictures erupt like threats in the emblem books, to celebrate the growing gap between image a n d meaning. W h o , opening Andrea Alciati's Emblemrlta a n d seeing a n amputated hand with a n eye o n the palrn, planted in the middle of the sky over a rural landscape, would ever think ofprudence, as the text for the emblem requires? Instead, he will recognize that a hurnan body has been mutilated, a silent allusion to the state of nature as rubble and a n unconscious est;tblishmenr o f the fragment as the prevailing aesthetic category. By the accumulation of these materials, the sr;ige is being set for the modern. 'The history o i that time prefigures the real history of today: These images, which then emerged illto the world like wild beasts from their cages. are still at large. Ka&a described them: "1.eopards break into the temple and empty the sacrificial vessels; this is rcpe:lted time a n d again; in [he e n d i t can bc fbreseen and beconlcs parr of thc cere~llony.''In allegory, a writer is the witness of this scene.

The Superior Man and the Absolute Cocotte .

The Superior Man and the Absolute Cocotte

Having haunted so many restless youngsters in the firsr thirty years of the twentieth century and having then been interred arnong those books known to have once been important, though no one can say why, O t t o Weininger's Sex a n d Chaiucteihas just been reissued. And one can already foresee that although it will excite the unseemly enthusiasm (after all, it's so Middle European!) of a few rare zealots, most people will greet it with a flicker of impatience, if not indignation, and ask, "What? After three quarters of a century, d o ive still have to put up with this arrogant and suicidal young man? This srudent who went out of his way to bad-mouth women, homosexuals, and Jews?" Agreed, but does today's sorry official culture really have any reason to look down its nose at him? T h e true anci-Sernire says, "Besides, some of my best friends are lews." T h e true enemy of women says, "Besides, she's a nice girl." T h e true homophobe says, "Besides, I like them." Weininger is just the opposite of these people. First of all, he himself was Jewish; second, it was precisely his atrocious remarks about women that aided Karl Kraus, thar most eloquent worshipper of woman. in putting the law to shame when it sought with impunity to condemn a number of Viennese fiIIes de joie; third, what Weininger wrote about h o n ~ o s e x u a l i tis~ an early, clumsy effort to approach a subject about which modern thought has never been able even to rise above clumsiness. So one begins to suspect that the who]; story is a bit more complicated, ambiguous, and misleading. 1 will try to tell it for what it also is: an erotico-philosophical feuilleton. Believe it or not, there was once a time when the "problem of sex" actually existed, and was not merely h d d e r for statistics, sociologists, marriage counselors, and liberators of humanity.

IIJ

For three generations, from the n~idnineteenrhcentury on, any hint of sex gave rise to excruciating spasms and c ~ s at pall over everything. 'Then, as always, sensitive young people indulged in n~asturbation,but in the heroic certainty that they were courting madness arid death. Indeed, according to what was then acceprrd doctrine, the spinal cord would supposedly turn rapidly into pulp and rricklc down the backbone. And when Strindberg, in Sor~of a Stl-vant, revealed rhat this was one of many deceptions ptacticed on him as a child, i t was a gesture of unheardof audacity. There were also, as Frank Wedekind described, epidemics of suicide anlong high school students overwhelmed by erotic fantasies and guilt. And the whole world kept piling libido on every knickknack: All o f Art Nouveau can be seen as an attempt to eroticize industry, the beginning of the mass production of objects (winding flights of stairs, untrusrworthy door handles . . .) that Weininger's amoral, insatiable woman might continually relate to in her increasing boredom with the ever present and inept man of the law, so stupid and so convinced of being the custodian of the spirit. And it is even plausible that abstract art, whether pre-lnfol-meI (as in Schmithals) or absolute decoration (as in Gustav Klimt), was born of an excess of erotic tension: T h e chromatic blur serves primarily to cover or envelop in a vibrant veneer scenes too indecent to be shown. It was amid these quicksands that O t t o Weininger was born in Vienna in 1880. H e was one of those fatal individuals especially to themselves) who cannot say anything without carrying i t ro its "ultimate conclusions." Like many others, he had the vice of the Absolute, and with a neophyte's energy he went looking for it where people at that time supposed it to be: in science. But for a shrewd eye like his, it was precisely science that presented an image of distressing uncertainty behind its positivist arrogance: T h e most subtle theorists, like Ernst Mach, had reduced the ego to an anteuoovI through which impressions flowed. T h e nihilistic sword of the new epistemology drove consciousness into the "sea of sensations" and transformed it into a "bundle" ofcharlce psychic aggreptions. T h e subject, ~ r o u dand positive, discovered itself,to be a patchwork, a "kaleidoscope" thar "reduces everything to a hodgepodge of elements," "renders everything n1e:uiingJess and without fo~~ndatiorl," and "destroys the possibility of st;~rtingfrom n fixed point for thought." In the end it destroys "the concept of truth." Behind these agonizing results, onc glimpses the impassive slleer of

116

. The Superior Man and t/le Absolute Cocotte

David Hume. But who was it who championed the unity of the subject against Hume's corrosive acids? T h e great Inlmnnuel Kant, and the whole of nineteenth-century German culture was a continual gesture o f homage and betray;ll toward him as the last bearer of the law. Weininger therefore turned to Kant as to an urlassailable rock in the "hodgepodgen o f elements. Had he been an ordinary spirit, his path would have been laid out: a chair in philosophy and a lifetime o f sober research as a neo-Kantian thinker, of which there were quite a few in the Germany of those years. But Weininger had an aberrant originality and followed his own phantasms rather than common sense. And his m i n d was equally violently obsessed by ethics and by eros. Thus he had the utrer effrontwy to launch himself o n a hitherto unheard-of project: to marry epistemology and sexuality by squeezing Kant, "the superior man," and Lulu, "the absolute cocotte," into the same bed. As might have been foreseen, the two of them sprang out of that bed with mutual repugnance (perhaps Kant's famous

Realrepugnu ~zz?) . From this incident emerged Sex and Character, first a graduate thesis, then a heavy tome, and finally a contagious best-seller until the late 1920s. Hut Weininger was not around to witness this Iasr phase: H e had fired a bullet into his heart a few months after the book's publication in 1903 H e was twenty-three years old. T h e reasons for his suicide can be divined from the illuminating fragments collected as O n Last Thi?lgs a n d published posthumously Weini~lgerwho had invested his book with the fanatical necessity of being the truth, had come to a growing realization that his creatio~lwas a grandiose hilure a n d above all that the person O t t o Weininger was not the spotless and perfectly conscious subject he had thought: rather, he had increasingly come to resemble woman's proxy the criminal. Judge Daniel Paul Schreber, caught in a similar conflict, had found a way out in paranoiac delusion. T h e Kantian O t t o Weininger chose suicide: "The decent man proceeds by himself toward death, if he realizes that he has become definitely wicked." So how should one read Sex and Character? Certainly not as a scientific treatise. That would be to fall into the error of which Weininger himself was a victim, in order to derive-the mean satisfaction of smiling superciliously at these sornctinles hilarious pages, pure fin de silcle grotesqueness, in which he lashes out at women, Jews, and homosexuals. No, Sex and O'haracter is a desperate, subtle confession, both lucid and raving, that stages an intermezzo in the "tragedy of consciousness." And precise-

I

I

The Superior Man a~zdthe Absolute

Cocotte

.

1r7

l y f o r theatrical reasons, Weininger had to give i r the seal of scientific solemnity, to formulate it in that grave and cumbersome language that is nevertheless continually shaken by a tremor, the first sign of a psychical tempest, the omnipresent threat of eros. T h e hidden point from which the whole book proliferates is the specter of the androgyne. '['he bisexuality marvelously depicted by Plato, the cabalists, Jakob Hijhme, and books of alchemy, all the way to Honort de Balzac's SPruphitn, and riow a lost and elusive chimera, resurfaces by murky underground channels in young Weininger, as it also did, and by no less murky channels, in the slightly older Wilhelrn Fliess and Signlilnd Freud. Having stated the obvious fact that masculine and feminine traits coexist in every person but carrying it-as though obsessed-to its "ultimate conclusions," Weininger ended by noting that bisexuality necessarily led to an incurable and baleful split in the subiect. O n one side is man, son~ething,affirmation, the heir of Kant's transcendental subject, reduced to a policeman ever on the alert, his will vainly tense, in danger of losing his identity and damaging the law. which in his coercive vacuity he represents. O n the other is woman, nothing, negation, this amoral and irresponsible creature, this Lulu who has no ego (and yet is sovereign), who tells lies nut of biological necessity and copulates continually with everything around her. This outrageously comical comparison was not invented by Weininger, as his undiscerning critics have always insisted, but transcribed by him. T h e text from which he transcribed it was none other than the clandestine system of thought that governed (and still governs) our civilization. Weininger sketched that oppressive cage in the darkness and made it recognizable. 7'hinkilig the cage's founding assuniprions through to their "ultimate conclusions" caused it to creak. Or rather, Weininger himself tried to get out of the cage but could not, precisely because of his "scientific" a n d Kantian assumptions. Outside the cage, he might truly have begun that "research on principles" (nlasculine and feminine) promised by the book's subtitle. And there he would havc encountered alchemical and mythological symbolism to serve as a p i d e . Ipstead, Weininger's involuntary grotesqueness rages just when hc is fumbling to emerge from his cage. Once he had finished writing Sex nnd Charrrcter, W'einingcr seems to n hnllucinlrhave realized that his whole systenl did nothing but d~>.rcribe tion ~ r o d u c c dby fear of the void and its troubling synonym Woman:

118

. The Superior Man and therlbsolute Cocotte

"And this is also thc explanation nF man's deepest fear:fiur of the woman, that is, fear in thefdcc o f t l ~ nbs~nce e of'menninq: that is, fear befbre the s~dzrctivenbyss of the void." For if "woman is ~narzksin, as Weininger observes at the end of his Kantian "deduction of femininiry," his whole book could no longer claim ro have described woman as a real being, but woman as a perpetual hallucination of sin. And this is no small feat: He may not have written a scirnrific work, but he was surely a faithful and clairvoyant chronicler of the specrcrs of his civilization. His error, once a g i n , was the one that Karl Kraus is said to bnve pointed out in Strindberg: "Strindberg's rruth: The order of rhe world is thrnreoed by rhe feminine. Strindberg's error: 'l'he order of the world is threatened by woman." T h e "cultural world," in its ever renewed respectability, has'not been exactly generous toward that valuable error krlow~las SEX and C,'haracter: when the book appeared, because it had too much success, was read roo avidly by young girls, and therefore could not be raken seriously; today, because it is offered as a period piece, for the grotesqueness scartered throughout it and for the pompous incongruity of the scier~~ific apparatus ~ l l a goes t with ir. Very few people have actually ack~iowledgrda debt of gra~itudcto this book. And those who did were writers who were indccd horrified by the "cultural world": Kraus, Strindberg, Wittgenstein. "

The Ordeal of Impossible Words

The sound of the banalities generally uttered about Sinlone Weil can already be heard in these few words by Sirnone dc Beauvoir: "A great famine had just struck China, and rhey told me h a t Simone Weil broke down and wept on hearing the news. Those tears, more than her philosophic gift, made me feel respect for her." This sentence illus~ratesa reaction that is still with us today: O n e pronounces Simone Weil's nanlr and is immediately surrounded by co~lrritefaces. Rising to the o c c a s i o ~ ~ , someone says he respects her because even though she was an unskilled intellectual and graduate of the Ecole lVormale SupCrieure. she took a job in a R e n a ~ ~factory; lt another ups the ante of admiration because she joined in many trade-union struggles; someone else recalls the war in Spain; another vouches for her piety and alludes thoughtfully to her lasting reluctance to be baptized; and some estimable and obtuse layman will also stand ready ro call her a "sai~lro f our time." I thirrk nothing would have ar~noyedSimone Weil more than to see herself reduced to an upholder of good cawes, one of those sanctimonious and undiscrirnirla~ingpeople who plunge into eveiy good deed of the momelit. Those who sprak of her this way would really likr to evade and ignore her, since they are incapable of "paying attention to her soul," as one of Hugo von Hofinannsrhal's charactel-s demanded. Unlike Sirnorle de Beauvoir, we will nor be conccnt with a few sobs over China. By now i t has been settled beyond a n y doubt that crying about the world's disasters is no Inore significant than a eel-cificatr of good conduct. Let us look instead at what is really intitnidatjng in Simone Weil, which Beauvoir clu~llsilycalls her "philosophic gift": her thought. Let us finally open her books, especially her truly secret books, those

rzo . The Orde~zlqf'lmn~~ossible Word

Cahiers written in the overly clear handwriting of a model schoolgirl between ,940 and 1943, the year Weil died in L,ondon of exhaustion and tuberculosis, at the age of thirty-four. What sort of mind emerges from these books? Certainly not one suitable to be considered in the usual histories of modern philosophy, and not even one capable of feeding those encyclopedias that are all the more dismal the more they claim to bulge with ideas. No, Simone Weil was not an academic philosopher, nor was she one of those tiresome. long-winded pundits who continue to hold the stage today. We need only read a few of her pages to realize that we are in the presence of something ofwhich nlaily may even have lost all recollection: a mind both transparent and hard as a diamond, a mind stubbornly focused on a slim bundle of words. And among them we recognize almost all the impnuibir words: those words so old, so immediate, but also so abused and threadbare that many people avoid saying them and circumvent them out of fear and shame. Those who d o so are sensitive, enervated, and cultured. For Simone Weil, it would not have been possible. She continued to fix her gaze directly on tboir words. the same ones, moreover, that we find woven into the few inexhaustible texts to which she always returned: the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the pre-Socratics, Plato, Sophocles, the Gospels: "Love," "necessity," "good." ,> "desire," "justice, maihrur," "beauty," 'limit," "sacrifice," "emptiness." 'I

Weil was well aware that these words are likewise ordeals: Those who utter them are made to pass through the fire. Those who are able to utter them, because they know what they refer to, emerge unscathed. But almost nobody emerges unscathed. In the mouths of alrnost everybody, such words are mangled corpses. Under Simone Weil's pen, they return to being what they are: mysterious crystals. To observe these crysrals with nttention, one must at least be a mathematician of the soul. And that is what Simone Weil was. It is customary to distinguish two periods in Weil's brief life: one of "social commitment" until 1938, the other of "mystical conversion" lasting unril her death. These embarrassing definitions belong in a biographical dictionary. T h e truth is that Weil was always one thing only: a gnostic. When in the early years, they called her " t h e - ~ e dVirgi~l"and she was inciting the stonebreakers of Le I'uy to revolt. when she irritated Leon Trotsky with her unassailable objections, when h e participated in the struggle against Fsanco during the Spanish Civil War (and (;eorges Hataille made fun of her in the character of Lazare in Blru du cirl), Simone Weil was already what she would later discover herself to hc. "Very few arc the

The Ordedl of impossible Word .

121

spirits to whom i t is given to discover that things and beings exist," she once wrote to Joe Bousquet. And in her writings, we feel from the beginning, with the articles calling for inlnlediate political action, that truly for her, "things and beings exist." O f course, in that first n ~ i l i t a ~period, lt the wholc vertigino~~s network of connections and resonances, from algebra to the zodiac, that we find later in the C~/,Ieri had not yet formed in Weil. A ~ l dyet there is already an impressive distance, as far as lucidity is concerned, between Weil and her most renowned contempor;iries. Think of all the Oxford dandies, poets from the Latin Quarter, and German exiles who discovered "social commitment" and even the "proletarian cause" in the early 193os! But Simo~le Weil was the only one capable of si~nultaneouilyfollowing the oppressed to the point ofworking with thenr on the assembly line, and recognizing that the very country the oppressed looked to as their liberator was actually the most abusive n ~ u t a t i o nof oppression. In examining the socialist world, Weil did not fall into any of those traps into which almost all intellectuals of the time threw themselves, quite content to feel that they were on the side of history. She did not need to wait for the proofs, the documents, that so many others with sluggish reflexes were still waiting for half a century later. T h e lucidity of her mind was enough for her, and when Trotsky with glum amiability, teased her about her drastic ideas. she once replied, in connection with the words "revolutionary" and "counterrevolutionary," that "if one wanted to seek the truth, i t was necessary to set limits to that terminology." Sublime understatement. I have spoken of "crystals" and of "attention." 7oday, w h e ~ lthe beaches o f the world lie strewn with huge ideological carcasses, to encounter Weil's writings may be the equivalent, to use the categories of Mount Analogue by Renk Daumal (one of the few writers akin to her, as well as a friend), of finding apeiizdam, that strange "curved crystal," difficult and dangerous to procure, that is "the sole substance, the sole material body in which the guides of Mount Analogue recognize a value." In this world of analogy, "it is the sole guarantee of every coin, as gold is for us," and also the only source o f "incontest;~bleauthority." '1% find it, one need only have a clear mind ;ind tllat p;irticul;ir cl;iirvoyancc of sight that Weil called simply "attention." Hut she also ren~emberedthat "true attention is a state so difficult for m a n , a state so violent that any person;ll disturba~lcein sensibility is enough to prevent it." And the sarne word allowed her to offer the most ele~nentary,but in the end persuasive, definition of culture: "What is culture? The formation of attention."

A Report on Rraders ~f'Schreber .

A Report on Readers of Schreber

Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs were published in 1903 by [he firm o f Oswald Mutze in 1,eipzig.l 77iis edition, printed at the author's expense, is hard to come by today, the family having apparently bought up a n d destroyed most of the existing copies.' T h e book did not, however, wholly escape the notice of psychiatrists. T h a t same year, 1903, a review of it appeared in the Alkem~ineZeitsch).tftfur I'sychit~trir,followed by another in 1904 in the De~rtscheZeitsrhrzft fur Nerven/~ri/kund?.T h e first reviewer, C. Pelman, set o u t to distinguish Schreber's Memoirs from the mass of those "more or less voluniirlous works by our ex-patients in which they make loud, public accusations claiming to have been denied their freed o m a n d p u t the blame o n criminal doctors."' Pelman, with a gesture of ironic detachment, dismisses at the outset any sirnilarity to these "dubious literary products," pointing o u t that Schreber's book has "only o n e thing in c o m m o n " with t h e m , "namely. the fact o f havillg bee11 written by a mental patient, while in all other respects it towers high above them" (p. 657). Indeed, Schreber's primary concern could not he said t o express personal resentment; but rather, he "offer[ed] his person t o the judgment of experts as an object of scientific observation" (,p. 658). Having thus given his approval to Schreber's worthy purpose, I'elman provides a quick and extremely vague sulnmary of the hlemoirs. H e shows greater interest, however, in the court proceedi~lgs~vherebySchrehcr e v c n t ~ ~ a l lregained y particular he concede; that the judge's judicial battle his freedom, and in with the authorities was 110 confrontation between "two ordinar). adversaries," since the dispute can be said to have occurred "on an equal level." Finally, I'elman concluded, "t;or these reasons I would be sorry if t h e book were removed from circulation . . . because it deserves a better fate.

123

T h a t Schreber is sane is not something rhat will be accepted by any thinking person. But one must surely recognize rhat here is a Inan both intellectually gifted and worthy of respect for his feelingsn (p. 659). T h e second review, signed by one R. Pfeiffer, deserves to be quoted in full for its lack o f perception: Thc author, a typiciil paranoi~~c, introciuces his book with a brirfopell letter to Professor tilechsig, followcd by 350 pages describing in dct;lil his delirious systematized idcas, in which ~nedicillcxperrs will fi~ldrlorlling neiv. What is more interesting is the vcrhatim reproducrion i l l the documents of thr tl.ial proceedings and the co~irt'sreasons for deciding to lift the ban o n Schrebcr, despite the persistence of his delirious ideas. 'l'hcre is no rcason to fexr a wid? circularion of [his book among the 1;1y public, a l [ h o ~ ~ gi ht might. dcspirr the obvious situation of rhc hcts, create confilsion.~ O n e o f these two reviews very probably attracted the attention o f the young Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, then an intern at the Burgholrli hospital. O r perhaps he encountered SchreberS Memoit, a m o n g the new works issued by the same publisher who, a year before, had brought o u t his o w n first book, Psychokogie und Put/~ologiesogenannter okklrlter Phuizomenr. Be that as it niay, we find J u n g already citing Schreber's Memoin in 1907, in his fiycholo~giedcr Dementiapruc~~.ox [ T h e Psychology of Dementia Praecoxj .' We know the fundarnell tal import;lnce o f this work in Jung's development: It marks, a m o n g other things, an early declaration o f principle with respect t o Frcud. Indeed, in the preface, dated July 1906-three nionths after beginning his correspondence with Freud, t o w h o m he h:ld presented a c o p o f his Assoziutioristz~dien-Jullg is anxious above all to explain how much he is "indebted to the brilliant discoveries of Freud" (p. j), a n d after specifying that n o criticism o f Freud makes sense except zcjithin psychoanalysis, he mentions for the first tirne certain reservations of his own, especially his resistance to p1:lcing sexuality "so predonlioantly in the f o r g l - o u n d " or g r s n t i l ~ gi t "the universality which Freud, i t seems, postulates" (p. 4). The" eonlinous words manifest a difference o f perspective that was to be pri~iticilllywiped o u t in the next few years, only t o reappear later in a r n t ~ c hInore radical form at the tinie o f JuogS hre:lk with Frcod. 111 7 7 1 l'syi.bn/og~ ~ ofDimrntiu 1'177ecox, the references to Schreberk M[,iiioirs serve p~-inl:lril~ to ilo f the illness being treate~i,and there is 11" lustrate certi~ill~l~:~r:~cteristics

724

. A Report 011 Readers !f.Ychreber

a t t e m p t a t interpretation. T h e first interpretative essay o n Schreber's Memoirs is thus the one by Freud, written in the autumn of x9ro. Before examining its theses, I would like to review a few aspects of its complicated prior history. T h e proble111 of paranoia had already come ~ i p for Freud i n the early years o f psychoanalysis, as attested by the many times h e mentions the subject in his letters to Wilhelm Fliess in the years 1895-96 and especially by the farsighted "Uraft H," enclosed with a letter of 24 January 1895 and devoted to :I first theoretical h r m u l a t i o n o f paranoia. Here paranoia is traced back t o the various pathological modes of defense already singled out by Freud-namely, hysteria, obsessive neurosis, and states of hallucinatory confusion-and at the same time differentiated from them; the draft for the first time, arnong other things, employs the tern1 "projection" (later treated further in "Draft K").T h e much less drastic p b l i c explanation o f this theory appeared the following year, in Freud's Weitere B e ~ n e r k u n ~ eiiber n die Abwehrneur~ps~chosen, whose third section is devoted to the "Analysis o f a Case o f Chronic Paranoia." Here, for the first time in the G e r m a n language, Freud uses the term "psycho. ,> analys~s, referring specifically to the case of the paranoiac female patient who was sent to h i m by Josef Breuer and who is the subject of the study. I n this rapid analysis, Freud's aim is once again to show how "paranoiil, o r gmups of cases belonging to it, is also a defence-psychosis; that is to say, that it results from the repression of p i n f u l memories, as d o hysteria and obsessions, a n d that the form of the symptoms is determined by the con~ does not, however, risk establishtent of the repressed r n e m ~ r y . "Freud ing a theory of paranoia o n this basis and specifies that his analysis is limited to "some such conclusion as this: this case is a defence-psychosis a n d in the category o f paranoia there are probably others like it" (p. 170). I11 fact, this caution conceals his already clear ambition t o provide an exhaustive interpretation of the entire paranoiac pathology, a n d some o f the terms that recur in the course of this analysis, for example "projection," will also remain fundamental in successive formulations of the theory. W h a t Freud instead abandons entirely is the theory of a specific sexual trauma, with the discovery in 1897 "that there is no 'indication of reality' in the unconscious, so that it is impossiblt. to distinguish between truth and emotionally-charged fictiotl."; Finally, in a letter t o Fliess in 1899, Freud goes a step further in his theory of paranoi:~.coming t o consider it "a surge forward of the auto-erotic tendency, a regression t o a former state" (letter 125; p. 304).

A Report on Rrrzders ofsrhreber . rry

After this letter, more than ten years pass during which Freud makes almost n o m e n t i o n o f paranoia in his published works. H e continues, however, to wrestle with the many problems raised by it, as is apparent in his letters to Jung, who, in The Psychokogy o f D e m e n t i u Prclrcox, had already discussed the case of the paranoiac w o m a n presented by Freud in 1896. Jung recognized it as "extremely important for psychopathology,"8 and in the end he offered a criticism that touches the truly delicate spot in Freud's study: " T h e 'hysterical' mechanislns h e uncovered suffice to explain the origin of hysteria, b u t why then does de)nentiu prtrrcox arise?" (p. 35). As early as the first months o f his correspondence with Jung, Freud raises t h e question o f paranoia, a n d in a letter of 6 December 1906 he states openly, "I have still fbrmed n o definite opinion o n the dividing line between dementia praecox a n d paranoia. . . . But m y experience in this field is meager."" Freud will come back to this second statement several times, nlmost with a feeling of inferiority with respect to Jung, who had numerous patients suffering from paranoia and dementia praecox in the Burgholzli clinic. A n d it is significant that Freud's great study of paranoia, the paper o n Schreber, is the only one o f his great cases t o be based solely o n a text. After his first meeting with Freud, in Vienna i n March 1907, Jung wrote to him, obviously comnienting on conversations they had had during his visit, "Azltoerotij~rias the essence o f Dementia praecox strikes me more a n d more as a momentous deepening of our knowledgen (p. 25)and here we see the reemergence of the theme mentioned in the letter t o Fliess in 1899 Even in the early exchanges, we observe differences in terminology between Freud a n d Jung when they are dealing with paranoia and dementia praecox. C o n l m o n t o both, however, is their impatience with the ambiguous term "dementia praecox," which, in fact, was t o be replaced by the fatal word "schizophrenia" only after the publication in 1911 of Eugen Bleuler's important treatise De17rentinpr~~erox, oa'er Gruppe der Schizophrenieil. I n April 1907, Freud sends J u n g the outline of a paper, "A Few Theoretical Remarks o n Paranoia." This is the first time that Freud, in 3 gesture o f paternal trust, asks Jungls opinion o f a manuscript. In these fundatnental notes, he states, a m q n g other things. "The sexual instinct is originalIy autoerotic," "In paranoia the libido is withdrawn from the object," and "I'rojection . . . is a variety o f rrprrssion. in which a n image beconles conscious as perception" ( p p 39-40). J u n g reacts to this manuscript with oblique criticisms. H e shows it to Bleuler, w h o tclls him he will use it in his m a j r ~ rstudy o n dementia prarcox. T h e

126

A Report on Re~zderso f Schreber .

. A Report on Readers ofSchreber

[paranoia] . . . is their attenipc to cure thernselves" (letter t o Jung, 26 December 1908; p. 191). T h e year 1909. marked by Jung's second visit t o Vienna in March a n d by the trip of both men to America for the Clark Conference in the summer, was t o charge the relationship between Freud a n d J u n g with ever more ambiguity a n d a~nbivalence.Meanwhile, l u n g discovers myth as his favored material for analysis. and Freud, for the time being, shares his enthusiasm. At the beginning of 1910, they are making preparations for the Nuremberg Congress, a n d Jung seems increasingly aggressive in presenting his ideas. I n the importanr letter o f 11 February 1910, in which he describes himself as "sitting so precariously o n t h e fence between the Dionysian a n d the Apollinian," J u n g emphatically statcs, "Religion can be replaced only by religion."" While the favorite pupil speaks of "the Walpurgis Nights o f m y unconscious" (p. 296), the master does not insist o n their differences a n d proves a c c o m n ~ o d a t i n g ,albeit worried. T h e Nuremberg Congress is held at the end of March. W h e n it is over, Freud and J u n g spend a day together at Rothenburg, a n d it was probably o n this occasion that J u n g first spoke t o Freud a b o u t Schreber. T h e r e is, however, already a first indirect reference to Schreber in Jung's letter of 17 April (p. 307), and from then o n until the end of the correspondence there are numerous such references. Freud seems in particular t o have playfully absorbed various expressions from the M~nloirs,such as "miracled," "basic language," a n d "nervous conjunction" (this last appears often in the correspondence with Karl Abraham as well). In a letter o f 22 April, Freud refers explicitly t o "the wonderful Schreber," whose book he has set aside for the holidays, a n d he observes that the m a n " o ~ l ~ h t t o have been m a d e a professor o f psychiatry a n d director o f a mental hospital" (p. 311). During the summer of 1910, after a particularly exhausting year, Freud went to Holland for a rest a n d from there left in September for a longdesired trip to Italy, ;rccompanied by Ferenczi. T h e journey coincided with a m o m e n t of intense self-absorption o n Freud's part, when he found h i n l ~ e l f c o n f r o n t i na~new obstacle in his self-analy~is.O n c e again it was a question of Fliess and paranoia. Ferenczi kept pestering Freud with questions precisely about paranoia, a suhject he himselfwas involved with for the moment. and Freod must frequently have been loath to respond. for once he was back in Vienna, he felt the need to justify himself t o Ferenczi in a revealing letter that includes these words: "Nor only have you noticed

observation added b y Jung, in his letter o f 13 M a y 1907, is supremely comical a n d illuminating for the history o f psychiatry: " H e [Bleuler] doesn't want t o say autoerotism (for reasons we all know) [that is, prudery], b u t prefers 'autism' or 'ipsis~n.'I have already got a c c u s t o n ~ e dt o 'autoerotism.'" ( P P 44-45). Meanwhile, Jung relentlessly continues to feed Freud inreresling cases o f dementia praecox encountered in his clinical practice. In J u n e 1907, Freud singles o u t among them the case o t a paranoiac with "hon~osexual experiences," a n d this is the first time that homosexuality appears in ronnection with paranoia. I n a letter of 17 February 1908. however, Freud suggests t o J u n g for the first time r possible theoretical conlleition between homosexuality a n d paranoia: 1 have been in conrrlcr with a few paranoia cases in my practice and

C:UI

tell you a secret. . . . 1 h;~veregularly encounrercd a decachme~lcof libido

from a homosexual component which until then had been normally and moderately cathected. . . . My old analysis (1896) also showed thac the pathological process began with rhc paricnr's estra~lgementfrom her husband's jisterj. My one-time friend Fliess de\:eloped a dreadful case of paranoia after throwing off his affection for me, which was u~~doubtedly considerable. 1 owe this idea to him, i.e., to his bchaviour. One must try to learn sonlcthing from evcry experience."' I n this letter, Freud throws a sudden light o n the obscure basis a n d complex personal connections that mark his theory of paranoia. It turns o u t here t o be linked in its central element-the role o f hon~osexualitywith the most serious, passionate, a n d painful psychological experience in Freud's life: his friendship with Fliess a n d its breakup. Clearly, J u n g grasps or once t h e importance o f what Freud revealed t o h i m , a n d he replies three days later with a ploy that takes o n a n all too obvious meaning in light o f w h a t occurs between them a few years later: "The reference t o Fliess-surely not accidental-and your relationship with h i m i l ~ ~ ~ e l s m e t o ask you to let m e enjoy your friendship not as one between equals b u t as that of tither a n d son" (p. I 22). T h e solid basis is thereby laid for a difficult and emotional relationship, one that will also be broken in d u e course. During 1908 the copious exchange of ideas o n para~loiabetween Freud a n d l u n g continues. as does a c o r r e s p o n d e ~ ~ cbetween e Freud and Srindor Ferenczi, w i t h w h o m Freud succeeds in working o u t a crucial hypothesis: " W h a t w e regard as the manifestations o f their disorder

127

i

La

128

. A Report o t ~Readers ~fSchreber

that 1 no longer have any need for that full opening of my personality, but you have also understood i r and correctly rerurned to its traumatic cause. . . . This need has been extinguished in Ine since Fliess's case, with the overcoming of which you jusr saw nie occupied. A piece oFhomosexua1 investment has been withdrawn a ~ i d~ ~ s for e d the e~llargementof my own ego. I succeeded where the para~loiachils."" Freud had taken Schreber's Memoirs with him on the trip to Iraly, and he read about half the book, but with the feeling that he had already grasped its secret. Back in Vienna, he ininlediately announced to lung, without mentioning Schreber, thar he was preparing an article on pal-anoia. But lung understood whar was going on and promprly replied, on 29 September, "1 was touched and overjoyed to Ic;ir~lhow much yo11 appreciate the greatness of Schreberi mind and the liberating iepoi A O ~ O L of the basic language." Further on in the same letrer. Jung dernonstr:~ted [hat behind Schreber he had glimpsed [he whole mythological and religious background wirh which he was concerned at that moment: "The Manichaeans (Schreber's godfathers?) hit on the idea that a number of demons or 'archons' were crucified on. or affixed to. the vault of heaven and were rhe filher~ofhuman heiugs."" Freud replied, " I share your mrhusiasm for Schreber; it is a kind of revelatioil. I pl;~nto introduce 'basic language' as a serious rechnical term. . . . After another reading I may be able to resolve all the intriguing fantasies; I didn't quite succeed rhe first time. , . . I wish you luck with your immersion in mythology" ( p 358). Freud worked on the Schreber case from then until mid-December. O n the sixteenth, he wrote to Abraham and Ferenczi that he had finished his paper. A few days earlier, he had announced to lung that he would bring the manuscript with him to Munich, adding, "1 am not pleased wirh it, bur it is for others to judge. . . . 1 shall h:we to leave other parts of my speculation on paranoia for n later paper3' (p. 377). And on 18 December he repeated, "The piece is formally imperk c t , fleetingly improvised. 1 had neither time nor strength to do more. Still, there are a few good things in it, and it contains the boldest thrust a[ + + + [sexual] psychiatry since your LIrm. l'r: I am uiiablc ro judge irs objective worth as was pssible with earlier papers, because in working on it 1 have had to fight off complexes within myself (Fliers)" (pi?. 379-80). Nothing could be clearer: Once again the ghosr of Flies3 Ioon~sbehind Judge Schreber. Freud's paper was p ~ h l i s h ~ind 1911. i l l i111 ~ S S L L Cof tile &hrbuch chat marks rhe great watershed in [he history of psychoanaly-

A Report on Reuderf o f Schreber .

129

sis. Indeed, it also contained the first part of lung's new book, Wajzdlungc~nm d $mbole der Libido, which made i t clear thrlr the pupil, now8 turned rebel, had taken a quire different path. Meanwhile, o n 28 March 1911,lung's young and ralented disciple Johann Jakob Honegger Jr. committed suicide; in Nurcmberg he had presented a paper on paranoia that anticipated with remarkable lucidity the ideas that J u ~ i gwould later express on the subject." O n 14 April, Schreber died in the IIiisen psychiatric clinic, near Leipzig, unaware that his Memoilzc had become the basis for [he theory of paranoia that would donli~iatethe cellturb and without Freud k ~ l o w i ~of l g his death. Freud's paper o n Schreber consists of three parts and a postscript. T h e first part follows the course of the judge's illness as described in the hfernoirs. Freud gives an extreniely partial summary. picking o u t from Schreber's tangled account only what may be useful for the iilterpreration he later offers. Almost entirely lacking, tbr esample, is any reference to the political aspects of the judge's delusions, to the "compulsion to think." or to transforrnations of the "basic language." T h e second part of Freud's paper is entitled "Attemprs at Interpretation." Afier a rapid methodologicdl preamble, [he crux of the theory appears: "The study of a nunlber of cases of delusions of persecution have led me as well as other investigators ro the view that the relation between the patient and his persecutor can be reduced to quite a simple formul a , " 1 i This formula says, "The person who is now hated and feared as a persecutor was at one time loved and honoured" (p. 424). I n Schreber's case, this person is obviously Dr. Paul Emil Flechsig. And here comes the homosexuality: "The exciting cause of his illness, then, was an ourbursr of homosexual libido; the object of this libido was probably from the very first his physician. Flechsig; and his srruggles against this libidi~lalin,pulse produced the conflict which p v e rise to the pathological phenonlenon" (p. 426). Having revealed this enurnlity, Freud pauses for a moment ro ask himself, "Is it not an act of irresponsible levir): an indiscretion and i ~ former ~ g a caluniny to charge :I rnali of such high ethic;tl ~ t ~ ~ lasd the Senatsprasident Scllreber with homosexoalit~~?" Having overcome this grave doubt, which n y s much about [he cautio~lrequired at the time by even the least cautious of psychonnalysts, Freud goes illto dct;lil ahout the relatio~lshipx i i h Flechsig, d i s c c r ~ l i nbehind ~ his hgure chose of u~ Schreber's father, whose qualirier AS an rothorir;~rilnp e d ~ ~ o glead

rjo

. A Report on Readers

A Reporr orr Rerlders oj'Schreber .

of Schi-eber

Freud to find h i m particularly suited to the role; his dead brother; and finally the G o d in the Memoirs a n d his representative, the sun. These transformations seen1 to Freud t o be connected to the theme of the Double, which he mentions, however, only in passing. Finally, at the end of the chapter, Freud analyzes the problem o f the motivation for the outblc;lk of the conflict, which m u s t be related t o " s o n ~ eprivation in real life" (p. 442), a n d he suggests that this privation might have been Schreber's lack of progeny: "Dr. Schreher may h a w formed a phan tasy that if he had been a woman he would have managed the business of having children more successfully; and he may thus have found his way back into the feminine attitude towards his father which he had exhibited in the earliest years o f his childhood" (p. 443). T h e third section, " O n the Mechanisnl of I'aranoia," c o n t a i ~ l sInore coluplex theoretical considerations. Here the starting point is the observation that what has gone before is insufficient to establish rhe "distinctire character o f paranoia." which most be sought by entering into the "mechanism by which the symptoms are f o r n ~ e d . " Meanurhile, '~ r brief genetic digression allon~sFreud to single o u t "the weak spot in their [the paranoiacs'] development," which "is to be looked for somewhere bew e e n the stages of auto-erotism, narcissism and homoserudity" (p. 448), a n d he adds that a "similar disposition would have to be assigned to patients suffering from Kraepelinh dementia praecox or (as Bleuler has named it) ichizophrenia" (p. 448). At this point, Freud begins t o analyze the in~pulses,of the transformation, under the pressure of various proposition "I ioue him" into "I hute him." as part o f persecution mania o r in other forms such as erotomania. paranoiac jealousy, a n d alcoholic delusions of jealousy. It is this portion of Freud's paper that has perhaps had the most influence o n subsequent psychoanalytic literature, because o f the extreme subtlety and flexibility of the transformations suggested to which the? can be related. and the vasr range of As for the formation ofsymptoms of p r a n o i a , Freud singles o u t as the mosr striking characteristic the proccss ofprojectiuri, which hc defines as follows: "An internal perception is suppressed, a n d , instead, its content, after ~ ~ n d c r g oai certain n~ degree of distoition, enters conscious~~ess in the form of an external perception."' And Freud pro~llisesto take u p this crucial theme again in some f i ~ t u r estudy, biit this w;ls nor to happe11. W i t h t s the papcr have the passage o n projection, all the fundaniustal c l e n ~ c ~ iin been presented, and Freud goes 011 to 1final, intrici~teorchestration of'his themes, stressing first the three phases of repression in p;lmnoia and then

j 1 I

131

problems connected with the "detachment of the libido," a phenomenon peculiar ro paranoia but not unique ro it. At the end of this section, various diffsrences with Jung o n the subject of dementia pl-aecos-differences that h a d already cropped LIP several times in their correspondencereappear in disg~lisedform. Having thus arrivcd at the end o f his analysis, Freud feels the need-and this is clearly significant-to state that his theory of paranoia was formed prior to reading Schreber's Memoin: "I can nevertlleless call a friend a n d fellow-specialist t o witness that I had developed m y theory o f paranoia before I became acquainted with the contents of Schreber's book. It remains for the future to decide whether there is more d e l ~ ~ s i oinn niy theory than I should like to admit. or whether there is more trurh in Schreber's delusion than other people are as yet prepared to bec ethe real lieve" (pp. 465-66). A n d this surprising, periultimate s e n t e ~ ~ is end of Freud's paper o n Schreber.

I

T h e n there is the postscript, two a n d a half pages o f filndamental significance in the history of psychoanalysis. Freud read them at the Weinlar Congress (21-22 September 1911, the last public occasion o n which Freud and Jung seem ro have been officially united). Here Freud's attitude seems almost to be one o f mild self-defense: having begun by recalling that in analyzing the Schreber case, "I purposely restricted myselt'to a minimum of interpretation."'Vreud recognizes that a wealth of other material can be extracted from the Memoils a n d cites in this connection the references to uiid Syml,ole der Libido and in an article by Schreber in J~ing'sWz~idiz~rigeri Sabina Spielrein. H e then turns to the subject of the sun as offering new mythologiculinterpretations, mentions totemisni t'or the first time, and in the last paragraph rakes up, again for the first time in his work, the theme of mythology in general, with words that were to have considerable resonance: This short postscript to my analysib oEa paranoid parienr rnay serve to show [hat lung had excellc~irgrounds for his asserrion [hat the n ~ ~ t h o p o cforces ic ofm'znkind are nor exrincr, but that to rhis w r y d;~).they give rise in the rleurosc to rl~cs~r1icpsychological 17roducr~;sin the remotest past ages. 1 sho~11Jlike to t'lke LIP 2 suggcstivii that I ni),sclf n1:ldc some rime ago. ;11ic1 add char the same Iiolcts good otrlic 6)l-cesrhar \vork 6)r-rhc ti)rmatior~ofreIigions. A n d I a m of'rhc opinion [liar th' tinie will s o o n hc ripe FOI. 11s to makc :111 extension of^ principle o f which the truth has long been rccognizcd by psycho-annlysts,and to complctc \+,hath ~ hitl~erto s 1i;ld only ;In i n dividuill and ontogcllctic application by the addition of its nnthropologicnl

132

. A Report otr Renders of Schwber

and phylogenetically conceived counterpart. "ln dreams and in neuroses," so our principle has run, "we come once more upon the childand the pecut his cmorional life." liarities which characterize his modes of t h o ~ g h and "And we come upon the stzz,fzgc too," r h ~ we s may complcre o u r proposition, "upon rhcprivrritive man, as he srands revealed to us in the light of thc researches of archaeology and o f ethnology." (pp. 469-70)

With this tribute, Freud also said farewell to his favorite pupil J u n g a n d at the same time announced Totem und Z b u . Jong, for his part, reacted b;,dly to Freud? prper o n Schrcbel: I q :I letter of 11 December 1911, rather resentful in tone, he referred to a point in the paper where Freud speaks of the paranoiac's "loss o f . . . libidin11 interest"'Vn the world: As for the libido

1 must confess that your remark in the Schreber

ani~lysis. . . has set up booming reverberations. This remark, or rather the doubt

expressed rherein, has

resuscitated ail the dificulries chat have beser

me throughout the years in my attempt ro apply thc libido theory to Den]. pmec. T h e loss of the reality function in

D. pr. cannot be reduced to re-

pression of lihiilo (defined as sexual h u n g e r ) Not by me. :it m y rate.:"

T h e tone, the m o m e n t , the context of these words make them look like an explicit declaration of war a n d the recognition of a now unavoidabie split. T h e Freud-Jung relationship had begun with discussions of dementia praecux, a n d it collapsed with them, along with the ridiculous name of the disorder. W e are left with schizophrenia. Jung's different view. of libido appeared more clearly than ever in the second part of Wandfuiryrnund Syinbole der Libido, first published in the Jahrbirch of 1912 illid issued later in the same year a l o ~ i gwith the first part in a book. There are other references in i t to SchreberC ilfernuirs, and still more appear in the rrvised version published b y J u o g in 1952 under the title Symboic drr Wuridiung. H e r r J u n g states explicitly, a m o n g o t h e r things, that Freud's analysis uf the Schreber case is "very iinsatishctory." a n d in a footnote he claims to have drawn Freud's attention to the Meurzoirs. Otherwise the references are illustrative, a n d the M t r n a i ~are ~ considered o n a par with ail the o t l ~ e rmythnIogic;~l,poeric. mystical. i l ~ l d psychopathological subjects discussed in the book. In any case, in 1914,rwo years after their break, Jung attacked Freud in connection with the Schreber case in his long supplement to his 1908 lcc-

A Report up1 Renders ofScbreber . 13.3

ture "Der Inlialt der Psychose" [ T h e C o n t e n t o f the Psychoses], which Freud a t the time had liked. In these pages, Jung gives what has remained 3 classic explanation of the methodological differences between reductive interpretarion (that of Freud) and : ~ m ~ l i f y i ninterpretation g (that of rung himself), here called "co~lstructive."~' I 7 h e Schreber c:~se,according to lung, can be said to reveal in a striking fashion the insufficiency o f the first method, which permits the analyst to complete only "one h a l f o f the w o r k ' (p. 186). while leaving quite open the qiiestion of the purpose a n d dynamics o f the delusion. to which Jung thought he hiniself had already provided a first answer in Wandlungc~zund Syrnbolr der Libido.

In 1911,the same year in which Freud's paper o n Schreber Gippeared. Sabina Spielrein published an article o n a case of schizophrenia in which she referred t o the Mcmoirj. O f Russian origin, a pupil of J u n g in Zurich a n d involved with h i m in an ambiguous love affair, a n d n ~ i l c hesteemed by Freud, Spielrein is one o f t h e most interesting a n d least studied among the pioneers ofpsychoanalysis. T h e dates o f her birth a n d death (r886?-after 1934) are still uncertain. Alexander Grinstein lists thirty of her psychoanalytic contributions from 1911 to 1931. Finally, we know that Spielrein was Jean Piaget's training analyst a n d that in 1913 she returned to the Soviet U n i o n . where she disseminated Freudian doctrine a n d taught in Rostov until 1733, w h e n psychoanalysis was b a n n e d . In t h e abovementioned article, Spielrein analyzed the case of a schizophrenic woman that presents some analogies with Schreber's story: for instance, the fear of 'LCatholicizariori"as a "conversion to sexuality"; the influelice of the psychiatrist Auguste Forel o n the patiellt, similar to Flechsigls o n Schreber; and the mythological delusion. which Spielrein subtly traces. Moreover, in the "Final Considerations" of the paper, we find Freud's basic statements in his postscript to the Schreber case anticipated almost to the letter: "The parallel with the mythological way of thinking goes back to a pnrticuli~r affinity of the dream mechanism with archaic thought. 1 was nluch struck by this during the analysis o f this patient. If Freud a n d Jung have esmblished a ixirallel between neurotic a n d d r e ~ mp h e n o n l e n ; ~a n d schizophrenia, I think I a m able to add all essenti;il clement to their conception by proposing that all this be considered in relatioll to its phyloge~ly."2~ In a review o f the Schreber case i l l 1912,Blculer, despite 111 his douhts alld hesitations, openly ;~cknowledgedthe enornlous importaoce o i F r t l l d i

134 . A Report on Readers oj'Srhreber

paper: "This brief sixty-page essay contains a huge wealth of thought. It is not to be read b u t studied."?-' T h i s acknowledgment is followed by vario u s objections that Rleuler h a d been brooding over for years, b u t h e wholly accepts the crux o f rhe theory, that is, the connection between a n d homosexuality. Wirh this review, [he first phase of the history of the Schreber case hecomes somehow crysrallized. Freud, for his part, will come back rime a n d again over the y23rs to questions connected wirh his paper o n S ~ h r e h e r , b' ~u t it will always be ro find confirmation for the ideas formulared in it. As for his followers, a sort o f holy terror has seemed t o surround Schreber's name for decades. T h e theory of paranoia is obviously accepted, but no one dares t o take a closer look-though the rnastcr himself had suggested it!-ar

other aspects of the Memoirs.

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I I

As long as we feel accustonied to consider the sphere o f writing as, despite everything, superior and protected, the appearance of mad~less,which insinuates itself stealthily as never before, is all the more terrifying. H o w has it succeeded in penetrating? H o w has it hecn able to get past the guards of this hundred-gated .fhebcs, the city o f books?" (p. 618).

So far, the one great artempt outside o f psy'choanalytic circlo to inrerpret Schreber's Memoirs is by Elias Czanetti. Here, roo, it is interesting to note how he came to read them. In Augusr 193'). Canetti was living in I,ondoll, in the srudio o f the sculptor A n n a Mahler, daughter o f the composer. "Among her hooks, which I knew well, I noriced one that was new to me:

I ~ J

Schreber's Memoirs. 1 opened it and i l n ~ n e d i a t e saw l ~ that I'd find it very interesring. I didn't know where it had come fro111and I didn't even connect it with Freud, whose work I had n o t yet rrad."Lfll'hebook was there by chance, having been left behind by a doctor who had lived in the studio a n d had enligrared to America. C:anetti asked Mahler if he might take i r with him, I)ut he did not get around to reading it until May 19.19. I r was a disturbing experience, o n e that irispireci him to write the rwt, chapters o n Schreber in C7).owdsarid Pozuer. A note from 10.19 testifies t o the book's immediate effect: What things I have Found here [in Schreber's book]! Support for some of the ideas that have been haunting me for years: fbr instance, the insoluble

I 1

O n 6 July 1928, the Litrrarische Welt published a piece by Walter Henjam i n entitled "Rooks by Mental Patients" and subtitled "From M y Collection," Benjamin tells of finding o n e o f rhe rare copies of Schreber's M~iz0ii.s in a small anrique bookstore in Bern in 1918. H e does not recall whether at the time he had already read Freud's essay. Rut never mind: "I was highly fascinated at o n c e . " ~ jSchrebeis Memoiri occupied a central place in Benjamin's precious c'pathological library," along wirh a book by the nineteenth-century doctor C. F. A. Schmidt: "If t h e world of delusion, like that of knowledge, also h a d irs four faculties, the works of Schreber and Schmidt would be a compendium of its theology and philosophy" (p. 617). In an elegant digression, Henjanlitl then gives his readers a flreti~lgreport on the themes and language of the Memoirs, concluding with a passage in which casual journalism yields t o the tone of a great essayist: "There is something daonting about the existence of such works.

A Report ow Reuders of'srl~reber .

I

1

link betweerl paranoia and power. His entire system is the descriprion of a srruggle for power, with God Himself as his real antagonist. Schreber long imagined he was the only surviving human being in the world; all the others were the souls of dead people and God in multiple incarnations. The l d to be the o n l y one, the only one among illusion that a man is or w o ~ ~like corpses, is decisive for the psychology o f both the paranoiac an? the extreme practitioner of power. . . . Rut Schreber also had in him rhrs cornplere ideology of National Socialisn~1 ' s a delusion. . . . This study of paranoia has its dangers. After just a fcw hours, I am seized wirh a rorrner~ting feeling of being locked in, and the more collvillci~lgthe system of madness, the stronger my fear.'It is clear from these words, a n d from the whole passage, that Schreber appeared to Canetti to be a little like the sovereign inhabitant of the last room in that huge waxworks museum of power called Crowds a n d Power. A n d it is just in that position, right before the epilogue. that Canetti placed his retelling of the Schreber case in the book that for decades occupied his life. -l'he technique is narrative, ns required by Canerti's particular method-he also tried it succrssfully on Franz Kafka's Letters to Felice a n d Speer's iWemoirj-of thinking while narrating, a rnerhod that makes the reader realize he is being led to an inevitable interpretation of the facts when he thought he was sinrply listening to a recounting of them. Canetti deals first o f all with the paranoiac's ';L.~iseofpo~ition":It is always :I position ofcostl~icimport;incc, which allows rhe p;ll.anoi;~cto speak o f constellations "as though they were bus-stops just r o ~ u l dthe c o l . ~ c r . " ' ~ And here the connection with the powcrtul figure ;llready appean: "By the very nature ofpowcr, the same must be [rue o f r h e ruler. His sense of his

I

1

own position is in no way different from that o f the paranoiac" (p. 436). T h e second point touched o n by Canetti concerns the ~ r o w das , it appears in the myriad souls surrounding Schreber. T h e third point is the obsession with conipimries, eq~iallyessential for the paranoiac and the ruler. T h u s the structure of Schreber's delusion in relation to political power has already been outlined: l)isg~1isedas onc of the old conceprions of the universe which pres ~ ~ ~ ~ rbe o sexistence ed of spirits, his delusion is in 6cr a precise model of politicrii power powcr which feeds on the crowd and derives irs s ~ ~ h s r a l ~ c e from it. An arrempt at a conceptual analysis of power can only blu'r rhe clarity of Schreber's vision. This coritains all che real elemenrs of the situa[ion: [he strong and lasting attraction exercised over [he individuals who are to form a crowd; the ambiguous attitude of these individuals; [heir subjecrion through being reduced in size; the way they are taken into the man who in his own person, in his body, represents political power; the facc that his greatness must continually renew icself in this way; and finally, a very imporrant point not m far mentioned, the sense of carasrrophe which is linked with ir, of danger to the world order arising from its sudden and rapid increase and u~lexpectedmagnetism. (p. 441) As we see, m a n y o f the themes patiently developed by Canetti in his great work can be found concentrated, and greatly intensified. in Schreber's vicissitudes, if we look at them in terms of power. And Canetti will certainly be the last t o let go of such a theme, since his story-meditation follows this line, avoiding any possible distmction; he is similar in this to Freud, w h o treated Schreber's text f r o m a n equal a n d opposite bias. Canetti's m e t h o d allows h i m t o arrive at s o m e of his most i m p o r t a n t aphoristic conclusions: "'To be the last man to remain alive is the deepest urge of every real seeker after power."2') "No-one has r sharper eye for the attributes o f the crowd than the paranoiac o r the despot who-as will be more readily admitted now-are one a n d the same" (P. 447). "I'aranoia is a n iihess oj'power in the most literal sense of the words" (12. 448). And at the end of the first part of Flnerti's treatment, the image of Hitler and Nazism appears, operating "in a rather cruder and less literarc form" (p. 447) than Schreber's delusion. In the second part, after having established a firm link between paranoia and power, Canctti goes o n to give a kind of descrip~ivepicture o f the paranoiac, still as seen through Schreber. T h e psychological analysis is

I 1

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A Report on Rr~u/ersof .Yc/~,-rbrr.

1j,7

prodigiously acute here, and i t points from the start in quite other directions than Freud: "[There was] a well-known attempt to find the origin of his particular illness, and of paranoia in general, in repressed homosexuality. There could scarcely, however, be a greater mistake. Paranoia may be occasioned by anything; the essencc o f each case is the structuru o f the delusional world a n d the way it is p~opied."."' In thc analysis of this structure, many themes already treated by Canetti reappear by contrast: Here the accent is o n rigidity, o n the petrification of the paranoiac's world, as opposed to the world o f metamorphosis, to which a splendid section of Canetti's book is devoted. In Schreber. this rigidity is manifested primarily in his "mania for finding causal relations" (p. 452), and in verbal obsession. O n this point Canetti achieves some of his best characterizations: "Perhaps the most marked trend in paranoia is that towards a complete seizing of the world through words, as though language were a fist and the world lay in it" (p. 452). At the close o f this second section, Canetti restates with even greater claricy his theme of the relation between paranoia a n d power: "In this, too, the paranoiac is the exact image o f the ruler. T h e only difference between them lies in their p o s i t i o ~in~ the world. I11 their inner structure they are identical. . . . It is difficult to resist the suspicion that behind paranoia, as behind all power, lies the same profound urge: the desire to get other men o u t o f the rvay so as to be the only one; or, in the milder, and indeed often admitted, form, to get others to help him become the only one" (p. 462). T h e a p a t h y o f psychoanalysis toward Schreber gradually breaks down after the end of World War 11. Very little stands o u t from prior years except for two articles by W. J. Spring and K. 1.' Knight, dating from 1939 and 1940 r e ~ p e c t i v e l ~111 . ~the appendix to a lecture delivered in 1946 to the British Psycho-Analytical Sociery, Melanie Klein refers to the an;lIysis o f the Schreber case as containing "a wealth of material which is very relevant to my t ~ p i c , ' which ' ~ ~ is then a rapid sketch of the "paranoid-schizoid position" in relation to various processes o f splitting. A n l o ~ l gtllc various quotations from Schreher in Freud's paper, Klcin especially singles o u t those concerning the division o f s o ~ ~(fOr l s cra~llple.1:lechsig1s), :1 process she understands as "a projection o f Schreber? feeling that his e o w l s split" (p. 23). O n this and other points, Klein suggests correctio~isa n d amplifications o f Freud's theory but concludes, however, that "Freud's

138

A Report uw RerzJen of'Schreber . 139

. A Report on Readers ?f Schreber

approach to the problem of schizophrenia a n d paranoia has proved of fundamenral imporrance. His Schreber paper . . . opened up the possibility of understanding psychosis a n d the processes underlying ir" (p. 24). In 1949, the Amcrican psychoanalyst Maurirs liaran began publishing a number of short articles o n Schreber,'.' later to be recycled in his derailed analysis of 195'):'' These concriburions esrablished almost a niodel text char keeps reappearing today: a prudent variarion o n the themes in Freud's paper a n d the extrapolarion of a few details from the Menroirs t o lend them new i ~ n p o r t a n c e ,hut without raising doubts about the fundamentals of Freud's analysis o r carrying it to more far-reaching conclusions. Articles by A. C. Carr, K.Waelder, J. Nydes, I? M. Kitay. R. £3. Whire, and H. F. Searles all belong to rhis kind of rext, naturally wirh notable differences o f position.'j T h e last two authors :ire primarily concerned ro stress the impurtance in Schreber of the mother complex as well, a [heme larer taken up in a n interesting paper by R. Sroller, which deals in general with the problem o f bisexuality in Freud.'"he mosr in [he obvious sign o f the renewed interest of official Schreber case appeared in 1962, when a syniposiurn was held in Atlantic City, New Jersey, o n Reir~terprctntionsofthe Schrc~berCt~je:FrezldJ Theoyy

of'Parunoia. Until 1955, most discussions o f the Schreber case continued t o be confined to Freud's paper, there having been no new edition of the Mcwzoilr in German or any other language. It was therefore a n extrenlely usefill, indeed event when a n English translation, amply annorated a n d edired by Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter, was put~lishedin that year.'- In their introduction, the two a t ~ t h o r sfirst oiltline the history o f the Schreber case a n d of t h e notion of paranoia in the evolution o f psychiarry, showing the many and curious fl uctuations and uncertainties that have marked it from the beginning. This highly ilseful hisrorical introduction is p;tired with 3 theoretical discussion at the end of the volume in which [he authors, with daring sincerit): d e n o ~ ~ n cthe e inadequacy of Freudian theory. T h e alternate theory they proposed is, howcver, extremely wr;lk, a n d as such 11.1s bee11 rhc target o f Jacques 1.rcani cruel a ~ o c k c r y . 'For ~ Macalpine and Hunter, rhc crucial elcment in Schreber's p;lronoia can he said t o hc his " f i ~ l t ~ s i oe sf pregcnital procrearion."" provoked by his frustrated wish t o have c h i l d r c ~ i T . h u s the whole axis of Freudian interpretation is shifted, without bearing much fr~iit.In particu-

lar, the mythological and anthropological examples char the authors come LIP with arc quite meager a n d randonl, especially when compared wirh the enormous possibilities along these lines t o be f o u n d in Schreber's

Mrrnoirs. Papers began appearing after 1950 provicii~lgnew information about Schreber's life and family, thus fi~lfillinga wish expressed by Freud forty years earlier. T h e first moves in [his direction were by W. G. Niederland a n d F. Baumeyer,"' w h o from the beginning offered highly interesting data chat have become the basis for all studies o f s c h r e b e r in the context o f his family. T h e figure who particularly emerges from these articles is the farher, Daniel Gottlieb Moritz Schreber, a n enlightened and sadistic pedagogue who for [he whole nineteenrh century had, a n d in an underground way srill has. an enormous influence i l l Germany as a chanmpion o f hygiene, gy~nnastics.a n d a narrowly moralistic upbringing. For many years, the mosr docunleured work o n h i m was the dissertation by Alfons Ritter, a young Nazi who venerated the elder Schreber and inscribed this apothegm at the beginning of his book: "The path ro the renewal o f the German essence and Gerttian strength necessarily leads to 3 profession of h i t h in blood and soil.""' T h e elder Schreber seemed to him, with some justification, to be 3 precursor of such a "renewal." Niederland's a n d Bau~neyer'sstudies were able to explain some hitherto mysterious derails in Schreber's Memoiu by reconnecting them with facts in his life. In addition, in the Arnsdort clinic, where he was the director from 1946 ro 194'). Baumeyer unexrthed some cli~iicalfiles relating ro Schreber, files thar had come froni the archive o f the Soonenstein n~irsing home. These docunlents were in the most recent German edition ' ~h e y of Schreber' Memoiri, accoilipanied by Baumeyerl ~ o m m r n t a r y . . T are especially imporrant because they contain a number of statements by Schreber that are not in the Memoirs, iincludi~lgthe Famous sentence "Die Sonrze ist e b r Hure" ("The sill1 is a whore"). o n which Lacan shrewdly cornn~ented.~-' O n c e the figure o f Schrebcr's tither had been recalled from oblivion with such surprising results, rrscarch war extended to p ~ v i o u sgenerations of rhis remarkable family of scientists and juiists. A n excellent article published in .(.ilic.et docunlc~rrsrhe recurrence, i l l val-ious forms, of certain nloralistic obsessions in the jl~dgc'sforebears, thclrl,y c;lirilig a glaring lighr o n an ad~liirtedlyheavy k l r n ~ a : ' ~Finally rhr most brillia~lt work, o n e that tnorc o r less sums u p thcse first i n v e ~ t i ~ ~ t iooF~Sl~sh r e h e r ' ~

Accompaniment to the Reading of'stinrer . 149

last a n d most bewitching offspring: "Stirner's book shows once again h o w deeply rooted abstraction is in the Berlin essence. A m o n g t h e Freien [Free O n e s ] , St[irner] is obviously the orle with t h e m o s t talent, independence, a n d precision, b u t with all that he t o o turns his somersaults from idealistic abstraction t o t h e materialistic k i n d w i t h o u t arriving a t anything."" Each o f these iudgments s h o u l d b e kept in m i n d while reading the furio u s attack o n Stirner i n T / I C&rr?~an ~ ZdeaLogq: w h e r e h e is presented as "the mosr feeble a n d boorish m e m b e r of that philosophical confraternity [the Freielz group] ."7

Feuerbacl?, ktter to h s brother, Late 1844 Feuerbach's first impression is that Det- Eli'llzige is a work o f "extreme inrelligence a n d brilliance" a n d that it has "the t r u t h o f egoism-however eccentric, one-sided, a n d untrue-on its side." Feuerbach goes o n t o say t h a t Srirncr's a t t a c k o n a n t h r o p o l o g y ( t h a t is, o n h i m s e l f ) is based o n a misunderstanding. For t h e rest, he considers h i m "the freest a n d m o s t t a l e n t e d writer 1 have ever known."* S o a t first Feuerbach t h o u g h t o f answering Stirncr in a light a n d friendly m a n n c r in an o p e n letter t h a t would begin: '"Inexpressible' a n d 'incomparable,' k i n d egoist: Like your . writing itself, your judgment o n m e is truly 'incomparable' a n d 'unique. But caution a n d suspicion s o o n g o t the uppcr hand: In a n o t h e r letter to his brother, o n 1 3 December, Feuerbach already suggests that "Stirner's at7,

tacks betray a certain vanity, as t h o u g h h e wanted t o m a k e a n a m e f o r himself a t t h e expense of mine." Finally, i n the review h e later wrote o f Dcr Einzige, Feuerbach seems t o b e intimidated a n d chiefly concerned t o p r o t e c t himself. H e d o e s rlot care t o m a k e concessiorls t o S t i r n e r a n d defends t h e h o n o r o f his o w n doctrine. T h e n silerice. In 1861, in a letter t o Julius D u b o c , he recalls rhat old controversy as having been settled for once a n d for all.''

Ruge, letters of November and December 1844 to the pub/i~/~ev Frobel Ruge's first m e n t i o n o f Stirner appears in a note sent in N o v e m b e r f r o m Paris, reporting that Heinrich Weine's poems a n d Stirner's Der Einzige are "the t w o m o s t irnportant publishing events of recent times." T h e audacities o f t h e "Deutsch-fiai'llzosi~cl~en /ah,-biicher" (mealling Marx) n o w seem "largely outdated." Ruge, a t first a friend a n d defender o f M a r x a n d then

his bitter enemy, combines praise for Stirner with gibes a t M a r x in a n o t h er letter to Frobel a few days later (6 D e c e m b e r ) . O r rather, for the first time h e uses Stirner as a stick with which to beat Marx: Marx professes comniunism, but he is :i fanatic of egoism, and with a corlscience even less apparent than Bauers. Hypocritical egoism and the urge to play the genius, his posing as Christ, his rabhinisni, pricst and human victims (guillotine) reappear in the foreground. Atheist and communisr fanaticism is srill, in realiry, thc Chrisrian kind. Sneering and gnashing his teeth, Marx, a new Babeuf, would send all those who srand in his way to slc~ughtcr.H e imilginei these festivitics, since he cannot obserzle them. Fanatical egoism is loaded with sin and guilt, while egoisin that is able freely to acknowledge itself as such is the pure kind, which does not live like a vampire on thc blood of man, with the excuse of understanding him to be a "heretic," "itthun~anmonster," "pi~hlisher,""shopkeeper," "capitalist," "bourgeois" . . . and so on. A mean person's egoism is mean; a fanatic's is hypocl-iticCll,false, and cager for blood, an honest nian; is honest. For each wants and shoi~ldwant himself, arid to rhe extent chat each r r ~ i !Lvallts ~ this, the abuses of power book ro you.

Lire

balanced. I have

Stirner's (Schmidt's)

L a ~ e r i, n a lerter to his m o t h e r on 17 December, Ruge again c o m m e n t s o n Stirner: T h e hook by M a x Stirner (Schmidt), whom Ludwig may also kriow (he used to come in the evening to the Walhurg tavern and sat in front ot.us), makes a b~ra~lge impreasion. hlany parts are absolutely niasterful, 2nd the whole effect can only be liberating. It is the first readable philosophy book to appear in Germany, 'ind one might say rhat i t marks thc appearancc of the first Inan cn~irclydevoid of peciantry and old-fashioned attitudes, indeed entirely sclf-assured, were it not rhar his own fixation, which is rhat of uniqueness, makes him niuch Icss self-assured. Anyway i t has given me great joy to sce rhar diainregl~acionhas now reached this total form, whereby no one can swear with impunity on anyrhing.l" B u t i n this case too, enthusiasm for Stirner does n o t last long. I n 1847, Ruge enthusiastically approves K u n o Fischer's violent a t t a c k o n Stirner a n d t h e "modern s o p h i s ~ s , "a n d this marks t h e beginning o f the habit o f branding Der Eixzige a n infamous book. A n d w h e n Stirner publishes his reply, Ruge p r o m p t l y suggests t o Fischer, "It would certainly be a g o o d

Ljo

. Act ornpc~nirnr,ntto t l j ~ lierzdinRof Stirner

idea for you to answer Stirner wirh a letter a n d trip him rip once more over his basic stupidity. .l'liese people get f ~ ~ r i o when us sonleone shows then1 their lack ofgenius a n d wit, h r in the end i l .111 comcs down to the fact thar they ;Ire gcniuscs and other- peoplc ;I!-c;~sscs.. . . *I'Iiey c o n h ~ s e tl'lt>ologic.rzlcnovetncnt with philosop/ric,/r/ movetnent or, it1 other words, rhe praxis o f will with the praxis of freedom."'

FIRST REVIEWERS

'

T h e first mention of Der Eirrz@ in the press ;Ippears in 3 bricf irem from ? ~ ~November 1844). After ide1:riBerlin in the A%r~r/l'lrimrrA h e n d z e i t u ~(12 @ing Stirner as a "close friend" of Bruno Rauer, the anonymous iour~lalist goes on to explain that LIey E i i r z i ~is nevertheless an all-our arrack o n rile "outlook of 'humanitarian liberalism'" (namely, Hauer's). But what strikes t h e reviewer p a r t i c u l ; ~ r lis~ Stirner's excessiveness: " W i t h chis b o o k the neo-Hegelian tendency is pushed to its extreme: the fr-ecdorn o f the subjective spirit is here sought in the individual's rota1 lack o f restraint, in every man's singularity, in egoism." Frightened as he is, the writer is still attracted t o Stirner: "Even if this principle, as here presented, is still roo one-sided a n d untenablt., i t is nevertheless based o n true a n d correct intuitions, a n d if sifted propel.ly, may turn out to be fsuitful." This first ITviewer was expecting a thrill f r s m L)n. Ezi/zicyr,a n d he got it. These were rhe culminating years of "critical criticism," criricisrn that "took n o prisoners."" It s e e ~ u r dnatul-a1 to expect something that made o n e say "this goes t o o 6ar" while putting to rout all previous artacks 11s being t o o timid a n d caurious. And here i t was. '1-he last phase in the "process of decomposition o f absolute spirit"!' was being carried out. I-iaving fired a few skyrockets, starting in 1842, wirh his short essays (the most impor-rant one, "7'he False Principle of O u r Educario~l,"appeared in the Rlli'il~ijchrZ e z t u ~ ! ~[IIC ; paper t o which M a r x also c o n t r i b u t e d , a n d o f which b?, a n olninuus coincihis dence lle became eciitot-in-chief rsvo days after Stirner had p~~blisheci last :irticle in it), the silent, ;tIooFStirncr- nolv canie for-ward with a ni:~ssive work thar made only one claim: that o F b u ~ - y i philosophy n~ in T h e 61-stlong, systematic reviews of IIrr Ei~/zigrcanic,, in order o f prtsr i g , froin Fe~lc.rbac11,' Moses Hess." and thc l'russian officer a n d h t u r e general, Franz Szeliga."' Stirner replied to them with a n cssily restating the idcas o f Llcr. Eiilzigt, a n d making then], if poshil~le,even less tolt.1-a1,le.I- 'l'he s,lme thing hap-

Accompnniment tu the Reizding of Stirner

.

111

pened two years later, when [he rrnowned historian o f philosophy Kuno Fischer vehemcnrly attacked Stirner's book. T h e author's response (signed G . Edward) was again harsh and sarcastic.'" After Drr finzi